"Listen"

written by Becca M.

Listen

The beginner’s guide to meditation usually goes as such: “Breathe deep and just empty your mind.” Just. Just. Really, to be able to tune out all the engines and agendas and electrical static that surround us in the city takes some zen-master-level-140-type-shit. And for those of us who aren’t quite there yet, there’s still a way to completely eliminate distraction and lay in a pool of pure embodied mind: Float.

I chatted around before my session and heard about experiences that ranged from swirling ecstatic visuals to profound realizations to mindgasms. So when I shut the tank door and settled down into the water, I was eager to start chipping away at that checklist. “Oooh,” I thought, “I better make some mind room for all these answers I’m gonna get, prepare for all this cool shit that’s about to occur to me, oooh I’ll sure be able to tell some neat stories. ”About forty-six breaths in, though, I realized that it wasn’t going to happen like that. 

I had my first float a few days ago and can still feel the effects calmly lingering in the shade. I can’t really tell you my experience, though, because it was mine. 

I can tell you that you will enter a velvet starless dark so thick you won’t be able to tell the difference between eyes open or closed and it doesn’t matter anyway. The tank is filled with about a foot of salty water, but filled completely with you. You to the sides, you all the way down and you to the very top. You have the opportunity to observe as your thoughts find their voice and then echo into a soft reverberation, a faucet turns from gushing to a slow trickle. You hear the trickle. You hear the phosphorous silence that sparks between inhale and exhale. You hear yourself. And for the next hour, all you can do is listen.