Floating voter: Float NOLA in the CBD
Tanks for the memories
Float NOLA, CBD
Out of the many physical developments of my (cough) middle age, the most noticeable to me is my growing misophonia. This is defined as “extreme sensitivity to patterned based sounds”, though for me, the sound of people eating and ambient noise such as loud cell phone conversations often provoke a flight or fight response. Maybe I’m just becoming a cranky old fart, that’s also a good possibility.
Whichever it is, sensory deprivation has become more and more attractive to me in recent years. I kind of want to go and live in the National Radio Quiet Zone in Green Bank, WV or the One Square Inch of Silence in Washington’s Olympic National Park. But then, I’d get bored. What is a boy to do?
Well, luckily for me and all local phonophobes, you can microdose a cloistered existence in a dark room in the CBD. Float NOLA has floatation tanks that come with, according to their website, the promise of “both instant and cumulative healthful benefits”. Me? I mainly wanted a new experience and to just drift away in a cool dark room without any noises for an hour or so. The center of a city’s business district may seem like a counter-intuitive place to do this, but it’s a Sunday and there’s no Saints game, so it’s relatively quiet outside.
There’s a short orientation on arrival for first-timers like myself. The owner/operator, Cecil, has been in the floatation tank game for a quarter of a century, and is keen to impress that his tanks are among the only ones in the country that are drained and thoroughly cleaned between sessions. This is at once reassuring in an immediate sense, but somewhat terrifying if this is true, and I’m glad I’m here and not diving into a stagnant brown pool in, say, Los Angeles, for instance.
We’re in a low-lit, smallish room with a 9’x6’ tub (made of hemp materials). There’s a shower and a stool for your things. Cecil recommends rinsing your feet before you start, and putting vaseline over any cuts so that the tank’s salts don’t irritate you. There are silicone earplugs, which I’m all too familiar with from, well, wearing them every night to sleep in and jamming them in on airplanes so I can nap.
Cecil leaves, I shower briefly, and the tub fills up very quickly, to about eight or nine inches. The tank has a lid, which you can close, but Cecil says that the levels of darkness and silence are the same either way. The old heads love to close the lids, apparently. I’m not generally claustrophobic, but I leave it open.
Some ambient, new-age music starts up, the kind which only exists in spas. It lasts for a couple of minutes, the lights going out half way through. I’m lying in the tub now, trying the buoyant pillow that they provide under various parts of my body to find a comfy position. They work best for me under my kidneys, but your results may vary. Some people can float without it. I must have dense bones.
I’ll be honest: the first part of the float is an adjustment. I’m wriggling, trying to work out which position I’m most comfy in. I’m also dimly aware of low level conversations in the lobby, but the earplugs do a pretty good job and I realize I’m more sensitive than most people. It’s impressively pitch black. I feel a little self-conscious, acutely aware of my own tensions, plus the sounds of my splashing as I move and the self-imposed pressure to be making the most of the hour.
Once my floatation pillow has found that good spot, though, I fully relax. I try the suggested ‘progressive relaxation’, slowly letting the tensions in my body go, working from the feet upwards. I breath intentionally, in through the nose, out through the mouth. That’s a thing, right? Despite my self-sabotaging, I slowly slip into a more serene state. A silent, dark, tranquil cocoon envelopes me and my anxiety evaporates. I’m less self-conscious and it becomes meditative. I lose track of time.
In the real world, assuming you don’t spend most of your life in a casino, you can’t escape knowing what time it is. It’s on every screen. When the means to tell the time are removed, though, time stretches and shrinks in weird ways, temporal dilations and contractions. I found it refreshing, once I got past my own intrusive thoughts.
An hour passes. As the music starts to play softly and the low lights come back on, I slowly sit up. The last 45 minutes (I’m guessing) seemed to last a long time. In a good way. I shower, dress, and head out as the tank drains. Cecil greets me in the lobby with some water and we chat about the experience.
If you’re going in thinking it’s going to a quasi-spiritual, out of the body, Joe Rogan-on-DMT, dissociative trip, then you’re going to be disappointed. I didn’t leave my own body or see fractals or disappear into my own subconsciousness. To be fair, that’s not what Float is selling. For me, it was a novel, relaxing, meditation-like experience. In a world that assaults your senses at every turn, it was just wonderful to be in an environment without pop-up ads or people yelling into a phone or eating an inappropriately loud snack in a cinema.
On the Float website, it says “Expect nothing and just let everything go.” I think that’s pretty good advice for first timers. Sadly, I must rejoin the real world. I step out, reaching for my AirPods and their sweet, sweet noise cancellation. If I could just get a floatation tank for home use, I think my life would be immeasurably better. For now, I’ll take an occasional session here.
More information at the Float NOLA website
Float NOLA, CBD
Out of the many physical developments of my (cough) middle age, the most noticeable to me is my growing misophonia. This is defined as “extreme sensitivity to patterned based sounds”, though for me, the sound of people eating and ambient noise such as loud cell phone conversations often provoke a flight or fight response. Maybe I’m just becoming a cranky old fart, that’s also a good possibility.
Whichever it is, sensory deprivation has become more and more attractive to me in recent years. I kind of want to go and live in the National Radio Quiet Zone in Green Bank, WV or the One Square Inch of Silence in Washington’s Olympic National Park. But then, I’d get bored. What is a boy to do?
Well, luckily for me and all local phonophobes, you can microdose a cloistered existence in a dark room in the CBD. Float NOLA has floatation tanks that come with, according to their website, the promise of “both instant and cumulative healthful benefits”. Me? I mainly wanted a new experience and to just drift away in a cool dark room without any noises for an hour or so. The center of a city’s business district may seem like a counter-intuitive place to do this, but it’s a Sunday and there’s no Saints game, so it’s relatively quiet outside.
There’s a short orientation on arrival for first-timers like myself. The owner/operator, Cecil, has been in the floatation tank game for a quarter of a century, and is keen to impress that his tanks are among the only ones in the country that are drained and thoroughly cleaned between sessions. This is at once reassuring in an immediate sense, but somewhat terrifying if this is true, and I’m glad I’m here and not diving into a stagnant brown pool in, say, Los Angeles, for instance.
We’re in a low-lit, smallish room with a 9’x6’ tub (made of hemp materials). There’s a shower and a stool for your things. Cecil recommends rinsing your feet before you start, and putting vaseline over any cuts so that the tank’s salts don’t irritate you. There are silicone earplugs, which I’m all too familiar with from, well, wearing them every night to sleep in and jamming them in on airplanes so I can nap.
Cecil leaves, I shower briefly, and the tub fills up very quickly, to about eight or nine inches. The tank has a lid, which you can close, but Cecil says that the levels of darkness and silence are the same either way. The old heads love to close the lids, apparently. I’m not generally claustrophobic, but I leave it open.
Some ambient, new-age music starts up, the kind which only exists in spas. It lasts for a couple of minutes, the lights going out half way through. I’m lying in the tub now, trying the buoyant pillow that they provide under various parts of my body to find a comfy position. They work best for me under my kidneys, but your results may vary. Some people can float without it. I must have dense bones.
I’ll be honest: the first part of the float is an adjustment. I’m wriggling, trying to work out which position I’m most comfy in. I’m also dimly aware of low level conversations in the lobby, but the earplugs do a pretty good job and I realize I’m more sensitive than most people. It’s impressively pitch black. I feel a little self-conscious, acutely aware of my own tensions, plus the sounds of my splashing as I move and the self-imposed pressure to be making the most of the hour.
Once my floatation pillow has found that good spot, though, I fully relax. I try the suggested ‘progressive relaxation’, slowly letting the tensions in my body go, working from the feet upwards. I breath intentionally, in through the nose, out through the mouth. That’s a thing, right? Despite my self-sabotaging, I slowly slip into a more serene state. A silent, dark, tranquil cocoon envelopes me and my anxiety evaporates. I’m less self-conscious and it becomes meditative. I lose track of time.
In the real world, assuming you don’t spend most of your life in a casino, you can’t escape knowing what time it is. It’s on every screen. When the means to tell the time are removed, though, time stretches and shrinks in weird ways, temporal dilations and contractions. I found it refreshing, once I got past my own intrusive thoughts.
An hour passes. As the music starts to play softly and the low lights come back on, I slowly sit up. The last 45 minutes (I’m guessing) seemed to last a long time. In a good way. I shower, dress, and head out as the tank drains. Cecil greets me in the lobby with some water and we chat about the experience.
If you’re going in thinking it’s going to a quasi-spiritual, out of the body, Joe Rogan-on-DMT, dissociative trip, then you’re going to be disappointed. I didn’t leave my own body or see fractals or disappear into my own subconsciousness. To be fair, that’s not what Float is selling. For me, it was a novel, relaxing, meditation-like experience. In a world that assaults your senses at every turn, it was just wonderful to be in an environment without pop-up ads or people yelling into a phone or eating an inappropriately loud snack in a cinema.
On the Float website, it says “Expect nothing and just let everything go.” I think that’s pretty good advice for first timers. Sadly, I must rejoin the real world. I step out, reaching for my AirPods and their sweet, sweet noise cancellation. If I could just get a floatation tank for home use, I think my life would be immeasurably better. For now, I’ll take an occasional session here.
More information at the Float NOLA website