By Bob Flaherty
For the Valley Advocate
My journey. Where it begins and ends I have no idea. I do know that I could use some healing along the way, I’m just not sure what it is I have. Although, yes, I am acutely aware of my mousetrap nervous system and my constantly yap-yap-yapping mind.
PHOTO BY DAN LITTLE
Injuries? Oh yeah. I’m active and I’m old — do the math. But I have been brought back to life more than once by my acupressurist wife Annemarie and by Northampton acupuncturist Amy Mager, and have testified at the State House in support of such things.
But I don’t tend to ask about all those chakras and meridians; I just go with the flow. And when my doctor (and half my gray-haired friends) hounded me to get a colonoscopy I sighed OK. And when my wife hints that I should expand my horizons and seek out some alternate healings I say OK to that too.
Which leads us to this night a couple weeks ago and a back-to-back brazen barrage of light the speed of Hyperspace, and a sightless, soundless, saltwater chamber with the offer of, dare I say, weightlessness.
Brain training
It feels like a living room, Go With The Float, a comfy oaken mishmash of every living room you’ve ever been in.
Christopher Wardlaw is known as the float facilitator, a young dude with an old soul vibe. Of the float tank experience he happily lists: “Darkness, silence, temperature homogeny and approximate weightlessness. Those four inputs in concert make for a boundless time.”
Count me in. But first I am to enter a small room and prepare for the king of strobe lights, the Roxiva RX1, a modulating, oscillating, high-frequency phenomenon with 16 street-grade LEDs and the seemingly harnessed suns of all planets.
Stroboscopic is Wardlaw’s baby, his business within the business, and calls the RX1 the “Ferrari of these machines. For visual flickering entrainment, this is far and away the craziest.”
PHOTO BY DAN LITTLE
He says there’s no longitudinal research on flickering entrainment, nor what happens if you do it a lot, brain-wise. “It’s never been tracked. The biggest body of research suggests that 40 Hertz gamma waves may be a beneficial intervention for Alzheimer’s, but it’s in its infancy. We don’t make any claims what the lamp does or is for, but you will indeed see fractal geometries behind your eyelids, and it’s very compelling to experience the RX1 and the flotation tank back-to-back,” he said.
The RX1 is a descendant of Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine of 1959, which had a cylinder with cut-out shapes whirring on a record turntable under a suspended light bulb. One looked at it with closed eyelids as the oscillating visual patterns were said to induce an alpha wave mental state. “A low-fi analog version of this thing we’ve got now,” said Wardlaw.
Before sitting in the “gravity chair,” beneath the imposing head of RX1, I must answer some basic health questions, such as: “Am I prone to epileptic seizures?”
(Things to know before reading on: I learned to swim (to a certain extent) in my 40s — lessons documented in the long lamented Hampshire Life — and took my second psychedelic trip 50 years after the first one, February’s Valley Advocate, and, oh yes, that concert Annemarie and I attended at MIT in ’79 or ’80 featuring Mission of Burma and strobes. On the subway on the way home my wife gasped at the two purple beams that emanated from my purple eyeballs like searchlights from alien craft. So no, no epilepsy to speak of, but maybe I should have mentioned that?)
I am told to close my eyes and get ready and I think I remember Christopher giving a 3-2-1 countdown but I’m not sure and WHAM BAM WHAMMY we are underway. I am about to get “Rxcked.”
Remember the opening to “The Big Bang Theory?” Now speed that up-up-up-up-up and hang on to your armrests as your delicate face is blasted with solar-bright flickerings of semi-psychedelic madness. In your headphones roll Moogish, deep-throated poundings and the chair shakes and shudders like a stagecoach ride.
PHOTO BY DAN LITTLE
The imagery goes by in light years, slashing, morphing, kaleidoscopic patterns, the 4th of July finale set to unending warp speed — when suddenly a wisp of recognition, like a humanoid form appearing in a sand storm in a hundredth of a second? You recognize a facial expression, a person you knew, a dog? But gone in an eyelash. Newsreels of a hundred years cut into pieces and tossed at you like ground pepper. The horn of a rhino, the peak of a mountain, ever-dissolving lattices and tunnels and whirlpools. And, though Wardlaw assures you there’d be no danger if you did, you wouldn’t open your eyes on a dare.
But what you can see through tightly-shut eyelids is, forgive me, eye-opening. There are times when the intensity of the audio matches the explosion in your face and WHOA your pulse quickens for a split-second and by split we mean a second split into a thousand units — images are on you and past you before you can even recall it.
At 20 minutes, everything goes dark, you flick the light switch on the wall and whew you’re back to normal. You don’t quite know what to make of what you just lived through. Relaxed? You’re relaxed NOW.
“The brainwave entrainment hypothesis,” said Wardlaw. “When we expose ourselves to a rhythmic stimuli, if we do it for long enough, the brain starts making the frequency … different spectrums of brainwave frequency are associated with different states of consciousness. It’s hard to understand what the stimulus is because it’s changing so rapidly — the snow of the visual field interacting with the anatomy of the eye.”
When I mentioned the vaguely familiar images that appeared, he said, “All of that is endogenous,” meaning, I think, that my subconscious brings something to it.
He practically rushes me to the tank. “You’ll be hitting that beta/delta border, likely to drop into the experience faster.”
Naked and unafraid (to some extent)
It is possible that no one digs flotation tanks like Christopher Wardlaw. How would the brain react when denied external stimuli? Wardlaw is on a mission to explore that in big gulps.
He has floated over 3,000 hours, over the course of three years, and thinks he may have the record for density, floating for three, five, eight hours at a time, multiple times a week. “I have an ethical responsibility to really understand the full range of what can happen in the float tank,” he said.
Wardlaw, 30, grew up in Amherst, got a bachelor’s degree at Keene State College and kicked around with a number of rock bands. His first float was in 2018, intersecting profoundly with his interest in classic Buddha meditation. “I came into some money and kept floating till the money ran out,” he laughed. “I quickly became obsessed.”
His passion for floating got him hired here three years ago, what he calls “working full-time and floating part-time. I will work here as long as it stays open. I’ve built my life around it.”
He lives right around the corner with his wife Allyson, who works at the place too. He and GWTF’s owner Stephen Bryla both serve on the board of the National Flotation Conference.
PHOTO BY DAN LITTLE
“The tank dissolves the conceptual framework that surrounds boredom,” said Wardlaw. “Insights gained inside the tank often carry over to every day experience. If you do the lamp before you get into the tank, you’re a little bit front loaded, yeah? It’s a relaxing kind of stimulus, leading to a dissolution of the boundaries of the body.”
Then there’s the Float/Lamp/Float sandwich Wardlaw does all the time. “We have these technologies that can non-pharmacalogically induce altered states of consciousness. And profound ones. A customer with a broken femur found weightlessness to be the only reprieve from pain.”
Though the company makes no claims as to what 70 minutes in a sensory-deprived tank can do for you, Wardlaw is convinced that the practice can up one’s game, cranium-wise. “If you’re doing a focused attention task, maybe sitting at your desk — with research pointing to delta waves as the predominant activity in the float tank — it primes you for that task. It’s training wheels and rocket boots. If you’re already good at something the float tank can be a wild accelerant for that practice.”
“OK, Hemingway,” I tell myself, “don’t get carried away.”
I shower off and climb in. Float “cabins” feature a foot of water, 1,200 pounds of Epsom salt and are 4.5 feet wide, 8 feet long and 7 feet tall. Once the lights go out it’s way more enveloping than that. Your only sense of the place is the lighted memory of it only seconds ago.
Remember my non-swimming, easy-to-drown past? Well, the dead man’s float has never been my strong suit, because I’m likely to end up the deceased in question. Because of this wariness of water, I am incapable of lying on my back and letting myself go — even though I am in a tub so salty a hockey puck could float in it — and the back of my neck is in spasm and I find I have to support it with clasped hands to keep the rest of me from agitating like a boated tuna. So much for relaxation.
Until I remember Wardlaw’s instructions about this halo-type hat hanging by the shower that’s good for that sort of thing and I grope for the door handle and climb out of the tank and go fetch it. Back in utter darkness, the hat does the trick and back I lay, cool as a jewel, and, without lifejackets, noodles or little bitty floaties, I am, dare I say, buoyant.
Weightless, I whistle, I sing, I snap fingers, I slosh around like a baby in a 1950s bassinet, but everything’s muffled, no echoes bounce off these invisible walls. The old expression “can’t see your hand in front of your face” has come to life. Eyes open, eyes closed, exact same thing.
I move my hands like fins and gain my first insight of the float. If you’ve ever watched a tankful of tropical fish you may wonder why they’re not bored out of their scales swimming around and around the same enclosed tank day in, day out. The secret, I think, what makes it exciting, is weightlessness. They’re darting about and having the time of their lives. I can relate.
PHOTO BY DAN LITTLE
One of the reasons I don’t take baths at home is that the scalding hot water turns icy cold in a hurry. But this tub gets neither hot nor cold, heated from underneath, same temp as the human body, homogeny controlled by a laptop. It’s conducive to meditating, I can feel that, but I’m about as good at meditating as I am at the backstroke, though I try at both.
My legs feel heavy, the mental image of wearing chaps in a cowpuncher movie, and I find myself feeling for them, and they seem … inflated. Inflated like a Macy’s balloon. I am, oddly, not alarmed by this.
You remember Wardlaw’s words about not being able to locate yourself in space, “allowing the body schema to dissolve.” I’m not dissolving, rest assured, but locating myself? I remember a momentary disassociation during my ketamine trip, but I’m pretty much together here in the tank, wriggling my fins like the Lake Malawi cichlid I’ve become.
Many floaters report a deep relaxation, some experience euphoria and spiritual insight. Some reach a state of wakefulness while asleep, though very few report being actually asleep. I swear I fell asleep. Maybe for only a second, maybe for half an hour, hard to say — time in the float cabin is kept at bay like everything else.
“Oh, I’ve definitely fallen asleep,” said Holyoke psychotherapist Avery Klotsche, a regular here. “Being in a place where you can’t do anything does allow us to go into a sleep state, very restorative at least, away from all your devices. The claustrophobic may not appreciate it but your average Gen Z workaholic needs it badly,” they laughed.
Klotsche’s first time in a float tank was in NYC.
“I’d read about sensory deprivation and found a float tank right by Central Park, right before Christmas,” they said. “When I came out one hour later and got the bus to go home I was soooooo relaxed. Anything could have happened in that chaos but I was calm the rest of the day.”
Klotsche found Go With The Float in 2020 and has taken over 40 floats at the location, including a recent three-hour session that started at 7 a.m.
“I had never gone in the morning. I usually float at night because it helps me sleep,” they said. “It’s a totally different experience that time of day, but I came out alert and had a very productive day.”
Of the “dissolution of the boundaries of the body” Christopher Wardlaw attains: “Chris is operating on a different level, but I have felt a little disembodied at times,” they said.
Klotsche is also not the first person who has likened floating to being back in the womb.
Me, I don’t remember the womb. I remember being out of the womb and screaming for relief from the garish neon world and the shocking pang of starvation. This is better.
