The tank, it is said, can be a useful space to ponder life’s important questions… whether to change job, house or relationship; those major life decisions. Go in with a question and you may just find the answer in those 200 gallons of salty water.
I’ve been giving a lot of thought recently into why the tank can work for people in this way; how it is that the float tank can deliver you to the answer that you need.
Let’s start by looking at our mind when we have an important decision to make: We will, most likely, be doing a lot of thinking. There will, most likely, be a lot of thoughts, feelings and emotions flying around in our heads, creating a pretty loud internal narrative.
And yet, the great paradox is that it is this very internal narrative that is obscuring our ability to find the answers.
Let me explain.
There is, at all times, a very natural flow of life that moves through us. It does not need to think about how to move through us, it moves as effortlessly as a river navigating its way around a large rock, it doesn’t think “oh I must swerve to the left,” just knows. However as a human, we lay over this natural flow an internal narrative of thoughts, feelings and emotions.
You see, the tank isn’t diving into your internal narrative to find your answer, it is instead dropping underneath this turmoil to where there is a simple and natural flow that has always been. As Adyshanti once said:
“Life has always been driving itself, but when you get out of the driving seat, it will flow in ways that you could never have imagined.”
The float tank is, if only for a moment, removing you from the driving seat. Or as another teacher of mine, Hareesh once explained to me, “People think that I can manifest what I want, of course I can’t. What I am actually doing is feeling into how the universe wants to move through me, then when I align to that, it looks like I’m always getting what I want.”
When you drop into this flow, you might find that the answers aren’t what you want them to be. But it’s not about perfection or how we might imagine things to be. It is, quite simply, just about how it is.
On a personal note, I have found that when the answers make the least sense, that is when they have turned out to be the most attuned to the flow.
If this idea of finding a place of cooperation with the flow is new to you, there is some advice that Adyashanti once gave that I have found to be very helpful. He said that when you get that intuitive sense of what you need to do, you will know that it is coming from a deeper place if, when you ask it to explain itself, there is silence. This place of pratibhā, of deep intuition, will not explain or quantify itself. Ego, on the other hand, just loves to explain itself. So if you’re not sure, go ahead and ask your answer to explain itself to you, if it does not try to explain how or why it is right, if instead it just is, then you may be dropping into that space.
Perhaps one of my most favourite quotes that encapsulates this beautifully is from a Jesuit priest called Anthony De Mello. He said that:
“Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable.”
So stop resisting the invertible, lie back my friends and surrender to the flow.
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