Soaring Through the Canyons of Manhattan: A Floatation Experience

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Musings from 20th Street

At La Casa, we love water, the element of renewal.

Read this review of one of La Casa’s satisfied clients about his first floatation experience:

Soaring Through the Canyons of Manhattan:

A Floatation Experience.

By Lampoet516

Originally posted at Lampoetry.com

Earlier this week I celebrated the winter solstice with my first session in a floatation tank. In all likelihood this is not something I would have pursued on my own initiative. In fact, the only reason I found myself sipping peppermint tea in the waiting room of La Casa Spa & Wellness Center on East 20th street, just before lunchtime on Monday, is that my son Danny had proposed it as a holiday present – a bit of father/son bonding in a New Age setting where we went to be suspended in an Epson salt solution. It seems Stephen Curry put the idea in my son’s head, inasmuch as Steph is a big floater and my son is a big Steph Curry fan. Apparently Steph floats, not only on the court when he goes up for his patented long-range jumper, but before every game as part of his warm-up routine, when he semi-submerges himself in a tepid salt-bath.

The use of these floatation tanks has an interesting history, going back to the 1950’s, which you can read about here.  The tanks were developed by a neuroscientist named John Lilly, who first marketed them under the rather off-putting name of isolation tank or sensory deprivation tank. There you lie, in 6 inches of warm, brackish bath water, in total darkness, your ears plugged up too. As a relaxation technique it caught on big time in the late 1960’s, surged in popularity in the 1970’s and then quickly fell out of fashion in the 1980’s, presumably over the heightened concerns over public bathing in the age of HIV. Thanks to Steph Curry and some other recent favorable news coverage, floatation tanks are now enjoying a resurgence in popularity, and the tanks themselves seem to be getting a makeover, as you can see from the picture [below], with fabricators adopting high-tech design and even incorporating cobalt blue lighting to help create a mood more typically associated with a cloud computing data center.

The floatation tank at La Casa is more old school – no fancy blue lighting, no-space age looking tub. But I recommend it all the same, given the fact that sensory deprivation (as a relaxation technique) really doesn’t seem to depend so much on incorporating the latest in styling or design to achieve the desired effect. The floatation tank is truly a place for understatement, where less is more and still less is even better yet.

Setting aside all such questions of tank design, my initial adventure floating in brine was a wonderful experience. Other than a tumble in bed with a loved one, it’s hard to imagine a more pleasurable way to spend an hour – you will be liberated from the laws of gravity and cut adrift in the void right here in midtown Manhattan, all for the reasonable price of just $80 an hour. It’s an incredible deal — to be able to expand the range of your sense perception so far so fast and for such a reasonable hourly rate. Not only that but it’s completely legal.
Greg, who is the manager/caretaker of the tank at La Casa, explained to me that floatation is particularly well suited for those of us who meditate, because an hour of lying suspended in brine, deprived of sight and sound, opens up access to our interiority in ways that otherwise might take years to accomplish sitting cross-legged on the mat. Put it this way: by the end of my first hour, I had already sloughed off my skin and was just getting ready to ascend a shimmering column of light. Unfortunately before I could begin the ascent, there was a light tap on the door announcing that my hour was up.
I realize the better practice among spiritually minded folks is to be discrete when it comes to discussing personal Enlightenment.   It can be irksome, to say the least, to hear some social media savvy sadhu blather on and on about their voyage of inner discovery. But please remember, this is floatation I’m talking about, not samadhi – it’s a straight up commercial transaction that’s open to any of us with sufficient cash or credit. So I hope you won’t mind if I provide a slightly more detailed description of what I saw and felt lying there in the murk.
As it turns out, one of the most striking aspects of floatation is the panorama it provides of darkness itself. Simply being in a blackout chamber ushers us into this landscape of vast tranquility – presenting a vista of emptiness that is as majestic and sweeping as an Ansel Adams photograph. Opening and closing your eyes makes no difference. Between the inner and outer landscape there appears not a hair’s breadth of difference as you find yourself relaxing into near perfect equilibrium. For those of us who often struggle to find balance when we meditate, this gift of darkness is a powerful discovery and a boon in itself.
And floatation supercharges the experience. There is really no physical sensation quite like it that I know of. It’s more peaceful and relaxing than sleep as I soon found myself breathing with extraordinary depth. You are awake and yet liberated from gravity and suspended from the conventions of every day existence in Cartesian space. But for the fact of my steady deep breathing, it reminded me of my earliest days, that is of life in the womb, except a floatation tank is not nearly so cramped or confining as the last few months in utero, when, at least to the best of my recollection, one always ended up feeling like a contortionist. Instead, floating makes you feel loose limbed, so much so your limbs drift apart and begin to detach from your torso. As you lie there suspended in darkness, it feels far too spacious to be womb-like; or rather it’s more like entering the womb of space-time itself.
Of course, all too soon the tap comes on the door announcing bath time is over. Yet as you emerge from the tank and gradually re-acclimate yourself to everyday reality, this wonderful sense of deep relaxation persists. I can’t promise that you will have attained the vertical lift of Steph Curry but in the case of someone far less nimble (such as myself) I nonetheless found myself continuing to float as I reclaimed  the streets of midtown. Not unlike a figure in a Chagall painting, there I was buoyant and aloft, if not soaring, through the canyons of Manhattan, my limbs only tenuously attached.  This is what it means to float. I hope you can find a tank nearby and discover the pleasures for yourself.

Respectfully submitted by:
and
*Licensed Psychologist
*Certified  Psychoanalyst
*Stone Carrier Medicine Woman, Native American Traditional Organization

Mother Nature May Have Solution for Lowering Cholesterol in Pregnant Women

– University at Buffalo

Todd Rideout, assistant professor of exercise and nutrition sciences at UB, is researching how plant sterols may help lower cholesterol in pregnant women.
– Credit: Image courtesy of University at Buffalo

When it comes to effective solutions for lowering cholesterol levels in pregnant women, Mother Nature may know best.

Researchers are studying whether plant sterols can be used as a natural alternative to drug therapy for pregnant women who have high cholesterol. While it’s normal for a woman’s cholesterol to spike during pregnancy, excessive lipid levels — whether from genetic or dietary reasons — can have negative health effects on the offspring, both early in life and later on as adults.

For more info, click HERE.

Another Great Review from a La Casa Client!

“I go here for the float tank. Its big and roomy. More of a giant shower than a tank. Everyone is super nice and really helpful. Wish I had a tank in my house. This is the place to go for floatation…These people were super nice.”

– Leonard L.

This Floating Bucket could be a Solution to Ocean Pollution

A new product from two Australians aims to help suck up some of the 269,000 tons of plastic floating in the ocean. Video provided by Newsy.

Click the image below to see the video!

Why are health awareness campaigns failing to reduce skyrocketing obesity rates? According to a new study in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, consumers continue to make their eating decisions based on taste alone.
“Despite a recent trend toward healthy eating behaviors, many consumers still tend to overconsume unhealthy foods because of two facts that work in combination,” write authors Robert Mai and Stefan Hoffmann (Kiel University, Germany). “Unhealthy is widely associated with being tasty, and taste is the main driver of food decisions. There is little research on the conflict between healthiness and tastiness.”
Study participants were given a variety of yogurts that differed in sugar and fat quantity. Even when they were given better information about the ingredients, this was not a sufficient to encourage choosing the healthier yogurt. The strategy was especially ineffective for those eaters who needed it most, because the least health-conscious eaters were also the least likely to take any new health information into consideration.
Even though some health-conscious eaters modified their behavior slightly when given better information on the product, both the informed and uninformed unhealthy eaters expressed firm opinions that the less healthy yogurts were tastier. It was this tastiness factor that, in the end, drove the decision-making for both healthy and unhealthy eaters, and it could not be overcome simply by raising health consciousness.
“Policy planners must instead find ways to make healthy foods more appealing, by improving the actual taste as well as the packaging and marketing, and by investing in social campaigns which work on consumer’s emotions and encourage a sense that healthy eating is ‘cool’ and prestigious. Overall, a holistic approach is urgently needed in which food companies, consumers, and policy makers, instead of working against one another, manage to find mutually beneficial strategies to combat the world’s alarming obesity epidemic,” the authors conclude.
-American Marketing Association

GREAT NEWS FOR ANIMAL LOVERS!

According to a number of sources, including HigherPerspectives.com, Costa Rica is shutting down all zoos and freeing every animal in captivity.

Scientifically Documented Benefits of Floating: 

   

• regulates blood pressure     •increases endorphins     •syncronizes brain waves    • balances electrolytes     • decreases stress-related neurochemicals     •reduces heavy metal load     •reduces acidity     • balances pH      • remineralizes

In Floatation, you float peacefully atop the water, experiencing both buoyancy and weightlessness. You enter a state that is like the meditative state—both extraordinarily quiet and intensely conscious. The rejuvenative effect on the body and brain is shown to be equivalent to five hours of sleep and has the cleansing effect of a three-day fast.

60 minutes: $80

La Casa’s other water therapies are: PEDI-DETOX, STEAM SAUNA

Pedi-Detox:

Treat your feet like they are the kings of your body. In the feet reside over 4000 pores, and they are the largest pores in the body.  Within the fascia fatty tissues, a large quantity of toxins are stored.  Thus, the feet are an ideal place in the body to both release toxins and to absorb nutrients. Works from the head all the way down.

Benefits of the Pedi-Detox:     • detoxification    • stimulation & balancing of the   body’s energy meridians    • re-balancing of the body’s natural electrical energy system     • ATP production:  the increase in cellular ATP allows the cell to work and detoxify at a higher rate. This allows the cell to better withstand stressors, either physical or chemical.

30 minutes: $60

Steam Sauna:

Sweat it all out. Stay chill in the head with a cooling breeze (your head stays conveniently out of the steam cabinet).

30 minutes: $50

La Casa Spa and Wellness Center was created out of the experience one woman had with her mother. Long before holistic medicine became widely known, Dr. Jane Goldberg spent the 1970s seeking alternative cancer therapies for her mother, who had been diagnosed with terminal bone cancer. Following sound principles of holistic health, Jane’s mother was able to reverse her cancer condition entirely, moving from her wheelchair to joyfully playing tennis again. This experience inspired Jane to specialize in her psychoanalytic practice to work with cancer patients, and to fulfill the need for a holistic healing center in NYC. Jane and La Casa invite you to partake of the restorative and profoundly cleansing therapies that have brought La Casa world-wide recognition.

Think of your body as part of the earth,
Think of the earth as part of your soul
La Casa Spa
41 East 20th Street,
New York, NY. 10003
212-673-2272