Beauty

Breathwork

Breathing is something we do all the time, and generally automatically without noticing it. As we become more conscious, we use the breath to focus our attention inside. To actually feel the sensation of what it feels like to be you right this moment. Our breath can be long, or short it is just interesting to be conscious of the action of breathing. Sometimes our lives are moving at such a pace that our awareness is only about how tired and run down we feel, and our breath shortens. We need to take the time to relax and take a full breath. Each day we need to find a moment to be still and quiet and get reacquainted with our breath. Our breath can heal our bodies, which feeds oxygen to our cells.
This ability to allow ourselves to breathe and to feel our breath fills our lives with expansion which helps us to function, and gives us more natural ease in our lives. Floating is the perfect place to work on your breath. You can hear your whole body breathe. If you stop breathing you will notice this, if you breathe shallow you will notice this. And if your breath is expansive and full of joy you will notice this too. We can ultimately get to a place were in between the inhalation and the exhalation you feel that you are being breathed. We can learn to surrender and let go enough so you can actually allow your self to be breathed by the universe.

Business

"Corporate wellness, once perceived as a warm and fuzzy feel-good practice, is now considered a bottom line driver, according to industry experts."
Indianapolis Business Journal Feb 2003

According to a study published by the American Journal of Health Promotions, for every $1 spent on wellness programs, employers can expect a return of $2.30 to $10.10 through lower medical claims, reduced absenteeism, improved productivity and other factors.
The benefits of a corporate wellness program include:
• Increased employee productivity
• Increased health and well-being
• Decreased health care costs
• Decreased short and long-term disability
• Decreased workers compensation costs
• Decreased employee absenteeism
• Improved corporate image
• Enhanced recruitment and retention
In addition to the above benefits, an employer who utilizes Blue Lotus Flotation  Center will have employees who are considerably more resistant to stress. Give us a call to discuss how we can help take your employee's performance to a new level.
 
Here's an excerpt from floatnation.com: 
"There used to be an office in the city [San Francisco] where they had a bunch of tanks and whenever business meetings were held everyone was required to float first and only afterwards the meeting would commence.  The reason for such extravagant approach was that besides eliminating dilapidating effects of the stress on your body and mind to which business people are very susceptible, floating greatly increases your concentration, your mental acuity and awareness of the world around you. You become quite open to different ideas and other people's views.  The state of deep relaxation, the theta state, is associated with creativity, free associations, sudden insight. 

Business people will appreciate the rejuvenating effect of floating. After an exhausting week, you float and then emerge completely centered, fresh, relaxed. Another way in which business people found floating beneficial was listening to motivational self-help tapes while floating. It's very popular among some of our customers who are salespeople or stockbrokers. They claim significant business improvements from it. While you float, your mind enters a state of deep relaxation where it becomes very susceptible to positive suggestions. This is the concept called superlearning where tanks have been used with great success by the US Olympic team and many pro sport teams around the world."

Creativity

Floatation is the ultimate tool for enhancing creativity. Creativity is as important for business people as it is for artists. Relaxation plays an important role in the creative process. It allows one to be calm and able to listen to their mind. While floating, you are able to view your life and business from a more objective perspective, where the answers to all your questions are apparent. You float effortlessly in a silky solution of Epsom salts saturated in body-temperature water. With all distractions eliminated, including light and sound, you easily enter a profound state of relaxation unlike anything you have experienced on planet earth.
Shoshana Leibner "Floating Yoga"
The Greens and other researchers have remarked that many great discoveries have resulted from hypnagogic imagery experienced in theta state. The chemist Friedrich Kekule, for example, vividly described his state of "reverie" in which he suddenly saw a mental image of atoms forming a chain, and of snakes biting their tales; subsequent discovery that organic compounds occur in occur in closed rings has been describes as " the most brilliant piece of prediction to be found the whole range of organic chemistry." There are countless stories of such moments of inspiration and creativity occurring when the thinker is nodding off to sleep, or gazing into the sky, or wandering lonely as a cloud. Virtually all of them speak of the drowsiness, the physical relaxation, the vivid imagery appearing unexpectedly, that mark them as examples of the theta state. The tank cannot make geniuses of us all, but its ability to put us into a theta state suggests that it can be a valuable aid in promoting creativity.
As for the value of imagery, aside from the life-enhancing qualities of visualization and the relaxed physical state that seems to accompany it, there are definite practical advantages. Many studies have shown clearly that visual imagery is associated with the ability to remember: The stronger your mental imagery, the less effort you will need to take in and commit to memory an idea or event. People with "super memories" are able to perform their feats through mental images. With words, linked end to end like box cars, we can understand only in linear fashion, one bit at a time, while with imagery we can assimilate and entire scene, event, or complex relationship. Visualization is also a crucial element of creativity; by "seeing" things which have never been, or visualizing events before they have taken place, we can truly invent the future, just as we can invent a work of art or a new machine. History is studded with stories of creative geniuses who first encountered their reality-changing ideas in the form of visions, or mental images.
Professor Thomas Taylor of Texas A & M recently conducted a fascinating test of the effects of floating on learning and thinking. Taylor had tested subject groups to see which were visualizers and which were verbalizers, and concluded; " when the same learning records are analyzed on the basis of persons who are basically ' visualizers' verses those who are primarily' conceptualizers' ( non-visual thinkers), a greater degree of learning occurred in the visual than in the non-visual group. " Taylor also noted that the float group appeared to visualize better than the non-float group, and produced significantly higher amounts of theta waves, which are known to be associated with strong mental imagery.
The floatation tank is the optimal environment for visualization because the relaxation it ensures is so profound that the brain soon begins to generate an unprecedented amount of very slow, strong, rhythmical theta waves, which are associated with vivid, lifelike hynagogic images. All the methods of visualization used throughout history - the yogi's and monk's relaxed motionless lotus posture, the shaman's drug-induced catonia - have emphasized that a state of deep relaxation is essential to successful visualization. In the tank, deep relaxation and strong mental imagery come spontaneously and effortlessly.
Michael Hutchison "The Book of Floating"

Health

Through all sorts of tests, including EMG (which measure muscle tension), EEG, blood pressure, and measurements of certain biochemicals, scientists have determined that the float tank can bring about a state of extraordinarily deep relaxation-probably deeper than is possible by any other means yet available except for certain drugs. This state of relaxation is in itself beneficial to health, since it allows the body to maintain its internal system of checks and balances, its homeostasis. That is, the body has its own highly effective methods of maintaining itself at an optimal level of well-being, and if allowed to operate freely, it will generally do so flawlessly. But certain mental attitudes can throw this delicate mechanism out of whack. Stress causes harm by its disruption of our natural biochemistry. For example, researchers have recently discovered that, under stress, Type A personalities secrete forty times as much cortisol and three times as much adrenaline as Type B men. Cortisol has been proven to suppress the immune system. Tests have shown that floating decreases cortisol. Excess adrenaline, and related biochemicals such as noradrenaline and ACTH also cause our bodies to rev up in fight-or-flight response, and, ultimately, to wear out. Floating, through deep relaxation, lowers the levels of the harmful chemicals.
Deep relaxation is beneficial in another way. Because of what has been called the curare effect, and as explained by the Webber-Fechner Law, floating leads to increased sensory awareness; we simply feel our bodies better, more clearly, and as a result we are able to regulate them more effectively. As John V. Basmajian's experiments showed, we have the capacity to control the firing of a single motor neuron in the body, once we are made aware of that neuron.
Deep relaxation also leads to improved access to internal imagery. And awareness and control of mental imagery is the key to self regulation.
Michael Hutchison "The Book Of Floating"
"To beat stress, combat high blood pressure, ease headache pain, kick bad habits, and boost concentration.
Floating, free of light, sound, and touch, you are now able to tune in to profound relaxation that, scientists have found, trigger the same positive physical and mental effects that occur during meditation.
And even more significantly, this deep relaxation seems to linger long after the float is over, according to Thomas Fine, assistant professor of mental health at the Medical College of Ohio.
When researchers tested people who floated for 1 hour, they found that the subjects' heart rates and breathing had slowed down and their blood pressure dropped. This favorable drop in blood pressure may be due to the additional finding that floaters have lower levels of cortisol and other stress related hormones that influence high blood pressure.
If you are suffering chronic back pain, headaches, or some other painful condition, floating can be a part of your pain management program. According to Gib Koula, program coordinator at Stress Lab Services at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Appleton, Wisconsin.
Researchers have found that when floatation is used as a primary method of relaxation training, chronic pain conditions improved. For one thing, pain is eased because buoyancy reduces pressure on the body and thus brings blessed relief. Even more significant is the fact that floating triggers the production of endorphins, your body's natural painkillers.
Gratefully, this special painkilling effect continues after you step out of the Tank. Without outside stimulation you can zero in on your breathing, heart rate, and muscle tension." This feedback helps you learn how to deeply relax and alter bodily functions at will for the times you need pain relief when you are not floating,' says Koula."
--from "The Prevention How-To Dictionary of Healing remedies and Techniques"  the Editor of Prevention Magazine; John Feltman, Rodal Press, 1992.

Meditation

Has anyone ever told you that it takes years to be able to meditate. or if you just follow there program you will be meditating in no time. Yes it is very hard to relax. We are not taught how to do this. And really we are taught it is better to achieve, and run, and do. Well it is a good thing to be able to do everything. Floating will allow you to, relax, let go, learn how to relax and let go like nothing available on this planet.
The Floatation tanks are developed to have no sound no light and to suspend you within its warm salty solution. It takes you into the meditative theta state immediately. This allows one to open up and sense and feel more connected. Floating is the perfect place to slow down and be with oneself and meditate.

Sports and Athletic Performance

Another way of analyzing the beneficial effects of floating on athletic performance is in terms of the specialization of the brain's hemispheres. We know that when were playing at our best, in those wonderful moments of flow, there's a word less but perfect synchronism between body and mind. We don't have to give orders to the body; it acts perfectly, instantaneously, as in a third baseman's reflex drive for a backhanded spear of a line shot, or a flurry of volleys between two tennis players at the net, action moving too fast for the eye or the rational mind to follow.
There are so many simultaneous spatial variables involved in every moment of athletic action that, if the linear, detail oriented left hemisphere tries to interfere, it can only end up disrupting our play. And in the liberation of the right hemisphere, the float tank can be a valuable tool for athletes. There is extensive evidence that floatation causes the dominant verbal left hemisphere to let go its usual tight hand on the controls, allowing the often neglected or undeveloped right hemisphere to come into play. This effect, lasting as it does for many days after a float, can be maintained and carried by the athlete into the arena.
It's apparent that the brain's left hemisphere (verbal, sequential, analytical, relatively slow, processing details) has little to do with such moments of flow, while the right hemisphere) fast, visual, visual, spatial, holistic, synthetic) is operating freely. Athletic excellence depends so much on the nonverbal, large-scale processing of the right hemisphere that all athletes instinctively know that the intrusion of the nonverbal hemisphere can bring the flow experience to a dead halt. One of the oldest tricks in sports is to cause your opponent to activate the logical, verbal left brain, as when the baseball player, watching his hot-hitting opponent in batting practice, shouts, "Hey, Willie, you're hitting good! What did you do to change your stance-bend your knees more? Willie begins to wonder what he is doing, the left hemisphere swings into action, and the great slump begins.
1. Induces more rapid healing.
• Floating brings more oxygen, through increased circulation, to injured areas, allowing the body to heal in half the time. Regular Floating can stop the minor injuries from progressing to Major Problems.
• Floating aids in the reduction of injuries due to over training or muscular tension and imbalance and enhances the body's ability to recover from injuries and the normal stress of intensive exercise. It speeds the recovery from the stress of peak output, as in races and competition.
2. Improves Circulation.
• Floating in a pool with 800 pounds of Epsom salt allows the floater to have no weight on the spinal column. The blood flows to the extremities.
• Floating increases physical relaxation, which leads to improved performance, greater stamina, speed, strength, and coordination.
When you combine Floating with a Regular Training Program, Proper Diet and Mind Set, you have the Optimum Conditions for Success in your Sport.
3. Reduces Pain, reduce Gravity (by decreasing lactic acid and increasing beta endorphins).
Floating in Epsom salt, gravity free, allows the natural product of your own bodies natural pain killer beta endorphin. Pain stops the Breath, and Breath is the Only real Healer.
4. Increases effectiveness of guided imagery.
• Floating improves coordination and performance skills due to in-tank Visualization and Guided Imagery Rehearsal. Review technique in the Tank and Surprise Yourself when the actual Performance goes without a Flaw.
 Floating leads to Increased Confidence, Concentration, Calmness and Poise.

Stress Reduction

Floatation offers a relatively stress-free environment in which to escape temporarily from stressful external stimuli and free your system from its chronic state of arousal. This makes it a useful and life enhancing tool. But if that were all it did, floatation would be essentially a passive tool, and entering a tank would be little different from sitting quietly in a dark room. While the absence of stress is desirable in itself, it doesn't necessarily bring about the presence of its opposite, relaxation.
Floatation goes far beyond the passive. Scientists have now proven that floating activates a physiological response that is parallel to, and as powerful as, the stressful one of fight or flight. This response mobilizes the body's resources to bring about an active, alert, positive, and beneficial state of relaxation.
The idea of alleviating psychosomatic disorders by breaking the vicious cycle of stress and stress-reaction brings us to the floatation tank. While the stress relief of the tank works on a number of levels simultaneously, one obvious fact is that entering the floatation tank removes you from most stressors, both the primary stressor and secondary environmental stresses. In the tank there is no noise, no light, no other people, nothing to do, and nothing that needs to be or can be done. Like that time after the fight or the near accident, when you needed someplace just to sit and wind down, the tank is the perfect recovery-from-stress spot. There, with no possible threat from the outside world, your body slows down, the flood of chemicals that has jangled your nerves is eliminated, and your body chemistry returns to normal. And just as when, after some stressful moment, your heightened arousal gives way to a feeling of deep calmness, so in the tank the deepening relaxation of your body and brain is perceived as a delicious sensation of peace, well-being, exhilaration: I have survived and I am alive!
We all know what stress is. Though we might not be able to explain the physiological process, we're quite clear about our feelings. We talk about sweaty palms, chills down the spine, quivering like a leaf, getting cold feet, being tight-assed, having butterflies in the stomach, or receiving a shot of adrenaline. Many use these phrases with the belief that they're just figures of speech, apt clichés, not realizing that they are describing with poetic exactness very real physiological processes, all if which are part of an unconscious, reflective reaction to stress known as the flight-or-flight response.
Michael Hutchison "The Book Of Floating"

Yoga

Floating helps one with their yoga practice, brings you into a meditative state, teaches you how to relax, and concentrate.
The floatation environment allows for this exact, restful period of time, this break from from the routine, and puts you in a state of deep relaxation. This type of deep relaxation gives you energy that allows for insightful ideas to emerge, and gives you also the energy and the momentum to carry these ideas to fruition.
Floatings most important function allows you to be fully suspended, without gravity. You can feel your complete body, you can feel the placement of the bones, and muscles without any interference. For people who practice yoga it takes years to experience what is going on with their alignment.
This brings us to an important understanding that correct alignment is an important factor in our yoga practice. What you might be aware of is not being able to get into certain postures, pain, tightness, the muscles not extending as much as you would like. Moving is blissful, when the body is properly aligned, and loose, and when its not, we are all familiar with not feeling our best.
To get a better picture of what is being said here, image a thin line running up and down through your body. It is as if you were a puppet being held up from heaven, and totally connected to the earth at the same time. Your movement is easy. No body parts are held, stiff or tight. This is true ease.
Generally people who have problems with their lower back and pelvis suffer from too much sitting or driving. Floating allows you to feel if the front of the legs are tight from holding the pelvis tilted forward, or tension in the lower back because one is unconsciously thrusting the pelvis back. The ease is somewhere in between.
The length of the lower back is essential, that means finding that free place in between the two.
This takes a lot of attention, and regular discipline. Most people who start studying yoga, at least at the beginning are lost in just getting the postures, and because they are difficult, are not in a position to really experience how they are moving from one posture into the next, or even how they are really feeling while in the posture.
So the key is, to turn your attention inward, and feel the lengthening of your muscles downward through your lower back down your legs into your feet and at the same time, the lengthening upward through the head. One needs to breathe as one lengthens, and soften on one exhales. The easiest place to feel this movement, internally and externally is while floating. You can actually lengthen down into your toes and into the top of your head, at the same time without any effort. Can you do this while doing your yoga practice? If no is the answer, you have to call the nearest floatation center, and give yourself the test. See if while you breathe, you can have the breath motivate the movement. Then in your next yoga class see if while you are working you can continue to use what you have learned, to breathe and let the breath motivate the movement, and continue the stretching down into the soles of the feet and through the top of the head on each inhalation. If you do not understand why this is not happening, go back to floating and focus on your breath. Feel your breath, ride your breath as if it was a wave. Each breath is like a new day, explore the sensation of yourself as you breathe. See if you can sense the up and down quality as if there was a bellows inside of you, like an accordion. Now see if you can notice besides the up and down quality sensation, the waist, the ribs move too.