Transcript

My name is Stéphanie Reid and I am 29 years old, born and raised Winnipegger.  I work for a start-up called Permission Clicks.  So we do digital permission forms, online approvals for K-12.  Winnipeg based – little bit of a Winnipeg success story actually.  And then in my spare time I do dodgeball, I play dodgeball competitively so that takes up a lot of my free time.  I sit on the board there as well so that would definitely be my hobby.

Q.  How has floating impacted your life?

A.  Oh my gosh, so floating has impacted my life in so many ways.  And it’s interesting because every time I come, I come for a different reason and I get something different out of it.  And it’s not always planned.  Sometimes I come because I think I need to relax and I always feel relaxed but what happens in the tank is not always what I intended but it’s always really good and really beneficial.  At the end of the day it is super super relaxing so key is, no matter what happens for those 90 minutes you come out feeling like you’ve been at the cabin for 3 days.  You just come back with the Zen feeling and everything feels very calm and its funny actually to leave the building because everything feels so loud.

Q.  What do you enjoy about floating?

A.  It’s really allowed me to focus a lot more at work, to be able to take time for myself.  It’s a really great self-help and self-care, especially for someone who’s really busy, like me, where I’m working really long days, I have hobbies that keep me really busy, and also hobbies that are every hard on my body physically because I’m a competitor and athlete.  And so, having that balance of something that takes care of my mind but also makes my body feel really good is super rare and something I really appreciate.

Q.  Talk about your experience with the 7 Day Challenge

A.  So for the 7-day challenge I had come floating a few times, not as often as I had wanted to, but you know, life gets busy and we always put ourselves last.  And I had over that summer a bout of several fairly close very stressful events that happened in my life and so I just really felt the need to really recharge and just take a step back and I did a bit of a mini stay-cation.  And so I took a few days off work and I just kind of needed to reset.  And I came in and I just happened to see that you guys had the 7-day challenge when I came in for just a regular float and I thought well I’m never ever going to be able to commit to 7 days other than literally this week, right now so it seemed like a really good opportunity to try it.  I did not go one every single day.  I actually bundled them up and I didn’t go back to back but I would do one and have a two-hour break and then do another one a few days.  And actually I think that was probably the best thing that I could have done because the first one kind of got me into that mindset.  And then I was able to sit in this area that you guys have here, just process, do a little bit of journaling. And then the second one I went in was when some really cool things happened.  So, I definitely recommend it.  If you wanted to really see what floating is about but you’re worried about having time every single month to go, it’s a really really great thing to do to really kind of kick start the experience for you.   

Q.  How did you feel after completing the 7-day challenge?

A.  I definitely felt really good, super relaxed, very happy that I did it.  It was really weird because I kind of felt like I had built this routine of coming in every day or almost every day and then all of a sudden it was gone and I was almost mourning this loss of floating on a regular basis.  But emotionally, going every single day like that and then having a week off, it’s crazy how much stronger or how much longer that relaxation lasts.  Because if you go for one float, and you know, it lasts a couple of days, and then life gets chaotic again, and when you go for 7 days in a row it lasts twice as long.  You know, it lasted for about 2 weeks where I just felt like I was constantly still in that really Zen state and I was really performing optimally which was really nice.

Q.  Describe your first experience.    

A.  So, for my very first time, when I first came in I was lucky that Leah and Brad were both here.  And it was really cool to have them tell us, because I came in with my fiancé Sebastian, we came in together, and they gave us the whole run down of why they did this and how much of an impact it’s had for their life and they gave us a tour of the building as well.  And to see their passion and their commitment for it also made me feel like this was the right choice, especially this venue specifically because they were doing it for the right reasons.  You know, they’re not here to get rich, there here because they want to bring this to people and they believe so strongly in it which really came out when we met with them.  My first step in the tank, I definitely felt like, it was interesting because I’ve never shut off for 90 minutes straight, I don’t think anybody really has, and for somebody who’s mind is always going, I’m not claustrophobic or anything like that but there was definitely a first few minutes of sitting there thinking oh my gosh what am I going to do for 90 minutes?  This is going to be crazy.  I’m going to get bored. You know, there was that typical kind of nervousness, but it went away right away and the rest of the experience was just incredibly incredibly relaxing.

Q.  How are your floats now vs. when you started?

A.  So floating is really interesting because every single float has been different.  You kind of go in with the expectation of I know what to expect a little bit more, but I’ve experience something different in every single one of them.  The first few, to be honest, I’m pretty sure I fell asleep in a lot of them which is just a sign that my body was just so over tired and over stressed that literally that’s what I needed was sleeping.  And sometimes I come in and that’s what happens because I’m just super depleted of sleep and that’s okay.  But there are other times I come in and I get crazy amounts of thinking done or I just have a really different experience and it doesn’t seem to be consistent…its more consistent with what’s happening in my life around me.

Q.  How do you use your time in the tank?

A.  If I’m super super stressed about something, then sometimes I work through that.  Or if I come right after a dodgeball game then sometimes I’ll replay it in my mind.  But those things always come up very naturally.  I don’t try to force them.  So that’s the biggest thing that I’ve learned is that, I guess when I first started I was thinking, okay, I want to have this type of experience and I’m going to try to push towards these types of thoughts.  And you can’t really control it that way.  Your mind is going to serve up whatever you actually need, not what you think you need, which is very different.

Q.  Do you go into your floats with any intentions?

A.  I just stopped going in with intentions because I over focused on them and then half my float was spent arguing with myself basically about what I wanted to focus on. So, that’s probably the biggest thing that I had to learn from when I first started to going more regularly is that you just can’t force it.  You kind of just have to let yourself be, which is the whole manta really, and just let your brain and your body just do what it needs to do and you’ll be happy with the experience.

Q.  Tell us about your FLOAT.Calm experience.

A.  Everyone is amazing here.  The staff at this place, they’re incredible.  Obviously Leah and Brad, the great passion that they have, and that I think exudes onto the people that they pick to work here as well.  So, the people that are here are always very calming, very friendly, very easy to talk to.  I also think that what’s unique is that they’re very good at understanding that sometimes you really want to chat and sometimes you really just need to sit in a corner and read by yourself and they seem to pick up on that really well which is really really nice.  But it’s a really amazing community, everyone is always super friendly and I think that the staff here really exudes everything that FLOAT.Calm stands for which is nice and rare to see in companies.

Q.  How would you describe floating to others?

A.  It’s really interesting because trying to describe floating to somebody who’s never done it before is something that has been coming up a lot lately, just because my friends know that I do it and then especially with dodgeball becoming more competitive and everyone talks about their body being sore, and everyone knows if you put Epsom Salts in bath water that’s a really good way to ease the pain of muscle soreness.  Well this is basically that on steroids so I’ve been talking about it a lot more and trying to explain it to them and its really one of those things that’s really hard to explain because you don’t want to lead someone too much into one direction and again, give them this expectation that this is what you will experience and then they focus so much on that that they don’t get the experience that they want.  So I’ve tried to be very, which is weird because I like to talk a lot so it’s hard for me to not share it, but it really is one of those things that you have to come in and experience for yourself.  I’ll always tell people you won’t regret it, it’s going to be really really relaxing, the most relaxing experience you’ve had in a very long time.  You’re going to come out feeling incredible, you’ll feel incredible for a couple of days.  So that is always going to live up to that no matter what happens in that tank those things are always going to be true.  But everything else is a very unique experience and what they get might be very different than what I get.  So I just try to prepare them for having a really amazing relaxing experience, they’re going to love it and you’ve got to just give it a shot and find out for yourself.  I do have friends that have asked me, you know, if they are claustrophobic, they’ve asked about that a lot and I’ll always tell them you can leave the tank a little bit open.  So I think they’ve done a really great job here of helping people if they have those fears, of like, what if I need to get out, what if I feel like it’s too long, what if I’m afraid of the dark, whatever those cases are, you guys have corrected for a lot of those so that people can try it, but at the end of the day how do you tell someone what a massage feels like?  You can’t, right? They have to just go for a massage and they’re going to figure it out and if you have knots in your back and I don’t it’s going to feel different for you than it does for me.  So, that I think is a really good comparison, is just like a massage or just like your first yoga class, you really don’t know what it’s going to be like until you try it.