 We cannot teach people anything. We can only help them discover it within themselves. Galileo. They say if you speak to somebody at the level of the mind, you'll speak to the mind. If you speak through your heart, you'll speak to the heart. And if you speak through your lives, and your life is a story, you'll change lives. Today, we're going to share with you our journey to discovering the power of flotation for managing service-induced stress. Some of you may be curious, what accent is that? Others may be thinking, he doesn't look like a soldier. And some of you may just be waiting for someone else to speak. I invite you to suspend your judgement, to stay present and let's explore this path to inner wellness. I'm Michael, and this is my partner Beck. My journey started in 2010, when I was deployed to Afghanistan as part of mentoring task force. I was an infantry section machine gunner. My initial experience of Afghanistan was one of sweeping valleys, snow-capped mountains, and the joy of little kids coming up to us with smiles asking for lollies and bottles of water as we did patrols. Unfortunately, the reality of war is that it's not all postcards. And on the 24th of August, I was involved in a three and a half hour contact where my section 2IC was shot and killed. I was returned to Australia, suffering full body involuntary muscular twitches. I was to the point where trying to drink from a water bottle or eating my food, I'd spill it on myself. I struggled lighting a cigarette. The conventional treatments I was put on numbed me, and as you can see, made me gain weight. And just withdraw from my friends and my family. I didn't want to attend Christmas. I didn't want to attend birthday parties. I just went into a shell of myself. I was put on medications and started drinking a lot of alcohol. I was drinking around a bottle of alcohol a night just to numb some of the feelings and the thoughts that I would have at night. The medications stopped me from feeling anything. Fair enough, it stopped me from feeling too much about my deployment. But when you're sad, you're supposed to be able to cry. And there was a lot of times when I'd be thinking about things and I'd say to my partner, I really feel like I need to cry, but I just physically can't. This was the medications and this was the treatment that I was prescribed. I was suicidal and homicidal. Thankfully, the support of my partner Beck gave me the strength to turn around and move on to a path of healing using alternative therapies. And I'll allow her to talk a bit more about that. So our journey has had so many ups and downs. As you can see from this photo, being a carer for someone with PTSD can take a really heavy toll on even a healthy person. This is what I call the ripple effect. I was depressed. I was lonely. I'd isolated myself. I suffered from so many illnesses and I had debilitating back pain that would leave me bedridden for days and months on end. Sorry, weeks on end. And it really wasn't helpful for my caring for Michael. But I did believe that my only priority as a carer was to care for Michael. My stuff, it wasn't even an issue. It just became backseat sort of stuff. And when doctors told me that Michael would be on psychotropic medication for the rest of his life, I knew that things had to change. He was 25. And from what I could see, the supposed gold standard treatment was only making him dramatically worse. So I went searching for real solutions and I had to lead by example. So I turned to Google. And I got lost down that rabbit hole for a solid 12 months. I watched. I read. I researched. I contacted world leading academics to find real solutions. And to my surprise, there was a lot of acceptance for alternative treatments in other coalition countries including the US and Canada. Google introduced me to a whole new world of healthcare. Food is medicine. Cannabis is medicine. It's the importance of having a healthy endocannabinoid system, which I'd never even heard of before, yet alone even knew that I had one. Yoga and meditation as a spiritual growth and healing tool. Peer-to-peer mentoring programs helped us see that we weren't alone in this at all. And eventually, flotation, when I heard Joe Rogan speaking about it, I knew that the benefits were profound. But it took me six months to convince Michael to get in a tank. So two of the most important points that I've learnt over this continual journey is to take responsibility of your own personal health and well-being. If we had continued to follow the doctor's orders, I have no doubt that Michael would have taken his life by now, or at least had multiple attempts. And number two is to find multiple modalities that resonate with you and to use them together to enhance their overall benefits. For us personally, we've found the two most symbiotic are cannabis and flotation. But I'll allow Michael to explain flotation. Thanks. So as you've heard, there's a range of alternative treatments that have actually helped me regain a quality of life. But there's a select range of things that I actually attribute solely to flotation. One of the main things in particular that I noticed after my very first float was the overdue rest that I needed. As I'm sure a lot of you are aware, veterans suffer from insomnia, night sweats, night terrors. These things don't allow you to get a proper night's rest. And so for me, as well as the adrenal fatigue from being in a combat zone for eight and a half months, I found that getting in that tank and hopping back out, it was like I caught up on four years' worth of sleep that I'd just been missing out on. That allowed me to reconnect and almost come back to life as who I was. Another massive part of floating is it's helped me reconnect with my emotions. For a long time, as I said, I was numb. I didn't feel anything. I wasn't a proper partner to beck. And so through floating, I've learned, re-learned how to be happy, confident, how to love again. These are all emotions that were gone to me. With complimenting through cannabis and over time, I've gradually been able to, in the tank, get to a point where I'm now starting to reprocess some of the issues or traumas that I experienced in Afghanistan and view them more in a positive frame of mind. And this has allowed me to not have such harsh triggers when I am remembering or reminiscing on things or it comes to an anniversary. We're now trying to start an organization or have started an organization in Australia called Weeded Warrior, and we're active advocates for a range of modalities, yoga, flotation, nutrition, cannabis, trying to educate not just veterans, but the broader service community about how you can manage your service problems and regain some form of a quality of life. I would ask all of you who are either own float tank centers or are starting float tank centers to consider investing in veterans. I'll invite them into your place and provide this experience that has immeasurable benefit. We're grateful for the opportunity to be here and I'd like to thank you all for listening to us.