 Special, in a very poignant moment, there are those whom upon first contact put one at ease, then become engaged, then beguiled, and one leaves with a sense of thoughtfulness. There are those who embody that thoughtfulness, adding the heart, based in part on a life lived well. There are those who seemingly live with a joyful gravitas, and to communicate that openly with a natural caring and curiosity. Lee Perry was such a person. He was my, our friend. I didn't know her deeply, but I was certainly under her spell. Lee and Glenn were more, are more than influential. They are essential to this community. They were there at the beginning. They were the beginning. Glenn continues in his uniquely brilliant way. We miss her. We honor her. She was a wonderful person. So please, take a moment. Look around you at all the other wonderful people in this room, and the people you know in this community. Open yourselves, because she might be here. She is my deep honor and pleasure to introduce another essential and very caring person. Lee's daughter and my great friend Shoshana Leibner. Lee Perry was a pioneer, my best friend, and dedicated mother. It was challenging to share deep and intimate feelings that have lasted my whole lifetime for a truly exceptional person. Lee Perry woman, a mother of three. A pioneer dedicated half of her life of 89 years to empowering the human experiencing and floating was key. The images you see before you are part of my memory and memorial to my mother. The last year and a half, the pandemic affected everyone in business, closures, financial strain, production, operations, schools, homes, family life. All upended, yet unsurprisingly, the need for floating increased daily. We lost our mother, the person who made an industry when no one had ever heard of floating. No internet, cell phones, or social media. She had no applause, no pat on her back. She knew and it was clear to her how important floating was, and this I share with my favorite woman, pioneer mother and best friend, Lee Perry, co-founder of Samadhi Tank Company, for whom I created floating yoga. Lee, I feel blessed to be born your child, to be one of your children along with Lori and Josh, my sister and my brother. We are blessed to be raised, guided and inspired by you, both personally and professionally. Profoundly impacted our lives as young children, as adults and up to the last moments we spent together. I became a dancer because of you, dancing all over Europe, traveling the world because of you. I was inspired by my mother's vision to start distributing tanks internationally and launch Samadhi Italia, an import-export company providing technical and customer service. This enabled me to team up to set Samadhi float centers all over the world. Your work with Samadhi tanks gave birth to the floatation industry and impacted the world in a profound way. Benefiting millions of lives, all subsequent companies and centers and floatation products are a result of your efforts and this work continues. I believe this is needed more than ever. I feel blessed and honored to be able to carry on this work. Thank you for being my beloved mother, parent, inspiration, model and guide. May you rest in peace knowing the love and appreciation that many people throughout the world have for you in touching and improving their own lives. Thank you for being a visionary and I am privileged to carry on your dreams. Now let me introduce my sister, Lori. Lee, if she was here today, would have been very happy to see you and share a conversation, a glass of wine and a meal. She loved the energy of these conferences and the time we're connecting with old friends and the opportunity to meet as many of you new float enthusiasts as she could. What come this afternoon to share some of Lee's early history that you may not know? She was born in New York on February 28, 1932, during the waning years of prohibition. Her father was a rum runner, working with the Bronfman family, bringing liquor across the border from Canada. When prohibition ended, he was offered the Seagram's distributorship for New York. Lee's mother would have none of it, enough with those hoodlums, she said. Lee's first lesson in money is an object, not an objective. As she grew up, her father engaged in many different businesses. He was a real serial entrepreneur. The seeds were sown for her own entrepreneurial spirit. At 16, she entered Hunter College in New York, touching upon important values that she had throughout her life. She chose a college open to female students, regardless of their race, religion, or ethnicity. What could be seen as a contradiction? She joined the ongoing protest to keep this women's college from opening its doors to the men, even though the returning GIs from World War II were very popular. The doors were open to men in the early 1950s. In 1950, she met her father's stand. They married and moved to Cleveland to help in organizing the United Auto Workers Union, fighting for a guaranteed annual wage. They started a family. The guaranteed wage demand was met in 1956. A year after that, they picked up their young family and moved to Los Angeles. Our home was a few blocks from Stan's sister in Echo Park, a diverse working-class neighborhood. Stan worked as a machinist, and Lee stayed home, taking in sewing and babysitting for income and raising children. There was one car which Stan took to work. Ever interested and curious, Lee learned to cook Chinese food from one neighbor and Filipino from another. In 1960, our adventurous young family with children aged 9, 5, and 3 moved to Israel to live on a few blocks. According to Google, the definition of adventurous is to be without fear and ready to accept challenges and adventures with excitement. Doesn't that describe it? The family returned to Los Angeles after a year in Israel. Upon return, Stan began a career in social work and family counseling. Children in school, Lee was free to resume her own education, and she earned her elementary teaching credential at Cal State LA. When we were old enough, every other Saturday, she took us to the LA downtown library. We each left with our full complemented books. I can't remember if it was 10 or 12 each. First, we grew up. She was in a small Israeli dance troupe. She was a brown den mother. She studied painting. She made sure we had our music and dance lessons. Money was tight, but between the aunt who taught modern dance, the college students who taught music, and careful budgeting, she taught us the importance of the arts. We were frequent visitors at the local science and art museums for in those days. We may not have had much money, but we were definitely not surprised. It was a time for conversation about the activities of the day at work and at school and around our city, state, and nation. We learned how important it was to be engaged. She was an adventurous and cooked, and she knew how to stretch a cut of meat. The first night, it might be roasted with potatoes. The second, there could be a stew. And the third, maybe stir fry. And in our house, what was on your plate? Roast or maybe the difficult texture day plan. Every moment was presented as an opportunity. There was no blame in not knowing, only in not being willing to entertain something new. There was a new taste, a new idea, and the time was always now. She received a scholarship from USC and got her master's in education. In her final teaching position, her students were classified as educationally retarded. In other words, the children who were so disruptive in the regular classroom that they were tested and retested until they tested out into their own group of misfits. And she volunteered for that journey. In high school, her daughter, Warren Susan, decided to change her name to the one she has now, Shoshana. As Lee had demanded acceptance for the decision of her own name, she was perfectly willing to accept her daughter's choice. She believed in both the importance of a name and the importance of choice. The rights she claimed for herself, she extended to those around her. She was union strike of 1970 and became the school union rep. After Stan's death, Lee met Glenn Perry and her focus turned away from healing the world from the outside in to looking at the world from the inside out. From building unions to support the weak, she shifted her focus to the personal, expanding her internal world. She took us her job to provide a platform to increase the capacity of each of us to hear and see and do to create a better world for all. Lee and Glenn joined together, as you heard, to create an industry, the floatation tank industry that we're celebrating here today. For over 40 years, they designed and manufactured floatation tanks and built the first float centers. They created an environment free, a place to allow for the limitless experience of the contribution to the floating community. Their book, Quiet Darkness, How the Floating Tank Has Changed Our Lives and Is Changing the World, was completed and published at the end of last year. Right now, I am thinking of two lessons she taught me. There are no buts, only ends. The purpose of conversation is discovered in her last month's sessions about the meaning of it all. She knew she was transitioning to let them, laughing and crying and wonder together about the purposes of it all. As I think about our mother, I wonder, what is time after all? As Steven suggested, at this moment, we are here together remembering, and she is here with us. One final story. One day she said to me, I want to live to be 250. After I picked my job off the floor and said 250, she said no limits. And that's how she lived. And that's what she taught. Let there be no limit to your creativity, to your exploration, or to your joy. And now I'd like to present my brother Josh. Laurie and Joshana, thank you very much. Forgive me if I get a little moved during speaking. My mother was an incredible woman. So I just have a few things to say. She passed away early in the morning of March 13th this year. Leaving peacefully in her sleep, Glenn said that she did it perfectly. And I certainly remarked myself, of course, because that's how she would go. As you've heard a little bit of already, she was always on a mission to make the world a better place. We marched for peace in the 60s as a family. She taught the most challenging kids in the East LA, you know, the rough part of elementary school. From there she moved to a private school teaching children of some of Hollywood stars at the time. Dealing with an entirely different set of challenges. But the parents of privileged kids loved her because she had no time for entitlement or privilege. I remember she used to say to me, the price of freedom is responsibility, quoting Albert Hubbard. And I used to think to myself, no, freedom is having no responsibility. And once again, she was altering the way I related to the world, saw the world, dealt with the world. Grow up watching TV, forget about it. She thought television was poison, even our little 13 inch black and white zenith, which is all we had. Having tried to convince us how toxic TV was, she finally stopped trying to convince us and just unscrewed the back of the TV and took the tubes out. Except for the one or two hours a week that there might be something on that she thought was worth watching. Life was all about reading, music, the arts. We had piano, clarinet, violin, chorus, dance, drama lessons as far back as we can remember. We had records at the time, of course. Dylan, Baez, The Doors, Aretha, Pete Seger, Kingston Trio, Alan Sherman, Philoaks, shelves full of books, including, of course, the Encyclopedia. You want something to do with your board? Good. Read. And I remember just pretty much going across the entire wall, reading whatever was there. And some of these were real books, not, you know, these were not comic books. I vividly remember sitting in our lap, learning to sound out words one by one. And, you know, by the time I entered school, which I was half a year ahead because of the way that my birthday was and how they had schooled the time, but I could read, you know, well ahead of all the other kids because that's what I did for enjoyment, that and running around outside, you know, being a kid. When I, the last time I saw her, she asked me to read from a book that I brought her for her birthday, in February, which was Obama's memoir, the first volume. And we just sat and read for a couple of hours. And, you know, this was two weeks before she passed. So she wasn't 100% there. And part of the time I thought she was not there at all. And then she would stop me and say, hang on, can you reread that last paragraph? That was really enjoyable. I really, I like the way he writes. So she was catching every word. We attended Isomata, which is Idlewild School of Music and the Arts, several summers in a row. I remember watching or seeing a presentation, a showing of Rachelman. I was 11 at the time. And to this day, that story makes me appreciate people with markedly different understandings of exactly similar events, which is apropos, you know, our society today. Deeply principled. She was never conflicted about doing what she believed was right. She and Dad, as Lori mentioned, worked full time, both got their advanced degrees, you know, after hours. Her master's dad had a doctorate in psychology. We never felt poor, but nothing was wasted. One night, out a week or even a month, we'd have our Mexican food or our Chinese food at a local restaurant, which was a real treat. Our extravagances, we're renting a camper for a week during the year and driving up to Yosemite or Death Valley or New Mexico to visit our cousins. Here's a lesson I learned. One day she was feeling sort of, you know, she loosened the reins a little bit and bought me a five pack of juicy fruit gum for a nickel, which along with TV suites were rare. I went to my room. I vividly remember unwrapping a piece of gum, putting it in my mouth, enjoying that, thinking, well, two has to be better than one. So within a couple of minutes, of course, I had all five pieces in my mouth and I was chewing away. She walks in. She asked where the rest of the pack is, other than the one piece that obviously was, you know, that was okay to have opened up. My mouth was full of gum. She simply puts out her hand, points to her hand. I take the piece of gum out, the wad of gum out, put it in her hand. She turns and walks away. Not a word. What did I hear? Don't be a goner. So I understood, you know, that you don't get to have whatever you want in the world. That it's important to do the right thing. Developing, perfecting and evangelizing about floating in the floatation tank became her and Glenn's mission in life. They believed the world would be a better place if more people floated and floated away their fear, their pain, their anger, their hate. They touched thousands of people's lives and their company, Samadhi, became the name that everyone who ever floats will recognize as the people who started it. One more quick memory. When we were together back in December, the whole family was there or maybe it was a little earlier last year. And we were all working on or discussing some of the promotional ideas and some various things for the book, which was soon to be published. And a little spat happened started between two of us. I don't remember what it was, but it went on just a little too long and got, you know, a little unpleasant. I remember mom pushback her chair stood up and she was pretty diminutive in a firm and only slightly raised voice. She said, stop. This is this. This is not what we do. This is not all right with me. And there was silence. And Glenn said, okay, let's move on. No yelling, no drama, no trauma, just crystal clear resolve and conviction about how people ought to be and interact with each other. You know, incredibly impressive, incredibly instructive. I used to laugh as well. I used to do stupid like idiotic tricks with the dog, tell the dog to lie down when it was lying down, then God would get up and say, get up. And she would just chuckle. I think that was the funniest thing in the world. So that's who she was. And I'm enormously proud and grateful to, you know, ever to have had her as a mother. Thank you, mom. You're missed. You'll be forever in our hearts. And now I'll turn it over to Glenn. Thank you very much, Josh. Lee and I spent our lives dedicating them to promoting the use of the flotation tank in whatever way we could. When we decided to make it our life's work, Lee suggested that we write an intention that basically our work be for the benefit of all beings. And if that changed, we would stop. I agreed. We didn't know it at the time. That single act turned our enterprise into a spiritual endeavor, rather than a business. John Lily, the tanks inventor had said in 1971, in one of his early books. The firm belief that the experience of higher states of consciousness is necessary for survival of the human species. As the decades went by, we understood more fully his concern. One proposed the existence of Earth Coincidence Control Office, ECHO, ECCO, which determined the long term coincidences, synchronicity, and we ourselves are responsible for the short ones. I'd like to tell you a story that suggests ECHO may have known Lee and I were going to get together and work with John's tank 10 years before the tank was invented. John Lily invented the tank in 1954. A few years earlier, when I was born in 1941, my father raised foxes for their pelts. Each year in New York City, we lived in Massachusetts. There was an annual auction of the yearly supply of American fox pelts. In 1944, three years after I was born and 10 years before the tank was invented, my father sold a Pelt to IJ Fox Company, who was in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for the most money that a Pelt sold for that year. Before John invented the tank, I wrote an essay in junior high school describing my father achieving that distinction. Then 20 years later, in 1974, I met Lee and we started the tank business. The next year, I found the essay and showed it to Lee. She said, that Pelt you father sold in 1944 was to my sisters and her husband's company, IJ Fox. My father had dealings with Lee's sisters company 30 years before Lee and I met. I wrote the essay one year before John invented the tank. Lee's skills fit perfectly in the work of the Samadhi tank company. She had an amazing sense of what a person was like. And she liked everyone and was able to connect with them right away. She made everyone feel special. In many ways we complimented each other. In some ways we were well suited to each other. Many a night after getting into bed, we would crack each other up enjoying each other's humor. Even at the end, when she was more somewhere else than here, she still had enormous humor. Manners, consideration for others, and the facility of knowing how people were. We finished writing the book, Floating in Quiet Darkness, that we had been working on for two years, the first week of November. She immediately started to leave here. After ascertaining that she wanted to stick around a little while longer, I started doing many things to help her. From then on, I took care of her pretty much 24-7. She was rarely in pain, sometimes had some heart problem symptoms like not enough air. She was nearly always during the remaining three plus months, delightful and very happy. That was the most exquisite time that we ever had, a loving, perfect time together. The second week of March, she was ready to go. From sometime the night before until nearly 7 a.m. March 13, Lee was peacefully sleeping with very slow, shallow breaths. I decided to do a reading for her from the American Book of the Dead. A singing bowl had been set up on an altar. I went over and rang it three times, came back and sat down. She took her last breath at 6.58 and I did the reading. It was absolutely perfect. I felt totally blessed and totally loved. The thing I will miss the most is the thing I fell in love with. Her delightful, shining, radiant, loving being. Saying goodbye to Lee, my mother who held a glimmer, a smile, interest and focus for the divine in all of us. She was an awe of life itself, the highest potential in each of us. This incredible, intuitive power she had to assist and move you out of your drama so you could find your inner joy. Lee had an ability and her endless teachings and understandings of the benefits of floating are our true fortune. And I sincerely hope this will be continued with the float community. Reading, floating in quiet darkness gives you the essence of Lee's vision and values. She changed the world for the better and her desire is for us to all get along to be authentic, to be a force of good that changes the lives of others in a positive way. So let's come together and be the powerful force of creating health and unity here on this planet. I've never loved anyone like Lee, my mother, she rocked my world, she brought me home, she centered me, she gave me life and was the most amazing woman and human being I've ever met. I have really large shoes to fill because she has plans for me. The last conversations we had were about floating and the future. Our lives for the past 40 years have always been amazing and how to best introduce people to the experience and orient them about feeling safe, supported, and how floating can improve any area of their lives. I created floating yoga for my mom over 30 years ago, and she wanted me to share this with the float community. I started my life with dance, music, art, yoga, meditation, so I will carry on her life's work by sharing these techniques with you. May you and our extended float family find the inner strength, courage, happiness to live your lives fully with purpose, integrity, and dignity. We are the dreamers of dreams, the movers and shakers. Floating brings us home, makes our lives better. By floating regularly, you will learn about yourself and how to effectively in this world. Thanks, mom. May your light shine forever and we meet again.