 Thank you so much for having me here. This is one of the most kind and welcoming groups that I've gotten to be a part of, and I feel incredibly grateful. So thank you for having me. So I have a story to tell today, and I have a story to tell about how floating continues to profoundly and dramatically change my life for the better. But before I tell that story, I want to talk about autism for a moment. And the reason I want to talk about autism for a moment is because I am autistic. Did you hear that? I don't have autism. I am autistic. And that difference is really important to me because autism is a neuro type, not a disease. Autistic people, or at least the majority of autistic people, and let me stop right there and be clear that I can only speak for this one unique human being in my experience. But the vast majority of autistic people are not looking to be cured of something. They're looking to be accepted. They're looking to be understood. They're looking to be accommodated. They're looking to be relieved. Autistic people experience a wide spectrum of disorders. Often disorders dealing with integration issues like sensory integration or spatial integration or social integration. And autistic people are rarely disabled by autism itself, right? Autistic people are most often disabled by the environment around them, right? Just like how most people are disabled, not by themselves, but by the impact the world has on them, right? Let me give a quick example of this. In my house, we have one of those robot vacuum cleaners. You know, you press a button and in the middle of the night it goes off and cleans all the floors perfectly through some algorithm that helps it reach every floor on the first floor, every room on the first floor, and it's amazing. But the first robot vacuum cleaner that we got operated at such a frequency that the moment you turned it on, it instantly sent like a laser straight to my brain and it instantly sucked 100% of my attention. You would turn that vacuum cleaner on and somehow the frequency it operated at took me completely. Took me in such a way that it rendered me incapable of having any other thought at that moment. Incapable of understanding anything anybody else is trying to communicate to me at that moment and certainly incapable of communicating anything else because the frequency of that robot vacuum cleaner had my brain until it was turned off. And then it released me and I was slowly able to recover. That frequency of that robot vacuum disabled me, right? But worse, the real truth is, and this is real, the vast majority of vacuum cleaners actually have a speaker inside of them that amplifies artificial noise. Did you all know this? Right? And the neurotypical people like the sound of their vacuum cleaners working so much that they hear the sound on the floor. It sucks up that sound and they feel like, oh, I've got myself a quality vacuum cleaner. So there's a speaker in there literally that turns the volume up. So that frequency not only disables me, but that frequency is made extra loud to like extra disabled me, right? Now in my case, I happen to be married to this like amazing Brainiac woman who like went on to Reddit and read long enough to figure out that all you have to do is remove 17 little screws and in the way back left hand corner, there's a little red wire and if you just clip it, 66% of the volume goes down. And the robot vacuum cleaner is no longer disabling, right? Now, vacuum cleaner disabling is not a very big deal. I acknowledge it's not so horrible. It's not really awfully disabling the vacuum cleaner. I get that vacuum cleaner is small. But what's big for me is panic attacks. Panic attacks are really big for me and they're the worst. They're the worst thing for me. I know a lot of people experience panic attacks, people of all sorts experience panic attacks. We know that feeling right of like your heart starting to racing up and your breath goes into like panic mode and you start to feel overwhelmed, right? Your body heats up. We all know this feeling. For me, this feeling is really, really bad. For me, this feeling is if I'm like dropping down into the sea, like into the ocean and it's getting deeper and deeper and it's getting like darker and darker, it's really awful. As it gets darker and darker, it's like the water gets thicker and I get deeper until I'm all the way finally at the bottom, but when I'm at the bottom I'm surrounded by like seaweed that's taller than my head and it's dark and it's thick and it's all around me and I would do anything in the world to not have to return to that place again. It's horrible. I've been going there my whole life. For autistic people, panic attacks are often more severe and the reason they say this is because many autistic people lack interoception, right? So interoception is when our body has that like sixth sense, right? Like our body is talking back to us. Our body tells us really important things like, hey Murphy, you're kind of have to pee soon so you might want to start to make your way towards a bathroom so like in 20 minutes or so you can take care of that, right? Or like, hey Murphy, you're starting to get really hot. You might want to like take a layer off or like, hey Murphy, your breathing is starting to get like a little bit fast. You might want to like regulate yourself a little bit but I don't hear my body tell me any of these things. I don't really have a great ability to listen to my body in order to a lot of autistic people which means that you don't feel the buildup of the panic attack. You don't feel it coming. You don't do the things you need to do in order to avoid it coming because it just comes and then all of a sudden you're in the middle of the ocean underneath all of that seaweed and it's just absolutely awful. But I noticed something about floating which is the more that I floated the more distance there was between my panic attacks and the more that I floated the less severe my panic attacks were and I think I know why and that's because of what happens when I slip into that float tank, right? When I'm inside there and it's silent and it's dark, it's just me, right? It's just me. There's nobody else there. It's just me. There's no context for anybody else. I'm not seeing myself in the context of any other person. I'm not comparing myself to anybody else. I'm lying there. It's just me and it's dark and it's silent. All my muscles are at ease, hear my heartbeat, right? And I hear that heartbeat and it might seem so obvious but when I hear that heartbeat I have the epiphany, that's my heartbeat. I control it. How fast it goes, how slow it goes, I actually control that. It's mine. I own it. My breath in that float tank, I can feel it. I own it and your eyelashes, right? Sometimes you can hear them opening and closing and I had the thought that my eyelashes make sound when they open and close even when I'm not in the float tank. Maybe just maybe someday like the idea that I could be walking down the street through like the loudest of construction and my eyelashes are like making noise as they open and close and maybe someday I could be able to hear them. Maybe because I'm so in touch with my body and what it's saying to me. So I floated more. My panic attacks became less often, right? And then COVID, right? COVID happened and because of COVID so many things changed, so many businesses changed, the float center was changed dramatically. I had my panic increased dramatically and up until COVID I had the most perfect floating situation. You see I had found this hair salon on the northwest side of Chicago that had two Samadhi tanks installed in their basement by Lee and Glenn Perry themselves in the 80s. And these two Samadhi tanks are still being ran and operating are still in great shape and upstairs are 10 women who rent chairs in this salon who have absolutely no idea what this weird thing happening in the basement is. And the tanks weren't used very often so I was able to let them let me float untimed. And so now I had these amazing Samadhi tanks and I could float untimed and I was floating way more than once a week and floating for way more than an hour at a time and it was perfect. But about three months into COVID those Samadhi tanks got sold in order to pay the rent on the salon upstairs and so I started going to Elemental Float and Cryo which was an amazing place owned by a friend of mine which was also closed to COVID. It was just about this time that I found myself in Boston visiting a really good friend and I was staying in my friend's coach house and the first day I got there I realized that Float Boston was literally two blocks away. And so I booked floats not just one but seven I booked seven floats in a row while I was there for that week because I could and I had the time and why not. And I floated every day for seven days at Float Boston which by the way perfect. While I was there it just became perfectly clear that I needed my own tank. I had to float untimed I had to float more often it was the thing making the biggest difference in my life. And so I began the journey to my own Float tank. Took me about 60 days and $3,200 all in I rented a minivan I drove to Cleveland I bought a used inflatable Zen tank from a retired firefighter that tank had helped his wife fight gout and now he was selling it in order to fix up his Harley. And that tank and I went back to Chicago and through lots of work and experimenting and rows of thermal curtains and electric heaters set up to Alexa timers that go off perfectly at 4.30 in the morning so the temperature is just so outside the tank for me to just slip in every single morning. And it makes all of the difference because I'm learning to listen to my body. My body tells me to eat and I eat my body tells me I'm going to have to go to the bathroom and I start to make plans to go to the bathroom which a little embarrassing but I'm telling you is a really big difference maker. My body tells me to get out of the sun and I get out of the sun I'm learning to listen and I'm learning to respond. The float tank is helping me understand my own body and take care of myself. And when we can take care of ourselves that means that we can take care of other people because none of that is actually the real story. The real story is that about a month ago now two months ago really my amazing father died and when my father died I was immediately overcome with like grief and an immense feeling of responsibility that my siblings and I would now have to figure out how to care for my mother who has Parkinson's who my father had been caring for who I loved so deeply and that sense of responsibility was overwhelming. But what I'm really here to report is for about two months now I have been at my mom's side nearly every day helping her, listening to her needs, responding to what she needs and getting both of us through it together because I've been floating every day I've been listening to my own body taking care of myself and now in a position to take care of others and for this I am incredibly grateful. So I say thank you to all of you who dedicate your life to making floating possible, who give up so much and sacrifice so much in order to curate spaces that other people who might never tell you their stories get to heal in. Thank you for doing that on behalf of myself, behalf of my mom and on behalf of every single person that loves me, I am so grateful. Thank you all.