 Is the heart in floating? Is there any reason to float frequently? What can be gained by frequent floating that can't be gained by less frequent floating or not at all? For nearly 50 years, Lee Liebner Parry and I worked together on starting the float tank industry. We stood up here many times together and standing, well sitting up here now, I miss her. Some of this talk will sound familiar from other float conferences. But it is necessary for the points I will be making. We live most of our adult life on automatic. As kids, we learn most of our skills. We learn to walk, talk, eat, ride a bicycle, drive a car, and so on. This allows us as adults to walk with a friend down a New York City street and not pay attention to how we walk or talk. But instead, pay attention to talking with our friend. Many of our points of view we express when talking with our friend, we have actually learned prior so we don't even have to pay attention to those. We can respond automatically. There is, however, another altered state that is very different that most of us do not know how to get to, stay in, or utilize. It is a state of flow that high performance people like Steph Curry, the basketball player, use to sink every ball into the hoop. When we float, we may access this state and not even notice it. It is a state of total peace, tranquility, and joy. Our incessant mental chatter has quieted by the end of the flow. We have moved out of our mind and into our heart. It is a state of enhanced awareness. We experience no fear or negative emotions. We find it easy to learn new things as we did when we were kids. It may be like being in awe in a nature scene or involved in a project where time stands still or maybe we're involved in love. Floating frequently enough, we move into an expanded heart state of flow, awareness, and presence. I've been reading Acres USA, a gardening and agricultural magazine for over 30 years because growing healthy food to me is better than going to the doctor. In the last issue, a farmer was asked, what is the best advice you ever received? He said it was from his first mentor at the first farm. We raised pastured animals and she told me to never ignore that voice that is telling you that something is wrong. Maybe you forgot to close the gate to the pigs or turn on the electric fence for the turkeys or maybe you need to check on the chickens because you just have a bad feeling about something. You need to listen to that voice even if and especially if it's late at night and you are all cozy in bed. That piece of advice has saved me countless times. I was growing some tomatoes and I wouldn't think of them for the longest time and then out of the clear blue sky, I suddenly had the thought to go look at the tomatoes. This happened several times over several years. Every time, horn worms had just showed up on the plants and started eating them. It isn't always negative things that we get an urge about. One time, I needed to write a long piece about how to grow plants. I asked for help. Within the next day or two, I saw a review of a book about water. I didn't have a reason to get it but I had a little urge so I got it. While I was reading it, I had this thought, oh, just tell them, grow carbon. I had already years before obtained all the information I needed to be able to explain that simply and clearly and it was the perfect answer. I have always learned to follow those little urges and now I often have them half a dozen times a week. People who float or meditate sufficiently spend lots of time in these states and find events happen perfectly for them at the perfect time. They often receive messages like the rare one our farmer received and the ones I just spoke about. If we are working on a problem, the answers simply show up as soon as the problem is defined, if not before. Life seems to work like magic. Any time we touch these heart states, something special happens. The more we touch them, the more they happen and special things happen to us. If it is possible to live a life of magic, is it possible to make it happen? It is. And it is simple. Simply arrange your life to be able to touch the heart space frequently. The more you touch it, the more you live in your heart. Float often and long. Any day you can't float, meditate. Does floating automatically result in getting into the heart state? No, it doesn't. If you already meditate, that may be all you have to do. What is needed is to get out of the mind. Our mind is a processing unit. So process what is asking to be processed. That is, whatever comes up when you float, just take care of whatever shows up during your float. If you have trouble processing all of it because there's so much, so the mental chatter does not subside, it is because you just need to float or meditate more often. Some people would like to live longer lives. Shinzen Young has written what I think is by far the best book about meditation called The Science of Enlightenment. As mentioned in our book, Floating in Quiet Darkness that we published last year, he came to our center with some of his students several times, and he suggests that we meditate frequently. If we do, we can learn to access this expanded heart state of presence, flow, and awareness. In this state, we much more fully experience life. Foods are exquisitely more tasty. Relationships are far more enjoyable. Instead of being on automatic, we actually start to be present to experience life fully. Eventually, our experience of life is so much fuller that it will be as if we have lived twice as long. If you float often enough or long enough, your mental chatter will subside. You will soon have a lot less fear, and you should notice many improvements in life. Sometimes we are thrown curveballs. We experience emotional and physical traumas. These are stored in our bodies. Shinzen Young says, the more we live life in our heart, the more these traumas get released, often without us even noticing. Ancient baggage we carry around that makes us do crazy stuff, gets released, and we start living life more in balance. Instead of seeing ourselves as victims, we start seeing events and people as teachers helping us become evolved. Even when we cringe from some event, we can start looking for how we can feel blessed by it. Something else mentioned in our book, Dr. John C. Lilly, the isolation tanks inventor, said he noticed that dolphins were a lot more appreciative of touch than we are. He thought it might be because they float all the time. So he tested the idea by floating for long sessions and checked to see if it was true. It was. The pleasure of touch was significantly enhanced by long enough floating. Oz, the sound engineer mentioned in our book, who often floats for long periods, says that he has noticed that all senses are enhanced by three hours of floating and even more by five. As I mentioned in our book, shortly after meeting John, he inspired me to work at becoming more conscious this lifetime. What does it mean to become more conscious? If you generally start to become more aware in your life, you are increasing your consciousness. Increasing one's awareness in life is a very valuable process. Being able to notice more enhances our ability to function. If you decide you want to increase your consciousness this lifetime, then by frequently touching the heart space, those things that can help you do that start showing up. There's a lot of news we're exposed to in our life right now, some frightening and horrifying. By floating a lot, we move into the heart space and are able to tolerate and deal with the difficulties we are exposed to, not only in the news, but also in our life. Whenever I need to be creative or solve problems, I find I am far more creative and receive much faster answers to my problems when I float. Now, spending so much more time in the heart space than I used to allows me to access more help outside the tank than I used to even get inside the tank in the past. In the heart space, we can think outside the box, which is so very, very important for some problems. Einstein said, we cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them. Thinking outside the box, to me, is one of the best reasons for floating into the heart space. Though I mention meditating as well as floating, meditators often find meditating while floating so much better than just meditating. By any day, but any day, if we can't float, it will help our floats a lot to meditate those days. We think we provided a lot of information in our book, Floating in Quiet Darkness, about floating and opening and running a center. We started the first float centers for one reason, to sell tanks. The floaters could pay for our overhead and the one to two tanks, we ended up selling for each of the five tanks that we rented out each month, was gravy. Two months after opening our center, we were filled to capacity and we sold more than 100 tanks per year. All this back in 1979 when no one knew what a float tank was. I asked at the beginning of this talk, why float frequently? As you now know, it is to get the unique benefits of frequently spending a lot of time in the heart space. I think I have one of the highest qualities of life of anyone I know. If you wish to improve your quality of life, in our book, Floating in Quiet Darkness, there's a chapter describing what I think are the attributes of the best distraction-free float tanks. Interestingly, there is a part missing from that chapter. I have for 50 years struggled to better solve two float tank design issues. One, better air quality. The other, better temperature. I have recently designed the best float tank ever. It is here. If you try it, I believe you will end up agreeing that I have finally solved these two problems. If you want to know more, go to our website, samaditank.com. Thank you.