 Floaters. How's it going this afternoon? I'm curious. Who in here, while they're in one of these things, has experienced something that they would describe as unpleasant? Not counting solution. No. Okay. Raise your hand again if you have some sort of practice, some sort of inner work, some sort of intention that you do to actually invite the unpleasant into the float with you. Yeah? Okay. See, for some reason I'm interested in that. The unpleasant. The terrifying. As a psychologist and educator, I'm interested in empowering people's healing, guiding them in initiation rights of transformation to face themselves, find their power, so that we can all set out to change the world. Because we live in a culture that wants to keep pretending that life is going to get better and better. Despite the fact that we're in pain, that there's suffering, rage, and society doesn't want to hear about any of this. We're destroying the earth. At everywhere, there's oppression and injustice. We're in the age of instant global communication, yet there's some deep-seated feeling of separation and disconnect. We're in the age of yoga and self-help, visiting shamans to drink strange, bitter medicines all to find some happiness. We're taught to believe that there's a new technology that will make us live longer and happier just around the corner. Carl Jung was a psychologist who lived long ago, but his work is particularly poignant and relevant and necessary for our times. He said, the West stands there with their empty hands. A few outmoded ideals and with its blind rationalism produces the very mentality that destroys its own roots. But man and his soul, the individual, is the only real carrier of life, who doesn't just work, eat, sleep, reproduce, and die, but also has a meaningful destiny reaching far beyond him. And for this, we have no myth anymore. All of you are pioneering a radical tool that people can use to go inward. What excites me really about floating is that right now, you are helping people write the new myth for our time. In Jungian terms, the new myth comes when we face the raw nature of our own souls. This is when we take up the intention to face all the parts of ourselves, to own the parts that are hurting, that we're hiding from. So I want to talk about what we're hiding. What are you hiding from yourself? How can we find those things in our self that we don't even know or we don't want to face? How can we heal? Jung said we stand on a peak of consciousness, believing in a childish way that the path leads upward to yet higher peaks beyond. This is the chimerical rainbow bridge. In order to reach the next peak, we must first go down into the land where the path begins to divide. What does he mean? I think he means that the linear technoscientific rationalism can't give us a complete knowledge. It's a piece of the picture, but not the whole picture, of the realm that is essentially magical. It's more complex than our mind-body-sense organs can handle. To really know ourselves, we got to intentionally walk into the fire, a self-directed ceremonial sacrifice to gain the gift of the language of nature, the enchanted world of our psyche, where there is both beauty and violence. The float tank, I think, can help us do this. We have to overcome our bias towards the external, the merely physical, empirical shared reality, and go into what Jung called the self-liberating power of the introverted mind, a deep communion with one's own unconscious. The unconscious is always at work whether we like it or not. It can be visualized like this. Imagine a giant iceberg floating in the Arctic. Only the tip is our everyday waking consciousness, ego. Yet hidden beneath the surface is an enormous force that we must contend with. Jung discovered in the unconscious that there are autonomous complexes. These are autonomous forces, energy systems. Think of a dream you had recently. There could be all sorts of things going on, a wild landscape, all sorts of dream characters behaving maybe in strange ways. Each dream character believes that they're independent. Yet, when you wake up, you realize the whole dream came out of your being, enjoyed your being to be known and resolved back into your being. Like this, complexes carve out a piece of us, make claims on our psychic space. At this very moment, you and I are colonized in civil war. Complexes live in what Jung called the shadow, which is the part of us that we don't want to be a part of us. The shadow is that first murky layer in the unconscious that we need to become familiar with. Usually this is filled with moments in early childhood where the original unity was damaged. Let's say a child runs up excitedly and tell a parent something. Both mom and dad are in an adult world. Maybe they're in a mean or aggressive mood for some reason. And say, heavily, don't bother me right now. The child's personal container breaks down and the archetypal defense system takes over, storing this entire experience, both the adult's emotional reaction and her own, in the body memory. The body memory of a particular feeling then is deemed dangerous, threatening, unsafe. Not something to be had if you want to remain a good boy or girl in relation to mom or dad. We create a very personal subjective system of inhibitions and prohibitions, defensive walls, where a sea of inner children are, a system that contains our safe life space. It works, but is really a prison. I came to discover, after having a few difficult experience in the float tank, that the continued practice of floating and using Jungian active imagination greatly increased my capacity to put complexes in relationship rather than let them dominate me. While in the darkness of the float, I could enter my own darkness, the shadow. Floating created the perfect environment to meet, say, a hurt inner child. Welcome him. Let him tell me what's hurting him. Instead of being a constant, unconscious stressor, the complex was allowed to speak, to finally be able to unload a story after carrying it for all these years. Psychotherapy begins when we can assemble the ones inside, so there's some dialogue going on. To begin to heed the call of what Jung called the individuation urge. That what's in all of us that seeks wholeness, uniqueness, relatedness to all things. Therapy begins when we can tell a story, a deeply personal story. But for trauma persons, it's not so simple. Especially early childhood events like surgery, being violated, witnessing war, emotional abuse, any distressing event or recurring stressor, we find with early childhood trauma when it's incredibly severe and annihilating before the ego has even formed. That the person can't personalize the story yet. Asking the question in a cognitive way, tell me your trauma, this doesn't make sense. Giving it a label like PTSD or adverse childhood event doesn't mean much to the person. The memory just can't be experienced. It can't be storied. So this doesn't come as a personal story, but an archetypal story. We can relate it imagistically, mythopoetically, because myth, archetype, psyche are recapitulated in our shared evolutionary heritage. One image is this. When Dante and Virgil go to various circles and stages of hell, there are images of splitting, people being dismembered, ghosts of the past are rising from tombs talking to them. They go to the deepest layer of hell, passing severed heads of grotesque figures calling out to them. And in the darkest, deepest layer of hell is a three-headed monster, with one sinner being bitten in each of its three jaws, blood dripping down each three chins. And the name Dante gives to this figure is not Satan or the devil, but diss. Dismemberment, disease, dissociation, disaster, diss. At the core of this darkest level is this disintegrating force. This is the trauma complex. At the other side of this is an integrating symbolic force of a psyche, our eternal, changeless, divine nature. Unless there's a relationship to these opposing forces, we keep getting disconnected and ripped apart in the inside. So I don't know how floating will come into play yet, because relationships are what trigger us. In relationship is where shadow projections play out. Just think of a time where you gotten into an argument with someone, perhaps a parent or a spouse or your child. And you said things you just didn't mean, and later you came back and said, sorry, and maybe something like, I just wasn't acting like myself. In the psychotherapeutic relationship, someone is trained to hold space for these unconscious projections, transmute them back to the client in a space of love, where the client is totally seen, and they can come into a relationship with unconscious. In the tank, there ain't no one else in there. So my research on working with complexes and trauma is just beginning. It's a qualitative, phenomenological study that will root out the rich, lived experience of people in the form of story, art, dance, action. But I can give you some assumptions and hopes. Floating may allow the person to identify with a stable core, with the very ground of being that is unaffected by any phenomena. And yesterday I was thinking that this perhaps relates to one of Dr. Feinstein's subjects who said after the float, how healing it was to know that they were still there, a part of them was still there. Who is that person that is always there in us? Two, floating may lubricate the imaginal organ, the path of communication with the unconscious so that somatic body intelligence, the imaginal intelligence, ecological intelligence is increased. Which by the way I feel like that we're all losing in these times because of iPhone and social media and constant stimulation. But I feel like it can increase this capacity for imaginal intelligence. The person can take up the inner work with greater courage and take seriously the psychic reality of autonomous complexes that present themselves to us in dream, altered states, in relationship, in the float. The phantasms of the dark lose their ominous shroud, revealing to the loving, welcoming, innermost being why they help you in the first place. You can relate to them, you can own them, they lose their power to keep you identified with them. And third, floating can help the person get in the body. The trauma person cannot own parts of themselves because feeling in the body has been traumatic in the past. Floating may help in an intriguing way that the repeated practice of floating can lead to situations where in the float they actually feel the anxiety more. Now in respect to the transformational process this is actually a really good thing because they essentially need broader tolerance to carry anxiety to let it play out physically and psychically. The more anxiety the more life space. They can relate dynamically and mythopoetically to the story to let it change to remember what has been dismembered. To recover the shattered dignity and divinity. That's each of our birthright. Now Bessel van der Kolk, the psychiatrist said trauma persons are the victims whose problems represent the memory of suffering, rage and pain in a world that longs to forget. So my challenge to you is to remember. To not ignore the dark, the repressed parts of yourself, not hide the challenging stories even that come with the float. To overcome our culture wide victim mentality. To begin a dialogue about internalized oppression, to foster community that takes responsibility rather than find the villains and perpetrators in the other externally. To set the intention to work with the superior forces of the unconscious so that we stop acting them out, letting them rule us. If you expect to be a healer and especially in a float center working with clients. I see this as a requirement that you recognize and live from a place in yourself that's unconditional, eternal, changeless, heart, love. Thank you.