-I have some questions but I want it to be more conversational, so if you want to just
-talk off the top.
Aw I don't have no problem talking I'll talk the ears off an Elephant, you know that
-Definitely. So yeah I guess my first thing would be, just tell me a bit about you, and what you do careerwise
or just in your life
Alright, I'm a bit of a jack of all trades.
My grandfather told me when I was a
child-- cause understand my parents came out of the Jim Crow south.
Where black men couldnt
choose a professional career
they had to learn how to do a lot of things
sometimes they
were short order cooks
sometimes they mechanics and because of that, my grandfather
told me, learn how to do many things and you'll never be broke but only do things you really
love to do and so growing up I realized I loved being in the kitchen, culinary arts,
and I loved writing, and I loved being around creative people so everything I do has some
kind of creative outlet or creative expression to it.
The other love I have in respect to
what I do is politics
I am always about trying to make some kind of change because I don't
think anythings ever been perfect,
and we certainly aren't living through perfect times and I'm always about how do we maximize
a culture or society for most people
as opposed to what we see going on right now, minimizing
it for most people, maximizing it for the very few--
so culinary arts, writing, creative projects, politics, that's my daily week.
-Okay. And so you're a pretty long-term floater. When did you first start floating? How did you first hear about floating?
I first started floating many years ago, it had to be...
25 years ago? 30 years ago. I got
into it because I made a bet with a friend of mine when I was a teenager. About who was
gonna be the first person to be in the guinness book of world records
And whoever won that bet had to determine the feat for the other. So he ended up
winning and he broke the record for running the empire state building in record time.
And because he did his first, he told me that I had to do mine. And when he said I had
to do do was break the world's record for sit up and look at the size I am, right.
The guy who set the world record for sit ups at the time is like 5'5" weighed a hundred and forty pounds.
You know. Of course two hundred and twenty pounds.
Any way I trained for it and I tried, for uh...
united negro college fund as a fundraiser
-what year was that?
This was in 1987 1988 this was a long time ago. And cause I was I was still without this.
And uh, and I did exactly 11000 situps, in seven hours and fifty eight minutes.
Was that non-stop?
It was continuous you get two bathroom breaks that you could do but other than that it was
and I ended up herniating three disks tearing five muscles and everything else. And so my
back problems began at a very early age.
I was still in my 20s. Very early age. And therapy wasnt what it was now my problem wasnt
one that could be remedied by surgery -- either not remedied or that was a very dramatic step.
So I was looking for any kind of relaxation therapy I could find and that's how I found
floating.
I initially started because I was trying to go for pain alleviation. and found that it
worked.
- Okay
Which is one of the reasons why I continue to do it, it's just one
I do it for other reasons but that was the reason I started
- So had you found anything else that helped? just floating helped?
Well, floating helps more than any other thing. Floating keeps me from taking muscle relaxers.
floating keeps me from doping up to kill pain.
I do that and inversion. Gravity inversion. Because, if I can get the decompression in
my body,
--Inversion
Yeah inversion, going upside down. Because if I can get that decompression, I can stave
off the inflammation, and I can stave off the sciatic and I can stave off the disk pain.
But floating is as close as I can get to zero g environment.
And if I could live in a zero G environment, I would.
But since I cant... I come in here and I get a float done. As long as I can do it once
a week and I can sustain myself through the week by just doing my stretching workout and
inversion if I can get in here for that once a week it helps me out. Gets me over the hump.
So what brought you to floating was primarily physical, do you meditate or anything--
Oh yeah, I do. And the pod is like the perfect environment for that. Because to me meditation
is enhanced more by reducing as many snesory inteferences as you can possible get to and
when Im in there.
Theres no light. no sound. It's just me and the water. I can begin to-- it reminds me
of something, when I was younger, I had a cousin who taught me how to write and he got
me started by saying that at the end of each day, before I go to bed, sit down and write
for fifteen minutes.
And I said why. It's because there's a lot of crazy that comes into your head every day
and if you don't write the crazy out of your head, you never find the sanity to get to
where you want to go in life
And so he called the technique the crazy 15.
Well, I can come in here and take a crazy 60. Or I can come in here and take a crazy
90 you know what I mean?
Because, my earliest introduction to meditation was actually writing. Before I went to more
traditional methods, but now I come in here and I can go through that same sorting process.
and clear my mind.
-That's amazing. So how would you say that floating integrates into the rest of your
life? You said you come in weekly but have you seen-- beyond the physical stuff, have
-you seen any sorts of improvements?
I'll put it this way. We talk about well-being. We talk about two types of well-being most.
mental well being and physical well being.
and that you can say that mental well being and physical well-being means that there are
two beings to you. But see, there are really five.
There's a mental, a spiritual, a psychological, there's an emotional, physical, all of those
are beings of you. And each one of them has a health that needs to be maintained. There's
an emotional health we need to maintain, a psychological health we need to maintain,
spiritual health, so on. And so on. And to me well being is how cohesive and comprehensive
can the health status of each one of your beings be? and it's only then when theyre
all at a a certain health level, that you have what you call integration.
- Okay.
And so that's what I'm always going for. Is how can I get all of my beings to
do that now float allows me to wowrk on them all at the same time
Awesome
Because it's a physical -- I have to get in that water and float. But the others are all
silent internal metaphysical. And so while I'm in there doing the physical, it leaves
me to the others. and so in that one hour, in that hour and a half, I can integrate all
of that. I can comprehensively be who I am. And who I want to be in that time that I'm
in there.
That transfers into every aspect of my life. My relationships, my relationships with other
peope my relationships with my children, my relationships with my wife, it transfers into
my ability to tap into my creative resources quicker, instead of having to wait a long
time to get to them, because when I go in there, I mean all kinds of my mind is moving
at light speed sometimes. I gotta get it to slow down. But there's a point in time, whenever
I'm in, when it seems like I just enter into this part of my brain where *pew* ideas just
start spitting out all over the place. Where there's a new recipe, or this, or it's a new
idea, to write for somebody's speech, or an article for huffpost, whatever it is, it
just starts coming out, and so that part of it I find transfers directly into what I do when
I get out of there, what I do for the rest of my life, but, I would recommend that everybody--
I to me, it...houses should be made with float tanks.
-Like with the kitchen...
Houses are made with bathtubs, but they should actually be made with float tanks. Because,
I remember when my children were born. And I said to my wife, I may never be able to
give my child a palace.
I may never be able to give my child a mansion. Or a penthouse in new york City. But your
body is the first home they will ever have. And so I will do whatever it is I can to help
you make your body the best home for our child. The child lives in utero, in a sac filled with
water.
So to me, floating is going back to the womb. And the umbillical connection I'm looking
to is to my own psyche. So when I go in there, I'm going back into the womb, looking to reconnect
with myself. just like the child was connected to the mother, your psyche becomes your mother
and father when you leave the womb.
And many of us are disconnected from our psyches, we need to be reconnected. So when I go back
into the womb, That's what I do.
I'm connecting back to my psychic spiritual placenta. So I can get hooked up. To me again.
So that's one of the reaosns why I do it too.
-That is amazing. That was very well-put
Tell it to everybody. That's why it should be-- everybody should have one of these things.
Everybody's got showers and bathtubs and should have float tanks too. Believe me the world
would be a better place if more people were floating.
-I agree, I agree. So on that note, what would you say to anyone who's considering floating
and maybe hesitant about it, or just, first time floaters, people just starting their
practice, anything that you would tell them?
Yeah, I would say to them, try to imagine being able to go to a space and time reserved for
you. Where you have no concerns about anyone else, you have no concerns about anything
that you have to do. There is nothing pressing on you.
And you are in an environment that 70% of your body is made out of. If you can just
allow yourself to entertain that, you can be convinced by that. otherwise, it's just--
your psyche is too distorted to pick up on
that's what I have to say. I am also welcoming to any environment that most of my body is
made up of.
if you were to completely dehydrate a human body, it would fit into a shoe box. Okay.
So when somebody says water...
I'm with it. And that's saying something coming from a black man, cause we don't like swimming.
See I know about the safety of salt, so-
You put 600 pounds of salt in water, I'm there
-Um...that was great. I have one more question actually. I feel that there's a pretty marked
difference between a person's first float, their fourth float, their 90th float. So,
have you seen any difference between when you started and now?--
Oh yeah. Because the first float anybody has is acclamation. They have to allow
themselves to get adjusted to sensory deprivation. And absence of depth perception.
-The novelty of the tank, the strangeness
Right. Because we feel our greatest security when we see. So we have to overcome-- acclamation
to me in that first float is overcoming the insecurity of the environment. And once you
overcome that insecurity, every time you go in there, the access to the psychic aspect
of it that I was talking about earlier, you get to it quicker. So instead of having a
float for an hour and only being in that access margin for 10 minutes, you can have a float
for an hour and be in that access margin for 55 minutes. Cause you get there quicker. The
quicker you get to it, the longer time you stay there, the more you're in that beta wavelngth,
it gets better and better every time.
-So how many times have you floated?
Phew. Here? God. Must be fifty sixty times already.
-Okay. But then you said you've been doing this for years?
Oh so if you were to go back through the years well over a thousand.
-And so have you done
-other tanks? I know you prefer the pod, is that your favorite one?
Yeah
-But have you done any other ones? Samadhi?
I've done samadhi tank, I'm a little too big for it, because when I'm in there, part of
me the sensory deprivation is not touching anything. And my shoulders are always .... and
so, when I'm in that pod, I prefer the darkness of the samadhi tank, I mean that's like two
midnights in a jug. That thing is super dark. That, I really like that.
I wish that that could be replicated in the pod. But absent that, it's the space that
I really need to be in. And so the pod works for me. And so other tanks that I've done
have been podlike
-Okay.
-Have you ever tried room 3?
I tried room 3. It's too much space for me. I like the enclosure.
Because I don't know anybody-- not even an elephants got a womb that big. So again, I'm
looking for the owmb experience right?
So the pod, more space to me. Yeah. my son has tried both tanks, he prefers the Samadhi
tank. But he's not as big as Iam.
-Does your wife float?
She floats, yeah, she's done it a couple of times. I'm trying to get her in here to do
more. Because I think that when both people are floating there is a really happy household
going on
-A lot of introspection going on
A lot of introspection. I'm glad you said that word. Cause that's the one thing that
is most absent in our society and culture right now. We're all extrospecting. We're
not looking inward about anything. and because of that, we don't operate with any kind of
critical thinking processes whatsoever.
-Absolutely. Yeah. So that's why I appreciate you, you know, sitting down for this conversation.
-You and I have great conversations, all the time, but I've very much feel like Float
-Sixty is something of a cultural nexus, where we can make that normal and make that OK.
-To introspect and take time for yourself
Yeah.
-And be vulnerable. And so that's what we're trying to do, is establish a community.
That's a good point, be vulnerable. And to that point I will bring up this one definition.
Because being a writer I'm always trying to get people to understand the words that they
use. And when you're not introspecting, what you're not doing is learning how to trust
yourself.
Because introspection brings you closer to the knowledge of your inner voice. And I define
trust as a condition of confidence that your vulnerabilities will not be exploited.
-Say that again
A condition of confidence that your vulnerabilities will not be exploited.
Many of us out here make bad judgements about our life, because we are exploting our own
vulnderabiltiies. Whereas if we were aware of them, we could either, conquer them, or
overcome them. But because we're not introspective, then we're not hearing the wisdom of our own
innner voice. So this alows me to stay in tune to that.
You feel me?
-Yeah. That's perfect.
Alright.
-Thank you. That's everything.
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