Machines of Floating Grace

MY HYDROLOGIC ZEN QUEST, a search for buoyance of body and spirit, began in a far-flung swath of the San Fernando Valley, at a featureless beige building next to the Ventura Freeway. The setting was a little discordant, to say the least. There were no icons or signage hinting at the cosmic wonders that lurked inside, and the lobby was empty except for a tacky oxygen bar—more Venice Beach Boardwalk than Sedona—with fluorescent liquids in whimsically shaped bottles. I was given a short orientation and led to a dimly lit room with a shower in one corner and, in the center, a large white pod shaped like an egg. Then I was left alone.

After rinsing off I climbed into the bed-sized pod and tried to lay back in about ten inches of body-temperature water that the receptionist said had been mixed with eight hundred pounds of Epsom salt. I reached up and brought the lid down, sealing myself in for the next hour, undergoing the amplified thoughts and alien weightlessness of a sensory deprivation tank for the first—but not the last—time.

How did I get here? This would have been a good question to reflect on in the tank. However, once I’d dimmed the pastel LEDs, quieted the ambient music, stopped troubleshooting the risk of saltwater eye contact, and adjusted to the novelty of no gravity, I became quite mesmerized by the amplified act of breathing and eventually gave in to a sense of drifting through dark outer space. Perhaps I was experiencing “theta waves,” a phrase I heard for the first time not long after I moved back to Los Angeles, about fifteen years ago. An acquaintance of my co-worker had stopped by our office, alleging that accessing these coveted neural frequencies while awake was usually only achieved following years of intense meditation. He had, however, discovered a shortcut: “floating.”

Normally I would have let such chatter slide by, my usual response to sun-sign inanity, but at the time I was working in a dark, windowless room at CalArts and lulled by the constant polyphonic clanking of the gamelan ensemble practicing across the hall. I was, in short, in a receptive state. Bemused but curious, I did a bit of searching online and found testimonials claiming that floating in an enclosed vessel could indeed deliver a profound sense of calm, a drop in anxiety, or a near-psychedelic experience of pure being. Some acolytes maintained that floating could cure everything from insomnia and chronic pain to PTSD and drug addiction. Then there were the academic studies charting the brain waves of meditating monks, rich with theta oscillations humming in the ideal range between four and eight cycles per second, akin to that crepuscular moment on the brink of sleep.

Floating didn’t begin on the West Coast. But like so many methods of physical and mental optimization, its strange history and recent resurgence wouldn’t have been possible anywhere else. In Los Angeles, the annals of floating reveal their own map of the city: in Malibu, drug-fueled sessions at the mountaintop home of a defrocked scientist; in Beverly Hills, a pioneering business that brought the practice closer to the mainstream; in Hollywood, visionary hacks who used the idea as grist for the B movie mill. Today, floating can just be part of your commute along the 101: Stop by the gym, get a manicure, and then spend an hour riding those theta waves. Indeed, to those familiar with the long Southern California tradition of metaphysical breakthroughs beneath popcorn ceilings, the sight of an unremarkable building in Tarzana is, if anything, ripe with possibility—a subtle signal that that some sort of transcendent experience may very well lie within.

FLOATING WAS ONCE known as sensory deprivation, and the status it enjoys today as a benign therapeutic practice belies its more sinister origins. Like many other aspects of the counterculture, it evolved out of American postwar military and government research. In the 1950s, scientists studied how a loss of stimuli affects the minds of workers—submariners, long-haul truck drivers, and eventually, astronauts—who often endure isolated and monotonous conditions. There were reports that subjects sometimes became disoriented and experienced unusual effects, seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. At the same time, the military, fearful that Chinese and Soviet interrogators could re-program the minds of captured soldiers through a combination of drugs, hypnosis, and isolation—“brainwashing”—began funding multiple studies that investigated the effects of sensory deprivation. Their concern, later debunked, was that stripping all stimuli made the mind more malleable and subject to manipulation.

It was against this backdrop, in 1954, that neurologist John C. Lilly and neuropsychiatrist Jay T. Shurley conducted their first experiments along these lines in a soundproof water chamber at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Their hypothesis was that mental functioning depends on outside stimuli and that lacking input, the mind will simply fall asleep.

To test their theory, Lilly and Shurley became their own subjects, immersing themselves in water for hours at a time. (According to Lilly’s later recounting, the brainwashing angle was a ploy to obtain federal funding and had the unintended consequence of scaring away potential guinea pigs.) They connected a breathing tube to a repurposed aviation mask, smearing the goggles with tar to block out vision. After floating in the dark chamber, the doctors wrote down their observations. They weren’t lulled into a state of preconsciousness. In fact, the opposite happened.

The two researchers discovered that stripping away stimuli didn’t empty out a mental vessel that could be manipulated but instead revealed a deep realm of self-exploration. Shurley wrote that three hours in the tank were equivalent to three years of psychoanalysis. Lilly went even further. “I made so many discoveries,” he later wrote, “that I didn’t dare tell the psychiatric group about it at all because they would’ve said I was psychotic. I found the isolation tank was a hole in the universe. I gradually began to see through to another reality. It scared me. I didn’t know about alternate realities at that time, but I was experiencing them right and left without any LSD.”

Although Lilly published several papers on the results of his “richly elaborate states of inner experience,” his metaphysical adventures weren’t aligned with the prevailing currents of scientific funding. So he changed course and roamed further from mainstream science, later gaining renown—and notoriety—for research into human-dolphin communication and psychedelic drugs.

When his 1967 book Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer was favorably reviewed in the first Whole Earth Catalog the following year, it introduced Lilly’s consciousness-altering theories to the growing counterculture in California. Soon he was leading workshops at the famed Esalen Institute in Big Sur and rubbing shoulders with the likes of Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Ram Dass. In 1971, Lilly and his family moved to a mountaintop Malibu ranch where he installed float tanks in his home. According to his Tanks for the Memories: Flotation Tank Talks (1995), it was here that he altered the water’s additive from sodium chloride to gentler Epsom salt, establishing a standard that remains widespread to this day. The Lilly house attracted curious types keen on giving floating a try, and if they weren’t planning to drive home down Malibu’s perilously curved roads, they could enhance their journey with a dose of LSD or ketamine—or as the guru called it, “Vitamin K.”

IN THE SUMMER OF 1972, a quiet, young computer engineer in Santa Monica named Glenn Perry attended a five-day workshop led by Lilly in the San Bernardino Mountains and underwent his first float session. In a dark shed, participants took turns kneeling in a tall tub of water and were instructed to practice “dolphin breathing,” holding your breath for as long as possible and then taking a fast inhale. Perry recalled^* emerging from the water “to a scintillating, shimmering universe, a sparkling energy system.” He also found that his severe shyness had disappeared. This experience changed Perry’s life, making him a devoted flotation evangelist. Within the next few years, he left his job at Xerox to pursue a career in manufacturing and selling float tanks. He gained Lilly’s blessing and named his business Samadhi Tank Company, a Sanskrit term Lilly suggested that translates as bliss, enlightenment, and liberation.

Besides selling tanks, Perry and his wife and business partner, Lee, wanted to set up a place where more people could experience floating without having to commit to a long workshop. They searched Los Angeles for the right property and settled on a former Rolls-Royce repair shop in Beverly Hills, converting it into a modern space with five private flotation rooms and a reception area with futuristic gray couches and complimentary chamomile tea. Samadhi Spa, the world’s first public float center, opened in the summer of 1979. “INFINITY COMES TO BEVERLY HILLS,” blared the press release, while promotional photos showed the proud couple posing by their tanks in matching white satin outfits with pointed collars and bell bottoms.

Within a few months, the Los Angeles Times reported that Samadhi Spa was attracting celebrity clientele, like Robin Williams and Kris Kristofferson, as well as “housewives, priests, attorneys, accountants, therapists, television producers, movie directors, doctors, and others inclined toward traveling the reaches of inner space.” The Perrys had also sold three hundred home tanks over the previous four years (priced at around two thousand dollars each). By 1981, they opened a twenty-tank center in San Francisco. Other manufacturers were emerging in Colorado and Arizona, and over a hundred float centers had popped up across the country. In 1983, the Float Tank Association was established to promote the industry, with Lilly and the Perrys serving on the board. The 1970s hot tub party was out, replaced by a solitary, lukewarm journey of self-awareness.

The Perrys shared Lilly’s belief in spreading the gospel of floating, but as James Riley notes in his book Well Beings: How the Seventies Lost Its Mind and Taught Us to Find Ourselves (2024), unlike Lilly, they were also running a business. For market appeal to be maximized, the experience had to shed its earlier scientific associations, assuming the look and feel of a therapeutic spa rather than a laboratory. This was achieved through changing nomenclature—“isolation tank” became “float tank” or even “bliss machine”—and more welcoming designs. Glenn experimented with wood and fiberglass before settling on an amalgam of vinyl-lined cardboard and thin plastic, adding Styrofoam insulation that could completely eliminate light and sound to achieve a full immersion. To better understand the mechanics of soundproofing, he contacted a physics professor at the acoustics research center at UCLA for access to the school’s anechoic chamber, where, as he recounts, the professor fired a gun to demonstrate the room’s muffling capacities. (It was the same chamber where, in 1969, Robert Irwin and James Turrell invited volunteers to sit in dark silence, intending to incorporate their perceptions into an artwork for Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan.)

The crucial finishing touches aimed to add a sense of comfort and safety, to soothe even the most claustrophobic of potential day-floaters. The Perrys tried different colors and coatings, but it was the user-adjustable features that most softened the experience; clients could control the lighting, open or close the tank’s lid, and select or mute soothing music. Later, they developed tanks disguised as furniture, hidden in the bottom of couches or beds. Beneath the cushions of a sofa lay a zipline to nirvana. Lilly naively declared that their line of “float furniture” would make them millions. However, it proved too difficult to produce while keeping up with the demand for classic models.

If the Perrys wanted to domesticate the float tank, Hollywood had the opposite idea. The 1980 cult sci-fi film Altered States, directed by Ken Russell and inspired by Lilly’s early experiments, follows a renegade scientist’s quest to plumb the depths of his consciousness by experimenting with a potent combination of psychedelic drugs and isolation tanks.^* Things go extremely awry as he loses his grip on reality, regressing into an ape-man and then nearly obliterating into molten cosmic energy. Naturally, it was a boon for business. In 1981, staff at Samadhi Spa’s Beverly Hills location told the Los Angeles Times that they had “an incredible wait list,” receiving so many calls that their regulars couldn’t even get appointments. The owner of Miami’s Womb Rooms even created a promotional campaign using float-tank imagery from the film, successfully attracting intrepid customers searching for their own chance at temporary annihilation.

The popularity was short lived. The trend of New Age exploration waned in the 1980s, and many cite the AIDS crisis as sparking unfounded fears about hygiene and water-based transmission. Within the decade, more than half of the nation’s float centers shuttered.

AFTER NEARLY THIRTY YEARS of obscurity, float tanks began to see a resurgence in the early 2010s. One reason was the rise of “self-care.” Another was an unlikely proselytizer: mega-podcaster Joe Rogan. After reading Lilly’s book The Deep Self: Consciousness Exploration in the Isolation Tank in the early 2000s, Rogan installed a Samadhi tank in his Woodland Hills home and frequently declared his passion for floating’s psychedelic effects and its popularity among UFC fighters and other manly men. As interest in floating and starting float centers broadened, an annual convention for business owners—FloatCon—was launched in 2012, attracting hundreds of entrepreneurs from across the country. An industry podcast, The Art of the Float, out of Portland, Oregon, began in 2015 and ran for nearly a decade. Clinical study also resumed, primarily at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where subjects take MRI scans before and after floating. The results, while yet small, have been promising, confirming measurable drops in anxiety and stress, improved management of eating disorders, and enhanced cardiac health. The term float therapy has become the preferred parlance, and floating is fully immersed in the ever-expanding trillion-dollar wellness industry. Float centers can now be found in most cities across the US, as well as abroad, from Poland to Tasmania.

I called Woody Cheuk, the executive director of the Float Tank Association, to hear about the industry’s growth and evolution. “More people are offering floating as an adjunct alongside other modalities, and it’s appearing at luxury resorts and spas,” he told me. “It’s being accepted as a type of meditation now. Being alone for an hour in silence with your thoughts—that’s valuable, there’s something valuable in doing nothing.” Of course, setting up a float tank is not as simple as unfurling a yoga mat in your bedroom; it requires specific plumbing, careful water filtration, sanitation, and soundproofing, Cheuk added, but he was pleased to see it reaching new people. He also noted that float center owners are starting to offer complementary services, like saunas and cold pools, to attract a wider clientele.

When I sought out a float session in 2010, I found only two options in the LA area—the beige building off the freeway and Float Lab in Venice Beach. In 2015, Just Float opened in Pasadena and billed itself as the largest floating facility in the world, with eleven private, spacious rooms and a pleasant reception area for post-treatment relaxation, where customers could sip tea and peruse books on meditation and spirituality, postponing their return to the outside world. Floaters were encouraged to contribute their theta-induced thoughts and doodles to a communal journal. (These offered a rare glimpse of vulnerable and compassionate human nature, resembling YouTube comments found beneath ambient albums like “Music for Airports”—sentiments ranging from “I’ve been so anxious … so grateful I found this” to “I’ve decided to forgive my dad.”)

Today, the float therapy map of greater LA has expanded—from Newport Beach to Torrance to Corona, as well as Palm Springs and San Diego. There are dozens more places where floating is on the menu, merged into proliferating boutique wellness chains and offered alongside “stackable” options like infrared saunas, meditation, yoga, sound baths, and massage. (Just Float closed in 2023, but its facilities were taken over a few months later by Float Restore, which added a salt room and other services.) Sometimes, an accompanying array of trending aesthetic procedures are also offered—cryotherapy facials, electromagnetic sculpting, thermal shock, etc.

In the blurred spaces between gyms, spas, and medical offices, new hybrids of “fast wellness” emerge. Architecturally, these businesses don’t demand much differentiation, easily fitting into existing stucco boxes on busy streets or clustered around parking lots or in malls. Inside though, boutique exercise studios resemble dimly lit living rooms decorated in stylish neutral tones, and medical offices with friendly names (Tia, Parsley, Kindbody) crib the aesthetics of a natural wine bar. Doctors’ waiting rooms screen infomercials for sketchy cosmetic interventions, and strip mall medspas keep a nurse on standby to administer (the ghastly named) “injectables.” These can all be quick stops on one’s regular rounds of self-care/optimization, combined with workouts and a cup of bone broth, then an hour of phone-free mental drifting via sound bath or float session.

Last spring, I went to a newly opened branch of Artha Wellness Sanctuary in Studio City for a fifty-dollar hour-long float. The interior design was somewhat severe, with high ceilings, low lighting, and walls painted in a dark palette. Founded in 2020, this hybrid gym-cum-medspa is situated on a busy commercial strip, offering Pilates, contour light therapy, and a float room. When I visited, compact, serious women clad in Vuori marched out of the yoga studio and a placard in the lobby advertised a surgical jawline-sculpting procedure. Around a dim corner, the mysterious cryo chamber emitted an ominous glow. A stunning aspiring-actress receptionist led me to a private room with a white, closet-sized chamber containing warm saline water. After I bobbed like driftwood in a dark sea for an hour, a soothing recorded voice brought me back to reality, and soon I was out on the blindingly bright sidewalk again, my recently constrained senses making the street trash sparkle.

Pause Studio, founded in 2016, has seven locations in greater LA, and its style is more typical of the contemporary wellness aesthetic—pale wood, biophilic hues, and potted plants. Citing our era of intense connectivity and elevated stress, its tagline is: “The solution to modern living.” As of 2023 Pause had awarded fifty-seven franchises across the country and projected two hundred more opening in the future. Besides float tanks, Pause has a menu of IV drips, saunas, cold plunges, injectable vitamins, and LED light therapies. At its Venice location, I passed a room with leg compression boots laid on a recliner next to a shiny metal IV holder. Wait, is this a clinic? No, a spa. With scented candles and chocolate-flavored amino tablets for sale in the lobby. As a pleased customer wrote in a review: “Hot tea with our IV!”

With similar business concepts like Restore, SweatHouz, Perspire, the Covery, Sauna House, and Othership currently multiplying, we’ve entered the era of the accessible wellness chain. This modest democratization might warrant celebration in our “wealth is health” world—particularly in a city that has spawned hundreds of costly diet, beauty, and anti-aging fads over the past century. Now, for thirty-five dollars and up, a quick hit of (drug-free) transformation is just around the corner!

Ironically, the most appealing aspects of floating are the very experiences its consumer-friendly identity seeks to suppress: the rare phenomena of isolation and sensory deprivation. As Glenn Perry reflects in his memoir, flotation tanks “minimize the information coming into the senses.” This was true for him in the early 1970s and is even more vital today. For who among us is not jammed to the brim with information (much of which is chosen for us by an algorithm)?

In a recent moment typical of my sensory intake, I caught part of a Brian Eno interview on my car radio and started thumb-typing quotes into my phone at red lights, all the while swiping away my daily meditation app reminder. He was voicing what sounded to me like a modern sales pitch for float tanks: “If you want things to come up from inside you—all of the accumulated knowledge and information and experience that you have—if you want that to manifest itself, you have to stop trying to stuff more stuff in at that moment. You have to give it space to come up.” For some of us, the only way to stop ourselves from stuffing in more stuff might be to lock ourselves away for an hour alone, drifting through dark inner space at the neighborhood tank.