Drown out the world with isolation
Demand for float centre’s services grows as stress- fighting benefits catch on
The Float House is the brainchild of two brothers, Andy and Mike Zaremba. Football players at McMaster University, they gave up tackling and blocking to take up yoga. Then they graduated to the tank. They had their reasons. Four years ago, Andy Zaremba was on vacation in the Cayman Islands with his partner when she went into labour prematurely.
She was flown to a hospital on Grand Cayman where their daughter was born by emergency caesarean section, weighing only 1.9 pounds. After two weeks in the intensive care unit, the baby was flown to BC Children’s Hospital, where she remained for 10 ½ months.
Andy, now 35, was under so much stress, he began having heart palpitations. He even went to hospital because he thought he was having a stroke.
“The whole time, she was in a struggle for her life. Every day, it could change. One morning, she was fine and by that night, she was deathly ill.”
At around this time, Andy and Mike, now 32, installed a sensory deprivation tank in Mike’s condo. They had tried it once or twice and found they liked it.
Basically, the idea is to tune out the outside world while tuning in to yourself.
It worked like magic for Andy.
“Just to get that little break out of the hospital and totally decompress was the best thing ever.”
After setting up the tank in Mike’s condo, they started inviting people over to experience its therapeutic effects. Their guests loved it.
Their in- condo experience became the test market for their company, the Float House, which has two locations in Vancouver and one opened by a cousin in Victoria.
After drawing up a business plan, they opened their first location, in Gastown with five tanks, about a year ago. It proved so popular, they’ve added four new tanks, making this, they claim, the largest float centre in the world. Recently, they opened in a second location in trendy Kitsilano with five tanks.
The prolonged salt water bath ( it uses Epsom salts) where you bob like a cork is designed to release stress. Floating reduces the effects of gravity and sends the body into a deeply relaxed state somewhere between being asleep and awake. Supporters of the process claim it has health benefits including lowering blood pressure and helping with battles with weight and addictions.
To the Zaremba brothers, the business is a natural offshoot of their passion for yoga.
One of the eight steps in yoga is pratyahara, the withdrawal of the senses. Most yoga practices end with shavasana, or deep relaxation.
“This is super shavasana,” said Andy of the float- tank experience. “This is shavasana on steroids.”
While floating seems to be in vogue, there is nothing new about it.
In 1953, Dr. John C. Lilly, an American physician and psychoanalyst, devised the first isolation rank.
That was a time of major experimentation in the U. S. with psychedelic drugs like LSD and guys like poet Allen Ginsberg and writer Timothy Leary, who were close associates of Lilly, leading the counterculture beat generation.
Vancouver did not escape the float- tank experiment. There were several in the city in the 1980s. There was even a 1980 movie about the phenomenon called Altered States in which a Harvard professor of abnormal psychology played by William Hurt conducts experiments on himself with a hallucinatory and an isolation chamber.
But flotation’s popularity ebbed.
A Montreal establishment called Ovarium weathered the storm. It has been in operation for about 30 years.
The Zaremba brothers also discovered a big enterprise in Portland, Ore., called Float On.
They credit the resurgence of flotation to the growing popularity of yoga and meditation and to one rather unlikely ambassador, UFC commentator Joe Rogan, a fan of ultimate fighting which is known more for its blood lust than for the soporific chanting of yoga mantras.
In a number of YouTube videos and in his own podcast, Rogan touts isolation tanks as the path to nirvana.
The Float House in Gastown is the first of its kind in Vancouver in 20 years. Why now? Stress is often called the bane of modern times. This has given rise to a new wave of entrepreneurs including yoga studio operators, herbal dispensaries, massage therapists, spa operators and, now, float tank operators.
This new- age journey doesn’t come particularly cheap. A dunk in the tank costs anywhere from $ 39 to $ 75 a session, depending on how many you buy in a package.
A small price for piece of mind, you might say.
“It’s like going on an intimate date with yourself,” said Mike, who used the float tank to alleviate severe back pain.