float (in) nature
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Full project title
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Project Description
We live in a world full of stressors. Our systems of living today manifest a global health issue; a certain detachment to our own respective well-being and conscious experiencing our everyday lives. Floating therapy is a form of water therapy that has been clinically proven to relieve stress and anxiety through an immersive experience. Floating in nature, connects humans to nature on a deeper level, stimulating an inner awakening and spiritual connection to our bodies and the Earth.
Geographical Scope
Project Region
Urban or rural issues
Physical or other transformations
EU Programme or fund
Which funds
Description of the project
Summary
Floating as a therapeutic practice has the ability to improve overall well-being and adaptive capacities for humans to become better versions of ourselves. Its profoundly meditative and humbling experience makes us question what it means to be human, and our ways-of-being in the world. It provides us space to think and reflect, and over time, foster deep connections between ourselves as humans, and the world.
Floating (in) nature is a project idea based on accessible and inclusive urban design and planning: utilising natural spaces to open up facilities that may cater to floating practices. The North of Sweden (the colonial term being 'Swedish Lapland') provides a historical, natural and cultural context that serves as a suitable testbed for such initiative. The main motivation behind the idea is to open up floating experiences to all, where every citizen may enjoy and benefit from such holistic practices and deeper sense of well-being. Floating as a practice motivates ecological awareness – not through the development of new products and services, but through instilling an inner dimension of change and consciousness to the world.
We don't need more – we need less. We need to find ways that shift our paradigms of thinking towards creatively using the resources we already have. Such creativity can derive from education and cultural involvement, but also through nurture and personal development. Floating supports the latter; the affective and insightful development of oneself in connection to the world.
Key objectives for sustainability
Epsom salt is the main component of a floating experience. Epsom salt is what makes the human float, effortlessly and completely relaxed, on water. The high salt content provides for an almost anti-gravitational experience, relieving the body from worldly pressures – both literally and metaphorically. Clinical trials conducted in controlled laboratory conditions, by use of a sensory deprivation tank, have shown that floating experiences relieve stress, anxiety, and pain, as well as facilitate the rehabilitation of injuries through the promotion of physical and psychological recovery. Urban services that offer floatation therapy entails an hour-long float session in which the human lies in a sensory deprivation tank and floats away into nothingness. This relaxing practice brings the human to a deeper level of relaxation, reaching a theta brain wave where the brain shifts to slower, more powerfully rhythmic waves with a frequency of about 4-7 Hz. Everyone experiences theta waves at least twice a day: when we awaken from sleep to consciousness, and when we drift from drowsiness into sleep.
Epsom salt contains magnesium sulphate, in the formula of MgSO4*7H20, and this can be large reason in which floating may profoundly affect the health and well-being of urban citizens today. Medical research has indicated that magnesium deficiency is increasing throughout the developed world, and float therapy directly treats this deficiency. When Epsom salt is dissolved into a bath, magnesium sulphate is absorbed into the bloodstream via the skin when the human enjoys their hour-long float session. The effects of daily stressors in our lifestyles is exacerbated by the fact that magnesium deficiency in itself also results in anxiety and depression.
The best part? Epsom salt is based on magnesium – the eighth most abundant element found in the crust of the earth, according to the University of California. It can be regenerated and recycled through the earth's natural processes.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
We don’t need more in this world – we need less. Mostly, we need spaces to question and re-visit our existence to the world. Floating in nature is an aesthetic and spiritual practice that centres of the human as a vessel for experience. Unlike technological advancements that tend to neglect or escape our innate humanness – perhaps of fear for mortality and vulnerability – floating aims to re-build our damaged relationship both to ourselves, and to nature. It is the purest form of sustainability, as it builds upon enjoying nature as is, as supposed to what could be. Being an aesthetic practice means that floating is a way of experiencing the world we have today – cue Yuriko Saito’s Aesthetics of the Familiar (2017) – and that world-making is a process in which we, as humans, view and define our world.
Key objectives for inclusion
Floating, as a practice, is inclusive. It does not discriminate. All humans from any ethic, socio-economic class, and background, may enjoy and benefit from this practice. Floating in nature aims to provide a testbed that is accessible and free-of-charge. Ideally, the set-up would be locally organised and maintained, establishing a co-ownership model of maintenance. Booking systems can be applied, similar to certain public saunas in the municipality, or operate on a first-come-first-serve basis. The ease of implementation of this idea comes from that there is already a culture, interest and the systems in place for such activities (e.g. public saunas, ice baths, camping areas, sleeping huts & shelters, etc.). The summer months would provide the optimal outdoor temperatures and testbed duration (approx. 1 to 2 months) for this idea to be tested. The idea has the potential for scalability – from a local to regional to national initiative, with southern regions providing even better climatic conditions to implement longer floating durations in nature.
Physical or other transformations
Innovative character
There are many practices in our world today that are unsustainable and excluding. Socio-economic discrimination embodied by the lack of access to opportunities and technological products result in the digital divide (Dijk, 2005). Systemic racism and ethnic discrimination plague societies. We live in a world where information is consumed at ridiculous speeds – in which, combative and segregating political rhetoric is a norm. Floating gives us the opportunity to remove ourselves – temporarily – from unhealthy environments and secure spaces for us to breathe, reflect and reconnect to our humanly bodies without the distractions from the world. Sometimes, that is all that is needed to create deep change, development and awareness.
Light and Akama (2019) discuss ethics as matters of obligation and care, where ethical practices should serve to create space for people to come together to re-examine, re-make and re-imagine their relationships with the beings and materials around them. That is what floating is – and does. Floating as a practice embodies social and ethical sustainability, inclusion and aesthetics. It is an aesthetic practice – meaning that it is based on a close interdependence between the way we as humans move, exist and experience a space, with the material forms and environmental contexts that surround us.
Everyone, from all backgrounds, is invited to take part in floating practices. It not only re-defines our individual relationship with nature, but also our relationship to each other, thereby building a sense of community and belonging.
