The body has stated a preference.
Field Notes of Rahgah - 20260920-S5
Lie down where you are carried. What is held has no reason to hold on.
Wednesday I laid out that the question for this work has become what puts this physical body at ease fast enough for awareness to leave it alone. By Friday the physical body gave me an answer, and the answer was expensive (of course). It wants to float in warm salt water while suspended in complete darkness.
When I can afford it, on my Fridays off, I run in the morning and then go float. I’ve done this for a while; last year I went most of the summer. I go for the joints and tendons; running takes its toll, and the occasional lift I performed badly. It’s never a session for me, it is however a necessary and effective maintenance that does often work like “pre-session”.
This Friday the float was forty minutes of pink noise; my leg muscles came out of it the most relaxed they’ve been in months. During the experience, the body jerked the whole way through. A foot, a leg, the other leg, the spine. Nothing I did to settle it worked, so I stopped doing things and let it jerk, and eventually it was just something happening in the tank.
Meanwhile I saw more phosphene activity than I have in a long time. I used to think that the activity tracked how deep I was getting, I don’t think so anymore. It tracks how relaxed the body is, and in that tank the body was as relaxed as it gets while still awake.
The part that matters: I was able to do a full chakra walkthrough, root to crown, activating, balancing, charging, whatever the words are, and I started it and I finished it. I haven’t done that in about a year. On the daybed I fall asleep partway through or space out and come back at the end with no memory of the middle. In the water I stayed with it the whole way.
So the body has stated a preference, and the preference is an expensive tank and monthly bills that I can’t keep in my office or budget. The tank is a bundle, though. Full support with no pressure points, warmth, darkness, and sound. I’ve worn a mask and headphones on the daybed since day one, so darkness and sound are already there and can’t be what changed. That leaves support and warmth.
One of those two let the walkthrough finish, and each can be tested on its own. A bolster and a wedge on the daybed get me most of the way to the posture, in the room the body already knows is for work, at a duration it doesn’t associate with sleep. If that runs the walkthrough to the end, it was support all along. If I still drop off, it’s probably the warmth, and a warm bath with the mask is the next test (if I ever find time for it).
I’m not moving my sessions to the amazing bed we are now proud owners of. I fall asleep in a half-raised position every night; I keep sleep and “the work” in separate rooms on purpose. The daybed stays home base, the office is the sanctioned and fortified place for my operations. What I’m doing is bringing one ingredient of the tank into that room and finding out if it was, indeed, the ingredient.
The other option is to stop asking one setup to do everything. The daybed has produced clean exits, what it can’t maintain is a long sequence. Fridays in the tank are for the sequential work and maintenance; the daybed for missions, contact, intuition, aspirations, etc. Different jobs, different conditions.
This week’s panel is the same bunk from Wednesday’s room, seen from the foot, with our hero now in it. Mask on, headphones on, console above his head reading him, monitoring, documenting. Seven sliders, each at its own height, a tiny ode to temperance.
I cut the cable that ran from the console to the headphones in the thumbnail; the world these notes come from should have solved wireless by now better than whatever our own Bluetooth technology continues to fail at. The short lead hanging off the earcup keeps the cassette-futurism note without the coil.
He crossed the bridge, hung up the suit, washed, ate, dosed, and is now lying down. The spread is one full day. The body gets what it asks for first, and then it allows for a clean release.