Floating Through Life

A few weeks ago, I had an epiphany. Well, alright it was a little less dramatic than that. It was a mere realisation. Last year, I began counselling. I went back today for the first time this year after having to stop for a little while due to rehearsing and performing in two versions of the same show at the same time for seven weeks. It meant that life beyond Shaftesbury Avenue did not exist but when I first started going, I had to fill out a bunch of forms. Some were your bog standard name and address type forms but there were others. Forms that had me rating my happiness or sadness from a scale of one to five. Measuring my stress levels at work and at home. Pin-pointing what triggers my anxiety. I told her my stress levels, regardless of where I was, were consistently at a nine. I felt like a game of Buckaroo that was nearing its end. If one more thing was added to my load, I was going to fall apart. Everything would come crashing down. I cried at nearly everything from the more serious concerns in my life to there being no milk left in the fridge. Regardless of how much sleep I was getting I was just...tired. All the time. I knew steps needed to be taken, counselling being a big one, in order to live a healthier and happier life or I genuinely was going to make myself pretty ill and pretty soon. So I began taking those steps. Slowly at first and then all of a sudden in giant bounds. 

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1 pod. 12 inches of water. 500KG of Epsom Salt. 1 naked Carrie. 1 hour. Floating is my new favourite thing. 🛀 @the_floatworks Edit: I got the Epsom Salt thing wrong before! Some places do 1000KG but the place I went to does 500KG (half a tonne) ❤️

A post shared by Carrie Hope Fletcher (@carriehopefletcher) on Jan 29, 2020 at 7:43am PST

A few weeks ago, I went floating. I've talked about it everywhere on social media so why not on my blog too. I'm officially obsessed. You get entirely naked (stay with me...) and get into an 8ft by 6ft pod filled with twelve inches of water and half a tonne of Epsom Salt. That's enough salt that you float. You get ten minutes of music, forty-five minutes of blissful silence and then five minutes before the end of your slot, the music plays you out. You stay in there for an hour (some places do ninety minutes but I think that's little too long for me...) and I swear to you, you go somewhere else. Or you don't. People have said they hated it and got bored before the music had even stopped playing ten minutes in and had to get out! I, however, am completely converted. I've had 4 sessions so far, two of which were #gifted, and I've just bought four more. The reason I'm talking about this (believe it or not there is a reason) is not because I'm newly obsessed and I want to tell the world, it's that whilst I was in there, I didn't think about anything. Well...I did think of some stuff, of course, it's impossible for the mind to go completely silent but my mind was quiet at the very least and for those that know me, they know my mind is never quiet. Whenever I do any of this self care shit that you're meant to do to relax you, I never actually relax. During the few massages I've had, I lie there and worry about something that happened yesterday or about all the stuff I have to do when the massage is over. I have even been known to worry about the fact I only have ten minutes left of my massage and i'Ve NoT cAlMeD dOwN yEt! Facials, hair or nail appointments, I talk and talk and talk and talk so I feel more exhausted afterwards than when I went in. Floating, on the other hand, I zone out entirely. I emerge from the pod an hour later and can't believe that I didn't find something to obsess over. I didn't write a mental to do list to be completed immediately upon leaving. I was zen as zen could be.

Part of this is because I think Floating is my "thing". I've found something that works for me and my GOD will I be sticking with it! But I think part of it is that I'm also just a bit better? Not at anything in particular. I just feel better than I did six months ago when I was crying every day and went to bed not knowing how I was going to get through tomorrow if it was just going to be "same shit, different day". I couple weeks before I left Les Mis, I had a week of proper crazy. Everything happened all at once and usually that would have melted me down to the wick. However, when things cropped up and I was asked to be somewhere at short notice the following day, I didn't panic. I just said yes or no and got on with life when usually I would have cried at the mere thought of something else being added to my already full plate. It meant my week was full of early mornings and late nights but my quieter mind meant that I could actually enjoy each meeting and work day as it came my way and not stress about the extra workload. I'm aware this doesn't mean I have finally found "inner peace" and I won't always be this calm and organised, but it means at least I've found things that work for me that I can keep turning to when needs be. 

Here's to quiet minds!

P.S. For anyone who follows me on instagram, THIS. This is why that song was in my head the other day. 😂