Avoiding Source

On returning to what saves us

If I look back on my life, I see a glaring and uncomfortable truth: I have spent most of it avoiding the very thing that saves me.

Hindsight is 20/20, right? Well, in hindsight, I can see it everywhere now. In myself, in others throughout each day, and in my work every week with owners of float centers around the world.

I felt so convicted that I burned my business down (again) to clear out anything that wasn’t in alignment with my new commitment to confront this head on.

What am I talking about when I say “Source”?

Source is what you encounter when you stop moving, stop producing, stop performing. It’s the truth that emerges in silence. It’s bigger than you, and it knows you completely. It’s where the ideas come that you know aren’t yours. Where clarity arrives without striving. Where you feel held by something larger.

As someone who prays daily and has found my way back to the Christian contemplative tradition, I’ve learned that Source isn’t something you conjure or manufacture. It’s Someone you make space for. Whether you call this God, Christ, Spirit, the Divine, or simply Truth—the practice is the same: you have to stop, be still, and listen.

What you call it matters less to me right now than whether you’re willing to stop avoiding it. The practice comes first. The naming can come later. What I’ve found is that when you actually show up in the silence, in the surrender, what meets you there will make itself known.

The Antenna

As an artist, a highly-sensitive person and someone that has pursued healing and Truth since I was young, I’ve had more moments than I can count where I’ve tuned into Source and felt something much greater than myself.

It’s the ideas that drop in out of nowhere.

It’s the serendipitous encounters that make your jaw drop.

It’s the right person coming in at the right time, just when you need it.

Rick Rubin writes in The Creative Act:

“We are all antennae for creative thought. Some transmissions come on strong, others are more faint. If your antenna isn’t sensitively tuned, you’re likely to lose the data in the noise. Particularly since the signals coming through are often more subtle than the content we collect through sensory awareness. They are energetic more than tactile, intuitively perceived more than consciously recorded.”

I have been building and tuning my antenna for most of my life—privately.

More recently, I was blessed by being connected with two mentors that came through this more subtle sense, Rich and Blake. Much of our work together involved seeing the true value of my expertise, being 1-of-1 in a tiny, niche industry where I had seen behind the curtain, acting almost like a business partner to provide strategic advice, often along with emotional and spiritual support. They helped me see what I couldn’t see on my own, poured into me with their own belief to give me greater conviction and held me accountable to follow through on what I was hearing from Source.

What Listening to Source Actually Produces

Since committing to this work of not avoiding Source—of actually showing up to the practices that tune my antenna and disconnecting with all the things I felt like I needed to do that weren’t in alignment—my life looks completely different in ways I couldn’t have predicted or engineered.

Going deeper in my relationship with my partner.

Moving in together into a new home out in the woods outside the city.

Getting my first art studio.

Completely changing my business model and cancelling every single contract.

None of these decisions were based on data or what others were doing. They were based on signal. On Source. They all required major leaps and stretches of faith, and they’ve all pulled through in ways that validated the signal I was following.

My business became more profitable than it’s ever been—not by doing more, but by focusing on my core gifts and what I do best. The work I used to give away for free, thinking it wasn’t valuable enough to charge for, became the center of my offering. My client results deepened into greater transformation, both personally and professionally, because I was finally showing up as myself rather than who I thought I should be.

My art practice expanded after years of it being squeezed into the margins. Through my time in Source and direction from my mentors, the work evolved into something entirely new—immersive, interactive experiences where one person goes through the gallery completely alone, like a float (no distractions and no phones for a safe, healing space). Last month, I held Volume One of this, the prototype and my first major exhibition in 10 years, creating a solo experience based on my most honest and deep artwork yet, reconnecting to the Inner Child and finding faith again after losing all hope. It was a vision I’ve held since I was a child, finally bringing it to life. The results were more powerful than I imagined and now we’re finalizing a short documentary about it all to continue forward.

I’m showing up in my business and life more authentically than ever before.

This is what happens when you consistently return to Source and let it reorder your priorities, your relationships, your work, your time.

The fruit is real. The changes are concrete. But they required me to let go, deepen my faith, and stop avoiding what I knew I needed to do.

What Avoiding Source Costs Us

I see this pattern most clearly in my work with float center owners.

Constantly, I talk with them and they say:

“I don’t get it. We have hundreds of 5-star reviews, people love it and so many tell us it’s transformed their life, so why aren’t they coming back?”

In our weekly calls, we continue to return to the same answer: you need to go float.

So many of the problems, the confusion, the indecision or chaos comes from a period where they’ve been avoiding Source. Sometimes this isn’t intentional. Sometimes, external factors are at play.

But almost always, we return to the same answer.

These business owners all have their own stories of pain, trauma and issues that led them to step in the tank for the first time and it changed their life for the better. So much so, that they made a tremendous physical, emotional, spiritual and financial investment to build a space of their own to provide it for others.

They tuned into something that brought them tremendous healing and transformation. They received an invitation—or a calling—to create spaces for others to experience the same.

Then they fell off their practice.

They stopped floating.

They stopped returning to Source.

And the business began to struggle.

I understand this intimately. I felt it at its most extreme when the world shut down in 2020 and I experienced a psychotic break that fractured my sense of reality. I felt like I was losing my mind, bombarded by darkness telling me I was beyond help or hope. I came closer to the edge than I want to admit. But the breakthrough came when I realized this wasn’t just a mental health crisis—it was a spiritual crisis. The moment I understood I needed to return to Source, to surrender and ask for help beyond my own understanding, everything began to shift. That returning to Source is what saved my life. Floating was a key part of the long restoration afterward, helping bring my body, mind, spirit and soul back into alignment, but it was Source that pulled me back.

But what I keep being reminded of since is that you don’t need a dramatic break to lose yourself. It happens slowly over time. One missed float session. One skipped prayer practice. One week of putting everyone else’s needs before your own until you can’t remember the last time you sat in silence.

I talk with my clients about the principle from Atomic Habits: never miss twice. We can’t expect perfection—missing once is human. But it’s in that critical gap between missing once and missing twice where everything changes. One becomes two so easily, and two becomes twenty, and suddenly months have passed since you last connected to Source. That gap between one and two is where we have to catch ourselves.

Faith, Trust, and Coming Home to Yourself

Recently, I worked with my clients to get to the essence of what floating truly is. We had in-depth discussions and peeled back the onion layers of common tropes and marketing speak to get to the core.

Float therapy is about faith, trust, and coming home to yourself.

That is a scary thought and a hard sell—not just for someone who may never spend time alone, but for anyone who’s been deep in distractions and addictions to avoid confronting whatever parts of themselves or their lives they’ve been running from.

We avoid floating (and we avoid Source) because the answers aren’t always easy or what we want to hear, even when we know they’re true. It reminds us we’re not always in control like we think or hope we are. It asks us to rely on trust, faith, and surrender more than we may want to. That’s why it’s such a hard sell—not because people don’t believe it works, but because part of them knows it does, and that means they’ll have to change.

Floating is so powerful because it is in many ways one of the most extreme versions of the space and time to be with ourselves and Source. No light and no sound (if you choose), no smell, no pressures on the body as you lay back, float effortlessly and do — nothing. And as a friend of mine said so eloquently, “it’s like a mirror, but also an opportunity to clean the mirror.”

This is what happens when we create space to encounter Source: we see ourselves more clearly. Not through the distorted lens of constant noise and comparison, but as we actually are. Recent studies on floatation therapy and anorexia demonstrate this perfectly—the practice helped people see their self-image accurately again, bringing perception back into alignment with reality. We need the practice to perceive truth.

The mirror shows us reality. But it also gives us the opportunity to clean what’s distorted, to come back into alignment, to return home to ourselves.

A Silent Revolution

I believe the hardest part of what everyone in the float industry has been grappling with over the last 50 years is that we’ve tapped into something much greater than ourselves to provide such a unique, healing and transformative space. In many ways, it’s the antithesis of so much we’re bombarded with.

It feels like a Silent Revolution is going on.

You hear stories like a marine-corp veteran who says their first float session left them with no pain, no anxiety and helped their PTSD dramatically. “I felt like I was 18 again,” he said. Or someone suffering from chronic pain who says they were finally pain-free without having to take a pill for the first time in years.

There are countless stories like this.

But the questions that haunt float center owners are the same ones that haunt anyone doing sacred work in a commercial context:

How do you sustain that? How do you continue to pay the bills? How do you convince someone to try it or commit to a practice long-term?

And perhaps the most difficult question of all: How do you put a price on something that feels sacred? Something that feels priceless?

(I will have a future post dedicated to this question. Subscribe and stay tuned!)

This tension—between the sacred nature of the work and the practical reality of running a business—is where so many float centers get stuck. When you’re disconnected from Source, you can’t hold both truths. You either underprice and slowly go out of business, or you feel sleazy charging what it’s worth, or worst of all, you stop believing in the work altogether.

Yes, there are strategies and systems that will help.

But the answer to how to hold this tension, how to price appropriately, how to show up authentically in your marketing while honoring the sacredness of what you provide—that answer comes the same way the original idea came through to you.

The Invitation

You will find it in the silence. In the surrender. In whatever you meet when you finally stop running.

For me, this has a name—but you don’t need to call it what I call it to encounter it.

You just need to stop avoiding it.

For float center owners: it’s time to go float.

For artists, seekers, business owners with a contemplative practice: it’s time to return to whatever helps you tune your antenna. To stop, be still, and listen.

The answers you’re looking for aren’t found in more strategy, more hustle, more content, more noise.

They’re found where they’ve always been found.

In Source.

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Thank you for taking the time to slow down and read.

I hope it resonates and helps inspire you back to Source. It would mean a lot if you shared it with someone you think needs it.

→ If you’d like to work close with me, read this.

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