Living a more balanced life with spiritual coach Risha Joshi

Everyone has a different story, and a different reason for hopping into the tank for the first time. Risha Joshi has been a regular since July last year, and her story is one of finding balance.

From a young age Risha has been helping people; in her early years caring for her terminally ill father, through to giving marriage advice in her early-teens to family members, and as she grew up, she became aware that helping people wasn’t just something she was good at, it was her calling.

In Risha’s eyes, we are all born balanced, free of anxiety and negative thought patterns, but it’s the traumas we experience in our lives that force us to live in a constant state of unease. It’s why she became a dentist initially – to help people manage their fears in the dentist chair – and it’s why now, she’s focusing her time on helping people in a more direct way.

“Me being the way I am, I like to get to know my patients, get to know a little bit more about them,” Risha begins. “I found that I was having the same conversations with people over and over again, mainly about what was going on in the news, how they were constantly in this depressed state. That led me to go away and think that actually, if we’re all thinking alike, then we’re not thinking.

“There are too many people in the world consumed by their thoughts and living in these states of fear that make them physically unwell, mentally unwell and emotionally unwell. It has a knock-on effect on every aspect of your life.”

“I realised I was quite good at it – connecting with people. And getting people out of a repetitive cycle of thinking and helping them see things from a broader perspective, like you do with floating. When you do that you can find that all of your problems aren’t great big monsters anymore, they’re just little aspects of your life.”

Now, Risha runs a wellness company called Get Conscious – “I named it because I think we can snap out of this mental routine and start living life to the fullest” – dedicated to helping people overcome their fears, mental blocks and confront their pain to live a more full and present life.

“Your mind is a highly efficient, extremely intelligent, two-million-year-old tool. It is designed to optimise itself. So whatever goes in there – for example as a child, if you put your hand on a hot stove and you burn yourself, the mind is not going to make you go through that same process over and over again to learn that lesson. It’s going to get you straight in the thought process to move your hand away from anything hot.

“As we go through life, and feel pain, rather than having to feel that – or anything that is even remotely associated with that pain – your mind gets hyper-sensitised to it. When we start feeling fear of feeling pain, or feeling emotions, we kind of shut ourselves off from feeling altogether, and that’s when you start thinking, ‘Where’s all the excitement? Is this it? Is this what life’s about, this 9-5 matrix?’

“You get used to feeling that chronic pain, rather than just letting yourself embrace it, then let it dissipate, like thoughts you have in a float tank. We should allow them to come in, then they float off. That’s how we should be dealing with our emotions. In our society, it’s more about ‘let’s get things done’: there’s a goal in mind. We have to get from A to B, and we forget how to deal with our emotions.”

This September, Risha will be heading up a five-day immersive retreat in the serenity of the Glastonbury hills, where she and her Get Conscious colleagues will help a team of people find their centre – that mental space where stress, fear and anxiety melt away. Through a multitude of practises including gong baths, a form of Tai Chi, meditation and much more. Those who take part in the retreat will leave with an awareness of when they deviate from their centre, armed with the tools to help bring back the balance.

“Everything that we do is to help people raise their personal awareness,” Risha continues. “So they can leave the retreat feeling like they know how to take control of their life. It’s not about giving a man a fish, it’s about teaching a man to fish. By being incredibly immersed in a five-day programme, people can understand what their centre is.

“Quite often people come to me when they feel like they’ve had enough; they’re going through a breakup, they feel like their life has broken down, or they’re feeling quite depressed about something. When you get to that stage and ask for help, it’s a turning point. People don’t make a change until they’ve gotten to a very difficult stage. Then we’d uncover all of their thought processes. So we’d start from the beginning. Quite often in a relationship, for example, it’s never a person or an object you’re missing, it’s the feeling you associate with it. We don’t want a million pounds for any other reason other than how it will make us feel.

“Fundamentally, all anyone is looking for is to feel love. But somewhere along the line, we all pick up traumas, and in order to prevent yourself from feeling pain, you create a story around your pain. The story is: ‘I’ll never make a million pounds’; ‘Love doesn’t come easily to me’; you make up a story, but that’s just your defence mechanism. And what we do is find your story, then we just smash your story to smithereens.”

As you can imagine, then, floating fits in perfectly with Risha’s vision of a more balanced life for everyone. On her return from a meditative retreat in Peru last year, Risha wanted to find a way of retaining the calm and centred feeling back in London.

“I came to Floatworks in July last year, and within my first experience I felt like I had an out-of-body experience. I got into such a relaxed state, I didn’t really feel any part of my body anymore. I went into a deep meditative state. Normally it would have taken me a long time to get there through meditation. I felt I could solve my problems in the space of an hour! I was able to work better and focus more. It just kept me on the right path and kept my mind at its optimum.”

So we can expect floating to become a part of Get Conscious’ regular programming in the future, then?

“When I first walked into Floatworks, I thought, ‘One day, I’m going to open my retreat, I’m going put in float tanks, and I’m gonna partner up with these guys’. That was the very first thought I had. And that thought hasn’t gone away…!”

To find out more about Risha and Get Conscious, you can follow her on Facebook