SWIM & FLOAT
Learn to navigate the current. Ease into the depth of renewal.
Why SWIM & Float
Oceanic boundlessness
Expanded states are often described in the language of the ocean: vastness, connection, the dissolution of separation between self and world.
But the ocean is not only serene. Beneath the luminous surface are unfamiliar depths, powerful currents, waves of emotion, the riptides of personal history and the wider tides of collective suffering. There can be profound beauty and healing here, yet guides and journeyers alike may rapidly find themselves out of their depth.
Oceanic boundlessness is a measured dimension of non-ordinary states (Dittrich, 1998)
There is vast beauty in the ocean of experience.
And we can rapidly find ourselves out of our depth.
This is where SWIM begins.
Four frames of knowledge and practice for learning to perceive the currents, stay connected to the body, navigate intensity and make meaning with discernment.
SWIM at a glance
Four frames.
Sixteen lenses.
One living system.
SWIM is not a staircase. The four frames are currents within the same ocean.
The body shapes the story. The story shapes the body. Relationships alter what feels possible. Values shape what we do with insight. Attention changes the world that becomes available to us.
rest on a frame, or on a single lens, and it will speak
- Agency
- Neuroception
- Regulation
- Embodiment
- Philosophy
- Contemplation
- Ethics
- Eudaimonia
- Interbeing
- Connection
- Creativity
- Transcendence
- Mindset
- Mindfulness
- Multiplicity
- Meaning
The four pillars of contemplative development
Why does each frame unfold the way it does? Because the structure is ancient. The wisdom traditions describe a path in four movements: the view you begin from, the practice you keep, the conduct it meets the world with, and what it ripens into. Every lens in SWIM stands on these same four pillars.
View
the ground you begin from
A frame large enough for the journey, and the aspiration you set out with. What do we understand, and what are we reaching toward? Orientation comes before movement: without a view, practice has no direction and experience has no shore.
Agency · Philosophy · Interbeing · Mindset
Practice
the keeping of the path
The daily training of attention, body and heart, until clarity, compassion and steadiness become available capacities rather than occasional visitors.
Neuroception · Contemplation · Connection · Mindfulness
Application
where practice meets a life
Ethics, relationship, work, repair. Insight becomes trustworthy through how it behaves; the path proves itself in contact with other lives.
Regulation · Ethics · Creativity · Multiplicity
Fruition
what the path ripens into
Not a peak, but a way of being: flourishing, effortlessness, wisdom lived so thoroughly it stops announcing itself.
Embodiment · Eudaimonia · Transcendence · Meaning
The frames of SWIM provide essential clinical knowledge through a process of self-practice and self-reflection (SP/SR). This includes foundational considerations for an individual's set, setting, skill and system to support the therapeutic process from assessment, preparation, through journey and into integration.
An altered state offers possibility
An altered trait is possibility practiced
And the fruition of practice is effortlessness
SWIM teaches you to navigate oceanic states.
FLOAT begins
where navigation gives way
to belonging.
Why the model exists
Psychedelic medicines reliably produce non-ordinary states: expanded awareness, a loosening of the ordinary sense of self, a felt sense of connection, and insight. These are among the most consistent findings in the field. In one survey of 886 people, more than 90% reported meaningful personal insight (Peill et al., 2022), and the strength of that insight tracks with therapeutic benefit (Roseman et al., 2018).
But the same states carry risk. An insight can feel entirely true and still mislead. As Bertrand Russell put it, insight untested is an insufficient guarantee of truth. The medicine loosens; whether that loosening becomes growth or harm depends almost entirely on context, preparation, and the people holding the space (Hartogsohn, 2024). And these states do not stand alone: contemplative training shapes what they become. In a controlled retreat, mindfulness meditation deepened the psilocybin experience and enhanced its lasting psychological benefits (Smigielski et al., 2019).
This is the gap SWIM & FLOAT was built to close. The state alone does not do the healing; the container does. SWIM & FLOAT is a pathway to cultivate a cartography, map, and the tools for navigating the terrain of expanded states, learned through clinical skills, embodied practices and relational awareness, to support therapists and patients within the ocean of experience.
Evidence informed, experientially driven
SWIM & FLOAT is grounded in the contemporary evidence base and a commitment to research literacy, so what is taught can be traced to what is known.
It is learned experientially, through practice, role play, embodiment and supervised experience, not through theory alone. Knowledge becomes skill only when it is lived.
SWIM & FLOAT is offered as a map, not the territory, and a good map stays useful precisely because it knows it is not the ground it describes.
How to use the SWIM & FLOAT map
SWIM is a transtheoretical, transdiagnostic framework. It privileges no single school of psychotherapy, and it works across diagnoses by targeting the processes common to distress, attachment, adult development, psychological flexibility, and flourishing.
Where SWIM teaches navigation, FLOAT supports a clinician to assess and support an individual's capacity to let go safely.
SWIM & FLOAT is a working clinical structure, applied across the three stages of care as seen in the three stages below.
Applied acrossThe three stages of care
Preparation
Assessment identifies which pattern is most live for a client, whether fear-based resistance, control-grip, or anxious dissolution, and the most relevant FLOAT dimension becomes a concrete, rehearsed skill for the journey ahead.
Dose
The frame guides tracking and minimal, well-timed support and embodied resources: reading the movement from contraction to expansion, protecting the liminal, holding potentiality rather than directing.
Integration
The work turns insight into changed living, distinguishing waking up, the state a journey can accelerate, from growing up, the slower developmental and relational work that no single session can shortcut.
From framework to practice
Ready to bring SWIM & FLOAT into your practice?
SWIM & FLOAT is taught through CPACT, our in-depth training for clinicians and therapists working with psychedelic and other expanded states.
Train for the depth, complexity and possibility of expanded-state work.