Check Out Casey Boyle’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Casey Boyle.

Hi Casey, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
My story, honestly, begins long before the studio.
For years, I was someone who cared deeply about other people’s wellbeing while quietly neglecting my own. I had the language, the tools, the awareness — and I was still running on empty in ways I wasn’t fully willing to admit. My nervous system was dysregulated, my sleep was broken, and I had emotions I kept deferring because I didn’t have a safe enough space to feel them — including from myself. I had convinced myself I’d get to my own healing eventually, when things slowed down. They don’t slow down on their own. I learned that the hard way.
What shifted everything for me was discovering float therapy — sensory deprivation — combined with frequency work and somatic healing. Something shifted that I didn’t expect. It wasn’t just that I felt better. It was that I started to remember who I was underneath all of it. Underneath the coping and the performance and the armor. That experience of returning to yourself — that’s what made this a calling instead of just a business idea.
I realized Columbus, Georgia didn’t have anything like what I was driving to find. There was this enormous gap between people’s doctor’s offices and true, integrative wellness — and almost nothing in between. That gap became the mission. Bridging the gap between healthcare and selfcare is not just a tagline for us — it is the reason we exist.
Signing the lease for Solace + Shades of Healing was terrifying. It still is sometimes. But I’ve learned to tell the difference between fear that says don’t go there and fear that says this matters so much it scares you. Opening in Uptown Columbus at 15 11th Street was the second kind of fear — and I’m grateful every single day that I listened to it.
Today, Solace offers sensory deprivation float therapy, PEMF, AO Scan biofrequency healing, wellness retail, and integrative life coaching. We are building something that treats the whole person — body, mind, and energetic field — because healing that only goes halfway doesn’t stick. And Columbus deserves a place that takes that seriously.
I built Solace because I needed someone to build it. The someone turned out to be me.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Smooth? Not even a little. And I wouldn’t change any of it.
The honest answer is that entrepreneurship has been my most relentless teacher. It does not care about your vision board. It does not care about your why. It asks you to prove both — every single month.
The financial reality of opening a float studio came at me fast. I had a ramp-up period on my lease, and then in month two, rent doubled — permanently — and I was suddenly looking at over $9,000 a month in overhead before I had fully found my footing. I had back rent accumulating while I was still building a client base, still learning the systems, still figuring out how to communicate what float therapy even is to a community that hadn’t been exposed to it yet. There’s nothing in any business course that prepares you for the moment a spreadsheet tells you the truth in a language you were hoping to avoid.
Technology was its own mountain. Getting my booking system and website to communicate with each other — so that clients could actually find me, browse services, and purchase without hitting a wall — took more time and problem-solving than I ever anticipated. Meanwhile, real people with real interest couldn’t get through the door because the digital door wasn’t working properly. That one stings, because every missed booking isn’t just revenue. It’s someone who needed what we offer and got a confusing experience instead.
And then there was the community piece. There was a float studio in Uptown Columbus before Solace, and it had closed before many of its clients could redeem their sessions. I inherited a community that had already been let down. My first instinct was to honor those people — not because I owed them anything legally, but because the whole foundation of Solace is that healing should feel safe. I wanted this space to feel trustworthy from day one, even if it cost me something.
But here is what I know now that I didn’t know at the start: the struggle is the preparation. Every late night rebuilding a financial forecast, every customer email I answered at midnight, every moment I questioned whether Columbus was ready for this — all of it built in me exactly what this work requires. You cannot hold space for people who are surrendering control and learning to be still if you haven’t learned to sit in your own discomfort.
The road has not been smooth. But every hard thing led me somewhere I needed to go.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
At its core, what I do is help people come back to themselves.
Solace + Shades of Healing is a float and wellness studio in Uptown Columbus, but it’s more accurate to call it an integrative healing space. We don’t treat symptoms in isolation. We treat the whole person — the physical body, the emotional body, and the energetic body — because healing that only goes one layer deep doesn’t tend to stick.
Our anchor service is sensory deprivation float therapy. We have three private float cabin suites — each filled with 200 gallons of body-temperature water and 1,000 pounds of pharmaceutical-grade Epsom salt. When you step in, the water is skin-temperature and the salt brings you to near-perfect effortless float — no light, no sound, no gravity pulling at you. Your nervous system, often for the first time in years, gets full permission to let go. We offer 25-, 40-, 60-, and 90-minute sessions, so there’s an entry point for everyone from the curious newcomer to the dedicated practitioner.
Alongside float therapy, we offer PEMF — pulsed electromagnetic field therapy — for cellular healing and pain relief; AO Scan Inner Voice biofrequency healing, which is one of the most fascinatingly accurate experiences our clients have ever had; wellness retail and supplements; and integrative life coaching. Reiki and AromaTouch are coming soon as well.
The coaching side of the work is something I’m especially proud of. I’ve built three programs — Foundation, Integration, and Immersion — that work across six pillars: nervous system regulation, gut health and nutrition, emotional digestion and somatic work, aura and biofield healing, habit building and daily rituals, and mindset and belief work. This isn’t a generic wellness curriculum. It is a deeply specific map for people who are done managing their symptoms and ready to actually transform. What I specialize in is the space where the practical and the energetic meet — where what you eat and how you process emotion and how your biofield is functioning are all part of the same conversation.
What I’m most proud of, though, isn’t any single service. It’s the commitment we made before we opened our doors and have kept every single day since: active law enforcement, firefighters, EMS, and licensed healthcare workers receive a standing discount on every session — not as a promotion, not tied to a partnership agreement, but simply because they deserve it. That decision is not on our marketing plan. It is in our values. In a city like Columbus, where so much of the community’s identity is woven into service, that felt like the only right thing to do.
What sets us apart is the combination. There are float studios. There are coaching practices. There are wellness spaces. Very few places hold all of it under one roof and understand how each modality amplifies the others. A client who floats regularly and does the energetic and somatic work alongside it is not having two separate experiences — they are building one coherent healing practice. That integration is the heartbeat of everything we do at Solace.

We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
I think risk is misunderstood — and I say that as someone who has taken several significant ones.
Most people frame risk as the opposite of safety. I’ve come to see it differently. The question I ask isn’t “is this risky?” — it’s “what is the cost of not doing this?” Because staying still has a cost too. It’s just quieter. It shows up later. And by the time you feel it, you’ve lost ground you can’t easily get back.
The biggest risk I’ve taken was signing the lease for Solace + Shades of Healing. I was committing to roughly over $9k a month in overhead — rent, utilities, salt — before I had a single paying client, before my booking system was working, before anyone in Columbus knew we existed. Every reasonable part of my brain had a list of reasons it wasn’t the right time. There is never a right time. I signed it anyway, because I had learned to tell the difference between fear that is trying to protect you and fear that is just trying to keep you small. That was the second kind.
Another real risk: the salt. Opening three float cabin suites requires thousands of pounds of pharmaceutical-grade Epsom salt, and I didn’t have the capital to acquire it alone. I had to ask for help — from people I trusted, who believed in this before there was anything to believe in yet. That kind of vulnerability — letting people see what you need before you’ve proven you deserve it — that’s a risk too. Not a financial one. A human one. And it turned out to be one of the most meaningful parts of building this studio.
I’m also actively working toward a contrast therapy expansion — an infrared sauna and cold plunge suite — which will require significant investment and community support. I could wait until the moment feels safer, more certain, more funded. But the wellness industry is moving, Columbus is ready, and momentum is a resource you either use or lose.
What I’ve learned about risk is this: calculated risk is not recklessness. It is clarity. It means you’ve done the work — the research, the forecasting, the honest assessment of what you can absorb if it doesn’t go perfectly — and you’ve made a decision in full awareness rather than out of impulse or avoidance. I don’t take risks because I’m fearless. I take them because I have learned to do the math and trust my gut, and when both are pointing in the same direction, waiting stops making sense.
The thing I’m most certain of, after everything this journey has asked of me so far: playing it safe was never actually an option. Not for someone who believes what I believe about healing. You cannot build a space that asks people to be brave enough to be still if you aren’t willing to be brave about the things that scare you. The work has to be lived, not just offered. I try to hold that every day.

Pricing:

• Single floats: Starting at $60 for 25-minutes
• Reiki 45-minutes $100
• Reiki & Coaching (mini) $175
• 3-packs starting at $145
• Memberships starting at $99/mo

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.shadesofhealingga.com
• Instagram: @Solace_ShadesofHealing_GA
• Facebook: Solace + Shades of Healing, GA
• Yelp: Shades of Healing