The WORLD of Spa

There is an organization under the umbrella name Wellness Media, which is initiating all kinds of endeavors to “bring industry experts, consumers and operators closer together.”

I recently submitted an article for their magazine called SpaAsia, Writer’s Award 2007 contest. (Winner receives a sizable cash prize and the opportunity to write a column for them for one year.) Their intention behind the contest initiative? “By unearthing new talents, the magazine is able to keep offering up fresh ideas and new perspectives to readers and industry operators. Spas are about more than just delivering feel-good factors.”

They further go on to say, “Scruples, or lack of these, can do much harm. It is with this view in mind that SpaAsia thought the rationale of casting the web wider to recruit more writers who can if they choose to become, the voice of conscience for the industry. Ultimately, the industry must deliver what it promises. And the question is: Is our industry mature enough to receive the voice of conscience?”

Some laudable components of their organization are the SpaAsia Foundation and Wellness Summit The Foundation was created to provide support and training for skilled but uncertified Asian practitioners through loans and training programs.

Wellness Summit gathers leading spa professionals to be a guiding voice " to persuade the industry to embrace the wellness industry with a conscience . . . that the collective wisdom of ancient traditions can only be honoured if it is delivered to the consumers with its due measure of integrity." There third summit will be in Manila in October.

I think this is all just so valuable. I’m glad they exist and are the gently policing the industry through education and dialogue!

Is Science of the Afterlife an Oxymoron?

In the West we worship science but love to dabble in the spiritual realm. We practice yoga and we seek out exotic spa treatments that spring from the sacred. We are fence sitters.

I just started reading a perfectly fabulous book called Spook, by Mary Roach. It and her previous book, called Stiff are both New York Times best sellers. While Stiff is a historical exploration of the human body and man’s weird postmordem adventures poking around in it, in Spook, Roach tackles the science of the afterlife.

Spook is filled with chapter titles like How to Weigh a Soul—something, I was fascinated to learn, has been an obsession through the ages for many a man of science. It’s a hoot to read about the lengths these earnest scientists have gone to get to the bottom of what happens after we die—with experiments that involve putting TB patients on the cusp of death on a scale to see if there is a drop in weight at the moment of death. A weight loss, they surmised, would indicate the soul has left the premises. But I also find the fact that these people consider it unacceptable that some things are unknowable kind of sad. I mean, really, why in the world would a soul, which has no matter, have weight?

Another chapter takes a look at reincarnation. Roach doesn’t hide her skepticism as she tromps around India with a reincarnation researcher whose life’s work is collecting copious data on people who claim to have reincarnated into another individual. More specifically, these are little children two- three- and four- year olds who spout intricate details about the dead individuals, details that only the dead person or his or her family would know.

In these case studies, the children, display remarkable “clairvoyant” abilities to, for example, “see” the spirits of dead relatives. The kids stop having abilities and visions at about five. Hmmm. Or could it be that by five kids know enough about flighty adults to wise up and shut up around them?

The Indian man Roach travels with is Dr. Kirti S. Rawat, a colleague of an American scientist named Dr. Ian Stevenson, a University of West Virginia professor on the paranormal. But that's an understatement. Stevenson, who died this year, has studied children for some 30 years and actually has the respect and attention of the scientific community. He has written case studies in academic publications such as JAMA, the basis of which is that souls often hop from body to body in families, so that a father, who passed last year, say, can now reside in the body of a daughter who was born this year. When that girl is old enough to speak she talks about her past life. Carol Bowman has picked up Stevenson’s work and has written widely on the subject as well, which began when one of her own children exhibited past-life memories.

What I found most interesting in all this is that in India, where reincarnation is accepted, there are loads of case studies, but it’s a lot rarer here in the West.

Purification

Had dinner at friends’ house last night and the topic of Buddhism came up. We had gotten on the subject of our imperfections, those things about ourselves that we self-examining sort never seem to cease trying to smooth out and make better. (Sometimes it feels more like a battle to the death.) Then someone said, This is why practicing Buddhism is good.

In that moment I felt the comment was like putting fancy perfume on an unbathed body. I found myself arguing that we in the West have co-opted Buddhism. We’ve skimmed off the juicy bits. We have the occasional one-hour sit in a loaned out girl scout’s cabin, judiciously learn to breathe from the diaphragm, carefully pick up spiders with tissue and set them out of doors instead of tromping on them and, satisfied, we call ourselves practicing Buddhists.

I also argued that we don’t really know what the hell Buddhism is. (By that I really meant I, and if I didn’t actually argue it last night, I am now.) If Buddhism is a religion, which I am categorically opposed to, there are surely some practices we don’t know about that can mess up a kid as much as Catholicism and Mormonism can. In the cold like of day all those thoughts sounds just that: cold. My friends, and all we good intentioned in the West, are simply borrowing it as a philosophy of life, and one of the basic tenets of all spiritual practices is intention.

But I couldn't leave it as just that. So, is Buddhism a religion? First, I suppose, you’d have to ask, Whose Buddhism? Japanese? Indonesian? Indian? As the original form of Buddhism was handed down it took on different forms. Some are stricter than others. I’ve tinkered a wee wee bit with Zen Buddhism, have tried sitting in zazen meditation and I find it too strict. This morning I started reading that purification rituals figure into the practice of Tibetan Buddhism. Incense burning, chanting and making object offerings. To my Western mind this seems easier, the arts and crafts version.

Then there are spa purification rituals, many Indonesian, that are spiritual in nature, as I’ve touched on in previous posts. Here’s another one: Jamu Asian spa rituals. Multi-star hotels offer them, like Four Seasons in Las Vegas and Spa Las Palmas in California. Jamu is an Indonesian tradition mixing an array of herbal ingredients that can be used internally or externally to promote health, healing and relaxation. The practice was originally passed down as a way to relieve sore muscles from long hours working in the rice field.

For the majority of us, Jamu is now mostly recognized as a line of products. Barring access to them, if you have some salt—Epsom, Morton—you can toss some into a warm bath, light a candle and some pretty-smelling incense and perform your own self-purification today. Other than those few items, all you need is intention.