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.

St. Theresa

Yesterday I behaved rather unlike myself. . . Ooh, back up. I read somewhere that to be a “good blogger” the author should state clearly the post’s subject within the first few sentences, just like any good writing. Because I aim to be a very good blogger, and because my blog is about The Land of Spa, let me say here that the topic of this post is only tangentially about spa-ing. I shall elaborate later.

I repeat, yesterday I behaved rather unlike myself. For the first time in a long time I received one of those chain letter type emails, the kind that require that you bother several of your best friends by forwarding them the email and then further asking them to bother several of their best friends to continue the chain. The chain must not be broken at all costs and as you sit in front of your computer you sort of freeze with the weight of it all: Bother your friends and get flak, or don’t bother them and forever wonder What if?

Those echains used to circulate around a lot but along the way people began to get annoyed by them and it mostly stopped except for the ones sent those people—you know the type: nice enough but not the hippest number on the dance floor.

Generally, it’s the topics of these emails that rendered the participant uncool. (Get ready because this is where this post becomes tangentially about spa-ing.) Sometimes they are just workaday spread-the-love kind of e-chains, but more often they are religion-based and thrive on fear, like all religion. I consider myself spiritual and I do try to live by spiritual principles. In fact, it is the spiritual intent behind spa treatments—healing hands, and the like—that I probably drew me to the subject of spas to begin with.

So when the echain came yesterday invoking St. Theresa, “the saint of little ways,” telling me all I had to do to make a wish of my choosing come true was bother my friends, well I don’t mind saying I could have used a wish fulfilled at that moment. So I looked at the sender; she definitely wasn’t what I considered one of those people, and I read the whole echain, which stated that I needed to send it in five(!) minutes, and I admit it. I caved. I sent it two 12 of (what used to be?) my closest friends.

Within moments I was shot back an email by my trigger-happy friend A (you know who you are), telling me how much she “hates” those echains. A couple of my other always-game friends (I love you T and M), not only didn’t get bothered by my e-intrusion, but they actually sent the chain along and bothered 12 of their friends. How do I know? Because one of those friends sent the same echain back to me today. I assume the rest just clicked delete as fast as their little fingers could reach it.

On the fourth day the echain says my wish will come true. I have three more days to see if A or T, M and I have the last laugh.

Correction

It has been brought to my attention that in a previous blog, A Case for Mindfulness, while praising the blog, The Healing Power of Laughter I failed to link to it. So here it is. Apologies--though I've also got it on my list of favorite links.

Old Spa Days

In a previous blog I talked about a story in the New York Times about the idea that the spa industry might be leading up to the need to standardize spa treatments—how else to insure that you’re getting your money’s worth?

I threatened to get in contact with one of the spa experts whose quote I found. . .I think I called it patronizing. I did call Neil Jacobs, the senior VP of Asia-Pacific Operations for the Four Seasons. (Or as he described himself, “I look after all the hotel activities and then look after the spas at nights.”) The quote in question, which I will paraphrase here, was that one could receive as good a Thai massage on the beaches of Thailand for five bucks as one in a Manhattan spa for $150.

Had to get to him through a publicist and she wanted to know the nature of my question. (It’s for a story for Spa Asia.) I told her it related to the NYT story—and then smoothed out the edges of my question so he’d agree to speak. It was only a day or two after the story appeared and in my innocence I imagined that he might be a bit contrite about his comment.

He wasn’t. In fact, I got the sense that he doesn’t do contrite. Jacobs was full of controversial opinions and not afraid to express them. I really liked him for that. He was not at all the kind of person you’d expect to oversee spa operations, especially in Asia where I imagine gentility might trump crusty bluntness. I liked that he didn’t walk a diplomatic line. Jacobs is British by birth—but quick to point out that he’s a naturalized American citizen with a home in California. His voice is husky, like he smokes cigarettes, and though his comments are not measured he knows a lot.

He does feel that the Asians have it over the West—even though I never asked him to comment on his comment, this much was clear. He feels, he said, that “they are intuitive healers while North American massage treatments feel too automated, like they have no heart.” (I should point out that he gives proper credit to Native American healing rituals and to Eastern European spa culture too.) So, he says, the Asians’ technique might not be as perfect but “their touch in many ways feels perhaps more spiritual, consequently more meaningful.”

He feels that luxury hotels have filled a gap by supplying an environment (a fancy, clean hotel) that Westerners feel more comfortable visiting. “In the old days, you would get traditional reflexology in a dingy back room somewhere, so Westerners were never exposed.” Sounds like a scene from The Quiet American.

He was fascinating to speak with. Bet he has lots of interesting stories to tell. Now if I can just get myself to Singapore I could contact him, he could put me up at the Four Seasons and then over dinner or a cocktail I could persuade him to tell me about the old spa days.

A Case for Mindfulness

It’s interesting how the burgeoning spa industry is about holistic healing—at least in part; the other part is our desire to turn back the clock, or freeze-frame it at the very least, which I think is my next point.

It’s so easy, even for those of us who are ‘students’ of it, to lose sight of the reason we care about the land of spa. All these ancient treatments and practices—Ayurveda, Native American healing rituals, Balinese casting of the dream ball, European water cures, yoga—that we feel moved explore, all rise from this central idea of nurturing mindfulness.

The question of whether these practices can coexist in purity as multinational corporations that are laying claim to them is something I contemplate, and about which I feel a little vigilant.

To that end, I feel the need to lighten up a bit. The other day I came upon a blog that I really like, written by a comedian/clinical psychologist called The Healing Power of Laughter. I like the dots he’s connecting about the healing power of laughter. It’s a smart blog and you should check it out.