Name it and you can have a choice for all kinds of different spas and multitude of therapies. Be it the traditional, Ayurvedic, Medical, or Thermal Spas, there are every kind to suit your need.
Why is there such a strong desire to leave the stressful and sometimes ugly world outside the doors of a spa or wellness centre? It could be because the ego’s craving for ‘no one loves me, and there is only me’ or ‘I really do deserve to pamper my body’. Needless to say that these statements are related to a frequent visitor of spa and not if the treatment is a part of a prescription.
But then there are also opinions like, why to pamper one’s body? It will become weak. It is better to work out and toughen it. Like always, the golden path lies somewhere in the middle, between maintaining your body through massages and treatments on one side and maintaining through physical fitness on the other. Especially with all the endless working hours working, sitting in front of computer screens or simply sitting for long periods of time.
The solution is to be gentle with yourself, keeping in mind that our body is a gift from God; it is like a jacket so to speak, which we are allowed to wear for 70 / 80 or more years. Any unnecessary stress or unhappy emotions or an unbalanced lifestyle will harm it. I am not even talking about the abuses like alcohol, tobacco, drugs or obesity problems.
It is the lack of respect for our origins, and frankly spoken, ignorance. Take for instance our beloved gadget, the mobile phone! We all know it is a transmitter and receiver after all, and this comes along with a lot of not-good-for-health radiation. Still we put them close to our ears and our body. Also men keep it in their breast pocket of their shirts, which is, if you haven’t missed biology lessons, right in front of your heart. We also don’t switch them off during our sleep, interrupting the necessary regenerating time with may be unnecessary ‘I-can’t-miss-that-call’ excuses.
Friends of mine were once discussing the benefits of spa massages. One of the responses was, which is still fresh in my memory, the massage is the process of moving the muscles from the outside, what otherwise our will force does while initiating our body movements. I would like to give you a different exercise which you can try to practice during a massage. Don’t get tempted to becoming too drowsy. Instead follow the therapist hands as they move over your body while massaging; move your consciousness from within aligning with the movements of the therapist.
Importance has to be given not only to the therapies and therapists but also to the exterior and interior design of the spa itself.
Now don’t allow your mind to wander to the images of ancient Roman Baths etc. Let your imagination roam slowly through a spa village which has individually designed buildings of single and couple therapy units, arranged in an open cluster; the meandering walls pleasing your eyes with unexpected visual treats; built with the local natural stone, they showcase tasteful paintings and sculptures amidst; the large roofs overhang forms enveloping you from the hectic life of the outer world; embedded in an intricately designed landscape, the fragrance of flowers, shaded trees, soothing water bodies. Now imagine gentle music is coming from a gazebo performed by real musicians, and not a canned mp3 noise …
Your sensations will feast a complete different experience through this kind of new architecture. Exciting floor plans and use of energizing forms and colours will support the therapies undergone inside the spa.
I recommend the above architectural design not because I am a steadfast devotee of Organic Architecture but research was done of how architectural forms and colours influence our perception and responses. Eventually our moods and mind depend on beautiful and lively sensations created by the physical atmosphere around us. In a nutshell, if you let human beings live in cold, steel-glass-concrete buildings, which suit more a bunker rather than a home or a school or an office, you can imagine the performance and output of them, because, there is nothing for the eyes to catch, nothing to cheer the heart, and finally the emptiness gets whitewashed with screaming colours from a giant TV set. If we are not already so apathetic about our senses by then, we would recognize the daily offence to our eyes, ears, and nose, just to name few of the significant sensory organs.
So, how can we go beyond ‘me, my and myself’ of having a spa treatment? Extend your “I-am-feeling-so-good after a spa treatment” to a place of no egoism, and do something which belongs to a broader world. Look beyond your horizon; overcome your carelessness and blindness, recklessness and rudeness, which we harbor from time to time. Do something to heal our Mother Earth with the entire rejuvenating cure you have received from a pleasant visit to a Spa.
