Life Lessons from a Korean Spa
Take it Off
On my first visit to King Spa, a Korean Spa in DC, I wasn’t sure what to do. I was at the first stop off in the women’s locker room, where a woman stood passing out uniforms to wear. “Shoes in this locker. Only uniforms in the main area, no clothes in the baths.” Women were walking through the locker room in all different levels of clothes, some completely nude, others in swimsuits, others in uniforms, some still fully dressed. Once uniformed, people passed through a gender segregated locker room into an eloquent main hall, housing various saunas such as the amethyst room, the Hinoki wood room, and Himalayan pink salt room.
It had been nearly a decade since I had been well versed in locker-room etiquette, playing women’s water polo. I didn’t quite have my sea legs yet, so I opted to take a middle way with my swimsuit on. I wove through the locker room, comfortable enough in a swimsuit, and approached the baths, greeted by a glaring red sign outside the baths. “No clothes. No swimsuits.” Women were nude marinating in the whirlpools. Alrighty then. I walked back to the locker. Took a deep breath. And went for the birthday suit.
A Brief History
Jjimjilbang or Korean Spas are a place for rest, rejuvenation, and the ultimate self-care experience. A mixture of the Hanjeungmak (wood burning sauna) and the public bathhouse Mogyoktang (public bathhouse), the modern Jjimjilbang is a combination of steam rooms, saunas and cold and hot public baths. The addition of the baths came after the Japanese colonization in Korea. The first modern Jjimjilbang was started in Seoul in 1992, then from 1995 to 2004, the number of spas, often open 24/7, tripled in Korea, spreading quickly to major cities in the USA.
Korean spas boast gender segregated bathing areas, where clothes and swimsuits are not permitted, as well as various coed rooms one can visit while uniformed such as the Bul Ga Ma Sauna, designed to release infrared rays and a mixture of negative and positive ions. Or the Hinoki wood room, where one can bask in a bed of wood chips specifically designed to boost immunity and help manage stress. From extreme heat, to sitting in an ice chest, one can have the full sensory experience.
The Scrub
I had been around nude women before, mostly at births where self-consciousness often yielded to the raw primal naturalism of bearing life. But this was something different. Women were just here to relax, to be in no social hierarchy, just a total acceptance of the body. When I got into the spa area the comparisons, the judgements, the shame and the embarrassment all melted away in the hot bubbly whirlpool.
Women were coming and going of all sizes, shapes and colors, and everyone was laughing together and embracing the experience. Some women would cover with a skimp hand towel, then eventually would let it fall away. The longer I lingered, the more comfortable I became. Stripped of clothes, technology and distractions, the only thing left to do was to be. There was a sense of mutual and shared belonging in being together in the waters. It was a baptism of sorts back into where we all started from, naked in water.
I had signed up for a scrub. The scrubs happen just outside of the whirlpools, divided by a hip high brick wall. A middle-aged Korean woman, speaking broken English, called out the registered number on my locker wrist key and guided me over to a plastic covered table. Every 3 feet or so was a different body, sprawled out and being scrubbed down. Arms of all shapes and sizes were held up in the air, scrubbed and oiled, legs moved about. Everything was fair game in the scrub, butt crack and all.
As I was scrubbed, by a middle-aged woman, in a bra and shorts, I reflected on what it meant to be washed. Laid out nude, she scrubbed me down with the ferocity of a mother, intermittently pouring hot buckets of water over me, then washing and conditioning my hair, brushing it out and tying it back up. I love having my hair washed at the salon, but this took it to a new level.
All Good things Come to an End
At some point in my childhood there was a last moment when a caring adult lovingly bathed me. There was a last moment when my mother washed my hair. I’m not conscious of what age I was, and I most certainly was too young to appreciate it or know that it would be the last time for that simple, nourishing act of attunement.
Sam Harris talks about the poignancy of knowing the end. We all have a finite number of times that we will experience something and rarely are we conscious and present for the last time we will do so. Tim Urban created a visual representation of an average human life, expressing in concrete images the finality of certain experiences, for example the numbers of pizzas eaten in a lifetime, the number of super bowls left, the number of times he will jump in the ocean, etc. While it can be tempting to feel depressed in knowing the end, the intention is quite the opposite. In knowing there is an end and a finite number to something, can we savor the experience now while it’s happening.
I believe many people yearn for safe touch, for a safe expression of their bodies in the absence of the pressure of a sexual gaze, for freedom of comparison, and for the liberty of embodied self-expression. A radical acceptance of our body and what it is and the possibility and connection of it could be so life changing. Many people never had a safe or loving childhood to experience mundane tasks of hair washing as an expression of love. And for many, touch can be a triggering experience to navigate. At the very least, for those with a less than nurturing childhood, we can perhaps imagine a loving maternal presence that attuned and tended to a childlike part of us, and who washed our hair.
Post scrub my skin was softer than I could imagine, smooth and fresh. Women giggled in the sauna and whirlpools together, laughing about their scrub downs. There was a sense of comradery and shared experience, no judgement or cutting down.
(You Make Me) Feel like a Natural Woman
My second time to the sauna I felt a new edge. I didn’t even hesitate to strip and roll into the steam room. It was an embodiment liberation. I watched as other women navigated the same mental acrobatics I had, trying to approach with a swim suit on, getting told to leave or get nude, covering themselves with a small hand towel. I witnessed the awkwardness of feeling frozen in programming warped in belief that nakedness must be wrapped and covered at all times. Focusing so much on the stories we tell ourselves about our bodies can be frustrating.
I experienced an outflow of gratitude for the skin, bones, and muscle that cocooned this awareness of my sensations. The vessel I am traveling through in this life in allows me the space to feel and to sense into my surrounding. Without this body, I could not feel the waves of the ocean, warm sun on my face, the touch of a hand, the warmth of a hug, the taste of a meal, the freedom of a gallop, the warmth of a hot beverage on a cold day, or the refreshing tang of a lemonade on a hot day. These bodies are just that. Bodies that allow us to move through the world, experiencing and tasting life.
When I have clients struggling with poor body image in a swimsuit,, I invite them to shift awareness instead to what it feels like to be in the ocean, under the sunshine, floating. Does the ocean think about the size, shape or color of the body it is carrying? There is a quality of dissolving and utter acceptance of floating in the rise and fall of waves in the ocean. Our body is just that, a body.
Boyd Varty writes that if “one person could become more natural, we could all become more natural…everything in the natural world knows exactly how to be itself.” In the US, we look through social conditioning externally to find meaning, and we search beyond ourselves to find purpose thinking about how we should look or act…no wild animal ever participates in a “should.” In the animal and plant world, there is never an inclination to be anything other than it’s wild, natural self.
Nature has an absence of should. A tree doesn’t ask what it should be, if it should be taller shorter, rounder or thinner. Nothing in nature asks what it should be or is anything other than what it is. A tree, a hawk, a horse, or any other creature is not trying to get to some other place where it suspects it will be happy, free or enlightened. It merely is open to being where it is now. As Boyd Varty surmises, communities of women who emerge as themselves heal themselves.
While I was soaking post scrub a scene from the movie Mean Girls popped into my head, where Lindsay Lohan’s character stands in front of a floor length mirror, while each person lists off things they dislike about themselves. Lindsay’s character doesn’t participate in critiquing her body and just says that she has bad breath in the morning (like every other human in the world). It is socially acceptable amongst teens and women, even mandated at times by an unspoken social code, to connect through comparison, which is ultimately an act of cruelty against ourselves. When we stop drawing comparisons, we stop limiting the experiences possible in our bodies and get to start living.
Self Care as an act of Sustainability
Self-care isn't selfish, it's sustainable. Everything in nature sustains itself through self-assessment, noticing what it needs, not necessarily what it wants, and attuning to itself then meeting that need. Being gentle and compassionate towards oneself is a starting point towards self-care. Compassion is to self judgement as water is to weeds, it allows for easier pulling and release of them. If we can be compassionate with our bodies, we can start to diffuse the judgements and shame.
While a Korean Spa might not be in your near future if you don’t live in a big city, it can be incredibly liberating to have novel sensory experiences, a sort of sensory spelunking if you will. We often talk about that in the context of sexual experiences but that is incredibly limiting. The body is a wealth of awareness and experiences if we let it be. We can invite awareness into the simple pleasures of experiencing life in a human body. For example, imagine making yourself a warm, cozy beverage on a cold winter’s day. Would it be tea, hot coco, coffee, a cappuccino, warm lemon water? Imagine the hot steam rising up from the frothy drink, and the sensation of warmth emanating from the cup revitalizing your hands. Or imagine adding freshly squeezed lemonade to ice, and sipping that down on a hot, humid, sticky summer’s day. Can you imagine the sensation of the sweet cooling liquid rolling down your throat.
Washing our hands can be another mindfulness check in. What does the slippery soap feel like as it lubricates your fingers, then the cleansing rush of water over top of it, and the gusto of the air drying machine or the comfort of a towel. We can explore opposing sensations in our body, hot and cold, space and tension, aliveness and fatigue. Often our bodies are harboring multiple sensations at once, but our brain tends to focus on the most dominantly uncomfortable one. Practicing a mindfulness of the opposing sensations can help us to hold space for the broader picture and to feel more grounded. Every day when you wake up you’ve never been in this moment, in this body, in this existence before. Each moment is an opportunity to have a totally transformative experience in your body.
We all enter this world naked, with just our bodies. It is the thing we have when we start the human life and it will be with us to the end, and everything in between will be full of change, hunger and satiation, thirst and satisfaction, wrinkles and knots, expansion and contraction. Making friends with our bodies, listening to them, is an important part of the journey of being human. We could all benefit from learning about rest, self-care and relaxation from a day at the Korean spa.
