by
Gale M.
Member since:
April 8, 2007
"Eight-Hundred Degree" Sauna
April 27, 2007 12:17 AM EDT
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comments: 7
Eight-Hundred Degree Sauna We are driving to the “Eight-Hundred Degree Sauna”. Beth, Marianne and I are accompanying Masae Masuda to the Aeon Mall for an onsen spa experience. I was sure we would entertain Masae, as she enjoys our foreign ignorance. She watches us clumsily stumble through her easy routine. So we start by stowing our 4 pairs of shoes in one tiny locker for a hundred-yen coin. Stepping up to the counter, a tiny man is trying to help us choose our size of terry cloth tunic. “Large” he and Masae say to each other. “Of course, because we are large Americans” we say to each other. Marianne holds the “large” terry dress up to her shoulders. It comes almost down to her hips. Okay! We are looking at each other with raised eyebrows and starting to giggle. This is supposed to be ‘large’? What have we gotten ourselves into? As the little man shoves the bags full of our terry cloth across the counter, I see his shoulders shaking with laughter. He is trying so hard to be polite. My, we ARE entertaining, we large Americans! Through glass sliding doors, across a large hallway, to the locker room. We get out of all our clothes, and dig into our bag of duds. Aha! There are tunics AND shorts! That is a relief for us. Wearing our thick terry outfits and leaving our glasses behind, we blindly follow Masae to the elevator. Each doorway we pass through, each room, each change of lighting and background music takes us to a level further from our real lives and brings us closer to a dreamlike, other-worldly place of exotic relaxation. The Eight Hundred Degree sauna is co-ed. The women wear yellow terry, the men, blue. It is quiet and as we move tentatively, I am secretly monitoring my heart rate and my interior pass-out-o-meter. The heat is a physical being, wrapping around us and invading every cell it can reach. Skin surface, hair, scalp, pores, nostrils, lungs and heart, deeper with every slow, carefully observed breath. The heat is like the biggest bass, surround-sound speaker; so low that it’s inaudible, but invades my deepest self. The large, dim tatami-matted room is not crowded, but there are many people. Reading, relaxing, doing yoga, talking quietly, resting or lying flat. Some are so eager for the heat; they are standing near the screened-off 800 degree rocks. Arms raised, they passively accept the heat’s power. A smaller room has a floor of gravel; prostrate bodies are in a line on the floor. The rocks are too jagged for my feet. Feeling more than a little dizzy and dreamily nearsighted, Beth and I move in slow motion back to the tatami room, toward a far wall. We sit, and then lie flat to allow the heat to work. I take a long time to start to sweat. Then it comes in small rivers down my scalp and soaks my terry clothes. Still monitoring my vitals, but not so closely, I instinctively move inside myself to my familiar yoga pose; shavasana, the corpse pose. The systematic relaxation I have learned from meditation seems forced upon me, as if the heat knows what I need. I surrender. Later, I recall that feeling; as we tour the rest of the spa; as we cleanse our bodies and experience the onsen; as we continue our travels through Japan; and even now, weeks later at home, the benefits of that world of heat have become permanent. Now it is personal. I am the summer.
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Comments: 7
you did a nice job writing this one.