Marin Independent Journal
Monday, January 30, 2006
Between a rock and a soft place: Hot stone massage is ideal winter therapy
Black Basalt rocks, tumbled for thousands of years by turbulent rivers until they are smoother than a baby's bottom, sit in a roasting pan at Stellar Spa in Corte Madera.
They are steaming hot.
Draped only in a soft cloth, I lie on my stomach on a massage table. Massage therapist Marie Maloney reaches into the roasting pan and lifts out rocks that range in size from softballs down to pebbles as thin as plywood and as small as postage stamps. Some, fresh from the heat, she places in on my back, over the cloth. Others, she cools a bit, and coats with massage oil until their surfaces feel silky. Then slowly, firmly, with the deft commitment of someone kneading a loaf of artisan bread, she runs them over my shoulders and neck, my arms, legs, thighs.
She smoothes me with the flat plane of a stone; she turns the stone on its side to push more deeply into my muscles. The smallest pebbles, cooled to room temperature, she places between my toes. For an hour, I surrender to heat that permeates instantly and feels cozy down to my bone marrow. It is like being a cub, groomed from neck to toe by some enormous, instinctively loving mammalian mom. It is almost impossible to stay awake.
"Hot stone massage is a great technique for people who find themselves in their head a lot," Maloney explains. "It brings you so deeply into your body. Heat is not only soothing, it stimulates the circulatory system. You get more oxygen going to the tissues, and the toxins are carried out. It's very cleansing."
Bliss on the rocks: Hot stone massage as practiced in thousands of spas around the world is one of the most unusual, and sensual, massage treatments available today.
""We have found it's very healing for people because it is so mesmerizing," says Patrick Vendeweg, one of the owners of Stellar Spa, one of the first Marin spa to offer this type of treatment back in 2000. "It's unique and innovative, because it's designed to be fun as well as therapeutic for full-body relaxing. We booked about 950 of them last year. That's 13 percent of our massage business." "
"Hot stones for relaxation and purification (also called thermotherapy - the application of heat) are actually a traditional healing technique. The Native Americans have used them in sweat lodge ceremonies for thousands of years, as have Norse cultures in their saunas. There's evidence that the ancient Egyptians and Romans, both cultures that worshipped cleansing and body treatments, practiced some form of massage with hot rocks."
--- Leslie Harlib
(A selection from the section)
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