Ancient Spa Elements for Contemporary Times

by Janet Willie LMT, LPN

“Water created the body so it could get up and walk around.” —Tom Robbins (1972)

For over 35 years, I’ve returned to the same river’s edge in Maine to center body, mind, and spirit. Through all seasons, I observe water’s changing movement: swirling eddy lines, raging currents, slow downstream dances, water’s songs beneath winter ice. Something ancient in my body remembers what it has always known about healing. Without fanfare or expense, through water I connect to wellness running through me.

We are water seeking water, bodies drawn to healing water sources since the beginning of time. We’ve wandered to water sites for survival, food, transportation, cleansing rituals, baptisms, vacation (Joujou, 2024). The thriving civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China were all built on water sources. Even a cup of tea becomes a healing watering hole.

Spa as Container
Spa—Salus Per Aquam, health through water—is fundamentally a way of being held, a location in time and space where healing elements gather. It’s not about expensive treatments or exclusive retreats, though that’s what the word may conjure. Spa is about our basic connection with elements that support self-care through our senses.

The Ancient Asklepian Healing Temples in Anatolia (circa 350 BCE) were such spaces (Christopoulou-Aletra et al., 2010). Upon arrival, health pilgrims underwent purification encompassing every aspect of wellness: healing waters, nourishing foods, movement and exercise, contemplation that shifted their sense of time, body treatments, and engagement with the arts—including theatrical performances that played out the human psyche on stage. Dreams held special significance. Deeper purification processes promoted access to dream states where spontaneous healing might occur and healing messages be revealed.

In the mid-1800s, composer Chopin and writer Goethe traveled to spa towns like Karlovy Vary in Bohemia, walking rivers’ edges, sipping mineral spring waters, wandering forests, engaging with poetry, painting, and theater. These spa elements conjured the muse and cultivated creativity, ultimately producing music and writings that provide solace to many still today. Modern wellness retreats continue this tradition.

As spa historian Jonathan Paul De Vierville observes: “Whenever and wherever Human Culture is born, lives, and dies, Spa Cultures appear, blossom, ripen, and flourish—then decline, decay, and die, only to be reborn, renewed, and relived by subsequent generations. These generative and regenerative archetypal processes are fundamental forms, forces, and flows within the very Nature of The Waters” (De Vierville, 2019).

How Spa Elements Support the Fascia
Fascia is an omnipresent fiber-fluid connective tissue that weaves the entirety of our body from our outer edge to our DNA. This fabric connects and communicates between self and self, self and outer world. Fascia senses and responds to the milieu surrounding it—pressure, energy, light, bioelectric fields, metaphors, information, emotions. It listens to all it touches and is touched by, reading the room both internally and externally, holding our record of experience.

This pretensioned fabric acquiesces to demands placed on it and our held beliefs. Under chronic stress, fascial fabric tangles, losing spring, stiffening. Tensions weave into the weave. Yet fascia can also flow like water, the primary component of its makeup. The container of spa holds fascial fabric as it morphs between fiber and fluid aspects. Inside this container—bathing, eating nourishing food, moving, contemplating, creating, dreaming—fascia listens and tensions unravel. The body’s wisdom flows with innate knowing. Creativity emerges.

Writer Louise LeBrun describes “our body being a membrane that sits between the force of creation that I am and the outcome of the intention that I carry.” The body is where “the power of creation ebbs and flows and moves and expresses” (Bérubé, 2025).

The Healing Framework in Action
The power of spa elements is profound. I was moved to hear a firsthand account from Dr. Grace Swanner, the last surviving spa doctor at Saratoga Springs, New York bathhouses. Saratoga Springs mineral waters and their therapeutic values were known to indigenous peoples, then discovered and sought by immigrants, later studied from the early 1900s through the 1960s by chemists, radiographers, engineers, and physicians. The waters were utilized at this recuperative spa park to treat many maladies, complemented by surrounding natural beauty—gardens, forest parks, music gazebos, and cultural arts.

Dr. Swanner treated Holocaust survivors who traveled to New York to “take the waters” for 21 days (minus the Sabbath), their health journey funded as partial restitution by the German government through the year 2000. The protocol: 20 minutes soaking in mineral water baths, followed by 20 minutes swaddled tightly in blankets. This healing regimen supported their bodies to mentally, emotionally, and physically knit back together following concentration camp atrocities (G. M. Swanner, personal communication, September 15, 2000).

The containers of this healing pilgrimage mattered profoundly. A community of people who suffered, then journeyed together to take the waters. Bathhouses providing healing mineral waters surrounded by tranquil environments. The mineral waters themselves held intergenerational and cultural context of health and healing from the European countries these pilgrims once called home. Each aspect of this spa container added an element to the healing biofield, ultimately supporting recovery.

Creating Your Personal Container
In today’s rushed world, I look for simple ways to create my own spa container—in my home, community, or world at large. I map my dwelling and community, noting spa elements I can weave into a day, a week, or over 21 days, centering around a water source: a river a few miles away, the town fountain, a nearby natural spring, a foggy morning walk, or a cup of tea.

There are endless ways to embody spa practices at home. A colleague who is an advanced bodywork practitioner illustrates a cohesive “spa container.” She thoughtfully chose colors to paint her walls, then hung her late mother’s artwork to honor her spirit, memory, and creativity. Weekly, a box of organic fruits and vegetables arrives, and she prepares nourishing foods in advance of her work week. Several mornings a week she walks 20 minutes around a nearby pond. On Wednesdays, she and a friend visit the gym and take a sauna. Monthly, she drives to the coast for an ocean walk and perhaps a dip in salt water. She attends local community theater. Her backyard garden provides meditative contemplation space. Her living room floor supports movement and fascial unwinding practices. She’s dedicated space to painting, with an easel set up for easy access. Brilliantly, she manages work-time boundaries and receives regular bodywork.

When we consciously engage with these ancient elements in contemporary life, our psyche and body acknowledge the healing thread woven throughout humanity’s health journey. As Thomas Hübl reminds us, our body’s healing is an art form supported through contemporary ritual—healing as a shared experience we awaken in each other rather than an individual journey alone.

An important aspect of the Asklepian Healing Temples was their communal nature. Individuals were not alone—health was a collective endeavor with synergistic effects. Pilgrims would walk for days to reach these temples, and remarkably, if someone was too ill to travel, another could journey in their place as proxy, demonstrating that healing was both a personal and communal responsibility (E. Tick, personal communication, 2003).

When we recognize fascial fabric as living metaphor of our connection, reading and responding to everything nearby, individual self-care nurtures collective healing. Weaving elements of spa into daily rhythm reclaims a birthright transcending economic privilege. Like fascia itself, the very essence of spa supports and transmits the wisdom of the fabric of you into this world. Spa on!

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References
Bérubé, A. (Host). (2025, April 30). Your body is on your side: A conversation with Louise
LeBrun [Audio podcast episode]. In Embodied.
Christopoulou-Aletra, H., Togia, A., & Varlami, C. (2010). The “smart” Asclepieion: A total
healing environment. Archives of Hellenic Medicine, 27(2), 259–263.
De Vierville, J. P. (2019, April 25). Where did spa cultures begin? Insiders Guide to Spas.
Joujou, W. (2024, August 1). Ancient water-based communities: A look back at history and
lessons for the future. V-Marine.
Robbins, T. (1972). Another roadside attraction. Doubleday