I Went to a New Age Spa So That You Don’t Have To

Written By Massimo Orsini

A still from Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man (1973), a folk-horror classic.

Reconnecting with an Old Friend

A close friend of mine was visiting from North Carolina. Whenever a long period has passed since our last encounter, our preference is to reconnect over an atypical experience. Once, several years ago in Vancouver, that experience was at an opera thematically focused on green tea and lutes (it was not good). Another year, that experience was an impromptu drive from Vancouver to Seattle, with the objective being to enjoy a great lunch and dinner before driving back to Canada to catch a flight in the morning. A border delay meant that we arrived much later than anticipated. Wanting to make the most of our experience, we were left with just enough time in the Emerald City for a rushed espresso, dinner, a cocktail, and the drive back to British Columbia in the early hours of the next day. Several years later, our tradition found us in Cuba where a section of our hostel was reserved for fowl and where a desperate drive across the country was necessary to leave the republic - a story for another post perhaps.

A First Visit, and Escaping Tigers

Not wanting to break tradition, I proposed that we attend a new age spa that opened in Toronto. I am not going to refer to it by name, but will refer to it as Motherboat for the purposes of this post. I was on the receiving end of targeted ads on various socials for years, and I always felt that it presented as a notch above slightly culty. I was curious.

My friend and I were both tired from work, we saw the value in a sauna/cold plunge circuit, and the spa’s website encouraged social interactions at their facility. This meant that we would not be shushed while getting caught up. Thinking that Motherboat had the potential for just the right amount of quirkiness, we reserved two spots.

Honestly, it was a great experience - sorry if anticlimactic. The facilities were clean, the lighting was warm and inviting, and we were given two towels each: one to sit on in the sauna, and one to dry off with post-shower at the end of the session. The sauna was a crescent shape with standing room in the middle, and the staff would make an announcement each time they added essential oils to the coals. Something to the effect of “this is a mix of geranium and bergamot, and it is intended to invoke a sense of peace.” The cold plunge room kind of looked like a mausoleum, with slate black tiles on the walls and floors, and flickering candles above each of the cold tubs which were organized in rows. The visual brought me back to the Panthéon, except instead of viewing entombed writers and philosophers of the French Republic in marble sarcophagi, largely young-urban-professionals volunteered to plunge in ceramic vessels as they spent disposable income on curated discomfort.

The staff were super helpful, and shared words of encouragement during the ice plunge session of the circuit. “Your body thinks you are chasing a tiger!” explained one of the staff members. “You need to fight through the adrenaline; focus on your breath, and remember that nothing can hurt you.” He was right. There was no tiger, we were far from the jungle, and frigid waters were tolerable if you were to just focus on your breath. Doing this for two minutes was not without a reward, as the euphoria that followed was certainly pleasant.

The whole experience was pretty tame. Further still, there is a lot of peer reviewed research that supports the wide range of benefits associated with sauna and cold exposure therapy. The latter, in particular, has been trending, with everyone from Anthony Huberman, Joe Rogan, and Gwyneth Palthrow, proselytizing its merits. It was great to be able to enjoy the hot-and-cold circuit in such an inviting location.

A Second Circuit

When my friend and I went to the spa, we registered for an “unstructured” session. This meant that we were largely left to our own devices to wander. While staff were on-site to share words of encouragement, the experience was self-directed, allowing us to sauna and/or cold plunge at our own volition.

I assumed, very incorrectly, that this was the typical Motherboat experience.

The next day, at a moment’s notice, I harzardly used the Motherboat proprietary app to book the last session available. I had gotten home from a run, wolfed down a quick dinner, and thought that a relaxing evening at the spa would be the perfect night-cap. What I failed to appreciate, however, was that I registered for a guided experience, structured around the themes of love and hardship.

A stark contrast to my experience of the night before, I found myself in a session that required its participants to participate in vocal toning exercises, among other rituals. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of vocal toning, that’s okay - I was also previously unaware. It’s the practice of using your voice to bring your cells and energetic pathways into harmony. This is done by producing an elongated exhaling sound, and that sound can either be in the form of a hum, a moan, or a shrieking yell. Let your instincts guide you.

Call me cynical, but I am skeptical of the claim that the practice of vocal toning can harmonize your cells and energetic pathways. In part because I am skeptical of your cells being concerned by such things, and in part because I am unclear on what energetic pathways actually are. What I do know for certain, however, is that thirty or so people in a sauna practicing vocal toning in unison is very reminiscent of a scene from Ari Aster’s Midsommar.

After thirty minutes of this and related practices, we were ushered out of the sauna toward the cold plunge room. This time, rather than the passive advice of a “Guide” relaying imagery of wild animals stalking us in the morass, tools were involved. Specifically, tuning forks. Upon emerging from the plunge, Motherboaters were directed to sit on the cedar benches lining the peripheral walls. Once seated, the Guide would strike the tuning forks to create sound and would hold the vibrating forks by the ears of the now-seated sauna-naut. “Your cells vibrate at a specific frequency” one of the guides explained. “When you are within six feet of a tuning fork, the vibrations of your cells harmonize with the vibrations of this fork, leading to cellular healing”.

At the conclusion of this segment we were led back into the sauna for a final hoorah. The Guide took a position in the center of the sauna, and like a minister preaching to their sweaty congregation, we were encouraged to share thematically appropriate thoughts and confessions. I said nothing, but I observed. “It’s important to lead with love” one participant shared. “It’s important to be honest with others even if it’s hard to” shared another. At the conclusion of every statement, the Guide reacted as though they just bore witness to the most profound statement uttered by another. They would smile brightly, nod, extend a long exhale, and utter a soft spoken “thank you” in conjunction with a call-back to what was just said. Something like, “wow. Thank you. It’s so true that if we lead with love, we will be happier for it.” Or,  “thank you - sometimes in life we want to hold back our authentic honesty, but that does not serve us.”

The Guide’s projected enthusiasm was juxtaposed by frequent glances at their watch. Spirituality may be a journey but that journey takes place during business hours only. When the Guide was satisfied that they heard enough to satiate their vibrations, they signalled the end of the guided session, and encouraged participants to lounge and socialize. I listened in on the conversation of two guys to my side – one likely in their lateish thirties, the other in their mid twenties. The older guy,  with hair fashioned somewhere between dreadlocks and unkempt frizz kept in a ponytail, was discussing “biohacking” with his newfound friend.

“If you stare at the sun as it is setting,” he explained, “you can actually heal your eyes. Doctors don’t want you to know this. I used to need glasses, but after doing this for a few months, my optometrist actually said I don’t need glasses anymore".

“Where did you learn all this?”

“Mostly from YouTube videos.”

Somewhere Between Science and Hermetics

“What is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body?”

- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

Beginning in the 16th century, the scientific revolution posited that the natural world would be more appropriately understood through scientific inquiry rather than through blind ascriptions to dogmatic spiritualism. The chieftains of this movement, including the likes of Copernicus, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes (among others), proposed a worldview that was antagonistic to prevailing Christian thought, which attributed certain sanctity to the natural world, and in particular, human life. This followed from the idea that the natural world and humanity itself was within God’s dominion. To compare the human body, previously understood as a brushstroke from the creator Himself so as to be represented in His own image, to a series of mechanical biological processes as Hobbes did in his Leviathan, was controversial and maybe even a little sacrilege.

During my visits to Motherboat, and in particular my second one, I found myself in an environment that strove to distance itself from the sometimes nihilistic conclusions derived from an empirical tradition. It was an environment that made real efforts to reconnect or perpetuate spiritual truth-isms.

When leaving the sauna to head to the cold plunge, we were advised that it would be appropriate to first shower, as a means of washing away the toxins that were emitted from our bodies. The implication, at least from my perspective when thinking on the choice of words used, was that referring to sweat would be too vulgar. Describing waste as toxins ejected from our body spoke to a spiritual process of purging what was no longer part of us in an ascending process - very dissimilar than suggesting that our bodies merely produce such waste in an intentional manner. (For the record: call it sweat, call it toxins, call it what you want: please shower.)

Similarly, rather than referring to water bottles as just that, they were instead referred to as water vessels. A whole lexicon seemed to have been developed to recast common items as ceremonial objects worthy of adulation. 

There exists a liminal space between the new-age spiritualism that can be found at Motherboat and the actual science that supports certain of their practices. It’s not lost on me that sauna, and cold therapy, work wonders for health and wellness. There is robust scientific literature that supports the view that cold exposure therapy is effective at treating a myriad of conditions in addition to real, positive physiological changes, such as the production of brown adipose tissue which is attributed to lower instances of cardiovascular and metabolic disease. For mental wellness, cold therapy has also been linked to better moods: although the initial cold shock causes the body to dump noradrenaline and cortisol, the experience ultimately leads to the production of dopamine once the body recovers from what it perceived, at least from a biological experience, to be a traumatic event. There is also the developed resilience that comes with exercising discipline over your body as every fibre of your being tells you to immediately exit that tub of ice water: if you can just quiet those thoughts, focus on your breath, you can get through it. If you can get through that, you can get through most things.

And this is all just in relation to cold therapy. For the purposes of this blog post, I have glossed over the myriad of benefits associated with sauna and breath work, as these practices are generally better understood and less controversial/trendy.

Concluding Thoughts

So if we know that this stuff is empirically good for us, why must we spiritualize it? Why do we seek out the knowledge of YouTube gurus and adopt terminology reminiscent of occult practice? Maybe it’s because society is collectively exhausted from the empirical, post-industrial age. Maybe we’re universally dissatisfied with the broken promises of late-stage capitalism. Or just maybe it’s because we know, deep down, that no matter how much or how deep we plunge, no matter how much we burn essential oils, we can’t escape the hard truth that we are forever within the tendrils of consumerism, for even in the most remote locations on the planet, there will be microplastics waiting for us.

But at Motherboat, you can tune all of that out for a 90 minute session.

Just focus on your breathing.

Another still from Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man (1973). Maybe the smoke from the fire smelled of geranium and bergamot, too.


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Massimo Orsini
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On Learning, Forgetting, and Vibes