The Portable Spa and the End of Innovation
Relaxing is easy when you have your own hot tub. It becomes a secondary habit, where when you know you’re feeling out of sorts, had a particularly long day, or even just a sore leg muscle, to get into the hot tub and let the heat and the bubbles work out the troubles. There’s a wide range of choices for your own portable spa, from sizes as large as swimming pools to small intimate affairs, choices of decor and style, and many extra amenities, like media systems, lighting, and other innovative features. The technology has come a long way.
This means that it’s easier for you to jump in and enjoy this pleasure and luxury, which is not a recent innovation at all, but has a very long and fascinating history. It’s not difficult to imagine that they must have been around for awhile, when natural hot springs are found all over the world, and rise up in popularity from time to time. It’s only a few more steps before it’s a formalized ritual, and becomes like the Finnish bath ceremonies, where it becomes a part of the annual ritual calendar, bathing at the end of the year to make a clean beginning. Contrary to some opinions, even in the Middle Ages, bathing was not an occasional thing for these Northern Europeans, but part of the regular routine.
Bathing was never just about getting dirt off the body. It had spiritual connotations since the beginning of recorded history, and was seen as a way of getting spirits off or out. It still does have spiritual connotations in nearly every part of the world, and every world religion has a bathing ritual in it somewhere, in both history as well as practice. It was also a very social thing from early times, at least since the Romans started to construct their famous bath houses. Part of the regimen in the Roman system was to add a massage in between baths of hot and cold water. This is precisely what the jets are designed to do. Spiritual and physical cleanliness were part of the thought behind these from very early times, then, and they also understood that massage would add another level of luxury to the experience, and move it from maintenance of health toward actual healing practices. It’s an old idea, with remarkable modern applications.
Related posts:
Leave a Reply