The art of the bath

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The bathhouse in the Russian tradition has a special role and significance. There they gave birth, and healed, and tempered, and washed, and even used spiritual practices of purification. Bath for a Russian person is EVERYTHING! The modern bath differs from the ancient Russian bath for many reasons, both in the technique of steaming and in mysticism. So the modern Russian bather no longer perceives the Spirit of the bath - the bathhouse, the bathhouse, as a living soul that can heal or punish.

Many Russians like to take a steam bath, use for this both private baths and the municipal one, where there are regulars. Over the years of active use of the bathhouse. Certain experience has been accumulated, with which I would like to share with the readers, perhaps who will need it …

Prohibitions

Many contemporaries perceive the bathhouse as a place for a stormy feast and meetings. This is a bad thing, because all this has a different place in our tradition, and the bathhouse is more a healing place than a drinking one. We will consider the bath in this aspect. Accordingly, you cannot drink alcohol in the bathhouse, including beer, eat abundantly, sing, use obscene words, or behave indecently. The bathhouse loves silence and thoughtfulness, which means there is no place for loud music, screams and scandals too. Alcohol and bath are incompatible.

Training

It is best to choose a day a week for the bath, when you will be doing bath procedures all the time. The choice of the day depends on the nature of the work and the presence of the bath itself. It's one thing when you have your own bathhouse and you are retirees, and another thing is working days and a shared bathhouse. But it is advisable to visit the bathhouse constantly, since the body develops a conditioned reflex to the separation of old skin and sweating. In addition, avid bathers know that even one week's absence affects the quality of the steam room on the next visit to the sauna.

Before going to the bathhouse, you should not eat too much, but you should not be hungry either. It is undesirable to take a steam bath when you feel severe fatigue, the disease progresses, there is a general malaise. Although, on the other hand, sometimes it is better to be in the bath passively, lie down, relax, drink tea with herbs, and that is good. The bath is useful all year round and it is advisable not to stop bathing procedures ever. In the steam room, it is imperative that you cover your hair with special caps in the steam room, so that the heat does not damage the hair follicles and the hair itself.

About steam and brooms

There are few good steam rooms. Most of them are beautiful, but the couples are not very high quality for various reasons. In the steam room, the temperature should not be higher than 85-95 degrees. Everything that is higher is no longer a medicine, but a show-off. The steam room should be able to regulate the heat with water. And if the temperature is more than 100 degrees, then there is no need to throw up the water, unless it is self-torture or a demonstration to the public of your coolness (stupidity).

Only clean hot water is poured onto the heater. Neither oil nor herbs are added to it, since, if they hit the hot stones, they burn out and deteriorate the air quality in the steam room. If there is a desire to use aromatic "additives", then it is better to pour them on hot boards of walls, ceilings or shelves, from where the oils will evaporate well, but will not burn. You can also use special bowls, where oils are added to the water, from where they slowly evaporate.

Leaves from a broom, grass must not be allowed to fall on the stove, as there they will also undergo slow burning and worsen the air quality. Sometimes the steam room needs to be ventilated, as in small steam rooms oxygen quickly burns out and air quality is disturbed. For ventilation, the entrance door to the steam room is quickly opened and closed, as if drawing air from it.

During paired procedures, it is advisable to drink plenty of clean water in order to activate the kidneys and sweating. After 2-3 visits to the steam room, you can gradually start drinking hot tea with herbal infusion with a bite of honey ("Lard, vodka, pies are our worst enemies!").

Bath brooms are used differently. For example, in the Primorsky Territory, oak brooms are mainly used. Sometimes birch and other brooms are on sale - they all have different properties. It should be remembered that brooms should not be soaked in hot water. Someone recommends doing this only in cold water, but we use warm water. Often we untie the brooms and add twigs of ordinary wormwood in the middle, and then we tie them again. We also scatter wormwood on the shelves for aromatherapy, sometimes we use wormwood brooms for the steam room. Add wormwood twigs to the basin with brooms.

Wormwood has excellent antiparasitic properties and a wonderful scent. Its reserves in Russia are huge and we highly recommend using it for healing visits to the bath.

Bath process. Start

Every experienced bather has their own bath rituals. They are developed over the years and turn into a kind of ritual, after which the state of health improves and in practice the proverb is learned: "When you take a steam bath, you do not grow old on this day!"

Let's describe our ritual, maybe it will be useful to someone.

When entering the bathhouse and after taking off our clothes, we go to the steam room and, looking into the far right corner, politely greet the bathhouse. We do it one at a time and quietly. After that, we make the first run - to warm up. We don't give in to steam much, the main thing is to slowly warm up the body in order to start the process of sweating. Usually, we go to the top bunk of the steam room for the first time: some on the back and some on the stomach. After the beginning of sweating, we go down to the lower shelf and begin to peel off the old skin with special mittens.

Cleaning the skin with mittens is a whole procedure that is difficult to carry out alone, since the help of a partner is required to clean the skin of the back. With the weekly practice of bathing the skin, the body begins to remove various "nasty things" through the skin: heavy metals, chemicals and everything that it cannot remove through other places. Therefore, it is important to visit the bathhouse on a weekly basis and do cleansing procedures there. After the first cleaning of the skin with special mittens, there can be a second or even a third - this is optional. But even after the first procedure, sweating increases. Note that cleaning the skin with special mittens is more effective than using a scrub.

After the first exit from the steam room, you should not sharply cool the body. That is, you cannot take a cooling shower or go outside. Professor Bolotov recommends cooling down slowly so that the sharp cooling does not cause the skin cells to collapse and stop the process of pulling up the fluid from the deep layers of the body to the skin surface, which contains all sorts of toxins and elements unnecessary for the body. When sweating in the bath, the body has a cellular mind and through the skin it removes a lot of what it does not need. People have different heights, fullness, respectively, and the skin area of different people will differ, but on average this figure is at the level of 1, 5-2, 5 sq. M. The weight of a multi-layered skin is over 11-15% of a person's weight.

Surprisingly, we met elderly people who had never been to the bathhouse! And they never used the amazing health benefits of steam room and their skin! And there is nothing strange in the fact that they have a lot of diseases that could be eliminated simply by visiting the bathhouse every week.

Second run

By the second call, we usually warm ourselves on the top shelf, as you like. At this time, you can also do "drinking" from Hatha yoga, fitness or other health systems, but not really persisting, but just for pleasure. After leaving the steam room and light cooling under a cool shower or air baths, we proceed to tapping each other with special brushes.

Since the brushes have stiff bristles, like needles, we tap them on the verge of pleasure and slight pain the whole body from feet to head. First, the back of the body, then the partner turns over, and we tap the front of the body, paying special attention to the abdomen (navel), where almost all the nerve endings converge. After that, the partner sits down on a chair, gently tapping his scalp.

After tapping the surface of the body with bristle "knockers", as a rule, the whole organism is activated and the vitality rises.

Third run and beyond

During the third visit to the steam room, we most often start tapping each other with special bamboo brooms, which are widely represented in the trade. To expand the range of effects of the broom on the body, you can fix an elastic band on the broom, moving it along the broom, we achieve different vibrational effects on the skin and muscles: from a wide superficial, to deep and narrowly directed. This is also a great healing procedure that helps to eliminate many stagnant phenomena in the human body.

After cleaning the skin, tapping with bristles and bamboo brooms, there can be several more visits to the steam room to increase perspiration. To determine the quality of the outgoing sweat, one should sometimes taste it with the tongue: when the sweat is no longer salty, this means that the main toxins have already left. Typically, it takes three to five hours to reach this stage of sweat quality. Such a quality can never be achieved by short "forays" into the steam room.

When steaming with brooms, one should not be equal to the force of impact and strong heat. Steam and a broom in experienced hands can work wonders. Experienced bathers work with two brooms at once, using various techniques of blows: from plowing the body without touching to complex and masterly blows.

When working with brooms, it is important to warm up (tap) the legs and especially the feet very well. In the center of the foot is the so-called biologically active point Yong-Tsuan (“babbling streams) - the beginning of the energy meridian of the kidneys. As a rule, in most people, the kidneys are affected by cold from early childhood and this causes a lot of direct and side diseases. Therefore, in the bath, it is advisable to warm up the feet well with the help of brooms, which will be an excellent prevention of many diseases.

Strong heat in the steam room, gambling banging with brooms and hardening in ice water - this is for amateurs. However, one should constantly and gradually enhance the effect of contrasting procedures "heat - cold" within reasonable limits. This enhances the general hardening of the body and increases the immunity of a person, which is extremely useful, because we live in cold climatic conditions and it is better to be friends with the cold than to hide from it.

As for the use of various kinds of masks, creams, honey, salt, soda and belongings in the bath, this is also not for everybody. Over the years of bathing practice, their own family traditions and methods of using additional funds are formed.

Outcomes

In order to undergo a minimum set of wellness procedures in a Russian bath, it takes at least three hours. The bath is a whole ritual. Sometimes they say about the bathhouse: “I went to the bathhouse to wash” - this means, it is not the bather who says. Sometimes, depending on the mood, it can slowly go to the sauna until seven or eight o'clock, and only then you begin to feel how the body becomes weightless and healthy.

In conclusion, we note that in the Russian tradition, the bath was used very widely for many events. One of the places where a bath is used in the life of a Russian is to cleanse negative character traits, transform negative qualities into positive ones, but that's another story.