The focus of this blog is to envision a manifestation of spa-retreat that enhances our appreciation of soul (as in the deeper, wilder life) and of water (as in this life-giving, essential element); and through this (plus a variety of other helpful additions), our sense of wellbeing. Every so often, I will review places that meet (or in some cases fail to meet) that ideal. What I want to convey is that it is not the glamor but the spirit of the place that matters.
This post celebrates one of my favorite places - Harbin Hot Springs in northern California. If you share that sentiment or have any constructive view on what you read here, please feel welcome to comment below.
In times of rapid change, it can be hard to find places that do not disappoint good memories. Remote places may have more chance of this, but less and less so with the relative ease of travel and trendsetting communications. Places where people gather, especially the popular ones, seem to be subject to even more of an erosion of character. Sometimes, it is better not to go back to the scene of love for fear that it turn into a scene of crime.
This post celebrates one of my favorite places - Harbin Hot Springs in northern California. If you share that sentiment or have any constructive view on what you read here, please feel welcome to comment below.
In times of rapid change, it can be hard to find places that do not disappoint good memories. Remote places may have more chance of this, but less and less so with the relative ease of travel and trendsetting communications. Places where people gather, especially the popular ones, seem to be subject to even more of an erosion of character. Sometimes, it is better not to go back to the scene of love for fear that it turn into a scene of crime.
But there are some people and some places that somehow sustain the essence of what they have meant to you, whatever the length of absence. Harbin and its devotees and residents are this for me, as it turned out. A few weeks ago in mid-March, I returned there after about seven years. I found it the same or even brighter and lighter than when I last was there. This surprised me, since I carried a few sadnesses back with me. But I was helped all the way.
The first help came in the form of my Harbin ride-board offer. Harbin is a bit remote being about 2 1/2 h drive from San Francisco north into the mountains beyond the Napa Valley. You can get almost there by the Sonoma County bus service from the airport to Santa Rosa from where it is possible to arrange a pick-up by Harbin staff. You can also put out a request to share a ride with someone who is driving. I arrived at Harbin with a stranger who soon was not.
My companion lives in San Francisco and tries to go to Harbin twice a month. Eighteen months ago he was paralyzed in a skiing accident for which he needed many months of intensive therapy that gradually returned the use of his legs. He is driving but he needs support to walk and there is still a lot of discomfort: the warm mineral water at Harbin helps. It helps so much that he is willing to make the trek for the day and to struggle up the hills and steps that a visit involves.
On the way, we stopped at the Kaiser physical rehabilitation center in Napa so that my new friend could visit, for the first time since he left there, with the people who helped him back to independence. We spent over an hour there in the end, talking with patients and physical therapists; and in my case taking in the enormity and value of the task before them all. Some people, like the man who'd had a stroke around the time my friend was hurt too, were vibrant with hope. But many were silent and somehow lost inside their numbing pain, despite the kind encouragement of the staff.
The word hospital, notes one of my favorite writers on soul, Thomas Moore, comes from hospis meaning both stranger and host and pito meaning lord or powerful one. It was interesting to go from this hosting place to the one that is Harbin. In both places, the people are mostly focused inward; in both places touch is valued. In Care of the Soul (p. 174), Moore asks what it would be like if hospitals cared for the soul in illness, as well as the body. Harbin takes care of the soul. You'll see all kinds of bodies - the conventionally beautiful and the less so - but most seem at home in their skins.
Harbin is set on 1700 acres of a beautiful northern California hillside, owned and operated by the non-denominational Heart Consciousness Church which aims to unite the human potential movement, the holistic-natural movement, and universal spirituality. You can get coffee and muffins or herb tea and sprouted breads. There is no judgment and a few rules to help keep the peace. It is run by a resident community of about 150 people. Once a healing place for the Native Americans, a resort for the Victorians, a playground for Hippies, it is now a spa-retreat for all manner of people wanting to 'escape civilization'.
I've camped there before (once for three months the summer I turned 40) right by the bouldered creek or tucked into the wooded aromatic hills. This time I stayed for four nights in the women's dormitory (wonderfully located right by the pools); and then for three nights, when my partner arrived, in a comfortable room in one of the old Victorian mansions. You can also stay in a tent cabin beside the gardens or in the domes (white sculptured spheres clustered on the opposite hillside). Many options to suit all needs.
When I first visited Harbin, I traveled out from England to do a three-week summer training course there while I waited for my job at a new five-star hotel spa to begin that fall. I wrote in my journal that as a single woman camping alone in a clothing-optional community, amongst apparent strangers, I felt safer and more accepted, acknowledged, recognized than ever before: 'For the first 24 hours, I wandered around with a cautiously watchful eye waiting for the signs of threat, the warnings to retreat - they never came. Meanwhile, something extraordinary was happening to my guarded English heart'. It's still a very comfortable place to be alone.
I was there to learn an unusual form of water therapy invented on site almost 30 years ago now by poet turned bodyworker, Harold Dull. Although Watsu (water-based shiatsu) is an effective therapy for physical, mental and emotional pain, I believe that this practice has gradually become a kind of cultural phenomenon. Some have called it 'the water family’. Harold now rarely visits Harbin, but you'll see his proteges floating people in the pools, inspiring others to pick up their friends and loved ones and do the same. I've been practicing this water art ever since that first visit; as for many others, it has become my passion.
More from my 1998 journal as I tried to describe the otherworldly joy I felt then (and still do):
The first help came in the form of my Harbin ride-board offer. Harbin is a bit remote being about 2 1/2 h drive from San Francisco north into the mountains beyond the Napa Valley. You can get almost there by the Sonoma County bus service from the airport to Santa Rosa from where it is possible to arrange a pick-up by Harbin staff. You can also put out a request to share a ride with someone who is driving. I arrived at Harbin with a stranger who soon was not.
My companion lives in San Francisco and tries to go to Harbin twice a month. Eighteen months ago he was paralyzed in a skiing accident for which he needed many months of intensive therapy that gradually returned the use of his legs. He is driving but he needs support to walk and there is still a lot of discomfort: the warm mineral water at Harbin helps. It helps so much that he is willing to make the trek for the day and to struggle up the hills and steps that a visit involves.
On the way, we stopped at the Kaiser physical rehabilitation center in Napa so that my new friend could visit, for the first time since he left there, with the people who helped him back to independence. We spent over an hour there in the end, talking with patients and physical therapists; and in my case taking in the enormity and value of the task before them all. Some people, like the man who'd had a stroke around the time my friend was hurt too, were vibrant with hope. But many were silent and somehow lost inside their numbing pain, despite the kind encouragement of the staff.
The word hospital, notes one of my favorite writers on soul, Thomas Moore, comes from hospis meaning both stranger and host and pito meaning lord or powerful one. It was interesting to go from this hosting place to the one that is Harbin. In both places, the people are mostly focused inward; in both places touch is valued. In Care of the Soul (p. 174), Moore asks what it would be like if hospitals cared for the soul in illness, as well as the body. Harbin takes care of the soul. You'll see all kinds of bodies - the conventionally beautiful and the less so - but most seem at home in their skins.
Harbin is set on 1700 acres of a beautiful northern California hillside, owned and operated by the non-denominational Heart Consciousness Church which aims to unite the human potential movement, the holistic-natural movement, and universal spirituality. You can get coffee and muffins or herb tea and sprouted breads. There is no judgment and a few rules to help keep the peace. It is run by a resident community of about 150 people. Once a healing place for the Native Americans, a resort for the Victorians, a playground for Hippies, it is now a spa-retreat for all manner of people wanting to 'escape civilization'.
I've camped there before (once for three months the summer I turned 40) right by the bouldered creek or tucked into the wooded aromatic hills. This time I stayed for four nights in the women's dormitory (wonderfully located right by the pools); and then for three nights, when my partner arrived, in a comfortable room in one of the old Victorian mansions. You can also stay in a tent cabin beside the gardens or in the domes (white sculptured spheres clustered on the opposite hillside). Many options to suit all needs.
When I first visited Harbin, I traveled out from England to do a three-week summer training course there while I waited for my job at a new five-star hotel spa to begin that fall. I wrote in my journal that as a single woman camping alone in a clothing-optional community, amongst apparent strangers, I felt safer and more accepted, acknowledged, recognized than ever before: 'For the first 24 hours, I wandered around with a cautiously watchful eye waiting for the signs of threat, the warnings to retreat - they never came. Meanwhile, something extraordinary was happening to my guarded English heart'. It's still a very comfortable place to be alone.
I was there to learn an unusual form of water therapy invented on site almost 30 years ago now by poet turned bodyworker, Harold Dull. Although Watsu (water-based shiatsu) is an effective therapy for physical, mental and emotional pain, I believe that this practice has gradually become a kind of cultural phenomenon. Some have called it 'the water family’. Harold now rarely visits Harbin, but you'll see his proteges floating people in the pools, inspiring others to pick up their friends and loved ones and do the same. I've been practicing this water art ever since that first visit; as for many others, it has become my passion.
More from my 1998 journal as I tried to describe the otherworldly joy I felt then (and still do):
The watery medium and the warmth are a crucial part of this transcendence. Somehow the boundaries between individuals and between people and the immediate environment or larger universe are removed. Water as cleanser, supporter, protector, eases the transition from separation to connection. In this place I fell in love with all types of people instantly and innocently. Call it spiritual, sensual, even sexual, the distinctions seemed meaningless. These can only be words and the experience was a wholly wordless one that gave me back a sense of what it is to belong.
How is it done? You hold another or are held suspended in spring-fed pools shaded with fig by day, lit by stars at night. Matching breath to breath you follow the free-flowing patterns of movement that arise spontaneously in liquid bodies. And after a while, if you let go of doing, remain present and aware, something magical happens. Perhaps it is this magic that evaporates out of the water and suffuses the air of the place.
How is it done? You hold another or are held suspended in spring-fed pools shaded with fig by day, lit by stars at night. Matching breath to breath you follow the free-flowing patterns of movement that arise spontaneously in liquid bodies. And after a while, if you let go of doing, remain present and aware, something magical happens. Perhaps it is this magic that evaporates out of the water and suffuses the air of the place.
In the Winter 2009 magazine for Harbin visitors, Editor Annie Prehn wrote: 'Harbin is about nature, health, and wellness, but you'll also notice another theme - magic - for there definitely is an indefinable element of magic here. It is that magic, which we call the 'Harbin experience', that keeps people coming back again and again. And eventually even making Harbin their home, their life, and their legacy. So come here first to get away, next to heal, and finally to welcome yourself home'. For me, this is exactly how Harbin is.
And again from my past journal, the unchanging experience:
Stepping out on to land, people are ready to play, eat well, dance, laugh, be creative, be themselves. There is no need to act the purist, radical or fanatic here because ordinary human activities are somehow washed clean of prejudice. Originating in the primal soup, nurtured in the watery womb, made mostly of liquid substance ourselves, the aquatic experience is a homecoming. Now I find myself sharing Harold’s dream of a world-wide community of water people. I have returned to my home spa town in England to see what part I can play.
And I did, but not for long. Soon I was back in California to join with a fellow Watsu practitioner in learning more about this healing art. A lot of water under the bridge since then. Just as I have matured, Harbin has too. It seems more confident about what it stands for and what it offers. The basic structure of the place remains the same though a new sauna-steam-cold plunge area has been added to the main pool complex. The old yoga room is now a cushy living-room space next to the library and above the restaurant. Yoga and other special events happen in the new Harbin temple, beyond the garden below these buildings.
The temple is stunning - a swoop of roofs that remind me of something out of East Asia - over organic adobe walls that seem to grow out of the land. All wood and earth and precious rock; making a space full of light. I loved practicing yoga there twice a day and joining the Kirtan chanting, the Osho dancing, the Spring Solstice celebration, always something happening. I was lucky that stunning spring weather graced my week-long stay. I sat in the garden feeling as if I was in some kind of paradise, listening to the birds, watching the happily lazy cats, delighting in the fairies both invisible and visible (a favorite Harbin eccentric, an elderly garden fairy was still there!)
Another wonderful thing about Harbin for me, is that it is a place of synchronistic encounters both with old friends and new ones. Nothing that happens there seems ordinary, whether it is a conversation or a sudden insight or an unexpected encounter with a plant or creature or a heart-and-mind expanding view. But most wonderful of all is the water which pours out of the hillside, both hot and cold, and fills the pools that are the central meditation space of the place. The pools (all outdoors) are clothing-optional (this feels very safe and is optional). They are places to soak in silence - talking if it happens at all is in whispered essentials.
A true water-baby, I like to be in those pools before dawn and last thing at night and as many times as possible in between. Water is the main healer in this place and it's an apparently simple but profound essential. If you need more, you can visit the Health Services right by the pools to book a treatment. A wide variety of massage styles, Harbin's own Watsu and related forms of aquatic bodywork, and other healing practices like craniosacral, shiatsu, chi ne tsang, energy work, reflexology and much more are on offer. The service is simple, available, and in my experience exemplary. I was there to treat myself and had four wonderful sessions.
I arrived at Harbin as battered in spirit as my ride-companion was in body. I think he left feeling better. I left feeling ecstatic. My partner loved it too. Harbin is a healing community: it has a community soul that is palpable to those of us who only visit. Like any community, it has its oddities and its ups-and-downs, but it is clearly thriving. It is a place that doesn't need to sell itself with marketing hype (a very refreshing and noticeable aspect) because it generates its following and finds its voice right there on site. Harbin doesn't talk about being green or sustainable, environmentally or socially conscious, it just is.
Obviously, Harbin is my kind of place. Whether it is or isn't yours, I welcome your input regards the ideal concept of spa-retreat below.
- There is a Harbin Hot Springs Group on Facebook for those who are members there.
- Harbin's own website.
- Harbin Hot Springs on Wikipedia.
- My recent experience for those interested in aquatic bodywork: A return to the water.
