Vision Spa Retreat

Three Wishes and Four Guiding Stars for Spa: A Dialog with Marion Schneider

Meet a Fairy Godmother of Spa ...

Sara Firman of Vision Spa Retreat talks to her friend and colleague Marion Schneider.

Audio link below

Sara says: 

I've known Marion since 2001 when I visited her spa-resort Toskana Therme [1.] in Bad Sulza, Germany, to take part in the 'Dreams and Rituals in Healing Waters' workshop with Dr Jonathan Paul DeVierville that is held there there every summer [2.]. 

Marion is someone who is not only very much aware of the problems that face us all now - whether in business, politics, or regarding the state of our planet - but is also actively working to help on all these fronts. She finds an effective and healing arena for this in the world of spa. 

Marion Schneider has:

• co-created some extraordinary spas (and has plans for more, as you'll hear)
• been instrumental in setting up many spa organizations and events (see later)
• helped countless people with their own spa-related ventures (Sara is one)
• included humanitarian and environmental considerations in all that she does.

This is the fourth in a series of interviews - below you'll find links to the previous three, which were presented as articles rather than audios.

Imaging Spa: an interview with photo-artist Linda Troeller

by Sara Firman of Vision Spa Retreat
[all images reproduced by kind permission of Linda Troeller]

Art washes away from the Soul the dust of Everyday Life
- Pablo Picasso

If Picasso is right, then Art and Spa surely go together.   Both might add something more soulful (moist, fluid, luscious, vibrant) when we're feel worn down by life.

One of the things I love about spa as healing space is the inherent potential for creativity.  It's a special quality of soul, that beauty is always bound up with feeling through experiencing.

Over the last two decades, photo-artist Linda Troeller's mission has been to convey through her work what it actually feels like to enter a spa and immerse yourself in the experience.

I first came across her work at Toskana Therme, Bad Sulza.  It was a booklet about their  Liquid Sound®, featuring Linda's art, that made it possible for me to convey that magical experience to my friends later.

Vision Spa Retreat is focused on all that is soulful and sustainable in spa, so I was delighted to learn more from Linda about how she came to be involved with spa art and what has inspired her in that.

Visit Linda Troeller's website here.

I began by asking Linda how her interest in applying her photographic art in the world of spa came about.

Beauty and Harmony: an interview with water advocate Barbara Harmony

 by Sara Firman, May 2009 for VisionSpaRetreat.com

Venus, as Botticelli portrays her in the renowned painting of spring called Primavera, is the moist, florid, green lusciousness of life on earth.  It's an Ozark early May weekend with rain dripping from a forestful of trees all around the cabin where I live.  When yesterday's phone conversation with Barbara Harmony (also in an Ozark Cottage surrounded by green lusciousness), upon which this post is based, came to a close I asked Barbara what she had planned for the rest of the day: 'I'm going to enjoy the rain,' she said cheerfully.

Barbara has inspired Vision Spa Retreat, partly because she's been a strong and effective Advocate for Water Quality and Bioregionalism over the past 30 years.  Her home and her inspiration for all those years has been Eureka Springs, a spa-resort town, deep in the Ozark hills of Arkansas.  Barbara is a Lifelong Learning Coach, Minister, and Astrologer.  You could say that Vision Spa Retreat's tag-line 'water consciousness for personal and planetary health' is personified by Barbara.

The evolution of spa

 

Very few think of SPA in its broadest terms, as a cultural form encompassing all the things we consider important for our wellbeing.  It's a rich cultural legacy that has in many ways been increasingly obscured by the tempting commercialization of what was once sacred and shared.  At times of upheaval, such as that which we are experiencing now, a willingness to reflect on our cultural evolution and the symbols of that - spa being one - may offer some insights into our predicament and our recovery.

'Spa Industry, Culture and Evolution' was the title of an excellent article Jonathan Paul De Vierville wrote for Massage and Bodywork Magazine back in 2003.  Jonathan,  long with Marion Schneider and Barbara Harmony, strongly influenced my expanding view of spa a decade ago now (for more go here).  Recently, I spoke to Jonathan about his abiding interest in the concept of spa and asked whether his focus has changed over the years.
             
Jonathan's involvement in spa stretches back  40 years to when he was working in Europe as a tour director for American Express.  His tours often included spa towns and he found himself especially attracted to these, noticing how spa as therapy was always set in a social context.  Spa was part of a healing system that included elements like kur parks (celebrating nature), and theaters (expressing community).  In the article mentioned, Jonathan wrote:

'A spa is a place with the purpose of facilitating whole human health care, wellness and social well-being.'

That statement might slip by easily in spa marketing language today, but perhaps this elaboration of it in the same article would not: 'Fundamentally, a spa is an eco-socio-cultural learning community and civil institution that attempts to bring together and truthfully integrate all the dynamic dimensions of time and space, temperatures, touch and therapeutic treatments within a supporting context of goodness, beauty, harmony and wholeness of nature.' 

Jonathan has persistently invited spa colleagues to deepen their appreciation of spa.

Spa as culture

Our conversation kept returning to the way in which industrialization of aspects of human culture, and in this case spa, has so often resulted in the loss of our connection with the depth of meaning and purpose that Jonathan discusses in his article, and the sense of connection provided by elements of the 'commons' (belonging to everyone or shared resources).  Culture is a blending of four areas, and, for Jonathan, spa as culture encompasses all these:

• Art - in terms of beauty and esthetics
• Science and technology - what is repeatable and provable
• Politics (including economics and law) - relationships and values
• Spirituality - the mystical, invisible

When viewed like this, as Jonathan points out, industry (or economics) contributes less than a quarter to the overall significance of spa culture. It is the general trend towards commercialization in the 1990s that he thinks has brought great change to our culture as a whole; the effects this has had on spa in particular have saddened him.  The emphasis has shifted from spa culture to spa industry, slowly consuming and diluting the other three areas through commoditization, and the marketing of that which was previously sacred.