Water, Watsu, and Wellness
By Karrie Osborn
Is it our shared bond with water that draws us longingly to a hot bath, a cool ocean, or a warm pool? Is it our chemical connection that brings us to water when we need replenishing or a chance to reclaim our health?
The potential for health and healing through water is unbounded: rehabilitating from knee surgery in a hospital pool, giving birth in water at home, recovering from the traumas of abuse in an aquatic energy session, and rejuvenating the skin with a thalassotherapy bath are just a few of the realized opportunities. But what else awaits us in the depth of water’s healing heart?
As research begins unraveling some of the mysteries water holds, we’ll begin to understand the true power of this liquid gold, especially as we continue to discover its new applications with bodywork. For now, let’s take a look at what we do know about this life source and its healing potential.
Dr. Water
When we talk about water and water therapies, we use words like “nurturing,” “enveloping,” “warm,” “peaceful,” “safe” — “womblike.” And it’s no wonder. Water may be the most maternal source of all, giving birth to so much life on this planet.
Yet even though we rely on it for our very existence, we rarely give water a second thought. It is such an intrinsic part of our lives, but we seldom stop to appreciate all that it offers or to understand all that it is.
We’re largely made up of water — anywhere from 50 percent to 75 percent, depending on muscle mass and age. Without it, we can’t sustain life longer than three days, we age more quickly, incur disease more readily, and watch our bodies break down more rapidly.
When we use it in the context of an external therapy — a bath, a pool — water does amazing things, both physiologically and psychologically.
Because it surrounds every part of the body at once,
it creates an enveloping touch that is both intimate and calming, regardless of the modality with which it’s being used. And aside from feeling good, being in the water is good.
Even without any other elements added to the mix, the benefits of simply being in the water are astounding. “The main benefit is being out of gravity,” says Theri Thomas, Watsu instructor and board member for the Worldwide Aquatic Bodywork Association (WABA). “Within 15 minutes of being out of gravity, muscles can go into a deeper place of relaxation as they get the signal they no longer need to support the body.”
In that same vein, being weightless in the water allows for better mobilization of the spine, Thomas says. For people with crippling disabilities, water gives the body freedom otherwise unknown on land, an important piece in healing body, mind, and spirit.
Thomas says being in water also increases depth of respiration, decreases rate of respiration, decreases heart rate, and calms the sympathetic nervous system. The latter is especially important in our culture, she says, where people are in “fight or flight” mode all the time. Add massageplanetfeine, stressed adrenal glands, and overscheduling, and most of us need something to bring us gently back to earth. “The time the body is most in balance is when it is in the water,” she says.
Immersion in water also affects the lymph system, decreases edema and joint compression, increases blood to muscles, and increases range of motion. These are the very actions necessary to really prepare
tissue for mobilization, Thomas says. “As a result, you get more out of an aquatic bodywork session.”
Additional benefits from being in the water include improved digestion, enhanced immune system response, deep relaxation and peacefulness, and an opportunity to replace debilitating holding patterns in the body.
From Whence We Came
Even without understanding all the physiological implications, ancient cultures have long known the healing powers of water. In fact, from ancient spa traditions comes the “taking the waters” philosophy, where healing pools were an integral part of art, culture, politics, and especially medicine.
Explains spa historian J. Paul de Vierville, Ph.D.: “Taking the waters is a phrase that holds mysterious connotations from a simpler, ancient time ... Taking the waters was, and is, a physical venture into healing, cleansing, and rejuvenation.”1 He says the ancients believed taking the waters cleansed the body, relaxed the heart, refreshed the mind, and purified the soul.
Dating back before written history, this philosophy of health was much more than just bathing. Taking the waters back then meant as much about art, dialogue, music, and socialization as it did about a bath. This spa culture, de Vierville explains, was an integration of experiences with health and rejuvenation at its core.
Many ancient civilizations appreciated the therapeutic value of water, de Vierville says. Egypt, India, Crete, China, and Mesopotamia all “utilized the waters, especially for religious rituals and healing rites.”2
The Greeks, and then the Romans, understood water’s therapeutic value and incorporated it into the earliest versions of healthcare. While ancient Greek society built public baths in conjunction with gymnasiums to facilitate sound bodies and sound minds, Romans largely utilized baths as a social and political activity.
Most cultures have created traditions of health or spirituality based on water at one time or another. Look at the Russian bath with its Siberian shamanic origins, which involves a hot vapor soak followed by a cold plunge. The Dagara people of West Africa partake in an annual reconciliation ritual that involves being dunked in the local river by a healer as a means of washing away negative energy. And, of course, Christianity has long looked to water for the cleansing baptismal.
De Vierville says global discoveries are proving that water has been a healing tool for thousands of years. At a site of ancient mineral springs in France and Germany, archeologists have found Bronze Age artifacts including drinking cups and votive fragments.
Large public baths of old exist only in miniscule pockets in the Western world today. But, even though the philosophy is largely lost, the medicinal elements of taking the waters is not. And that’s why we still see everything from hydrotherapy and vichy showers to floating and Watsu, as larger spas around the country keep the taking-the-waters herieforum.xxxe alive in their own ways.
Watsu and Harold
We couldn’t have a discussion of modern-day water therapies without first recognizing Watsu and its creator, Harold Dull. It’s been 25 years since Dull took his knowledge of Zen shiatsu and his appreciation of water and combined them into something unique in the world of bodywork, something that incorporated powerful and passive stretches, gliding movement, holding, centeredness, and breath.
In the midst of a Watsu “Silver Anniversary” celebration, where water therapy enthusiasts gathered from around the world to share their work, Dull sat down to share his thoughts on aquatic bodywork and Watsu specifically.
Besides being a therapeutic tool, Dull says Watsu is also a personal growth tool — for both client and practitioner. It allows people to go to a place within themselves for both introspection and deep healing, he says, and a big part of its success relies on trust.
“People need to be floated,” Dull says matter-of-factly, 25 years after he started floating his Zen shiatsu students in pools at Harbin Hot Springs in California. In the floating process, you are more than being touched — you’re being held. And that’s what so many of us are missing, he says. “We’re not being held enough. Holding puts you at a different level than touching.” When people are being held in the context of Watsu, “they can accept that kind of closeness,” Dull says, and benefit from it. What makes Watsu unique is the way it “realizes the potential in that closeness.”
The physical closeness that is created in Watsu allows practitioners to work with strength and fluidity. “Closeness allows us to do strong stretches,” Dull says. “Holding them allows us to do stronger stretches.”
The closeness also allows practitioners to connect to their client’s breath at a deeper level. “In stillness, we can really feel their breath and let water move us in the breath we share with them,” he says.
Breath and presence are key factors in Watsu, just as they are for most land-based modalities, but there is something different when it’s applied in water. From the breath pattern comes the movement.
Thomas, who’s spent 25 years teaching aquatic bodywork, calls Watsu a dialogue, creating movement in the moment. “The water creates an immediate bond,” she says. While the energy in our bodies connects and communicates on land, Thomas says it’s much more direct and immediate in water.
“It also allows people a connection with themselves,” she says. The goal is for the practitioner to “hold the space” so the recipient can find her own way. “Many people haven’t had the opportunity to have that safe space, to be encompassed or embraced.”
As part of that, clients are free to go to any level they need to. “It’s a combination of being held and being free — not having someone do something to you.” The resulting “connection of being,” or “sense of oneness,” Dull says, is a common benefit of the work.
Another benefit is how Watsu seems to utilize all the elements water encompasses. In a 2001 study conducted at the State University of Campinas in Brazil, Watsu recipients were asked about the effects this work had on them. A 37-year-old physical therapist wrote: “Watsu provided me the opportunity to surrender, to permit myself to be touched and cared for, and, at the same time, to be able to feel light, relaxed, and free as a child. This freedom and surrender I experience during a session brings more balance and strength to live a better life outside the pool, more lightness and ease, and a greater access to my intuitive side.”3
Admittedly, Watsu is being well accepted in spas around the world. And the more people who witness the work, the more people who understand its potential. “People who watch it get a sense of the spirit of it,” Dull says.
Linda de Lehman, an international Watsu instructor from Italy, says the beauty of Watsu is that “the entire body receives a massage, even if not by our hands. The water accompanies and accentuates our touch.” On her way to teaching the modality this year in nine countries and five languages, de Lehman says Watsu can take you to another place. “Silently floating, weightless, and being held — it often allows the receiver to access her own sense of divine innocence and oneness with everything that we are all born into.”
Watsu clients continue to report that the modality allows them to quiet their minds, an important step toward introspection and self-actualization. “Water definitely has the availability to lend itself to altered states,” Thomas says. “It’s not the agenda of the work, it’s just part of what’s happening.”
Aquatic Bodywork Partners
While Watsu is the most well-known of the therapies that fall under the definition of aquatic bodywork, it by no means is the only one out there. Several other variations of bodywork in water exist, each with its own focus and direction, including water dance, healing dance, and jahara.
At the same time that Watsu was being born here in the United States, water dance was being developed independently in Europe by Arjana Brunschwiler and Aman Schroter. Water dance, which incorporates elements of aikido, somersaults, dance, dolphin and snake movements, and massage, has more of an underwater focus and works on a whole different dimension, Thomas says. It slows the heart rate and breathing more than other therapies and can create a very deep state of relaxation.
Healing dance is a bridge halfway between water dance and Watsu, Thomas says. Developed by professional ballet dancer and choreographer Alexander Georgeakopoulos in 1990, healing dance is all about the movement. In fact, Thomas says, “the movement is the medicine.” As the body flows through 20 different spiral and wave movements above and below the water, rhythm pervades the experience to integrate the body and release blocked energies.
The specific work of jahara, from Brazil, relies on the principles of support, adaptability, expansion, effortlessness, and invisibility, Thomas says. She calls the work quiet and meditative, while also utilizing pressure points, consistency, and precision. Dull says jahara was developed more for clinical conditions and is often found in the paradigm of aquatic rehabilitation. Within the work, gentle traction to the spine leads to an expansion in the body.
Thomas says aquatic bodywork can be applied at any range of the spectrum — from very clinical work to a “deep, heart space connection.” It all depends on what’s appropriate for that client and that practitioner.
The Energy of It All
Regardless of how you use it therapeutically, water can’t help but be energetic. It’s vibratory in nature, and that’s what makes it so healing as it resonates with the water that lives in our tissue, blood, and brain.
In the world of aquatic bodywork, energy plays an important role, even if not always stated. Its power in the healing model, however, should not be underestimated.
Diane Tegtmeier, an aquatic energy bodyworker, says the clients she works with in water seem to respond more readily to her energy work than her land-based clients. “On land, I carry the same intent, but in the water it is enhanced,” she says.
Having integrated energy work with social work for 10 years prior to training in Watsu, Tegtmeier has seen her clients migrate from land to water. “It seems like clients can go into deeper levels of awareness in the environment of the water,” she says. And they recognize and appreciate that.
“It seems the water itself and the energetic field of two people in such intimate contact in the water allows the consciousness of the recipient to expand and go deeper than, in my experience, what happens on land,” Tegtmeier says. “The control of the mental process seems to let go more easily to allow the consciousness where it needs to go for healing.”
But why is water so healing as a therapeutic partner? “It’s womblike, it’s vibration, all of that and then something else,” Tegtmeier says. “Dr. Emoto’s work (read further for a discussion of Masaru Emoto’s research on the hidden messages in water) gave words to what it is I’ve experienced from the beginning — water has a specific crystalline quality, a specific polarity, allowing it to both store and magnify energy. So, if I’m taking someone in my arms with the intention of healing, the water medium in which I work seems to potentiate our intention, while also inviting the client and me to move into dimensions of consciousness that can take us to primal sources, like the womb,” she says.
“Water takes us to a more primal state where we are more vulnerable to the energy around us. If that energy is coming from a practitioner who has nothing but intention and holding the space for you, the transformative potential can be phenomenal.”
As with any modality, care must be taken with particular clients: the young, the pregnant, the elderly, the diabetic, the heart-compromised. But even more important is respecting the power of the medium.
“Water calls us to a higher standard of awareness as a practitioner,” Tegtmeier says. “Because a person can enter a womblike state, their consciousness goes to that womblike state. You’re activating that vulnerable fetus awareness, so anything in their environment can have greater impact. Half my clients say the sessions are like being in the womb. That means they’re impressionable. Whatever happens is going to go deeper. Because of the power of water, you have to be careful of pitfalls.”
Tegtmeier explains therapists need to have their own issues in order to be able to deal with the client’s needs. “If a client contacts a place of emotional pain, even physical pain, and the therapist is not emotionally prepared to deal with that, the results can be harmful. The personal and professional development of the therapist is as important as any other skill they bring into the water.”
On the Waterfront
Standing on the foundation of what’s already been built, what might we see if we could peek into the future of water as a therapeutic tool?
Pain/disabilities/chronic conditions
Potentially the biggest opportunity for water therapies to shine will be in the realm of pain, disabilities, and chronic conditions. Because of the weightlessness, the relaxation response, and the care both water and therapist provide, people who otherwise couldn’t “trust” their bodies are able to do so in water.
“Due to the principles of buoyancy, hydrostatic pressure, aquatic resistance, and floating in 94–96 degree water, a body has the profound invitation to relax and surrender to the peaceful sensation of being completely surrounded by a very familiar element,” says Cameron West, former director of the Easter Seals Community Aquatic Programs in Ventura, Calif. She says because of our watery composition, the body has a natural connection to water and can more easily find homeostasis, or balance, within it. “It feels like it is home,” she says.
When utilizing Watsu with pain patients, West says there is a “dance of peacefulness” that happens, allowing patients to “move out of their connection to pain and into a more wholesome relationship with themselves.”
Children have been another beneficiary of water therapies. Aquatic bodywork has also been successfully used for children with a variety of disorders and injuries, including orthopedic issues, congenital and birth defects including spina bifida and autism, brain and spinal cord injuries, and a range of neurological disorders.
Fibromyalgia sufferers have also found relief with aquatic therapies. “Watsu works really well with stress-related diseases,” Dull says, including fibromyalgia. Thomas agrees, “Straight across the board, fibromyalgia patients get huge relief with aquatic bodywork. They need deep work to get rid of holding patterns, but they can’t get deep work on land.” In water, however, with the absence of gravity, fibromyalgia sufferers can find release of deep holding patterns without painful effects.
“Any chronic pain does really well with water modalities,” Thomas says. “And for patients who have either paralysis or amputation, a stroke, or any sort of debilitation of the body, to experience normalcy in the water is a huge part of the healing process. To be able to feel beautiful movement is very liberating.”
That’s why pain clinics are incorporating more aquatic therapies, like Watsu, into their programs and why physicians are seeking new pain-relief avenues in places like water. “Doctors are looking for places to refer their chronic pain patients,” Thomas says. Aquatic bodywork is offering them the answer.
Floating and Liquid Sound
Even though sensory deprivation has historically been the means to higher consciousness for indigenous peoples around the world, floating is a modern-day avenue toward that goal. Despite being somewhat globally introduced to the film-going public in the early ’80s via the now cult classic Altered States , floating as a mainstream therapy is relatively new. Float tanks have been showing up not only in spas, but have had a presence in the training rooms of professional football teams, fitness centers, and even universities.
Today’s floating technology has changed drastically from its beginnings; now, even in-home tanks have internal lighting, emergency alarms, sound systems, and regulating thermometers. Most float tanks require less than a foot of salt water to keep floaters buoyant and strain-free.
Benefits of floating are said to include physical and mental relaxation, rejuvenation, clarity of thought, an integration of the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and a quickened process for healing injuries. One of the biggest benefits reported by those who’ve tried this therapy is the quiet that’s achieved with complete sensory deprivation and the resulting sense of peace and calm that remains.
Taking floating to even another level is Liquid Sound. Developed by Micky Remann in the spa town Bad Sulza, in Thuringia, Germany, Liquid Sound is the experience of floating in a warm pool as it is being fed with an underwater symphony. Music is piped through under-water speakers as floaters waft quietly atop the water. It’s up-and-coming in the world of classical spas and certainly pays homage to the taking the waters philosophy.
***
The bricks on this road of aquatic bodywork have only just been laid; there is much work to be done on the path ahead. “There’s a lot of potential in the work still to be fully realized,” Dull says. We must remember that 25 years is but a blink in the eye of complementary therapies, and there are so many questions to ask, especially as other modalities begin manifesting in water.
Tegtmeier says that regardless of what we want to call the work, the most important thing to remember when working with water is the power of intention and everything else you bring into the water with you. “There’s something about the nurturing quality of water that resonates in something deep within all of us, and it is healing,” she says. “And whether someone calls what they’re doing Watsu or physical therapy or hydrotherapy, that doesn’t matter as much as the intention that’s carried into the water and the space with the client.”
References
1 De Vierville, JP. “Taking the Waters,” Massage & Bodywork, February/March 2000, 13.
2 Ibid.
3 “What does Watsu mean to you,” information regarding State University of Campinas, Brazil via personal correspondence with Harold Dull, July 2005.
Resources
Worldwide Aquatic Bodywork Association — http://www.waba.edu
School of Shiatsu & Massage at the Watsu Center, Middletown, Calif.; http://www.learnwatsu.com; 800/693-3296
Watsu: Freeing the Body in Water, by Harold Dull (2004, Watsu Publishing)
The Book of Floating, by Michael Hutchison (2003, Gateways)
The Hidden Messages in Water, by Masaru Emoto (2004, Beyond Words Publishing)
Masaru Emoto — http://www.masaru-emoto.net and http://www.hado.net
http://www.wellnessgoods.com/messages.asp
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