The Spa at Suffering School

                                                      

Photo by Alex Bertha on Unsplash

You may be surprised to learn that there is a Suffering School Spa. You won’t be surprised to learn that because it is affiliated with the school and managed by the faculty it functions a little differently than regular spas. I recently spent a day there because I needed it. I was going to meet up with an old friend from college and I wanted to look and feel my best.

I was also concerned that I would not be able to see him without first getting stoned Suffering School Style. This form of getting stoned does not involve drugs. It is, rather, a process that happens gradually, usually after a great pain and is exacerbated by exposure to people who knew you before you went to Suffering School full-time.

Seeing  people from my past while stoned out of my mind had become a bad habit and I didn’t want to repeat that with him. I couldn’t, because he knew what I was like before, and he also knew a little about what I had been through since and would wonder why I was acting this way, so shrill and confident and so absolutely sure that everything was great. Oh, and I’ve never been happier.

This is what it’s like when you are stoned out of your mind Suffering School Style you become too much--too chatty, too brash, too laughy.

 And you do laugh a lot when you’re stoned because EVERYTHING IS GREAT!  HA HA HA!

This is not a good look for anyone, and that is why I booked a spa day, to find treatments that would address this fake facade growing around me.

Thankfully the Suffering School Spa has been treating students like myself since the time of Hippocrates.

Upon arrival at the spa guests are greeted with Seneca’s famous words carved above the door:  All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned to be wretched.  

Normal people don’t go to spas to feel wretched but I am not normal and neither is our spa. In the language of the brochure which is handed to each guest along with a fluffy robe--wretched does not mean what you think it means. It means that you need to get back to living in a state not counter to your natural state. And it also means that you are about to get zhushed up.

Zhushing up, according to spa literature, involved treating the areas that felt altered in such a way as to make one almost unrecognizable to old friends. In my case, I would need to treat those problem areas that were behaving less like flesh and blood and more like rock and ice.

I flipped through the brochure while waiting for my first treatment.  I could have read it for hours (and actually did), because unlike normal glossy brochures, the one from Suffering School’s spa is over five hundred pages long with some of our most famous teachers as editors. The poet/physicist/psychologist Emily Dickinson, is the chief editor and visionary of the spa. In the footnotes in the back of the brochure you will see E.D.(Ed.) and that means the citation is Emily’s. But you’ll know it’s her when you see all the dashes and the oddball choices of letters to capitalize.

Here’s a good example from page 372:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes—

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—

She’s right about that.  My nerves had been sitting like tombs for years and I needed them to act like regular nerves again.

The spa treatment for tomblike nerves is massage.  Massage is also helpful for

the Heart, which is unfortunately stiff, and the Feet (we can’t forget them),

They mechanical go round—

A Wooden way (They will need massaging too).

Really, my entire body has Regardless grown,

A Quartz contentment, like a stone—(normally, we believe contentment to be a good feeling, but not this kind).

Emily is quite clear, This is the Hour of Lead—

Remembered, if outlived

She instructs us to submit to the deep tissue massage because it is the only kind of massage that will iron the lead out.

Which I did. And wow, what a difference.

A Suffering School massage, like most of our spa treatments, is painful. It has to be. Otherwise the spa wouldn’t have its famous motto, given to us by one of our teachers, a 1922 Nobel Prize winning Physicist.  

Contraria Sunt Complementa, it states, which in case you don’t know means opposites are complementary. This does not mean that opposites go around complimenting each other, it means that in this spa setting--what you think is hurting you is actually healing you. Which is both funny and not funny at the same time.

The brochure reminds us that although spa massages can be difficult to endure, excruciating in some cases, students are to remember yet another well-known Suffering School motif—“sweet is pleasure after pain.”

I totally needed that massage to soften my stiff Heart and help my Feet feel less mechanical as they went their Wooden way.

And as soon as I recovered from it, I’m happy to say my whole body felt less stoney and cold and more warm and pliable, like clay.

What an improvement.

Next, I needed to address the Quartz contentment (Emily’s way of describing the suffocating grip I had on myself trying to hold it all together).

Now there is nothing wrong, of course, with holding it together, a little Quartz contentment is fine, but you never want to go full Quartz contentment.

I knew that I needed to step out of my contentment zone. I had to stop trying to holding it all together.  

Which meant doing the scariest thing in the world—I had to let go.

But how?

The brochure helpfully described the process in the following manner:

—as Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—

What this meant for me was a cryotherapy session followed by a sauna. Now cryo is different from crying. But you may want to cry as you stand naked and alone in a tube averaging -230°F /-111°C  and realize that there is no getting out of it.  The extreme cold is what makes you a Freezing person. A naked and cold freezing person.

But it’ll feel so good after when you hit the sauna. At least it did for me when I found myself surrounded by other towel clad Suffering School students as we warmed ourselves in the intensifying heat.

We chatted and shared moments from our past, all of us recollecting when we were Freezing persons. Slumped next to me in the corner was the beautiful Natasha Rostova from Moscow who had been, for most of her young life, so captivating, so effervescent, so utterly charming that Tolstoy himself wrote about her. Yet she, like me, had been altered in her suffering, her spark all but snuffed out, so much so that Pierre, who had loved her forever didn’t even know she was in the same room with him after not seeing her in ages.

 In her defense, that was her Hour of Lead—, which fortunately, she outlived, as had I, but both of us needed zhushing.  Natasha’s change made her drab and disinterested, while mine had me acting cold and fake . The two of us, actually all of us former Freezing Persons in the sauna, would need to remember how it is to be warm and alive again.

The unfortunate changes we had undergone were the result of too much Lead in the system. To get it out, we would need to go into a spa induced Stupor which involves bringing the body into complete relaxation through the gentle art of sound bathing.  

The sounds I bathed in were the sounds of nature. This was to re-wild me, as the aesthetician explained, because, evidently, my fake personality was veering into dangerous territory. I was close to being mistaken for a bot. In order to bring me back to the natural, I had to bathe in the sounds of  woodland creatures and birdsong while Natasha bathed in music of Mazurka to reconnect her with her folk dancing spirit.

After who knows how long, I woke up from my Stupor fresh and ready for the next treatment which was the Ultimate Spa Mud Bath or as our Roman students used to call it: Balneum Humi Summum.

 Interestingly, much of the brochure retains the original Latin, such as the words Per humum iterum humanus fit,*  inscribed below a picture of a centurion relaxing in one of the mud baths.  This elegant Latin expression translates awkwardly to something like: “it is only going back into the mud that one becomes human again.”

 * Suffering School Students are encouraged to learn Latin in order to read the parts of the brochure which are lost in clumsy translations.

I soaked in the mud long enough to remember what it was like to be a kid, how I didn’t mind dirt, or messiness, how I was not afraid to do something that didn’t look like work, like playing a game or soaking in a tub. I considered these things as I lolled in the mud quiet and happy until I felt ready to emerge.

When I finally did, I was ready for my last treatment, the floating tank. In this wonderful therapy I floated weightless in a tank of salt water. Little by little as the tension left the body I felt the sensation of weightlessness. The only way to describe it is it is the feeling one has when everything that you needlessly cling to is gently released.

 All that energy wasted on endless image sculpting and maintenance had worn me out. In letting go, the cares sunk to the bottom of the tank like a rock while I floated dreamily on the surface. I felt high as a kite—not from drugs, but from freedom from them, even the made up ones that live only in my head, like the one that I was addicted to, which had me grasping and clinging to a fake image. With that gone, I found myself in a state of bliss.

 Now, as anyone who goes to a spa realizes, this blissed out feeling will not last forever. We Suffering School students know that we will have to emerge from the spa, and live lives where we will likely encounter those who knew us before. And we will certainly, from time to time, have to re-endure a Day—

We thought the Mighty Funeral –

Of All Conceived Joy—

But, what we realize in re-enduring the Day is that the day was not a funeral for all the joy we would ever know. We could and would feel joy again. We would feel pain too,  that was made clear. But what our spa day does is to restore our ability to feel both joy and pain without being stoned. Rather than move through life in a state of Quartz contentment, we would have our moments of wretchedness, but then realize, as Emily tells us, that although the  

Woe you have Today

Be larger-- as the Sea

Exceeds its unremembered Drop—they’re water—equally---

The water, the salt, the mud are always around us, and in us, what we live in, the exact stuff we are made of. And only in this play of cold and heat, joy and pain--in Contraria Sunt Complementa, can you expect to come out of this particular spa looking and feeling your best.

Photo by Deniz Altindas on Unsplash