The Balanced Bath: A Prelude to Your Creative Reset Workshop
The week has just started, but Wednesday is coming. Humpday, right in the middle. What a perfect time to retreat from busy-ness. What a perfect time to try a Creative Reset.
You’re familiar with the Creative Reset series, right? It’s Frame Dance Productions’ offering of workshops to our community – in Houston and online – at a time when we all need quick responses to the uncertain and unfamiliar. And it would be nice to make these responses with a bit of grace, with awareness, with balance.
You know what will help? Water. Fortunately, Frame Dance has a workshop for that this Wednesday, September 16 at 7:30 PM. Know where it’s meeting? Wherever you want it to. Creative Reset is a series of learning and tool-building recalibrations, and our workshops are all about being stretched out and then coming from multiple directions to settle into ourselves.
This Wednesday, you’re going to work with water, first by yourself, and then in a workshop. You’re going to give your body and mind an evening of balance and flow.
Note: the balanced bath is only a suggestion! It is not a part of the workshop or a prerequisite for Brooke Summers-Perry’s watercolor class. But it’s a pretty great compliment to the class and a chance to set aside a couple of hours for yourself in the middle of the week.
First, you’re going to clean your tub if it needs cleaned (which it will if it is like my tub which is also a shower and is shared by the people who live with me. These are not bath people). Nice and clean. No harsh ingredients in those cleaning supplies, no irritation to your lungs or your hands. All right. Now you’re going to take off your clothes, take off your day. Ahhh. You did your work and you did it well. Time to let it go. By all means, dry brush while you fill that tub. Light candles if that relaxes you. Take a nice stretch, arms up with a big inhale, and roll down on the exhale. Get out a clean towel, fresh from the laundry or linen closet, and set it next to your tub. Check the water. Warm it up or cool it down if necessary. It’s almost time to get in.
What does your body need right now?
Magnesium in Epsom salts soothes sore muscles and softens skin.
Oatmeal treats sensitive skin, and even soothes irritation as severe as sunburn and hives.
Milk, coconut milk, and coconut oil all moisturize and have anti-inflammatory properties.
And then there are the ingredients that work – in part – by smelling w o n d e r f u l:
Ginger clears congestion and aids headaches (but can be irritating to sensitive skin).
Dried, fresh, or distilled to essential oil, lavender, rose, and eucalyptus benefit the skin and the spirit.
Just a bag or two of your favorite tea will turn your tub into a tiny oasis.*
Now that you have prepared the water, get in slowly. Feel the difference that the water makes on your skin, on your muscles. Breathe. Cover yourself as deeply as you can, and feel the parts of you that float. Swish your body and feel how that changes the water and your body in the water. Now be still, and think of nothing.
When it is time, get out of the tub. Rinse your body if it needs rinsing. Thank the water, and anything you put in it, for serving you well. Pull that plug. Get dry. Get moisturized. Put on whatever you like to wear best right now; your favorite pajamas, a pretty sundress, overalls, a big fluffy robe. You are about to take an art class with Brooke Summers-Perry, and she does not care what you wear as long as it doesn’t impede your work.
You are rested and focused and ready to meet the water again, but in a new way. Color it. Play with it. You are mostly water, remember. Our need for it is literal, and perhaps this is why we relate to it so well metaphorically. Get stirred up, settle, wave, float with it, push it, be moved by it, flow. It is in you and it is a tool. Use it.
*Ingredients suggested by the website helloglow.co. Go here for yummy bath recipes.
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