I’m reclining in a comfy beach chair in a dimly lit salt cave in mid-town East zoning out while restoring my mind and body’s health and functionality.
This experience is growing on me.
Part as well of my ongoing quest to find rejuvenating therapies that not only let me live longer but better. Why wellness as a philosophy that encourages curation and control of life’s physical and mental health needs has become a side passion of mine.
Halotherapy is the umbrella category for dry salt treatments.
It is a modern interpretation of dry salt therapy that stems back to the impact on miners bodies working in the salt mines and caves of Eastern Europe and Russia a century ago. Unlike every other type of mining activity, salters were observed by doctors to be healthier, to live longer and look more vibrant after chiseling and harvesting salt underground.
During WW2, large numbers of Poles and Russians hid in these caves to escape the Germans for extended periods of time and when studied showed strong improvement in health, especially oxygenation from the impact on their lungs cross all age groups.
Originally called Subterraneotherapy, doctors in the 1940s tested treatments in controlled environments around recirculated pulverized natural salt. The Halogenator which pulverizes and circulates the salt in Breathe Salt Rooms on Park Avenue where I am in the picture above is an nth iteration of their original machine.
The basic idea is that minutely pulverized salt mist cleans the lungs, respiratory system, and the skin extracting toxins and hyper-intensifying cellular cleaning. Unlike salt baths or wet inhalers, the dry mist reaches deeper into your respiratory and immune system.
Like most wellness therapies, Halotherapy moved into the mass market after being tested and adopted by pro sports teams and fitness gurus, then popularized through wellness practitioners. This is how I discovered Cryotherapy and more advanced procedures like PRP.
Personally, I find my lungs cleaner, my energy livelier with an immediate impact on my skin after each session in these caves.
Obviously the sensation is viscerally salty, yet in a pleasant, lip licking and cleansing way. You feel super clean and mentally more acute.
Spending an hour meditating every few weeks, deep breathing in a salt cave is an activity my body is learning to crave. When I travel, cryotherapy and salt caves are invariably on my search list of places to find.
These caves are not that easy to find even in New York. Most likely because of the costliness of the equipment and installations, and their relative newness as very few were available outside of Eastern Europe till around 2000.
At $40 per hour, once a month, this works for me. I simply feel better.
Each of us is well worth this one.
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Other posts on health and wellness:
A surprising experiment with Cryotherapy
