Hydrotherapy & Aromatherapy

This past week I officially started at Northwest Noetic School of Massage! It started off a little boring as there was a lot a basic hygiene and school procedures we needed to go over, but we also had our first weekend class and it did not disappoint!

All day Saturday was devoted to lecture. It was fascinating to learn the history of both these fascinating forms of therapy!

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Hydrotherapy is simply defined as the 'therapeutic use of water' and for thousands of years different cultures have been using this method for healing since ancient Greek and Roman times to Native American sweat lodges. We learned techniques from using hot and cold compresses to hot stone treatments to ice massages to saunas. It's amazing how extensive this topic is and I feel like we barely touched the surface!

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Aromatherapy is the art and science of using essential oils for the purpose of detoxifying, rejuvenating, and enhancing/amplifying the body systems; with the intention of creating change. Now this was a topic I was a little more hesitant about and not very interested in, but I found it fascinating in the end nonetheless! Our teacher had degrees in natural medicine and had established her very own apothecary so she was clearly passionate about the topic! She got a little technical with some of the botanical and distillation details, but I love that I now know how to make my own massage oil!

All day Sunday we were given the chance to put into practice what we had learned the day before so we spent 8 hours giving each other spa treatments. It was a great weekend and I learned so much!

This is a steam cabinet we used. Basically it's a portable sauna and you can see the steam coming up from the opening at the neck! So cool.