Metro Pulse/Cover/The Health & Fitness Issue

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Wanna Watsu?

Pins & Needles
Clinics treat allergies with acupuncture, acupressure

When the Last Fires Will Wave to You
The things that kill Knoxvillians before their time

Water-immersion massage may really float your boat

by Adrienne Martini

Debbie Ashton spends a great deal of time in water.

All of her hours immersed in the wet stuff suits her; Ashton looks as if she's rinsed away 10 or more of her self-confessed 50-plus years. She is at home in her own skin—and fully believes everyone can be, too.

Ashton believes that good old H2O may be the panacea for which the world has long searched. More powerful than the pull of gravity, able to build self-esteem in one single bound, water, it seems, can do almost everything but cure male-pattern baldness.

Of course, the benefit comes not just from the water, but from Ashton's ministrations while you are it. The voodoo that she doo so well is called watsu�, a word derived from slamming "water" and "shiatsu" together. It was created by the blandly named Harold Dull in 1980 at Harbin Hot Springs in sunny, crystal-loving Northern California. In the last 20 years, watsu has spread across the globe like kudzu across the south. Almost every state has at least one watsu practitioner and there are more than 1,400 worldwide.

Describing the experience of watsu is troublesome. Its proponents can sound like wishy-washy New Agers, breathily gushing about heart meridians and improved chi. Says Alexis Lee, a watsu instructor and therapist at Harbin: "The principles of watsu include letting the water do the work, moving with the breath and having total presence with the person in your arms a oneness is felt. This oneness extends far beyond giver and receiver to a oneness in their own universe."

While these descriptions shouldn't be openly scoffed at—after all, they are valid to those who always tend to describe things in such ways—they don't paint much of a picture of what is actually happening during a watsu session. Plus, the frank solidity of Ashton defies such ethereal terms.

"Solid" in the above sentence is not a polite way of saying "large." Ashton is built like a dancer, trim and muscular. Solid refers more to her connection to the earth; something about her just feels well grounded. Some of that may spring from her hard-edged accent that betrays her native home. While it has been softened over the years, her inflections still sound like New Jersey. Her manner can seem brusque and overly self-promotional to East Tennessee ears but is more a product of early environment than hubris.

Knoxville residents have probably seen Ashton's name quiet a few times, usually in advertisements for belly or ballroom dancing classes or Feldenkrais movement sessions. She holds a master's degree in dance and movement, and has been teaching both for 26 years. She was the first official person to bring Feldenkrais movement therapy to the Olympics, which she did for the kayak team during the Atlanta games. She also has her own line of water-therapy teaching videos and oversized exercise mats.

Watsu was not something Ashton discovered on her own, however. Nature's Pantry owner Ann Yates experienced watsu during a trip to Santa Fe's 10,000 Waves spa, where watsu water therapy is a regular menu item. Yates was a convert.

"[Yates] came to me, and said if I build the pool, will you go get the training?" Ashton says. "When I first saw watsu, I realized it was dance and therapy and water. I thought 'My God, it's me!'"

The first watsu pool in Knoxville was in Yates' backyard, which raised the eyebrows of her neighbors and, ultimately, had to stop being used for commercial purposes. But Yates' Well By Nature, the brightly-colored therapy center Yates built next to Nature's Pantry, offered a wonderful opportunity.

At its most basic, watsu is a floating massage, where the water becomes the practitioner's table. At Well by Nature the table is a 96-ish degree pool that is about the dimensions of a king-sized bed topped with two twin-sized mattresses. Unlike your standard swimming hole, the pool contains no chlorine and is kept pristine by an ozone and bromide filter.

This unconventional system, which makes the water feel more like a bath and less like a gym, brings with it some additional precautions. After donning your bathing togs, you'll be asked to shower to remove any lingering cosmetics, deodorants, hair productions, and general grime. Post-shower, you step into the pool, where Ashton tips you onto your back, puts a Styrofoam noodle under your knees, reassures you that your head will stay above the water, close your eyes, and float.

It is here that easy descriptions fail. In nice warm water, with your eyes shut and someone keeping your face out of the drink, time and gravity start to do weird little inversions. Imagine Dali's melting clocks coupled with a few of Magritte's puffy clouds and one of Picasso's dreaming women. Or that moment in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when the Heart of Gold kicks on its Improbability Drive, but not quite so campy. Or, to quote that deeply stoned sage in Steve Martin's L.A. Story, "Free your mind, and your body will follow," except, in fact, the nouns are reversed.

This inability to nail down a description surprises me. I am a self-avowed massage junkie constantly chasing the Zen-like three-day bliss I got from my first massage about a decade ago. I have even gone to one of Austin, Texas' massage schools, stopping just short of interning for my license because, by then, I'd discovered that touching naked strangers really wasn't my gig. That aborted career path, if nothing else, taught me how to describe a physical experience without resorting to hackneyed metaphors or whispy flummery. "That pertussion on my sacrum is really pokey and irritating." Clear and direct, without one mangled simile.

My massage monkey has driven me to try new therapies whenever a chance presents itself. I've been rolled up in foil like a baked potato and steamed a few times, which is about as pleasant as it sounds, been rubbed with hot and cold river rocks in the Arizona desert, which is more pleasant than it sounds but still not all that great, and, once, covered in algae and gauze, which I shall never, ever do again. I keep gravitating back toward plain ol' vanilla massage. While I haven't yet re-experienced that first-time buzz again, I have been remarkably enriched by the experience.

I went in to watsu as a skeptic, half-convinced that this was all just a bunch of smoke and mirrors, that the whole experience would add up to no more than my previous flirtations with new twists on the old massage form. At worst, I would emerge all pruney after a long, quiet soak.

Instead, what watsu was was all of the stretching and rubbing of a land-based massage done in the water, which somehow both lessens and intensifies the power of the therapist's touch. In the water, Ashton was able to fluidly contort my body in positions that most effectively stretched the muscles and released their constant tension but without ever causing me one moment's discomfort. The water's gentle lull also washed thought clean out of my mind. It was intensely relaxing, an effect that lingered through the next couple of days as well.

Watsu is good for the practitioner as well. "The warm water, that buoyant medium, makes it much easier for me, also. It's like a dance. It's very comforting to the patient and very kinesthetically pleasing to me," Ashton says. "Some of the best moments are when the person looks to me like they have goldfish fins."

While watsu gurus claim that this therapy can work some near-miracles to those afflicted with muscular and/or nervous degeneration like arthritis or fibromyalgia, what is provably true is that watsu can be incredibly relaxing for everybody. Folks with conditions that make table massage difficult can still receive its benefits if they watsu. And the near-weightless state is a perfect match for expectant moms.

"Even people who can't take traditional massage can take this," says Ashton. "It softens the touch."