Warmth Among Strangers: The Healing Community of Saunas
TW: Eating disorder mention
I open the door and before my eyes adjust to the dark all I see are nude body parts illuminated by firelight. I walk past them and find a seat across the fire. I lie down on my towel and allow myself to take up space; I extend my legs, put my arms by my side, and close my eyes. Naked amongst strangers, this is a space where I feel safe.
I stay for a while, at least long enough that I notice my mind drifting to the space between wakefulness and dreaming. I force myself back to the present moment, I listen. The man lying across from the fire has fallen asleep, his breath has become a part of the soundscape and I find peace in its regularity. I try to match my own to the rhythm of his and find pleasure in this brief moment of solidarity with a man I will never know. The fire crackles, the wind howls. Every once in a while the wood creaks — most often because somebody moves, sometimes for no reason at all. The stomach of the man to my left rumbles and his partner chuckles. ‘Are you hungry?’ She whispers, I can hear the smile in her voice and can’t help smiling too.
Is it strange to say that I had missed the bodies of strangers?
In 2020, Leslie Jamison wrote a piece for the New York Times in which she describes her experience visiting public baths in Istanbul right before the pandemic. She goes into their history, muses on what we gain from their presence and what we will lose as a result of their absence. To this day, it is one of my favourite essays.
“Communal baths offer a microcosm of the promises of urban living: How does sharing spaces of pleasure help bind people together? What do we lose when we lose the ability to live among the bodies of strangers?”My mind wanders. A year into my relationship my partner pointed out the fact that though I had told her my love language was physical touch, she didn’t believe that it was. I pondered on this as the reality of it hit me. ‘It used to be,’ I replied, suddenly aware of a part of myself I had lost without noticing. I think about the pandemic, about how I went from sharing a bed with an ex-partner to apologising for sharing a sidewalk. I spent the first lockdown alone and didn’t hug my parents when I got home at the end of June, terrified that my touch might hurt them.
“When we lose the ability to live among the bodies of strangers, we don’t just lose the tribal solace of company, but the relief from solipsism — the elbow brush of other lives unfurling just beside our own, the reminder of other people’s daily survival, the reminder that there are literally seven billion other ways to be alive besides the particular way I am alive; that there are countless other ways to be lonely besides the particular ways I am lonely; other ways to hope, other ways to seek joy.”
Syng os en morgen, 2018, Sif Itona Westerberg
I lost the ability to live among strangers when my anorexia tightened its grip on me; when a forced lockdown gave me an excuse to hide and push people away as I convinced myself that I could do this alone. I refused to listen as my therapist repeated: ‘you are not an island, Marion.’ My unease existing among others was an unease existing within myself. I used to see myself as different people in different languages, different countries, at different times. Overwhelmed by the idea of letting every version of myself coexist in one body that I refused to let any of them exist at all. Part of my reluctance to gain the weight that I had lost was a fear of looking like the version of myself that they had touched.
“It can be easy to believe pain has a monopoly on profundity, that we access truth or salvation through suffering but perhaps the Western obsession with Turkish baths, in all its fantasizing and fetishizing, has been in part an attempt to claim pleasure as something more than indulgence, more like a mode of survival.”I think about my body, about the fact that I always considered myself to be in tune with it but am now realising a flaw in this belief. The truth is, I have only ever seen my body as a conduit. Continuously pushing it to its limits in order to release the feelings I was unable to hold. How fast can I run? How long can I starve? How often can I purge? Oscillating between physical extremes as a result of my inability to put my feelings into words.
Pleasure demands presence. It invites you to inhabit your body more fully; no part of you is held at remove.Pleasure and pain can share this characteristic, but for years I only allowed myself presence through the latter. The more I let myself feel present through pleasure, the more I learn that releasing emotions is not the same as feeling them.
The sauna teaches me this; the joy of taking up space and sharing space. Lying still in pleasure, lying still amongst strangers — I learn to inhabit my body fully. Here, bodies are just bodies and they are both the most and least important thing in the world.
I come back to myself, every single version of her. I have been in here long enough that it has emptied and filled up a couple of times since my arrival. The man across from me is still sleeping, the fire still crackling, the wind still howling. I find comfort in this consistency, but I am learning to find comfort in change.
I decide to leave.
