Every once in a while – and remember I have massages like most people have sandwiches – I have a truly memorable treatment. It’s not so much the treatment itself (although it can be) but mostly it’s the aftermath. I had such a massage the other day at the Sequoia Spa at the Grove in Hertfordshire. It’s a rather glamorous spa with a huge local following, so I knew it was going to be professional – what I did not expect was what it did to my body. It was one of their signature massages, a Thai compress job. Now I have had any number of these before, where hot compresses of herbs and rice are pounded or smoothed onto your body to help relax the muscles before the therapist goes to work. A lovely stream of hot oil was drizzled on my aching shoulders and then massaged in with deep strong strokes, and then the compresses were called into play again. I felt relaxed afterwards and kept the oil on for a couple of hours to benefit from it. I did what I was told and drank huge amounts of water before and during dinner, and was thrilled to notice that all the tension had disappeared from my shoulders and that pain at the base of my spine was hardly there.
And then…I woke in the middle of the night with what felt like red hot iron bars going from my neck up to my head. If I hadn’t felt like this before, I would have been worried – a migraine? a brain tumour? The imagination runs riot at 4.a.m. No, it was my toxic body trying to clear itself. For what happened was the massage was so good, so thorough and so right that it was releasing the toxins I was holding hostage. I drank a few more gallons of water, and kept doing so for the next 24 hours, for that is how long it took for me to revert to what I term normal. My body still feels looser and relaxed and I have vowed to get the train to Watford as often as I possibly could and book Chris for this treatment – he is a really gifted therapist.
www.thegrove.co.uk
