The country of Finland (no, I’ve never been) has one sauna for every 1.6 people in the country. Every house has one. Public saunas are everywhere. One reason is heritage: It’s an essential part of their culture. But the other is a point of health that seems to be lost on many Americans. The body needs to sweat. Doing so rids our systems of acids and impurities.
We think of saunas as a luxury for fancy people and places, just a way of pampering ourselves. We don’t think of the health benefits and how many Americans will go the whole of winter without sweating a drop. Then we wonder why we are stiff, gouty, have early-onset arthritis, and get reliably sick every season.
Preparing for winter, I thought that I would try it. Sure, I can vaguely recall passing through one or two in my life for a bit, but I never understood the appeal. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I might be missing out on something essential in life. As it turns out, there is a sauna in town, and I figured that I would check it out.
You walk in and take off your shoes. This is a place mostly appealing to Koreans, so that’s cultural and makes sense. Then you go to the sex-segregated locker rooms (nothing trans going on) and put your clothing in another locker and wear the key on your wrist. You can wear shorts and a shirt that they provide or put on a robe or just wear a towel or whatever. Nothing weird about this at all.
Then you face a choice: dry or wet sauna. Not knowing what to do, I asked around, and several people recommended the dry sauna first. For how long? Well, this is where it gets tricky. Several people said to stay in as long as you can handle it, which is usually about 45 minutes.
So there I went. The blast of hot air hits you immediately, as if you were walking out of a casino in Las Vegas on a hot day. The temperature, as I gather, is several degrees above the normal human body temperature. Let’s say 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It feels like a sunny day without the possibility of sunburn. Apparently, it’s more than just the heat; it’s also the way the UV light interacts with the body, some science thing I don’t understand.
At first, nothing happens. Then it briefly becomes boring. You have no book, no cellphone, no images on the walls, no music; it is just you, on a bench, staring at nothing. The world stops.
It occurred to me that this was highly unusual. I’m almost always doing something. In this setting, I was doing nothing but sitting.
This is what solitude feels like: alone, no sound, no images, nothing external besides four walls, my body, and this heat. Otherwise, it was just silence. It was briefly terrifying. I thought that perhaps I would try what people call meditation, but not really knowing what that is, I’m not sure that I succeeded.
Then it occurred to me that perhaps meditating is a close cousin to just thinking and that I’m pretty good at that. So I decided to think.
What about? Mostly I just thought that I would like time to pass and to more quickly get from my present state to the sauna state, whatever that is. But this, too, was strange because there was no clock and I had no watch. Could I depend on my internal clock to guide me? If so, was this something I should do consciously, or is there something in our brains or bodies that vaguely keeps time?
Am I keeping time? Does anyone really know what time it is?
Suddenly I realized that in the stillness of nothingness on repeat, my internal clock was not working. Lacking any external clues, I was genuinely not sure if I had been sitting there for three minutes or eight minutes. I finally settled on the idea that I had been there five minutes, but I’m not sure why this mattered because I wasn’t sure how long I should be there anyway.
Better to forget all that and go back to meditation (er ... thinking) or at least give it another try.
Then it happened. The first drop of sweat fell down my back. It was cold and it stunned and then delighted me, like the way the first kernel of popped corn is a foreshadowing of the cacophony to come. Then it happened again. More beads of sweat and then more. Now we had some action and something to which I could pay attention.
As a new part of your body starts cranking out the sweat, which I am glad to think of as toxins, that part gets just a bit sizzly and tingling. It happened to my scalp. Sure enough, the scalp started sweating. Then the feet, same thing. Then I wondered what other parts were yet to pop forth and I thought of the back of my head and foot. Sure enough, they, too, had beads all over them.
Keep in mind that this is not like the shower or the pool. You are eventually soaked in water but the room is entirely dry. What this means is that every bit of the water around you and now dripping on the floor comes from within. That’s an awesome fact to consider.
Conscious of every tiny thing that was happening, I took note of how my jaw was unclenched and droopy and how my mouth was fully open. I never do this, and I wondered why it was happening. I could not figure it out but did not want to close my mouth. Every instinct in me told me to just let it hang there. So I just left it that way, figuring that it had something to do with needing extra oxygen.
After a time, a lady came to check on me and encouraged me to lie down on the floor with a pillow. That’s what she called it, but it was really a round stone that fit in my neck. She also left me a means of telling time. It was an hourglass like those used in the Middle Ages. The sand would flow from top to bottom in 20 minutes, she said.
I was fully delighted by this old tech, and my mind raced back to before there were clocks on the walls and in the city center and instead there were only sundials and hourglasses. Something seems humane about that. Fixed up with my rock pillow and my hourglass, I was ready for the long haul.
About halfway through the first flipping of the hourglass, something inside told me that it was time to flee this hotbox. And so it was. I went straight to the room across the hall. This was the wet sauna, sometimes called a steam room.
Opening the door to the wet sauna, it was overwhelming. I could see nothing but white steam. Not even the hand in front of my face was visible. Also it struck me as fully 10 degrees hotter than the dry sauna, which means that it posed a genuine challenge. I could vaguely make out that there were benches on the side of the room and found a seat.
I called out to see if anyone else was there, but there was no answer. Either I was alone or the other person had already passed out. Maybe there was a dead man there, but this was not my problem at the moment.
That’s when the water really began to flow. I was soaked in many layers from head to toe, breathing heavily and wondering what was happening. It was all deeply mysterious and somewhat alarming, that mix of high heat and a floating sensation that comes with sitting in a cloud of thick vapor, like the stuff you see out the airplane window, plus the utter lack of visibility. I even wondered if I could find the door.
There was no chance of telling time in there, so I imagined 15 minutes, perhaps, and headed to the door. Going into the hallway I was confronted with actual normalcy, a space without strange fogs and heat, and it was shocking. Stumbling down the hallway and getting dressed again, I wondered what had happened, if anything.
I will say this: After I got my bearings, I felt light as a feather and newly energized. I think that I’ve found it, the path to making it through the winter months with my health and well-being intact. I sense that these people are going to be seeing more of me in the future.
It seems like Finland has it right: One sauna for every 1.6 people seems like a civilized number. Notice that there is no Make Finland Healthy Again movement. They don’t need that. They have saunas.
