2013 Wellness Challenge Week 24: Create Your Own Healthy Home Spa 

Going to the spa is a great way to release unwanted stress, but it’s also a great way to add extra guilt about spending a lot of money on relaxing.

It’s funny actually that we so often get buyer’s remorse for pampering ourselves. The way we view pampering these days is all wrong!

Rather than thinking about it as a selfish waste of money, we should prioritize these types of activities and include a wellness category in our monthly budget. But if we haven’t looked at wellness as a priority in our lives before, it certainly won’t happen overnight.

Monthly trips to the spa might be out of the question at this point, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still get the same experience in the (much cheaper) comfort of our own home.

What’s In a Healthy Home Spa?

Spa trips are all about restoring natural beauty, feeling great and relaxing so that we can show up as our best selves each and every day – renewed, restored and rejuvenated.

Although we might not have a massage therapist or other licensed professionals to guide us through self-care, there are plenty of things you can do on your own to create your own healthy home-spa experience.

Self Massage

In Ayurveda, the sister science of yoga, there’s a daily ritual called Abhyanga. This is essentially an oil self-massage. Choose a body oil that smells good and helps your skin feel soft and smooth and then gently massage it all over the body. This is essentially like putting on lotion in the morning, except more luxurious. Take some time here rather than rush through it. Really feel the healing power of your hands and work through any knots you might discover, especially in your neck and shoulders.

Meditation

If you think about it, getting a massage is a lot like meditation. You’re lying down on a table relaxing, breathing and quieting the mind and body. Take some time to sit or lie down quietly and work on your breathing at your home spa. Watch your breath rise and fall and notice how it almost immediately helps you feel better. Start with 5 minutes and then slowly work your way up to 10 or more.

Take Care of Your Face

Beauty and skincare products these days are filled with over 100,000 chemicals that have been formulated to match the properties of natural botanicals. Unfortunately, less than 20% of those chemicals have been tested for human safety and there are specifically 12 commonly used chemicals that are known carcinogenic toxins.

This is unnerving on its own, but even more so when you take into consideration that our bodies absorb 60% of what we put on our body. Your skin eats too!

Take a look at your skincare products, including facial cleansers, creams, body washes, shampoos, soaps, deodorant, sunscreen, and in your makeup bag and see if you can find any of the following ingredients. (Click on the image below to zoom in and read more.)

Pangea Organics Natural Beauty

Luckily, I recently re-discovered Pangea Organics, an ecocentric skin care line that offers all the benefits of anti-aging, anti-wrinkle, anti-acne and moisturizing that mass market skin care products offer without the chemicals. In fact, Pangea Organics uses the same botanicals that the synthetic, toxic chemicals are supposed to be replicating!

Best of all, the stuff works (and smells great). Every person who I’ve introduced it to so far has been very impressed with how it makes their skin feel. Plus, they feel great knowing they aren’t giving themselves cancer by washing their face.

Why do I want you to know about all this? Natural beauty is an important part of showing up feeling your best, confident self. If we don’t feel beautiful, we’ll hold ourselves back thinking we are less than other, more beautiful women out in the world. And that’s just not true! Feeling beautiful, pampered and relaxed is your birthright and taking care of your face in a healthy, supportive way is a great first step to increasing confidence in your life so that you can make a difference in others’ lives with strength and grace.

If you’re interested in learning more about Pangea Organics, and how you can slowly start replacing your chemical-filled bathroom with more natural, soothing, beautiful products, you can shop the line here or sign up for my webinar on natural beauty I’ll be holding on Tuesday, July 16.

The Importance of Ritual

Now that you have a plan for clearing your mind, restoring a natural glow to your healthy skin and rejuvenating your body, you’re ready to be your best, happy self!

But taking the time to do this once isn’t enough. For it to be completely effective, you must make your healthy home spa a ritual. Start monthly and then perhaps make it a bi-monthly affair. Eventually you may even be able to have a home spa weekly or daily.

Rituals in the West aren’t nearly as emphasized as they are in other cultures, and it’s a shame. Rituals give us a sense of continuity, something to look forward to and a sense of peace. They provide space for us in our lives to reflect, create, relax and connect to that deepest part of our selves that so often gets buried by to-do lists and daily minutiae.

Creating a ritual doesn’t have to be a grand affair, but it does take practice, preparation and commitment. While it may seem like one more thing to add to your already long list of responsibilities, time to relax and restore may be one of the most important add-ons you can give to yourself.

Let your home spa be fun, invite friends to share in on the relaxation, and get creative. What works for me might not work for others and that’s okay. There isn’t one right way to do it.

Add your own flair to your healthy home spa to make it your own. Consider taking time to:

  • Paint
  • Journal
  • Read
  • Craft
  • Take Pictures
  • Sing
  • Dance
  • Watch your favorite movie
  • Walk
  • Garden
  • Listen to music
  • Do nothing

Make sure whatever it is you choose to include in your home spa is fun and relaxing and not work-related or anything that would add more stress to your life. Remember, we’re trying to eliminate and reduce stress in our lives, not add more!

So what kind of things are you going to include in your home spa? Let me know in the comments below.