Hot Stone Massage

Who would even think that hot stone massage already existed thousands of years ago?  I wouldn’t.  I’d rather believe that it only started to exist when computers started sitting in our cozy little homes.  I can’t exactly picture the kinds of stressors our ancestors might have lived with throughout those ancient, non-techie times; but I’d suppose it was far less stressful than the kind of life we live in right now.

Hot stone massage has been used since 4,000 years ago by the Chinese people to help relieve their muscle pain.  Archaeologists were also able to dig up this old jade massage knuckles from China.  They estimated it to be around a thousand-years old.  These massage tools are considered wonders to the work-enslaved individual these days.  I never thought that it can date back to as far as a thousand years ago.

Hot stone massage is quite interesting to me.  I’ve seen it on TV when I was still a kid, and I’ve always wondered why some crazy guy would want to pay some other guy to put odd-looking stones, which looked heavy, on his back.  I’ve always wondered how these burdening stones helped in taking the pain away.

It was just recently that I tried hot stone massage myself.  I sure wished I had tried it sooner because it was the kind of break I needed from my student-slash-employee kind of life.  That hot stone massage moment I received answered all the musings I had when I was a kid.

The stones that they used were basalt.  Basalt is an igneous rock, formed from cooled magma. They are the stones of choice because they can retain heat for a relatively longer time.  They also used smooth and rounded stones while massaging the body.  It was quite a fancy because they vary in shape, and each stone shape suits a specific type of massage.  Stones which appear to be a little porous were more for stone placement treatment.  Rough, porous ones are used because soothing oils are infused into the openings of the rock so that it seeps through the skin when placed on the body.

These stones are water-treated, and are kept at 120°F to 140ºF.

The benefits of hot stone massage and hot stone placement are tremendous.  You wouldn’t even imagine what these shiny black rocks can do!  We’ve got a number of benefits, like:

increases extensibility of collagen fibers
decreases chronic joint stiffness
eases muscle tension and spasm
increases blood flow
increases draining of lymph fluids
releases toxins and wastes products of muscle contraction

And the best thing about the entire treatment was that it relaxed my anxious mind.  It felt terribly relaxing that I didn’t want to leave the place.  Each stroke had the perfect pressure and a relieving amount of heat I wanted, as compared to the plain use of hands.  It’s not that the typical massage is less effective… it’s just that having a hot stone massage felt like an exciting type of treat for the body.