Salt and water. There is no mix, and nothing you have to buy.
My name is Ren Kagetsuki. The technique in this is entirely in the handling, and the step people skip is at the end rather than in the recipe.
Hyssop and herbs are not wrong. They are the container, and the container is not the content.
Filling it
The salt goes in while the water is running, not sprinkled on afterwards.
A handful of coarse sea salt, held in the stream from the tap so that it goes in dissolving. Plain salt, nothing added to it.
This is not decorative. Salt scattered on the surface sits on the surface, and you will get out having sat in a layer of it.
Hot enough to redden the skin, not so hot that you are counting the minutes. If you are rushing, the temperature is wrong.
Fifteen to twenty minutes. Longer is not better and is how people end up lightheaded.
The direction, and what upward means
Everything moves downward and off. That is the whole principle and people break it without noticing.
- Wash from the head down. Face and scalp first, feet last.
- Do not go back up. Once you have washed the shoulders, the shoulders are done.
- Do not put your head under the tap at the end. That is the commonest upward move and it is usually the last thing people do.
- Dry downward too. Head, body, legs, feet. Not feet first because it is nearer.
You are moving something off a body, not scrubbing a floor. The direction is the instruction.
The step almost everyone skips
The rinse.
People soak, pull the plug, and get out. That is half a bath.
The salt draws what is on you into the water. If you stand up out of that water without rinsing, it dries back onto the skin and you carry it to bed.
Stand under the shower before you get out, or pour clean water over yourself from the shoulders down. Thirty seconds is enough.
Head down. Clean water, no soap, nothing perfumed.
If one instruction on this page is worth having, it is this one, and it costs half a minute.
Afterwards
- The water goes straight down the drain and the room is aired. It has already left you and it is water.
- A clean towel each night, and the used ones washed separately at the end of the course. Nobody mentions the towel and it is the one thing that goes back on you.
- Nothing perfumed afterwards. No oil, no lotion, no scent, for that night.
- Bed, not the phone. Sleep is the second half of the working and screens take an hour off it.
The towel is the one that surprises people. You have spent twenty minutes moving something off and then wrapped yourself in the cloth you used yesterday.
If you have no bath
Most of the world does not, and this version is not a downgrade. It is what I would give anybody without a tub.
1. A bowl or a bucket of hot water, salt added while you fill it under the tap.
2. Standing in the shower, pour it over the shoulders in three or four goes, letting it run the full length of you each time.
3. Then rinse under the shower, head down, thirty seconds, clean water.
Even shorter, with nothing but a sink: salt in wet palms, worked over the back of the neck, both wrists and both ankles, then rinsed downward.
Thin, and it is the same act. I would rather somebody did the short version for seven nights than the full one twice.
Who should use the bowl instead
Twenty minutes in a hot bath is a real physical event, and for some people it is the wrong one.
If you are pregnant, if you have a heart condition or low blood pressure, or if you have been drinking, use the bowl version. It does the same work and it is not a lesser form.
I would rather be plain about that than have somebody faint in a bathroom on night three.
The floor, if you want it
The hoodoo form pairs the bath with a floor wash, and the Japanese habit is the same thing without the name.
Salt water in a bucket, a cloth, and you wash from the back of the house towards the door you use. Never towards the interior.
Then the water goes outside rather than down the sink, because that one has been used on the house rather than on a body.
Where the bath sits in the full course, night by night, is here: the seven nights, and what happens on the fourth.
If your tradition puts words to it, they go while you are in the water rather than before or after: the psalms read over this work.
And if seven nights of this buys you two weeks and then it comes back, tell me those two dates. That gap is the diagnosis.
