Aquaterra Therapies
Formerly Healing Waters
My Story
“If you love what you do, you’ll never work another day in your life.”
Maybe it was in a fortune cookie where I first read this old Chinese proverb. I pondered never having thought of “work” in this way but was titillated by the concept that in doing work you love, you are actually released from it!
For many folks, as well as for me, my fondest memories of rest and recreation are centered around a body of water. I learned formal swimming strokes and breathing long after I learned to swim. As a native of the N.C. Piedmont, my summers growing up were spent at, in or on Kerr Lake. Before my parents finished our lake cabin we’d take a week or two at N. Myrtle Beach. “SeaWaves Efficiencies”, to be specific.
A pleasant two-story cinder-block property painted pink and sea-foam green. Only one problem—NO SWIMMING POOL!—well, save the Atlantic Ocean, but as kids we wanted a cement pond with a diving board! The high rise next door happened to have this very amenity and I was envious! The second day when we came in from the beach for lunch, I took a little detour – you guess it – to the pool next door. I was three. My absence soon discovered caused some hysterics, whereupon my brothers were ordered back to the beach to find me. As my parents scanned the beach from the second story balcony, my father spotted my red, polka-dot swimsuit on the diving board next door. My mother shrieked and demanded he do something but he said ‘wait…just watch’ and off I went, out of sight under the surface of the water. Instinctively, I scrambled and bobbed to the top, doggy-paddled to the ladder and joined the line to do it again. My mother said she lost a year of her life that day. However, for me, waters’ call has been a siren’s song ever since.
A bit older, Synchronized Swimming and Water-Skiing were loves of mine so when my cousin invited me to water aerobics I ‘jumped right in’, so to speak. I couldn’t believe the effort required and the workout was the most fun I’d had at a gym in my life! I found a certification course and began teaching exercise in the water as soon as I was qualified. After years of recreation in the water, I already understood the properties of water and how they facilitate free movement. Teaching everywhere from the Country Club to the City Pools, I came to realize folks came to the water as much to heal as to exercise. Many, because of former injuries or advancing age, needed a kinder, gentler environment in which to condition. The Aquatic Coordinator at one of the pools where I taught went to Oregon to train in something called “WATSU®” and came back saying she had obviously gone there ‘for me’. She said she’d never seen a more likely fit than me and this new therapy in the water called WATSU® and that she just ‘knew’. Taken with her exuberance, I agreed to give it a try. Early in my first session of this floating massage, I ‘knew’ too. I knew I’d never felt this way and I knew that WATSU® had addressed a primordial yearning. I knew why she was so ecstatic and I knew it was for me.
I was born under the sign of Aquarius, the water-bearer. As such, in 1999 I opened the first WATSU®-specific pool in the region in my home in Orange County. I welcome clients to my floating massage table where you may immerse yourself in the most ancient, life-giving and life-sustaining element. Time stands still in the quiet comfort of the water where you lose the weight of gravity, the world, its agendas and demands allowing you to experience wholeness, peace and a renewed appreciation of the wonder of you. WATSU® is often described as an experience of returning to the womb. Take into consideration the concept that we all began life as aqueous creatures and this follows perfectly. (It is also why at three years of age, I had the ability to negotiate in the water without having been taught how to swim.) It’s a great fortune indeed to know and share with others, a path back to our original perfection and security!
So my life’s offering is WATSU® and bodywork, a vocation so rewarding and for which I have such passion that I can’t really call it work. It is joyous to find myself submerged in what has drawn me all my life. At last, I intimately relate to the once perplexing proverb: “If you love what you do, you will never work another day in your life”.