Cosmic Prose

Natasha Regehr

Tag: massage

2016 Gratitude List

October 10, 2016 / / 1 Comment

I am thankful for the big things: the people who make my world beautiful every day, both here in Morocco and in my other happy home in Canada; for the many places in between that I’ve been able to visit this year (twelve airports, if I’ve counted correctly!); for the rich cultures and histories that intersect my days; for meaningful work; and for the provisions that allow me to keep on living this colourful, promising life.

But every Thanksgiving, I take a few hours to collect all the smaller thanksgivings I’ve recorded throughout the year as well – those things that, at the end of each day, remind me that there is always, always a little goodness to be found, or to create, with a small turn of the mind.

Here, then, is my 2016 Gratitude List, beginning with last year’s Thanksgiving trip to an all-inclusive resort in Southern Morocco, and ending with yesterday’s roast chicken at home. I invite you to walk through my year of thankfulness with me: Continue reading

Tonique!

November 21, 2015 / / 2 Comments

What do Canadian teachers do when Morocco grants them a Wednesday off to celebrate Independence Day? Why, they go to the spa, of course, to work out all the knots and kinks acquired on Monday and Tuesday.  This knotty exposé (the closest to kinky prose you will ever find on this site) explores one woman’s search for the nonexistent no-man’s-land between “relaxant” (relaxing) and “tonic” (???) massage.  Relax, dear reader, and enjoy the show.

IMG_3582Massage in Canada involves sheets and undergarments.  Not so in Morocco.

I should have been prepared for this.  I discovered at the doctor’s office that those modesty-inducing hospital gowns are nowhere on the Moroccan radar.  I made a similar discovery at the esthetician’s and at the hammam.  Why would I think massage would be any different?

I will not trouble you with an exhaustive narrative of the experience; I will simply provide you with a helpful chart for future reference.  I suggest you print it, laminate it and keep it in your purse; it will be an invaluable aid next time you are considering an afternoon of pampering in Casablanca:

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I Feel a Hammam Coming On

August 29, 2015 / / 1 Comment

IMG_3359It wasn’t until I moved to a hot, dusty country that I understood the significance of footwashing in ancient civilizations. Unlike the symbolic ceremonies sometimes observed today, this was no delicate ritual; it was a yucky, gritty, never-ending necessity.

I know this because occasionally my soft, Western feet leave the smooth asphalt of my campus paradise and venture to the little hanout in the village on the other side of the wall. Within ten steps, my feet are filthy – so filthy that I now own special dirt shoes (fake crocs, to be precise), which I reserve solely for dirty walks in dirty places. When I get home, I head straight to the bathtub and hose my feet down, shoes and all. That is why there is pretty much always a set of plastic footwear drying in my washroom.

Oh, but I wish someone had advised me to buy dirt shoes before my first trip to the Hay Hassani souk, which was such a smorgasbord for the eyes that it never once occurred to me to direct my gaze downward – until I found that I had stepped in a puddle of – something – and that the contents of said puddle (“puddle” being a generous descriptor of the many animal and vegetable liquids potentially decomposing on the premises) would squish and squirt out of my sticky sandals for the next six hours.

Yes. I went home and washed my feet. Thrice. And I felt terribly, terribly sorry for anyone who might possibly have the morbid task of washing the feet of others in similar conditions. No wonder it was a servant’s job.

Now, we as Westerners pride ourselves on our fetish for personal hygiene. We live ultra-purified lives and equate uncleanliness with poverty, misfortune, and destitution. We sidestep anyone and anything that we consider soiled, and wonder how they can stand to live in their own filth. But today I had an experience that takes our sanitized self-image and turns it on its head. I went to a hammam.

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Yoga Prose

August 16, 2014 / / 0 Comments

 Yoga, I am convinced, has rescued me from a lifetime of back pain and immobility; but my first few sun salutations were more laughable than laudable.  Here’s a story from many years back; I won’t say how many, to protect the identity of my esteemed yogi. . .

I went to yoga tonight because I had nothing better to do, and because I have a policy of forcing myself to see at least one human face each day besides my own. If I manage to leave my property in the process, I have done well.

I have been to a few yoga classes before, and a few million pseudo-yoga classes – those would be the ones with instructors who are athletes, not weirded-out hippies. In my last real yoga class, I was apparently unable to feel the earth’s energy sufficiently to have correct elbow-wrist alignment in my downward dog (a pose I had perfected in pseudo-yoga, or so I thought).  In my previous class, the instructor had required different poses for women whose uteri were in different states. “That,” I had thought, “is none of your business, lady.” Then she had chastised me for choosing the wrong pose. I didn’t go back for three years.

But tonight I was in that annoying frame of mind that is characterized by both lethargy and restlessnesss, and since the neighbour and the paper boy don’t count as human faces in my anti-isolation policy, off I went.

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