Comfort & Relaxation Rituals
Reading aloud: an old evening habit worth returning to
In a top-floor flat in Pune, on the third night of the monsoon, a family of four sits after dinner with a...
Section
Comfort & Relaxation Rituals
Calming evening rituals, bath traditions, breath practices, and quiet comforts borrowed from older ways of living.
18 entries in this section
Comfort & Relaxation Rituals
Yuzu-yu and the herbal-flower bath
On the shortest day of the year, in the older neighborhoods of Kyoto and Osaka, the public bathhouses float whole yellow fruits...
Comfort & Relaxation Rituals
A warm eye compress in the evening
In a small flat above a bakery in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, a woman I know keeps a shallow enamel bowl...
Comfort & Relaxation Rituals
The tea ceremony moment: not the full ceremony, just the moment
My grandmother in Kyoto did not practise tea ceremony in the formal sense. She had no tatami room, no scroll on the...
Comfort & Relaxation Rituals
Steam inhalation: a kettle, a bowl, a towel
When the wind comes off the Atlantic in winter and the cold settles into Casablanca, my mother brings out a particular blue...
Comfort & Relaxation Rituals
Listening to rain: a season-specific calm
The monsoon in Bangalore is not a single event. It arrives in waves, sometimes three weeks of grey sky and steady afternoon...
Comfort & Relaxation Rituals
Sky watching: an old habit returning
There is a stone bench near my house in Kyoto, on the slope behind a small Shinto shrine, that points roughly southwest....
Comfort & Relaxation Rituals
Hand massage with warm oil: a small Sunday habit
My grandmother in Mysore had old hands, hands that had worked for seventy-five years, but they were never dry, and they did...
Comfort & Relaxation Rituals
Quiet music in the evenings
The radio in my parents' kitchen in Treviso was always on in the evenings, but always very quiet. You had to lean...
Comfort & Relaxation Rituals
Yoga nidra: rest as a practice
The first time I tried yoga nidra was in a small studio in Kyoto, on a Sunday afternoon in winter. The teacher,...
Comfort & Relaxation Rituals
Shavasana: lying down like it matters
My first yoga teacher in Kyoto was an Indian woman who had lived in Japan for twenty years. She ran her class...
Comfort & Relaxation Rituals
The Nordic sauna: heat, cold, repeat
The first sauna I ever sat in was on a lake in eastern Finland, built of dark wood that had silvered at...