A PICTURE OF HEALTH
- Styling ZINN ZHOU
- Words ROBERT ITO
Xiaopeng Yuan photographs the world’s weirdest wellness cures.
HAY BATHS:
According to northern Italian lore, hay bathing began 300 years ago when local farmers fell asleep in an Alpine meadow in the Dolomites and woke up the following morning miraculously refreshed and pain-free. It must have been that sweet, scratchy hay, they figured, and hay bathing (or, in German, heubad) was born. A century ago, practitioners were placed in a pit in the ground and covered in heated heaps of the stuff. Today, spa-goers in Austria and Italy luxuriate in tubs filled with the finest mountain grasses and medicinal herbs, which have been soaked in hot water beforehand. Hay bathers are basically stewing in a tub of hot, wet grass—and no amount of soul-healing lavender and lady’s mantle is going to make that sound particularly pleasurable. Even so, fans of the practice swear by it, and claim it can help with a host of ills, from sciatica and rheumatism to obesity and digestive distress.
OTONAMAKI:
Otonamaki, literally “adult wrapping,” was invented in 2015 by Nobuko Watanabe, a Japanese midwife. In a typical 20-minute session, a person curls into a fetal ball, and is then tied up from head to toe inside of a white cotton mesh sheet. Thus cocooned, the client is rocked back and forth by a therapist, or put in a hammock, or simply placed atop a thin mat and left alone with their thoughts. Years ago, Watanabe observed how parents in Japan were concerned that swaddling their babies might make them claustrophobic, and came up with otonamaki as a way to reassure them it was fine. Along the way, people ended up liking it, and otonamaki is now credited with reducing stress, improving sleep and easing lower back pain. To the skeptical eye, however, otonomaki patients look like they have been trussed up by some backwoods madman, or perhaps wrapped in preparation for a burial at sea.
