12 Things I Learned in My Local Saunas

I come for the sweat, I stay for the chit-chat

Hot room. Hot topics. This is my happy place.

I’ve been sitting my sweaty ass in steam rooms and saunas for many years now. It’s a big part of my recovery ritual and it’s my favourite part of the morning, second to that first cup of coffee.

When saunas turn noisy with jabber, I used to give the stink-eye every talker, my hot temper weaving with the ribbons of heat in these intimate spaces. To me, these are sacred and silent sanctuaries in which to center myself.

But that all changed when I found the Vancouver Island Sauna Scene.

The Duncan and Nanaimo cedar benches are packed, wet-bum-to-bum with yappy, boisterous experts on everything. Patriotic Islanders itching to tell a newbie like me the laws of life. These two saunas I frequent daily are where I get my dose of eccentric education, both good…and not-so-good.

The majority of regulars are retired Island men—callused-handed former mill workers, builders, and fishermen—all healing aching joints from years of hard labour.

But a diverse lot of others also add their voices to the mix. There’s a young female nutritionist who gives me free consultation, a couple of body trainers with good dad-gut advice, a married couple who travel the world as missionaries, and a hilarious elderly Chinese woman who sells her dumplings from home—and guys, I got her number!

My morning routine is always the same:

Fifteen minutes in the intense steam room to practice breathing and meditate a bit, then an ice cold shower, and into the sauna to perspire out toxins and decompress. They say 15 minutes is sufficient to hit the joints and circulatory system…but a half hour is the magic time for the brain to stir, focus, and reset. Please don’t hold me to this—this is sauna talk, after all. But that’s what they say.

They also say a lot of other stuff.

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Here are 12 salty beads of wisdom I’ve picked up in the saunas:

1. How to shoot and skin a deer. I didn’t take notes, but it doesn’t sound pleasant.

2. Like a murder of crows and a school of fish, a group of porcupines is called a prickle.

3. Listen more, speak less. In life, in love, at work, everywhere. (The sauna might be an exception).

4. Buying one 375ml Mickey and a 200ml Mini of vodka together is called getting a “Disneyland”. Get it?

5. The benefits of Vipassana meditation and where to practice it in my town of Duncan.

6. The symptoms and hormonal shifts that affect women daily during menopausal change.

7. Fuck Justin Trudeau. OK, this isn’t exactly wisdom, but it’s said so frequently in the sauna that I have to include it in this list.

8. I need to keep the empty 4-litre tubs of ice cream I buy (yeah, I eat a lot of vanilla sundae concoctions), and keep them for shrimping season. Then take them down to the Island docks and get them filled up—fresh off the boats—for a decent price.

9. The effects of psilocybin mushrooms on addiction and spiritual growth, and how the stigma is getting in the way of perhaps a very profound treatment.

10. Some people think they don’t get asparagus pee—the pungent stink the vegetable gives your urine. But everyone has asparagus pee! Some just don’t have the olfactory gene to smell their own. (Or hopefully not others).

11. With their own share of problems, the two towns I sauna in have pretty unflattering nicknames. Duncan is forever known as Drunken Duncan and Nanaimo is the City Without Pity.

12. Proud of being “inkless” my whole life, I was continually told of the best tattoo artist in the Cowichan Valley. So I gave in, at 51 years, and with a nod to old school sailor design for where I now live, and the swallow birds representing new beginnings and hope, I recently had my daughters’ names etched on my shoulder. I really like it.

And in the sauna, it’s on full display every morning, while I listen to stories and sweat.