“Launch a thirty-minute class after your most
popular yoga class and invite that class’s
participants to attend complimentary at first.”
– JESSICA CANDY, Spa Director, Four Seasons Resort Lanai
spa’s image and add dollars to your bot-
tom line.
Tapping into History
It’s worth noting that while meditation
has only become a fixture in Western
mainstream culture over the last dec-
ade, it has long been an important as-
pect of Western spa culture and a
number of Eastern cultures. Many reli-
gions around the world have long-es-
tablished associations with
meditation—while Hinduism and Bud-
dhism are perhaps the first that come
to mind, the Abrahamic religions all en-
gage in meditation to varying degrees.
(For example, compare the mind-clear-
ing mantras of Transcendental Med-
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itation with the repetition of the Chris-
tian Rosary.)
According to the ISPA Academy,
meditation in its modern form first ap-
peared at western spas beginning in
the 1950s. By the 1970s, researchers
were studying the possible health
benefits of meditation and designing
purpose-built meditation programs like
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction,
which was developed by the University
of Massachusetts to treat chronic pain,
according to the New York Times.
This is all to say: the role of med-
itation in mental wellbeing is nothing
new. Meditation has been used for
millennia as a way to “emerge into an
ever-increasing clear awareness of re-
ality” through “a state of focused at-
tention,” according to the ISPA
Academy. Its mental and physical
benefits—decreased stress and anx-
iety, lower blood pressure and in-
creased focus, attention span and
mental clarity—are well-documented.
The critical question, then, is “why
now?” Why has meditation finally en-
tered into Western mainstream cul-
ture, and why are spa-goers clamoring
for it?
“Stress levels are rising and the
pace of the American lifestyle are in-
creasing exponentially,” says Barbara
Stirewalt, general manager of Mohonk
Mountain House. Stirewalt has led
Mohonk’s spa since its inception in