The Salty Air

Our writer checked out the Bethesda Salt Cave

August 20, 2018 12:46 p.m.
Bethesda Salt Cave co-owners Janine Narayadu and her son, Max Bachmann. Photo by Deb Lindsey.

 

Janine Narayadu, a practicing massage therapist and native of South Africa, says she built the Bethesda Salt Cave for selfish reasons. To help with what she calls her “personal healing journey,” Narayadu—who’s in her late 50s and speaks with a soft accent—had been taking trips to manmade caves along the East Coast. She wanted to open her own massage space and wished she could visit a salt cave closer to her home in Potomac, so she opened the one in Bethesda in 2013.

Narayadu envisioned the cave as a place clients could use before or after she gave massage treatments. “The fact that it’s become a life of its own was never intentioned,” she says. Soon after opening, word spread, and people began asking if they might just come in for some time in the salted air.

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There are five massage rooms outside the salt cave where clients go for everything from facials to Reiki. The only class offered in the cave is salt yoga, which I went back for with a friend a week after visiting with my daughters. (Salt cave yoga is $25 for an introductory session; $95 for a package of five classes.) Staff instructor Erica Robinson guided us through a series of chest-openers, shoulder rinses and spinal twists. The goal was not to break a sweat, she said, but to encourage lots of deep, rhythmic breathing.

Yoga in the cave—awash in pink light from the salt lamps and away from the trammels of parenting—was like a participatory spa treatment. Though I did much of the work through breathing and movement, I felt as though I was the passive recipient of something like a facial or massage. Unfortunately, my earlier cave visit hadn’t prevented me from catching my daughters’ cold, but it still felt wonderful to inhale the salty air. I may even have felt a tingle in the deepest depths of my lungs. Or was that phlegm? Going upside down into a downward-facing dog pose still plugged my nose every time, but I did leave the class feeling pretty relaxed, and my friend swears that yoga in the cave cleared her sinuses.

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