Vibe Maxing at Othership
From the weirdly shaped and chaotic entry on 20th street, we were corralled into the locker rooms where we stripped, donned bathing suits, left our phones in lockers, and were then directed into an even weirder shaped room lined with cushioned tiers and that, once everyone was there, all fifty of us or so, all in swim apparel, the room felt like it might be some kind of chamber for Roman decadence, like a vomitorium—if not the orgy dome.
But this is a modern spa after all, and decadence is condensed into pure vibes. We were told to relax and offered complementary tea to drink. The crowd was twenty-something (except for me and my partner and her brother, who are no longer in our twenties, or our thirties for that matter) and ranged in skin tones from tan to brown to black, and seemed to be, at that moment, vibe-maxing—at least as much as one can among nearly naked strangers (nearly naked Americans are not quite as comfortable as your nearly naked European). Despite the soft-glow of the recessed mood lighting, there is a degree of discomfort in the room, as if we are collectively unsure of what was about to happen.
Othership, as their website copy declares, offers “otherworldly sauna and ice bath experiences for human beings to feel good now.” This makes me think of the 1989 Mötley Crüe song Dr. Feelgood, a song whose title alone suggested, to my ten-year-old self, all that was sexual in feeling good: where feeling good was sexual and to be sexual was to feel good; I don’t think that’s a bad definition.
“Othership is a modern bathhouse to regulate your nervous system, process emotions and connect meaningfully with other human beings.” It is a modern bathhouse as opposed to an old one like the Turkish and Russian baths on 10th in the lower east side. That bathhouse, in operation for over a hundred and thirty years, with its rank odors and illegally hot saunas, is fairly gnarly by comparison: one goes there because it is so gnarly. Here at othership, all gnarliness has been excised with an antiseptic precision. This is the domain of wellness after all and, like the curved chutes that Temple Granden had designed to placate stockyard cattle, all the edges here have been made smooth and curvilinear.
So, like a herd of young and attractive livestock, we are corralled again into the sauna room which is the biggest sauna I had ever been in, with its huge black stove hulking in the center and making the air waver overhead. We sit in numbered batches on tiered cedar benches. The shepherd and guide to our sauna experience is androgynous and Scandinavian and makes a near perfect imitation of Peter Pan as played by Mary Martins in Peter Pan (1960). She tells us how to regulate our nervous system and our emotions by regulating our breathing. There is the sense in which many people here are learning how to breath, as if for the first time. We are told to take long deep intakes of breath then to take a final sip at the top and we do this for some minutes.
We are told to feel our bodies, in a very literal way by tapping our sternum, our cheekbones and our thighs. Grapefruit and Lavander essential oil infused snowballs are dashed upon the surface of the hot stove so that the room is full of aromatic clouds. I am now sweating all over and have achieved that forehead-prickly discomfort familiar to me from every sauna I’ve been in: a sense of panic, or suffocation, my body telling me that it’s just too hot.
It is at this point that Aurdre Lorde’s dictum, self-care as an act of political warfare, crash lands in my mind like an alien spacecraft. For whatever reason it seems like the most profound statement of all time. But it is a statement that, in this environment, seems likewise to cancel itself out; self-care now, in 2025, a global industry valued at an estimated seven trillion dollars, is antithetical to political warfare, it is, in fact, politically complacent and therefore attendant to the ruling class and the ruling systems of profit and exploitation. Like a vampire selling you a gauze bandage, the system exploits us and antagonizes us and then sells us techniques for alleviating our anxiety and despair. Such is the mood of toxic positivity.
Nevertheless, at the day-to-day level, the techniques tend to work. In the sauna one is sweating out one’s literal toxicity, and perhaps the day’s mental toxicity as well; mental accretions, bad vibes, stuck thoughts: as the body circulates, so does the mind. This is the lesson that Othership is attempting to teach its participants. In a culture in which the body is often a foregone conclusion, a kind of accessory appendage to your smart phone, it is an idea that is too easily forgotten, or denied altogether.
If you had not sweated out your stuck mental energy, you will most definitely get rid of it in the ice bath plunge. So we were lead out of the sauna in small groups and brought to a another long room of various pools and were allowed to step down and submerge into this icy water. Taking cold showers or plunging into wintery lake water can amount to a kind of Buddhist mental experiment in which you attempt to embrace the shock without freaking out. I tend to have a terror of cold water and so to allow myself the experience and the intensity of the feeling without panicking reveals the line between the ego and perception/awareness.
Cold water can do in an instant what a sitting meditation does over twenty minutes; the habitual loops of thought are momentarily disabled; replaced by pure raging sensation. Nick Cave (the musician) in conversation with Bella Freud, described how cold water swimming chases all the devils off. Bella Freud, who also takes cold showers regularly, agreed with this, describing it as a kind of temporary antidote to neurosis. In any case, whatever thoughts had been circulating my brain-pan vanished as I lowered my body down into the cold luminous water. I was breathing too loudly and was shushed by an attendant: there is no shrieking or gasping allowed in the ice baths.
Transported once more into the hot sauna, the endorphins were blooming all along my body. Curiously I have no great memory of this post-ice bath euphoria, except that it happened. Whatever pleasure is manifest in the body alone, at any given moment, and that in the winter months we would call coziness, became at that time the prevailing feeling; the pleasure of the body itself as itself.
The session ended, I found myself outside showered and dressed, standing in the rain, with my clothes having that clumpy too-tight, too-hot feeling that always follows the sauna. In the distance, down on 5fth avenue, a crowd was shouting and marching: was it a protest? We walked down into a streaming crowd of tens of thousands of people dressed in pink, orange and saffron clothing, singing in the rain, walking down the avenue canyon under the brand-name signs: it was a Hari Krishna parade.
