It’s a purifying day in the neighborhood

It wasn’t so long ago that aromatherapy was associated with extreme New Age practitioners, and “massage” conjured thoughts of illicit activity and visits from the vice squad. Today, aromatherapy, massage and a host of formerly esoteric body and skin care practices are so mainstream, it’s hard to remember their beginnings.

But Southern Californians can experience many grooming and beauty rituals, some of which have yet to be “discovered” by posh Westside salons, in settings that evoke their origins -- our thriving ethnic communities where the treatments are part of the social and spiritual fabric. Neighborhood spas throughout the city offer steam baths, saunas and scrubs that remain virtually unchanged after import.

Many spas function as social centers where customers can find a corporal connection to their cultural ideals of beauty and health. Nothing says “home” quite like having a good sweat, a swig of icy water and a refreshing nap.

Even as an outsider, visiting a spa provides a kind of cultural immersion. So what if you can’t understand a word? There’s a palpable familiarity to the rhythm of interaction and tone of conversation when people are complaining about money, kids and spouses as they bathe away the day’s stress.

The need to beautify or even purify communally is a hallmark of nearly every culture -- except, perhaps, America’s Puritan settlers, who were easily distressed by matters of the flesh. Not until vast groups of immigrants imported their practices did Middle America embrace the sauna, therapeutic massage and circulation-enhancing scrubs.

“Every culture has some sort of day spa,” says Hanelore Leavy, executive director and founder of the Day Spa Assn. in Union City, N.J. “There were the Turkish baths, the Japanese bathhouses, the Swedish sauna and the cure centers in Europe where you took the waters and maybe a massage.” It’s fair to say that today’s day spa wouldn’t exist without ethnic communities providing a gateway to the spa experience.

Today, mainstream spas routinely look to alternative cultures for innovation. Some facilities are adding the yoga-like stretches of Thai massage to their menus. Others offer a range of Asian services, including the once-rare Korean akasuri scrub.

However, as some of the techniques are assimilated, some of the native flavors are rinsed away. The baby pictures on the wall vanish, American taboos against nudity reappear, and prices inevitably rise. Going to the source -- Koreatown, Little Tokyo or Thai Town -- for spa treatments offers a greater opportunity for authentic technique and materials. As a result, each treatment promises a fresh body and a fresh appreciation of how other cultures find joy in their sanctuaries of soap and scrubbing. All it takes is a bit of time, money and (sometimes) a high threshold for pain. Everybody, it seems, suffers for beauty.

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Korean soul cleansing

Midmorning in Koreatown, and I’m naked and blindfolded and surrounded by women in black briefs and bras.

It only seems like the start of a strange sex ritual. I’m at the women-only Olympic Spa, laid out on a vinyl-upholstered table for a vigorous skin scrub called akasuri.

In preparation for my first visit to a Korean spa, I had called every spa-junkie I knew for guidance and reassurance. I was told about the attendants’ underwear uniforms and to expect a “beautiful celebration of the human form” and “to have the bejesus scrubbed out of you.” Correct on all counts.

Literature for this spa explains that, “in the West, one goes to cleanse the body. In Asia, one goes to cleanse the soul.”

It’s a lot of work getting to your soul.

Inside the main room of the spa, nude Asian women of all ages perch on low plastic stools around a central trough. Using rough mittens or scratchy sponges, they scrub every inch of their skin, or their neighbor’s back, then rinse with bowls of water scooped from the trough. These are the do-it-yourselfers, who by tradition or economics scrub in the company of friends instead of spa professionals.

The $15 spa fee includes unlimited visits to many steam rooms, saunas and hot and cold dips, all centralized in one large room. Each steam or bath is said to impart special soothing properties. I start with a detoxifying sweat in a sauna lined with “Asian oxygen stone” (which is supposed to have moisturizing properties) and heated with charcoal derived from the ubame-gashi tree. In an herbal steam sauna, I felt like a royal princess, sweating onto its luxuriant lining of semi-precious jade slabs. I was tempted to stir in cream and sugar as I soaked in the communal mugwort tea bath, a deep, extra-hot, greenish-blackish, astringent solution that’s said to aid circulation and decrease infection and a host of other ailments.

Following orders to shower between each station, I complete an hourlong circuit of hot and cold immersions, figuring I am fortified for my $100 Milk and Honey Smoothie treatment, which includes the akasuri and post-scrub skin nourishing.

Led to an alcove of five vinyl-covered tables, I stretch out nude and am grateful for the blindfold that makes me feel invisible to the adjacent four naked women and their bikini-clad attendants. For the next 25 minutes, I am scrubbed with an intensity bordering on Geneva Convention limits. You’d never cause your own body this much pain, except maybe to walk in stilettos. (And if you have sensitive skin or any skin ailments, you might want to skip it.) The technician’s commands to turn over are communicated with swats to my posterior.

I dare once to peek at the process as the sturdy woman with rough silk mitts works down my forearms, exfoliating as she goes. What, I wondered, were those little gray balls rolling off the table? (Turns out it’s my dead skin.)

To soothe my freshly scoured skin, during the subsequent hourlong massage, my attendant splashes me with a milk bath, slathers me with pineapple cream, coats my face with crushed cucumber and scrubs me with a brown sugar masque. I feel ready to be baked for an hour till crispy. Instead, she finishes my treatment with a thorough shampoo, pulls me upright, ties my hair in a top knot, tucks me into a towel and kimono, and launches me toward the resting area. I plop onto a quilt on the heated jade floor and fall deeply, blissfully, snoringly asleep.

I make no apologies for my lack of productive work for the rest of that day.

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Pressure points

Fancy spas always seem to employ a chatterbox who unburdens her soul during my $2-a-minute massage. Thus, I secretly hope for a language barrier during my hour of shiatsu massage at Tawa’s Shiatsu Spa, a spare storefront in downtown’s Little Tokyo. The receptionist is fluent in English, but my masseuse isn’t. She is, however, expert in nonverbal communication. I don’t have to tell her where it hurts; she finds the taut spots on her own. The blissful silence is interrupted only for short English commands to change my position.

In Japanese, shi means finger and atsu means pressure. By means of precisely placed fingers, the technique also involves feet, knees and, I swear, shins and elbows that pinpoint my knots and nooks of stress. Though this spa caters mostly to men, who pay an additional $15 to access the saunas, hot tub, showers and cold dip, women can have 45- or 60-minute shiatsu in two large private rooms. The decor consists of dusty pink curtains, a wall clock and a narrow foam futon mattress laid directly on the beige carpeting. Luxe it is not.

To begin, I slip into baggy boxer shorts and toss a tiny terry towel onto my bare back. The room is inches from the corner of 1st and Central, an intersection where sirens wail and rush-hour buses shake the paneling. I don’t care. It keeps me alert.

My trim masseuse at Tawa’s is so petite that I am a little surprised how her heels deliver a wallop to my tightly wound hamstrings. With my eyes shielded by a second towel, I can’t peek at her technique, but I hear something that sounds hollow and metal. After the session, I realize my masseuse had used an aluminum walker to support her body weight as she walked along my back and legs.

I have to admire her agility, and her determination. This lady doesn’t give up on my gnarly knots. Using kneecap pressure on my largest muscles, assisted stretching and a soothing scalp and temple massage administered through the towel, she turns taut fibers into floppy soba noodles.

The session focuses on distinct body systems: bones (like the crunchy bits in my feet), muscles and organs (including work on my abdomen). Considering that no more than five words are exchanged, the session is artfully choreographed -- and easy. I didn’t have to call days in advance for an appointment, employ tricky breathing patterns or get greasy with stinky oils. I emerge knot-free, workplace ready and soothed into the kind of patient person who listens to the world’s problems.

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Bliss of the shvitz

After my first-timer’s tour of the City Spa, I am ready to pack up and drive back to work, thinking of the many reasons why I’m not going to be beaten with branches.

I’ve endured and observed lots of unusual rituals in the name of beauty and health. But at this Pico Boulevard institution, the pursuit takes on a manly swagger. I consider myself too much a sissy to withstand this Russian-style shvitz, the high-heat steam bath and the plaitza, a brief exfoliation treatment given in the steam room with a large, wet and blazing-hot oak-branch brush.

Heading toward the exit, I pass two friendly, skinny young guys paying $25 for spa admission. I find my courage, my credit card and my way to the women’s locker room.

Women are fairly new to the City Spa, which admits only men 4 1/2 days a week. On coed days, bathing suits are required and business for the plaitza is slow, so the spa’s Mr. Flagellator stays home (but women can ask a buddy for the treatment). Evidently, the spectacle of a man’s naked body being flogged is best reserved only for other men.

It’s just as well. It’s humiliation enough sweating marbles with men in the Russian Rock room, a 180-degree cave featuring two oversized wall ovens filled with glowing cobblestones. For more heat, one of the two guys tosses a bucket of warm water on the hot rocks, sending steam blasts to the upper benches. Some hearty patrons take a full 10 minutes of baking while wearing a dry, heat-absorbing bell-shaped wool hat, cheerfully embroidered with oak leaves.

As gentlemen, my sauna companions make sure I’m OK with the heat. And I am. It’s the cold that pushes the extremes. Just steps beyond the Russian rock room is an aptly named “cold plunge,” a small, deep pool of barely melted iceberg. I don’t let the warning sign about sudden temperature changes and heart attacks scare me. The plunge is so incredibly cold -- and thrilling after the intense heat -- I have to experience it three times. Even Mark Twain recognized the pleasure in pain when he described his first Russian steam as “exquisite torture.”

For more cooling, there’s a sizable unheated indoor pool. Extra heat comes from a eucalyptus steam room, a whirlpool illuminated by a skylight and sunshine on the rooftop deck. Though many come here for the Russian sauna, the sprawling place also offers rooms for sleeping, massage, watching TV and playing cards, in addition to a VIP locker room and a cafe featuring Middle Eastern cuisine.

It’s easy to understand the appeal of the shvitz. It was a popular ritual among Russian and immigrant Jews, who visited the public bathhouse in preparation for the Sabbath and to glory in indoor plumbing. The City Spa, which opened in 1955 as the Pico-Burnside Baths, is one of a few Russian-style spas in the country (the others are in New York, Chicago, Detroit and Miami). It also offers a glimpse of L.A.’s Jewish history on that stretch of Pico.

In 1989, Kambiz Besharat, who owns the adjacent wood flooring shop, bought the bathhouse with his brothers and extensively remodeled it. Besharat, an Iranian Jew of Russian heritage, remembers shvitzing all afternoon with his father as a kid. He’s still a daily visitor. But now on Saturday nights, families from all walks of life and many regions of the world, bond through the power of sweat.

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Thai’d in knots

You have to admire the immigrant work ethic, especially when you’ve pulled a back muscle lifting a 20-pound Thanksgiving turkey from the oven. After I left the basting to others, I scurried down to a never-closed Thai massage salon and got rescued for an hour -- for $25.

Four years later, prices that low are rare, but Thai massage is not. The technique combines assisted stretching, acupressure and deep-tissue massage to aid muscle relaxation and flexibility. Throughout the city’s Asian neighborhoods, simple storefronts that offer what many call “yoga-massage” have become popular destinations for L.A.’s best stressed.

Now the technique is showing up -- at four times the price -- on menus of exclusive resorts and fancy day spas. And its popularity is growing in Hollywood’s Thai Town, where the challenge is choosing among the many options. The grand-opening banner for Top Thai on Sunset Boulevard caught my eye.

Top Thai occupies a corner of the second floor of a strip mall featuring a Thai translation center, medical offices and a Russian grocery store. Open for six months, it offers traditional Thai massage for $35 an hour (or $55 for 90 minutes), along with a $60 hot stone massage or a $45 combination of Thai and Swedish.

The prices elsewhere are competitive, but Top Thai offered the advantage of newer, matching linens and fresher paint. My private room is shuttered with slatted accordion doors and outfitted with a sturdy foam mattress atop a carpeted platform, a small table lamp, an artificial orchid and a basket of hair bands. I slip into the now-familiar baggy boxer shorts and camisole top.

My therapist is a petite Thai woman with strong, ropy arms. The treatment focuses on my lower body, with a soothing emphasis on feet, ankles and hamstrings. Using her heels, hands, forearms, shins, elbows, feet and fingers, my therapist folds, stretches, lifts and stands on my limbs until my muscles get the hint to let go.

If you’re flexible, or want to be, you’ll like it when the therapist stands on your fanny, grabs your ankle and stretches your leg backward toward the ceiling. Or when she folds your knee across your body while holding your opposite shoulder to the mat. She does most of the work, but I emerge feeling both shaky and energized, as if I’d done an hour of calisthenics.

I won’t wait for another encounter with a big bird to go back. When the therapist rolls her knuckles across the tiny bones of my feet, years of high-heel hurts vanish. If they called this massage “stiletto therapy,” they’d book a million of them.

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Purely rejuvenating

If I spoke Sanskrit, I’d know that kaya kalpa translates to body rejuvenation or transmutation. I’m in a serene Hollywood Hills home and spa, learning about a holistic, ancient Indian treatment system for the body and soul. Raam Pandeya is president and practitioner of the Kayakalpa Alchemy Foundation, an organization that administers therapies based on his training in ayurveda, an ancient Indian healing system based on balancing the body, soul and mind; homeopathy; and a range of spiritual doctrines and holistic medicine.

His goal: “To enhance one’s capabilities so one can lead a healthy, prosperous, graceful life.”

This isn’t a one-size-fits-all program. Pandeya interviews me about my physical and mental traits, the workings of my internal organs and the vigor of my skin, sex life and digestion. He reads my pulse, considers my line of work and attempts to explain the essence of 10,000 years of holistic Indian medicine and spiritual healing.

His treatments aim to balance what he calls the constituent elements of the body -- divided into air, fire, water -- and then remove toxins. For the record, I’m an air -- a personality marked by intellect, restlessness, fear, anxiety, disrupted sleep and a lousy digestive system.

Centuries ago, Pandeya says, the intensive kaya kalpa regime was reserved for sages and yogis who meditated in isolation for months while receiving purification treatments -- everything from massage to tongue scraping. The time, costly materials and extreme nature of the process caused modern practitioners to develop kaya kalpa vatatapika, less intense, four- to five-hour sessions.

Even my abbreviated treatment is a test of strength and submission. I think I am just getting a body scrub and a steam, but actually I’m receiving a physical and psychological makeover. Customers are presented with a release form that clarifies the purpose of the $400 full session and states: “I understand that Kayakalpa is a technique of optimum health and beauty and is not intended as a treatment for any pathological condition.” That’s fine; I’m here for great skin and hair.

First, my nose is “treated” with herbal drops (which will, in theory, amplify the link between smell and memory). Then I curse as stinging eye drops are administered (to clear my vision).

Then my entire body is slathered in a thick, reddish, aromatic paste of 67 herbs and minerals. Even through the room’s thick incense, I can’t help but think I smell like tandoori and licorice. As the paste dries, it is supposed to absorb impurities through my skin. What I know for sure is that the paste turns black and crunchy.

During the drying, I am instructed to breathe and flex muscles rhythmically. The entire procedure, the alepa, aims to exfoliate dead skin cells, open the pores and enhance circulation.

To purify and nourish my skin, improve my sense of touch and strength, Pandeya pours warm oil, with 76 ingredients, over the paste as he and his wife and assistant, Sophia, vigorously, sometimes painfully, massage my body.

Now quite alert, I move to an outdoor steam chamber that looks like something out of an “I Love Lucy” episode. Its herbal steam causes sweating that further clears my pores. (Purity is within my grasp!) But first, I’m asked to consider a most important therapy. Would I consent to an enema?

Every bathing suit model in the world swears by some kind or another of colon cleansing, but I have no professional obligation for a flat stomach. I decline.

Then I slide into a deep, extra-hot bath where my head is aligned on a pillow to receive the 30-minute sirodhara, a mixture of herbs, minerals, milk and warm oils that’s dripped continuously onto my forehead, reportedly to stimulate my pituitary gland and clear the central nervous system.

It’s difficult to take the heat of the bath and oil. For hours afterward, I’m flushed and thirsty but feeling incredibly relaxed and, yes, pure. With oily hair, I attend an interview, to be told, “Wow, you have great skin” and “You smell like Indian food.”

How we suffer for beauty.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Spa directory

City Spa and Health Center

Women are welcome at this social club and spa or shvitz. The manly temple of sweat features exercise equipment, massage and plaitza exfoliation, a gym, saunas, cold plunge, pool, nap rooms, sundeck and cafe. Daily entrance fee is $25 before 1 p.m.; $35 after 1 p.m. and on weekends.

Open 2 to 10 p.m. Monday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Tuesday to Friday, 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sunday. Coed on Monday, Wednesday and 6 to 10 p.m. Saturday.

5325 W. Pico Blvd., L.A., (323) 933-5954, www.lacityspa.com.

Kayakalpa Alchemy Foundation

Raam Pandeya, a practitioner of ancient Indian kaya kalpa body and spirit purification treatments, resides in a Hollywood Hills retreat. Rejuvenating treatments include a $108 initial consultation, nutrition counseling, herbal and mineral supplements and skin care treatments and massage in a $400 half-day session. Hours by appointment.

6857 Camrose Drive, Hollywood, (323) 512-7226, www.kayakalpalchemy.org.

Olympic Spa

The women-only spa offers 21 services, many incorporating the vigorous akasuri body scrub. Services run from $15 for admission to hot and cold whirlpools, dry and steam saunas (including one lined in jade) to $130 for the nearly two-hour “goddess body treatment.” Open daily from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.

3915 W. Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 857-0666, www.olympicspala.com.

Top Thai Body Therapy

This strip mall location offers Thai massage, $35 per hour, $55 for 90 minutes and $65 for two hours. It also offers reflexology, Thai with Swedish massage, Swedish, deep tissue and hot stone massage. Appointments and walk-ins daily. Open 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Cash only.

Sunset Center Plaza, 5125 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 663-3439.

Tawa’s Shiatsu Spa

This Little Tokyo storefront offers Japanese massage in a low-frills private room. Hourlong massage is $60; 45 minutes is $45. Women are admitted only to massage rooms; men can access the hot tub, cold dip, saunas and showers for $15 with a massage or $15 without. Open 1 to 10 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays, 1 to 9 p.m. Sundays.

362 E. 1st St., Los Angeles, (213) 680-9141.