Spa Embassy facilitates access to bodywork for queer, femme, BIPOC, cash-poor folks, and those defecting from carceral whiteness as a radical act of decommodifying community healing. Spa Embassy currently offers a map with access information to the spas of the world, personally reviewed by Carrie and Carol, and links to other spa aggregates. We also offer Spa Residencies, or free short term stays in spas, for participants selected through a nomination system. Our eventual goal is to open up the best spa in the world, incorporating our extensive research into different healing practices and creative feedback from our Spa Residents.
Spa Embassy emerges out of the brutality that late stage capitalism wreaks on the nervous system. From our backgrounds with the power of somatic practices to reconfigure polyvagal habits and embodied memory into new possible movement, we platform spaces that provide the architecture for communal and public nervous system rerhythming. Spas prefigure a space outside of the demands of capitalism where instead of people as hyper productive output machines generating profit for others, we root in our resting and regenerating bodies, sensing and pleasurably attending to our animal needs as living organisms on this planet, and enjoying the witnessing of others doing the same. In contrast to mandatory contortion competitions in a system which treats life as capital, we research, platform, and facilitate getting to know what and where feels good as a compass to generative, unviolent, mutual growth.
Spa Embassy focuses specifically on healing justice for those who bear the burden of care in our society. We are the ones who feel the crushing weight of the world. By cultivating our army of empaths in these architectures for somatic feeling, we lead the way towards sensorium remediation and embodied knowledge as an essential and core valence of making the world otherwise. Our project aims to reset our social nervous system, to disrupt capitalist time, and to invoke pleasure as a way to decommodify healing.