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Published on 11/25/2024
Work, rest and play – it's the way to maintain a balanced life, but a little massage helps, too. But with so many options to choose from, what type is best? Among the more familiar treatments, from Swedish to bamboo to hot stones, Aurōra Spa offers The Chariot of Light, a 75-minute therapy that harnesses the power of LED.
Blending traditional movements and technological advances, this innovative full-body massage aims to reset the circadian rhythms, reduce inflammation, increase circulation, and enhance the skin’s texture. It certainly melts the muscles.
My therapist, Junelynn, invites me to lie on my stomach on the massage bed, where a heat pad quickly gets to work warming my body. After briefly brushing my skin, she drizzles Elemis's Musclease Active Body Oil over me, which we’ve chosen for its extra-soothing properties. It’s a heady concoction, infused with horsetail kelp harvested on the seashore, and the air fills with the fragrance of rosemary and pine.
Next, Elemis’s Instant Refreshing Gel is added to the mix – this anti-inflammatory oil is powered by arnica and camphor to deal with aches and pains. Junelynn pushes the freeflowing potion with a cooling poultice through my weary muscles with confident sweeping motions – she seems to know just how much pressure is right for me.
But it is the LightStim Pro-Panel LED machine that has caught my attention and persuaded me to try this imaginative treatment. Junelynn uses this new piece of tech to target the areas that complain most about my misuse and neglect: my neck, shoulders, and lower back.
The freestanding machine is a tall metal pole with an arm, at the end of which four panels hang, each studded with 1,400 medical-grade LEDs. It’s easily moved about, and its panels are just as quickly adjusted to create the best shapes to focus on the areas Junelynn has identified as needing special attention.
The idea is that this low-level light therapy will activate natural processes in the body’s cells to heal, rejuvenate and function better. For me, the aim is to alleviate chronic, albeit dull, pain, but this technology is also used for anti-ageing and acne therapies.
Junelynn places the panels just millimeters from my skin – by now I am so deeply relaxed that I'm only vaguely aware of the red glow of the machine’s lights. The massage enters a rhythm, the warming machine versus Junelynn’s experienced hands, until it's time to turn over so that she can resume traditional kneading of recalcitrant muscles on the front of my body. I slip comfortably to somewhere between waking and sleeping, until, too soon, the chime of a traditional bell tells me the treatment is at an end.
