Self-care no longer an indulgence, but a necessity said Perfect Balance wellness expert
There has been a significant change in course when it comes to self-care said Anri Greeff, somatologist and owner of Perfect Balance at Colour Rush, The Square in Sunninghill.
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Salon clients, she said, no longer view massages and other wellness therapies as luxury indulgence but rather an increasingly important aspect of personal wellness and mental health.
Greeff said:
“Since early this year there has been a marked increase in people booking massages or even something as simple as having their nails and facials done, all just to escape reality for an hour or two, and to do something that makes them feel good.”
People bring their lives to the sessions. She said:
“An important part of what therapists do is to listen, to allow our clients to offload while paying them physical attention during their special ‘me’ time. She said that it’s becoming more prevalent and where clients previously checked in monthly, many now shorten the time between visits to weekly or fortnightly."
It’s a tool for stress relief, said Greeff.
She said:
“Just like we go to gym to burn calories and to let out some stress on the circuit, so too does self-care help people relax, and let go of social and environmental pressures, the challenge of the daily grind, for a bit.”
She said that when she massages an individual, the energy absorption is immense. Greeff said that stress and challenging emotions are almost tangible on someone’s body and while it manifests physically with muscle knots, for example, there’s also a flow of universal energy that is harmonized.
She said:
“It can be quite scary when you realise just how much stress you carry in your body, what we are uploading to our physical selves on a daily basis. And you don’t realise it until someone touches you and shares it with you.”
Greeff added that the increase in self-care points to a possible realization, too, of the holism of the body, mind and spirit.
She said:
“We see people moving toward more homeostatic and neoplastic ways of healing themselves because medication has been so overwhelming these last couple of years that people want to go the more natural way. They want to see how they can improve their own mental abilities and wellness by doing it. More interestingly, and with massages, facials, etc it is a way to balance it out because that is your first step. Taking care of yourself, calming your energy, calming your body, and start resetting yourself just so that you can regroup. And that starts with taking care of yourself.”
