The Forgotten Power of Bathing

A captivating book that explores how a Daily Bath Can Improve Your Health and Happiness.

WHEN IS THE LAST TIME YOU TOOK A BATH?

To be human is to have a relationship with water. We are born from water, we came from water, and our cells are bathed in water. Bathing is one of the oldest healing practices practiced by humankind—a sacred opportunity for the bather to slow down, to luxuriate, and to reconnect with themselves and their world.

Sadly, in today’s go-go world, our relationship with bathing has been largely lost. This book is the prescription for getting it back.

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Elaine Drolet is the CEO of bath design company BainUItra, whose innovative bathtubs bring the bathing experience into the 21^st century.

Dr. Ken Redcross is a physician and author who is passionate about redefining healthcare and putting power in the hands of his patients.

What unites them is a shared belief in the transformative power of bathing—for your health, and for your life.

In this book, the co-authors explain how one simple change, developing a daily bathing practice, has the potential to offer you a more grounded, connected, healthy and stress-free life.

By the time you finish this book, you will be prepared—and excited—to begin an entirely new relationship with the eons-old human experience of bathing.

If you are looking for the ultimate wellness hack, look no further than this modern take on ancient advice: take a bath.

GET YOUR COPY TODAY

Available on Amazon in ebook and paperback format, The Forgotten Power of Bathing is a perfect accompaniment for your BainUltra bathtub.

INTRODUCTION

HOW THIS BOOK BEGAN

This book began in an airport.

Not literally—we didn’t write it between flights, or anything like that.

But we—your co-authors, Elaine Drolet and Ken Redcross—met in the Jean Lesage International Airport, in Quebec City, in May of 2019. One of us—Elaine—lives in Quebec, and is a fairly frequent visitor to Lesage.

That day, she was headed to New York City on business. The other—Ken—was returning home after a week-long spiritual retreat in Quebec. Elaine quickly recognized the bag Ken was carrying back from Le Monastère des Augustines, the Augustinian monastery—a place sometimes described as Quebec’s original wellness retreat—and quickly struck up a conversation.

As luck—or rather, as synchronicity—would have it, we had a lot in common. We immediately realized that both of us were passionate about the same thing: wellness. One of us was the CEO of a bath company, and one of us was a personal physician, but both of us believed in the tremendous spiritual power of a heightened connection between our health and our happiness. Both of us considered our work to be bound by the same mission: to promote wellness.

We spoke about Ken’s recent Augustinian retreat. Ken had come back from his experience revitalized, reinvigorated, and refreshed. We quickly agreed most people struggle to find the time to disappear to a monastery for days or weeks at a time.

We shared a common belief, one that has guided us in this book:

What most people need is not one great big spiritual awakening, but more practical and accessible avenues to spiritual renewal.

From there, we started exchanging more views about spirituality and wellness. We quickly agreed that wellness and spirituality are deeply interlinked—and that, in our individual work, we viewed our mission, in part, as one of encouraging everyday wellness practices—practices that ultimately lead a person to a greater spiritual connection with others and with themselves. Elaine spoke of her deep belief in the importance of making and fostering healthy bonds—bonds to others, but most importantly, to ourselves. It was this philosophy that helped drive her leadership style as the CEO of BainUltra, a bath manufacturing company combining therapy and artistry to create a superior home bathing experience.

Ken spoke of his private medical practice in the New York area, and his work as a healer. Ken also believed deeply in the importance of interpersonal bonds—in fact, he’d previously written a book entitled Bond, focusing on developing healthy physician-patient relationships. Ken also shared that he sometimes worked with various wellness companies as a consultant, but that, “I never work with a company that doesn’t speak to my soul.”

By the end of our conversation, both of us were convinced that we were on the same wavelength regarding the importance of the world’s urgent need for models of healing and wellness that were simple, accessible, and even joyful.

Before the plane landed, Elaine turned to Ken and said, “You may not know this, but I’ve been looking for you for five years.” Elaine explained that she had been looking for an authority who could become a responsible spokesperson for the therapeutic benefits of bathing. And while there had been candidates eager for the position, Elaine had held off, looking for someone who could speak to the ways that a daily bathing practice could not just improve people’s lives, but transform them—connecting them to an ancient ritual that has been practiced for thousands of years, across customs and cultures.

Meanwhile, Ken had been looking for something very much the same— a set of everyday practices that would better connect health to spirituality, for himself and for his patients. Ken had long followed a singular habit, one that many of his patients found quirky or even wacky: when meeting with each of his patients—regardless of why they had come in or what he was treating them for—he always asked them the same question: “how is your soul doing?” And he had long been on the lookout for therapeutic treatments that could revitalize and energize the soul. As he heard more from Elaine about the transformational power of daily bathing, he began to suspect that he had found such a treatment.

We started working together, exploring and explaining the power of a daily bathing practice. Eventually, we distilled our philosophy of bathing into the five following life lessons:

1. There is incredible power to slowing down on an everyday basis.

2. There is wisdom to be found in stillness and solitude.

3. You can renew and revitalize your life energy by stimulating your senses.

4. Water is the most important element in nature for stimulating your senses.

5. Bathing offers a path from inner connection outward, toward bonding with life and with others.

As you move forward in the book, you will find that these life lessons guide our arguments. You will see them recur throughout the book.

This book is in our collective voice, though at points Elaine or Ken will share more personal insights or information. Where that happens, we will note it with an “I (Ken)” or “I (Elaine),” as appropriate.

The book will range widely in terms of the content: from the spiritual and emotional benefits of bathing to its therapeutic uses, to the history and practices of some of the world’s great bathing cultures and most famous bathers. We’d like to think that there’s something in this book for everyone. If you are not a bathing aficionado, you will find in this book a series of arguments for why you should start. If you are health-conscious, you will better appreciate the therapeutic role that bathing can play. If you are looking for inner peace, or at the very least some stress relief, you will gain a vision for how bathing can help you reach these goals. If you are already a daily bather, you’ll find within the pages of this book ways to optimize your experience. If you are a history buff, you’ll come away with a heightened appreciation of how the great human ritual of bathing has evolved over the centuries, and how humans have had a historical relationship with bathing since time immemorial.

As you begin reading this book, we would encourage you to ask yourselves a few questions: think of it as a “baseline” reading for your own happiness.

How are you? (It’s a simple question at first glance, but it gets more complicated once you decide to answer with total honesty).
When was the last time you really took some time for yourself?
How often do you take a warm bath?

We think these three questions are profoundly interrelated: that your answer to questions two and three will have major effects on your answer to question one.

We wrote this book to lay out our shared dream: that everyone would begin a daily practice of bathing. We are certain that, if everyone were to do so, many benefits would accrue: benefits on a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual level.

This is a book about bathing. But it’s not just a book about bathing. It is a book about slowing down, celebrating every day the life that was given to you, and experiencing the power of stillness and immersion. This experience will lead to more presence, for yourself and for others, and therefore to more spiritual connection. It just so happens that bathing naturally lends itself to these states, and that if you consciously adopt bathing as an intentional daily practice, you will find yourself living a happier, healthier, and more spiritually fulfilled life.