History and Background of Hot Stone Massage
Massage is perhaps the oldest form of hands-on-healing known to humans, easily pre-dating written records. For millennia, people from virtually every culture have used a combination of touch, heat (thermotherapy) and stones as therapeutic tools. It's pretty safe to say that almost every culture has either used heat and/or stones to have some sort of healing effect on the body - whether it's using stones directly on the body like we do in a Hot Stone Massage, or indirectly, similar to a structure like Stonehenge affecting the body energetically. One of the first recorded uses of stones for healing was by the Chinese. Prior to the invention of metal acupuncture needles, ancient Traditional Chinese Medical (TCM) practitioners regularly used various shaped and sharpened stones to treat disease. The Chinese also used heat, in the form of 'moxabustion' (burning 'madwort' - a dried herb - over acupuncture points), to increase the yang/heat in the body and have ...