Rooted in Vapour

The door closes.

Water meets hot stone and the room slowly fills with vapour. We begin with the simplest thing: air moving into and out of the body.

Nothing needs to happen yet. We arrive through the breath.

A coach once invited me to consider the idea that I might be rooted in vapour.

For most of my life, rootedness has not come easily.

I grew up moving between cities, then countries and continued moving well into adulthood, until moving became floating and I was everywhere and nowhere all at once while living and working at sea.

It was difficult, but it gave me some superskills.

I became highly adaptable, comfortable with change and able to enter the unknown without needing to know exactly what would happen next. I became comfortable stepping into my courage, very resilient and learnt to trust my instinct and my body to guide me.

Then, during a period in which I was actively trying to understand what it felt like in my body to be rooted, I found myself working with steam.

Steam, heat, sweat, water ~ constant transformation.

I trained to guide sauna experiences at a very new sauna concept in Cape Town and began facilitating within its established formats. I loved the physicality of the space and the way heat brought people immediately into their bodies. There was less room for pretence. Eventually, everyone had to breathe, soften and drop their guards.

My relationship with heat had also been shaped by deeply personal experiences of traditional purification practices. Those spaces are deeply meaningful to me and are not mine to reproduce or explain. What I carried forward was an understanding that heat could be approached with intention, humility and respect.

As I became more confident guiding, I began wondering what the sauna might hold if I brought more of my own path into the room.

The first independent Sweetwater offering was a four-part weekly sauna series shaped around Land, Water, Body and Ritual.

I used the SaunaHaüs space, where I am still a resident guide, and invited my own community and brought in facilitators I trusted to work alongside me. For the first time, I was able to create without an existing script or prescribed theme.

I could draw on my own experiences, questions and ways of seeing. I could work with scent, sound, breath, reflection and the intelligence of the body. I began to respond to the people in front of me and guide the room in a way that felt natural to me.

That freedom changed something for me and I felt it right in my gut, the same feeling I had been following home.

I was not trying to recreate an ancient ceremony inside a contemporary sauna. I was discovering what the sauna could hold when approached with deeper intention.

It was also the first time Sweetwater's four pathways became lived experiences rather than ideas.

The movement and uncertainty that had once made me feel unrooted had prepared me for this. To sense what was needed, trust what I felt and remain present while something changed shape. A life lived in service and hospitality. It was coming down to reading a room and bringing what was needed for that room to feel at ease.

Perhaps rootedness is never going to mean staying still. At this time, I am rooted in movement. Rooted in my body. And somehow, rooted in vapour.