The July issue of Nashville Lifestyles featured our all-inclusive guide to relaxation and rejuvenation. Each day we'll be sharing one of our favorite wellness practices and procedures with you.
Salt and Soles
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Stepping into the low-lit Himalayan pink salt cave inside Salt and Soles, I could taste the salt in the air—like being on the beach but with no water or sun. The effect was as relaxing as a seaside vacation, especially since there are no devices allowed in the cave. Each 45-minute session is blissfully technology free.
Opened in 2017 by John Tallman and Connie Chang-Tallman, Salt and Soles offers salt therapy and reflexology in a cozy space off of Wedgewood Avenue. Each brings their own expertise to the space: John is an artist so he designed and built the space (the couple installed 15,000 pounds of imported Himalayan pink salt blocks themselves); Connie is a certified reflexologist and yoga instructor who was trained in her home country of South Korea, as well as with experts in India and the U.S. The space offers dry salt therapy (also called halotherapy) paired with reflexology, or you can have either service on its own. They also offer yoga in the salt cave, as well as wellness classes and detoxifying foot soaks.
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Each session starts with stashing your things in a cubbie and trading your shoes for a pair of cloth booties. The soothing lobby and retail space is filled with salt lamps and other saline products. All sessions start on the hour, and the room accommodates about 10 chairs—weekends will find you salt caving with others, but during midweek visits, you might have the darkened space to yourself. Shuffle along the gravelly salt floor and take your seat in a mesh reclining chair. They offer noise-reducing headphones to cancel out the sound of the generator, which pumps powder-sized pharmaceutical-grade salt into the room. A few minutes into the session, a soft hum fills the space and you can start to vaguely feel the tiny salt particulates in the air. On my visit, I could taste it on my lips and my lungs seemed to expand with each salty breath.
If pairing reflexology with the treatment, lay back as Connie, or one of the other therapists, goes through a full workup on your feet—using a mix of relaxing massage and targeted pressure points, the service feels like one of those vaguely painful deep tissue massages that you know has worked once it’s over. At the end, the therapist goes over the treatment, offering details about your pressure points and what they might say about your overall health.
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Combining the two, Connie told me, helps promote many health benefits, from rest and relaxation to inflammation. Dry salt therapy is used to help treat sinus infections, eczema, allergies, stress, and anxiety, while reflexology, which puts pressure on specific reflex points on the foot that correspond with organs or other parts of the body, can induce healing and clear blocked channels in the body.
During my session, Connie put firm pressure on certain points where the pain was strongest. At the end, she said she’d picked up on some neck pain and suggested I was having sleep issues—something I constantly battle. (These were mercifully alleviated the night after my treatment.) After 30 minutes of reflexology, I sat in the space for another 15 minutes in silence, relishing the dark and quiet. When I got back to my desk, feeling like I’d taken a catnap on the beach, I wondered how long I should wait to get back into the cave.
Salt and Soles, 1216 Wedgewood Ave., 615-920-5557; saltandsoles.com