THERAPY
FIRST-PERSON EXPERIENCE: SOPHIE BENGE
M
y mud wrap at Széchenyi Baths in Budapest starts with me following a man dressed in boots and shorts,
dragging a trolley which carries two dirty buckets brimming with thick grey-green mud. Inside the treatment room, spartan with hard surfaces and only mildly updated since it was built in the 1890s, he points to the bed while putting on rubber gloves. Never a word is uttered. In fact never has a treatment seemed more matter-of-fact or, as I realise a while later, more profound. I’m sitting naked on a plastic sheet as he splats fistfuls of soft warm mud onto the bed behind me. He then covers my elbows and presses my back downwards into the thick layer before slapping more round my shoulders, so that it snuggles up my neck. He quickly whacks a dollop on each hip bone, wrist, knee and ankle, pulls the sheet tight round my body, places a tarpaulin over that and walks out. No scents, no music, no dimming of lights. I wriggle to feel the full sensuality of the mud against my skin and soon surrender to feeling warm, albeit increas- ingly sweaty, drowsy and still. I like being bundled up under this heavy coat of mineral-rich goodness. Twenty minutes later, the gloved and booted man – with body odour – unceremoniously unwraps me, flicks the thick clumps of mud onto the floor and leads me to the shower to rinse
64 Despite the spartan
setting, the soft, warm mud wrap at Széchenyi Baths has a profound effect on Sophie Benge
“My mud wrap starts with me following a man dressed in boots and shorts, dragging a trolley which carries two dirty buckets brimming with thick grey-green mud”
me down. I then take over to remove any mud residues from my orifices! This is a one-product treatment with a multitude of effects: soft skin, loose limbs and muscles, bright complexion, clear thinking and, at first, a feeling of being light headed. I needed to sit still and quiet for a while as I waited for the gentle pulsation through my veins to fade and a mild pressure in my skull to subside. While sitting I met a woman who told me
her story, through a translator. Her hands had been clawed with arthritis but after 10 days of daily dunking in a bucket of this mud, her fingers were starting to unfurl. Joy radiated from her face.
This mud, mined from a natural reserve outside Budapest, treats up to 1,000 people daily across the city’s famous medical spas. Its a blend of magnesium, calcium and potassium plus copper, iron, manganese and selenium. Mud wraps like this are generally prescribed as part of a course to treat inflammatory conditions – or, in my case, as a general detoxifying tune-up, with real palpable effect on my body and mind. l
Sophie Benge is the writer of Healing Sources Email:
sophie@sophiebenge.com Tel: +44 7951 056609
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