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A Journey to Siwa Oasis
Each summer, on a threshold to the Sahara Desert, there is a tradition that draws people into the earth itself — a ritual known as the sand bath. I travelled to Siwa Oasis, a small town in Egypt near the Libyan border, to experience this ancient practice and to meet the sand, the sun, and the desert in a new way. What unfolded was both physical and spiritual: a purification, a conversation with the land, and a remembering of something very old within me.
Entering the Sand: The Ancient Practice
The sand bath I experienced at Siwa Oasis was something quite unlike anything I’ve done before. Siwa is a small Berber town in Egypt, sitting about twelve metres below sea level on the edge of the Sahara Desert. The sand there is said to hold a particular vibrational quality — perhaps because of its mineral composition — and in Siwa, people have been practising what they call sand bathing for many generations.
It’s a process that takes place only in the summer when the sand’s temperature is naturally high. A person is buried in the hot desert sand for several days in a row, usually three, and then spends another three days resting and integrating. During that time, the body must remain at a steady internal temperature. You can’t go near air conditioning or fans; food and drink are taken only at room temperature.
The Moon and the Memory of the Soul
When I decided to go through the process earlier this year, I wanted to make a deeper relationship with the land — with the sand, the sun, and the desert itself. I wanted to feel the energy of this place, to listen to what it had to teach me, and to see how this ancient treatment would work within my own body and energetic system. I did it beneath the light of a full moon, which felt significant. The moon seemed to add another dimension to the process, bringing with it a connection to a soul memory, to something ancient in my system that I could feel reorganising itself.
Meeting the Heat: The Body Learns a New Language
The experience was profoundly internal. I was, of course, very hot, but my relationship to heat changed. My body adapted quickly. For those days, you aren’t supposed to wash with water — only minimal washing of the underarms and private parts. Beyond that, nothing. The idea is that water would interfere with the effect of the sand bath.
So I went without many of the comforts I’m used to — being clean, smelling fresh — and instead found myself entering a kind of altered state. My body began to regulate its own temperature, and I became more attuned to the deeper layers of my awareness. There was nothing to do but lie there, rest, and observe. My energetic perception heightened, and I could feel communication taking place within my consciousness — an opening between the body, the mind, Spirit and the environment around me.
The sand bath itself lasts between twelve and fifteen minutes. The air temperature at the time was about thirty-eight to forty degrees. When I first lay down and the sand was piled over me, it felt almost unbearable — searingly hot. But after a while, something shifted. My body adjusted. The sand seemed to absorb heat from me, or perhaps I was absorbing something from it. Then the sand was brushed away, replaced with a new layer of hot sand, and the process began again.
After that, I was taken to a tent designed specifically for this purpose — a space that traps heat. There I was given herbal teas and encouraged to sweat. That part was even more intense than the sand itself. After about half an hour, I moved to a darkened room, wrapped in a blanket, and continued to release through sweat. When that was done, I drank room-temperature water and rested. This whole ritual was repeated for three days.
The Dojo and the Desert
Following the treatment came the integration — three more days of gentle care, rest, and connection. During this time, I found I had an unusual amount of strength. I even managed some movement practice despite the heat. There’s a sacred dojo on the land — a purpose-built space for spiritual practice, where heaven meets earth. It’s designed so that the air circulates, never becoming too hot, while still holding the warmth needed for the body to stay within the boundaries of the sand-bath conditions. I worked there, moving gently, feeling how my body had changed. And how a new relationship had been created with the desert.
From Sea Level to Sky: Strength and Resilience
What struck me most was the sense of internal resilience the process created. A few weeks later, I travelled from Siwa, a basin far below sea level, to Peru — to the Sacred Valley, about 2,800 metres above sea level. Within a week, I climbed a mountain to collect water from a clear stream and realised I was almost running up the slope. Usually, at that altitude, the air feels thin and I can tire easily. This time, my body felt strong, as though the sand had catalysed something in me — a deeper adaptability, perhaps an enhanced capacity for oxygen exchange or simply an energetic strength that remains hard to explain.
From a physical perspective, sand bathing exposes the body to intense heat, activating processes of purification and cellular repair. Platinum, one of the minerals present in Siwa’s sand, has strong catalytic properties — in chemistry, it accelerates reactions without being consumed. I can’t help but think of the sand as a catalyst too: not just for physiological change, but for something subtler. It seemed to accelerate inner transformation — a kind of alchemical process within the body, psyche, and energy field.
Giving Our Stories to the Sand
As a therapist, I’m curious about how this might relate to the way the body processes emotion and trauma. People who hold heavy emotional experiences, or who have absorbed the pain of others through their work, often show this in their bodies — through inflammation, chronic pain, skin issues. The body processes slowly; it carries stories long after the mind has moved on. I wondered whether the sand bath could support this kind of release — whether it might help to transmute stored emotion, to assist in the integration of what has been too much to carry.
For those of us who work in therapeutic fields, this feels particularly relevant. We work in co-creative fields, exposed to the unprocessed material of others, and that can take root in our own systems. There’s even a term for it — vicarious trauma — when the therapist absorbs something of the client’s pain. The sand bath, I feel, could be a profound process of purification and renewal for those who hold space for others.
It requires courage, patience, and a willingness to be uncomfortable. But it also offers something rare: an opportunity to meet oneself at a deep threshold between the physical and the spiritual, between earth and heat, body and energy.
Medicines of the Land: Sand, Salt, and Silence
In 2026, I plan to take a small group — perhaps four to six people — to Siwa Oasis to undergo this process. We’ll combine the traditional sand-bath treatment with salt therapy and gentle mind–body therapeutic practices to help participants release what they’ve been carrying, deepen into their own being, and reconnect with the resonance of their soul. You can find out more about the retreat on this webpage.
The desert has a way of stripping away the unnecessary. It brings you closer to what’s essential — to what endures when everything else is gone.
