L.A.'s wellness community is healing a fire-torn city with free massages, meditations, sound baths
Since the wildfires fires started last week, a Zuma Beach parking lot has been a Los Angeles Fire Department Incident Command Center. It has become a 24-7 hub of activity, filled with fire trucks and off-duty first responders recovering from grueling 12- to 24-hour shifts fighting the nearby flames. But there’s a surprisingly calm oasis in one corner of the lot: a pop-up massage studio.
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About a dozen licensed massage therapists have set up tables and chairs there, spaced three to four feet apart. They’ve donated their time and services to provide free bodywork for pain management to help ease firefighters’ physical woes and keep them mobile as they battle the inferno. The effort — which launched Tuesday morning — was organized by the Do Good Bus, a nonprofit that helps coordinate volunteer efforts in L.A.
“Our most critical need is helping first responders. That’s what we’re focused on right now,” says Do Good Bus board member Erika Swartley. “We have a large network of different types of healers and we put out the word — we’ve gotten so many contacts.”
Swartley says there are 13 massage therapists on-site from all over Los Angeles, as well as one licensed chiropractor. More practitioners are set to join in the coming days. They’ll be providing 30- to 60-minute treatments focusing on stiff necks, tight backs and catering to other individual needs.
“These [firefighters], they’re moving trees, they’re on their feet for really long periods of time,” Swartley says. “This allows them to renew — to sit down and focus on their physical health so that they can continue to go forward and fight.”
Los Angeles is well-known as a nexus of healers and wellness practitioners, from fitness gurus, yoga teachers and meditation experts, to sound bath artists, acupuncturists, reiki professionals and even well-meaning witches. And as the city of Los Angeles reels from the destruction of the still-raging infernos, the wellness community is assembling in a citywide effort to support affected Angelenos the best ways they know how: through free plant-inspired meditations, breathwork sessions and at least one healing snow ceremony.
Therapists to the rescue
Santa Monica-based therapist and author Claire Bidwell Smith says the grief therapy community, in particular, has really stepped up.
“For whatever reason, L.A. is home to the majority of the renowned grief therapy experts in the U.S.," Bidwell Smith says. "People are absolutely rallying, coming together.”
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On Monday, Bidwell Smith launched Elegy, an online hub and newsletter for grief resources that includes book recommendations, articles and a list of therapists donating their services. There are more than a dozen therapists listed so far, with new ones being added daily. She also started a weekly virtual grief support group that begins Jan. 21 — and will continue indefinitely — for displaced evacuees and people who have lost their homes. The gathering will include an hour during which Bidwell Smith will discuss varied aspects of grief and offer coping tips and tools. Then she’ll open it up to group processing and sharing.
“There are so many aspects coming from this disaster — it feels very similar to COVID times," she says. "But grief is a really big one that needs to be acknowledged and supported.”
Similarly, therapist Dana Nassau, whose office is located in West Hollywood, is offering limited free Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) sessions to individuals who have experienced trauma due to the fires, conducting sessions both in person and via Zoom.
“It’s a form of trauma therapy that can have a large effect in a relatively short period of time,” she says. “It essentially shifts how we relate to traumatic experiences.”
There's even a public Google sheet being passed around that lists more than 900 Los Angeles-area therapists who are offering pro bono therapy to process the trauma of the L.A. wildfires.
Movement and meditation
In West Adams, Empowered Yoga Studio is underlining that the stress and fallout of the fires ripple out to everyone in L.A. It’s offering free yoga to all who are struggling right now, regardless of if they’ve lost a home or had to evacuate, at both its studios on West Adams Boulevard and on Washington Boulevard in Venice.
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“It’s not just the people who are displaced, everyone is impacted,” says co-owner Rachel Hirsch. “Some people have been furloughed, restaurants have had to close. Whole ZIP codes are gone now, and that is traumatic for those people, but it also impacts the city broadly — it’s people’s friends, neighbors and community spaces. It’s important to show up for one another, hold space for each other, as we flow through these emotions.”
Empowered Yoga is also offering donation classes, with funds going to the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation (to which it’s also giving 10% of its overall proceeds right now) and offering “pay-it-forward packages” that local yogis and out-of-towners can purchase for themselves or others to help subsidize free classes.
“People from as far as the U.K. and Austria have bought them,” Hirsch says. “It’s incredible, the outpouring. People care.”
Also in West Adams, Kristina Robbins, of Sweet Antelope, will be helping frazzled Angelenos shake off their stress and reset their central nervous systems at her monthly Dance Your Ass Off event. The Sunday class and dinner —- put on with dance teacher Kristin Battersby and held at nearby START Los Angeles gallery on Venice Boulevard — is normally $85 but will be free for anyone displaced by the fires. The next one is Jan. 19.
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“I truly believe there is no greater source of wellness than a feeling of belonging,” Robbins says.
On Sunday Zula Den, a nonprofit wellness center on Jefferson Boulevard, held a free wellness day that included acupuncture, massage, sound baths and reiki. The next one — also free — will be Feb 15. The group will also host free sound bath and breathwork sessions this Saturday.
“We want be a space to welcome the community,” says Zula creative director Bar Asolin. “Sound baths are a form of meditation and allow anyone going through stress a way to deeply unwind. Reiki and breathwork — it helps people process emotions too.”
Artist Jess Mack leads monthly meditations at Merrihew’s Sunset Gardens, a 76-year-old nursery in Santa Monica. Classes, typically $15-$20, incorporate “the wisdom of plants,” she says, and are tied to the rhythms of the natural world at that moment in time — like earthquakes, torrential rains and, yes, fires.
Mack will host a free Tonglen Garden Meditation on Thursday for anyone who RSVPs. The event will feature a Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice for transmuting suffering, she says, during which participants visualize the suffering, breathing it in, then breathe out compassion and healing.
“People are feeling really ungrounded — it’s a time of great uncertainty — and this is very regulating. You use your body and breath as an instrument for healing,” she says. “The significance of doing this in the garden is not unimportant — we’re connecting with the natural world, which is also undergoing significant change and loss.”
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Insight L.A., a leading meditation nonprofit, already offers free online and in-person classes at its Santa Monica and Benedict Canyon locations. It has a robust schedule of weekly meditation “sits,” such as its Monday night group at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. But Executive Director Melissa McKay says that instructors have tailored their practices to address the stress of the fires.
“All the teachers are responding to this,” McKay says. “They’re holding space and addressing this communal crisis that everyone is going through.”
Small gestures with big meaning
Vanessa McCullough, a mobile manicurist who lives in Laurel Canyon, is offering free nail services — manicures and pedicures — to those affected by the fires. Though it may seem like an inconsequential token compared with the loss people are experiencing, she says the little things can make a profound difference.
“My area was affected by both the Palisades and Eaton fires — smoke and air quality in the canyon — and we were evacuated Wednesday because of the Sunset fire," says McCullough. "This is for anyone who needs some self-care. It’s extremely important to continue to provide yourself with self-care, especially in stressful situations that are out of our control.”
Meanwhile, participants from the recently-organized 14th Now, which describes itself as a “pro-democracy, pro-constitution advocacy group,” gathered snow that fell in Washington, D.C., on Jan 6. They bottled it and shipped it to L.A.-based members who, in turn, will be holding a “healing ceremony” this Wednesday, an offering to the city of Los Angeles that is free and open to the public.
They’ll gather at 6101 Mulholland Highway at 3 p.m., by an empty lot just below the Hollywood sign — “it’s called the last house on Mullholland,” says Dael Wilcox, an Elysian Heights-based retired schoolteacher, beekeeper and goatscaper. They’ll put the snow in a pottery bowl, then fill 125 small glass vials with the melted snow water. Then they’ll walk to an area just above the Hollywood sign and ceremoniously empty the vials onto the ground.
“We want to wish the best for the victims and firefighters,” Wilcox says. “This is a symbol of water to quench and heal the ground — for regrowth.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
