I built this sauna myself

I grew into this the way you grow into a language. My parents run a sauna school in Latvia, and I’ve practiced since I was a teenager — long enough that I was eventually invited to teach the tradition myself. I didn’t invent what I teach. I was given it, the way it was given to the people before me.

For me, the sauna was never a service. It’s a practice — and the ritual you see from the outside is only its visible body. Underneath it is something quieter: a discipline that comes from inside, not from a teacher or from society.

Two years ago, from mid-October to mid-March, I came to Spain for myself — not to work, not to study. I set one goal and lived inside it for six months: I built the sauna from the ground up. I ran the sewage and the water supply, wired the electrics, put in the ventilation, framed the roof, laid the tiling, put up the panelling, installed the stove and the window, and built the bench. Cold shower and work — every day.

The sauna was built where two monolithic concrete tanks used to stand — wells that collected rainwater for watering the garden. When the town installed the new water system, the tanks were no longer needed and stood empty. We kept one as a plunge pool — where, after the whisking, comes the flight: a floating meditation in the cold water. The other became the pêrtuve itself, the steam room, with a small space for tea and a changing room.

We met not because either of us needed something from the other, but because we both carried an old craft. Mine comes from the Baltics — a room where water meets hot stones, where the body is taken through heat in a set order, then handed back to stillness.

Jorge’s comes from somewhere else entirely: more than 30 years of manual therapy, his own method — Alphabiopraxis® — practiced in Archena. But both crafts start at the same place: the body, the hands, and a person who chooses to trust you.

We have a language barrier, and communication still happens with Inese’s help. But as brothers in the craft, in practice we understand each other without language, without words — because something very powerful unites us: a shared aim toward light and healing.

Now I’m going back. Not as the one who built this sauna — as the one who works inside it. It’s a strange feeling: to walk into a room where you’ve held every plank in your own hands, to know exactly how it smells as it starts to warm, and to know what it did to you — and then to bring someone else into it for the first time.

The house belongs to its host. The tradition belongs to the people who carry it. But this room is something between us, and it’s real. In November, I step into it with six people.