Getting Spiritual and Nude in Europe!: the Best Places To Go Practices To, Well, Practice!: 39

There's a thing that happens to Americans when they get off a plane in Europe and walk into their first proper sauna, and I've watched it happen to enough of my fellow countrymen now that I can recognize it from across the room.It's a kind of full-body short circuit.They walk in expecting what we have back home, which is a tiled room where everyone keeps their swimsuit on and whispers and clutches their towel like it's the last lifeboat off the Titanic. And instead they find an entire culture, hundreds of years old, where bodies are just bodies, where nudity is the most natural and unremarkable thing in the world, where a grandmother and a businessman and a college student can all sit together, completely bare, completely at ease, and nobody has a crisis about it except the poor American in the doorway whose entire nervous system is having a town hall meeting about where to look.I have been that American. We've all been that American. And this book is about getting past that doorway and into the room.