In the middle of the world’s busiest, most exciting island lies a secret place. It is a place of absolute serenity, healing and rejuvenation. You are no longer in Manhattan; you are in a space of timelessness. You are at La Casa.

At La Casa, we offer a healing experience that has its origins in the wisdom of the ancient world. Throughout the ages, the experience of healers and sages is that life is not linear and fixed but rather a world of gradations and of phases of subtlety. Underlying the apparent phenomenal world is a more refined realm of energy and creation; this is the realm of the 5 elements: Earth, Water, Fire, Air and Sky. It is the principles of the 5 elements and their healing energies upon which we base all our treatments and products.

THE SCIENCE

Our treatments and products begin with the idea that the skin is the door to inner health. Your skin is the largest organ in your body and serves as a link to all the other organs. Physicians are now reviving the age-old practice of delivering medicine through the skin. So great, in fact, is the ability of the skin to absorb substances that one drop of essential oil placed on the fingertip will show up in hair analysis ten minutes later. Therefore, the skin is the starting point in all our treatments. We treat the skin as though it is a living, breathing organ that expands and contracts, senses and responds, knows as well as remembers, ceaselessly dying as well as becoming.

Our approach is, then, to renew the body through the skin. We use various methods of tactile stimulation through ancient as well as modern massage techniques. We use methods of detoxification to cleanse and refine the skin; we then nourish the skin through careful application of our nutrient-rich formulas, selected especially to meet the unique needs of your skin.

At La Casa, we emphasize detoxification. It has been estimated that the body contains somewhere between 70 and 100 trillion cells. All through the ages, each of the world’s traditions of health and rejuvenation have emphasized methods of cleansing; cleansing of the body and mind is the sine qua non of a healthy as well as a spiritual existence. We like to refer our clients to the experiment that Nobel Prize-winning scientist Alexis Carrel conducted. Carrel had kept cells from the heart of a chicken embryo alive by simply immersing the cells in a nutrient solution and changing the solution. Each day new nutrients were added and waste was cleaned out. This experiment continued for 29 years without a hitch. It was beginning to seem as though with the right nutrients and with proper waste elimination, the cells would go on living forever. Until a fatal mistake was made! Carrel’s lab technician accidentally forgot to change the solution, and the cells died from being immersed in their own waste products. The cells were, in effect, lethally auto-intoxicated. To clean out the over 70 trillion cells that comprise the human body, we need to pay a lot of attention to waste elimination.

At La Casa, we have various methods of detoxification and cleansing.

• We encourage our clients to use our sauna to detoxify through the sweat glands. In natural health circles, the skin is referred to as the body's third lung, or third kidney. It aids tremendously in throwing off all toxins from the body. We absorb more impurities, and eliminate more waste through the skin than any other organ in our bodies (including the colon Two pounds of waste are eliminated every day through the skin. The skin works hand in hand with the kidneys On hot days, we do a lot of our elimination through our skin, and our kidneys don't have to work as hard. Conversely, on cold days, our kidneys take over this function of the skin because the skin is not eliminating very much.
• We offer colon cleansing. It has been said that death begins in the colon. There is a study of over 1000 women with histories of constipation Fluid was extracted from the breasts of the women. This fluid showed abnormal cells which are the same abnormal cells found in women with breast cancer These cellular abnormalities occurred five times as often in women who moved their bowels fewer than three times a week than in women who did so more than once a day.
• We offer salt-saturation detoxification. There is no better whole-body cleansing that immersing yourself in the 800 pounds of Epsom salts that comprise our float chamber.

At La Casa, we have created for you an environment that is a feast for all of your senses.

Touch

Touch has been called the mother of the senses, the earliest to develop in the human embryo. Like other primate animals, we humans are contact animals. We expect clinging, riding, grooming, patting, muzzling, kissing, tickling. (Chimps actually draw a tickler’s hands to their bodies.) The genesis of the ability to love is licking, evolving into tooth-combing among lemurs, finger-grooming in monkeys and apes and hand-stroking in humans. This licking and stroking is the sine qua non of love and survival.

Many of us have been raised with rearing practices that are de-sensualized; we were given bottles, blankets, cribs, playpens, toys and carriages instead of the old-fashioned breast-feeding, caressing, cuddling, hugging, rocking and patting. Most of us didn’t get our fill of tactile stimulation as infants and we try to compensate for that deprivation. We substitute self-manipulation in the form of thumb-sucking as children, and then later as adults by carrying worry-beads, chin-stroking, ear and hair-pulling, head-scratching.

At La Casa, we bring touch to a high art. No matter which therapy you choose to have, you will receive the healing touch of our expertly trained therapists.

Scent

Scents from diffused essential oils fill the air at La Casa. Essential oils are one of the most powerful healers we have. The mere act of breathing in these powerful aromas raises your vibrational level, moving you closer to a state of optimal balance. The healing begins in the brain. There are 800 million nerve endings in the nose which detect odors. The nerve from the olfactory bulb extends back toward the mid-brain and then on to the pituitary and pineal glands and finally to the amygdala.

Essential oils have the same function in the plant as blood has to the human. Oils serve as the defense system in plants. These oils oxygenate the plant and carry nutrients, vital elements and chemical constituents to every cell in the plant. They contain each of the plant’s healing nutrients including trace minerals, vitamins, hormones, amino acid precursors and other components. They give the plant the ability to destroy infections, stave off infestations, initiate and maintain growth and repair structural damage. The essential oil of the plant is literally the life force of the plant.

Essential oils detoxify the body. Oxygen pushes unwanted chemicals out of the cell. Normal cell function and balance is established only when there is sufficient oxygen.

As well, essential oils have the capacity to change the electrical frequency of the body. Our bodies are electrical. So is everything around us, including our television, our lights and our microwave. The difference between us and our electrical appliances is that we have a harmonic, coherent frequency whereas appliances operate at incoherent, chaotic frequencies. Our appliances have the ability to fracture the frequency that we operate at.

We know that the body awake averages a frequency of 62-72 Hz. Disease sets in when the frequency drops. The frequency of the body drops when the body comes into contact with substances that have lower frequencies: junk food, canned or otherwise denatured food, drugs, even synthetic vitamins. Research has shown that merely holding a cup of coffee in your hand can drop your frequency (through the aroma which has a more powerful effect on us than any of us would imagine).

The electrical frequency of essential oils ranges between 52 and 320 Hz. They have the highest frequency of any substance known to man. Because they are living substances, their frequency is harmonic with the human frequency. When essential oils come into contact with our bodies, the frequency of our bodies becomes raised to a degree that we become inhospitable hosts to pathogenic organisms.

We also use essential oils in massages, applied directly to the skin. Within 21 minutes of being placed anywhere on the human body, essential oil will penetrate every cell within the body. We rub our bodies with oils as specific medicines.

Because different oils have different healing properties, we can target the specific effect you want. We have a variety of oils with the effects of nurturing, cleansing, renewal, clarity,

Sight

Enjoy our tropical garden with its lush foliage. Research has documented that healing takes place faster in hospital rooms that have a view to the outside. At La Casa, we bring the outside into the inside; we even have a circulating pond.

Sound

The clangs of city life fade away as you listen to our soothing music. We have available classical, jazz, New Age - and probably whatever meets your fancy. A favorite is the dusk and dawn sounds at our spa in Puerto Rico.

Taste

We have available a large assortment of organic herbal teas.

You can choose from our wide range of therapies including massages, facials, body wraps, floatation, colon therapy, as well as mind/body therapies, all delivered with our distinctive style. This means a comprehensive whole-body approach to all treatments delivered by our highly trained staff, whose sole mission is to provide you with attentive service, timely information, and ingredients of the very highest quality.

In accordance with our mission to provide state-of-the-art services within the holistic arena of health and beauty, La Casa Day Spa has developed several original, trademarked treatments. Among them are:

Floatation

Although we didn't invent floatation, we have taken it to a high art. You walk into a sanitary, private chamber that is filled with 8 inches of water and 1000 pounds of Epsom salts. You float buoyantly atop the water that has been heated to precisely skin temperature. The chamber is darkened as well as soundproofed. Because the temperature of the water is the same as the skin, there is no nerve transmission from skin to brain, and you enter a state of utter relaxation.

THE WISDOM

We believe in arming people with knowledge.

We believe that knowledge leads to intuition and that intuition leads to wisdom.

We believe that wisdom leads us to make the best choices for ourselves.

We believe that using the 5 basic elements of life -- Earth, Water, Fire, Air and Sky -- in our daily lives gives a profound sense of awareness of and trust to this earth we share with all its other living beings.