Enter Gaia (pronounced “guy-uh”) in La Jolla and you know you’ve found a living workshop for feng shui. Owner Rhana Pytell has created a sensuous environment profuse with orchids, original artwork and entrancing sounds. In one of the relaxation rooms, a plate of scrumptious chocolate-chip cookies is offered with the requisite herbal teas and fruit waters. Surely balance must exist here.

Today’s treatment is the banya. That’s Finnish for sauna, but that doesn’t even begin to capture what lies ahead. The technique combines hot and cold, intense aromatherapy, a series of massages and a eucalyptus tapotement—where bunches of the healing tree’s round leaves are gently thrashed over the body. There’s no pain here, and honest to goodness, it feels like hundreds of teeny, tiny hands going up and down the body. Banya is available in San Diego only at Gaia, and on this day it was administered by Amy, a quietly energetic young woman who should be a national treasure.

The philosophy behind banya is to boost energy and promote health through applications designed to alternately dilate and flood the body’s circulatory system. Technical-sounding stuff, that, but look what’s involved in this two-hour extravagance: essential oils of lavender and peppermint, a lemon-lime hydrating solution, melted honey mango butter, mandarin-jasmine body butter, a cold citrus-sage moisturizer, chilled marble stones and a lengthy scalp massage using peppermint oil. Between these ministrations of fragrances are saunas, steam mists and buckets of ice water to pour over one’s head. It is a multisensory journey of glorious proportions.

Your correspondent now manages to stagger into another treatment room to meet Lupe, whose healing hands are downright inspirational as she indulges her client in a one-hour European facial. The word “bliss” only begins to capture the sensation.