Soaking

Aajonus gave this formula repeatedly across workshops and consultations with slightly varying quantities, but the core components remained consistent: raw milk, raw apple cider vinegar, and either sea salt or Epsom salt. The standard version he described most often was three quarters of a cup of raw milk, two to three tablespoons of raw apple cider vinegar, and two heaping tablespoons of sea salt or Epsom salt. In some workshops he gave the milk as one to one and a half cups, and the vinegar as approximately three tablespoons. The sea salt he specified as sun-dried sea salt.

The purpose of each ingredient is distinct. The milk provides fats, proteins, and minerals that bind with the chemical toxins in the water and prevent them from being absorbed into the skin and bloodstream. The vinegar, specifically raw apple cider vinegar, contributes its own mineral and acid profile that further neutralizes the chemical compounds. The salt, whether sea salt or Epsom salt, draws fluid out of the skin by osmotic action, which is the mechanism by which perspiration is accelerated and toxins are pulled out more efficiently. Aajonus noted that when he added the salts, perspiration increased noticeably, and he regarded this as a positive outcome because it meant the toxins were being removed faster.

He also described coconut cream as an optional addition to the bath, typically a couple of tablespoons, particularly when someone was going to be in the bath for a long time and wanted to protect the skin from drying. He likened the coconut cream to the spray wax at the end of a car wash, leaving a thin layer of oil and water-soluble fats on the skin when exiting the bath so it does not feel stripped.

For people without access to coconut cream, he sometimes mentioned coconut oil as an alternative, adding just a teaspoon. He acknowledged that no one was commercially making coconut cream in the form he wanted, so coconut oil was his practical substitute in those situations.

When using well water rather than municipal water, Aajonus said the protective additions were not strictly necessary because the chemical burden was absent. However, he still recommended putting at least a little Epsom salt in well water to encourage perspiration and to help with any minerals like iron that might irritate or dry the skin surface. He also continued to recommend adding a small amount of coconut cream to well water baths to keep the skin soft after the perspiring and drying effects of the heat.

Aajonus described a specific procedure for preparing the hot bath beyond just filling the tub. He instructed filling the bathtub halfway with scalding hot water first and letting that sit for ten minutes. The reason was to heat the bathtub itself so it would not rapidly pull down the temperature of the bath water once filled. After the ten minutes of preheating the tub, lukewarm water was added to bring the total bath to approximately 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

Once the temperature was correct, the milk, vinegar, and salt were added, and then the mixture was allowed to sit in the tub for seven minutes before getting in. This waiting period allowed the protective ingredients to fully disperse and begin interacting with the chemical compounds in the water before the body made contact.

He was emphatic that showers were not a substitute and were actually worse than baths when using municipal water, because a shower continuously streams chemicalized water over the entire body without any neutralizing ingredients present. He stated explicitly that with the level of fluoride and chlorine in some municipal supplies, taking a shower would leave him a shaking, nervous wreck. Baths, with the formula, were the controlled environment where soaking could be beneficial rather than harmful.

Aajonus recommended that everyone take a hot bath at minimum 40 minutes daily, and that 90 minutes daily was the ideal. He observed across his consulting practice that people who took 90-minute baths daily for a full year showed healing advancement two to three times faster than those who did not take hot baths. He considered this one of the most significant and consistent observations in his clinical experience.

He acknowledged that he personally sometimes spent many more hours than 90 minutes soaking, particularly at hot springs, where he described spending six to seven hours in a single day across multiple sessions, going through sometimes three sport drinks over that span plus his normal two quarts of milk.

The practical reason for longer duration is that the heat penetrates progressively more deeply into the body over time. Aajonus described the lymphatic system as capable of becoming waxy and hardened, and compared a cold stick of butter in a jar to what the hardened lymphatic fat resembles inside the body. The sustained heat of a long soak is what melts that hardening, and more time produces more melting and more thorough lymphatic clearing.

He did not recommend that people new to the diet take baths every three or four days as he did personally, and he noted that his own bathing frequency reflected where he was in his own healing process. He personally took baths only every three or four days by the time of the workshops, though he had taken them far more frequently during recovery periods.

The mechanism Aajonus described for why hot baths accelerate detoxification involves the lymphatic system specifically. The lymphatic system accumulates toxins that are wrapped in fats, and those fatty deposits become hardened and waxy over time, effectively imprisoning the toxins and preventing the body from clearing them through normal channels. The sustained heat of a hot bath penetrates deeply enough to begin melting and liquefying those hardened fats, releasing the stored toxins so they can be carried out through the skin via perspiration.

Because heat is what drives this process, Aajonus discussed alternatives to baths for situations where a bathtub was unavailable. His personal alternative when traveling without access to a bath was hot water bottles, up to seven of them placed at the calves, between the thighs, at each hip, in each armpit, and at the left side of the neck and head. He covered himself with beach towels to tent the heat and catch perspiration, lying on three beach towels and covered with another. He described using long underwear in cold situations to absorb the perspiration rather than letting it evaporate and chill the body.

He noted that the hot water bottle approach was less efficient than a full bath but was his best available substitute during extended travel. He stated that people who spent hours in hot baths, including sleeping in a hot tub in some cases, healed faster. He referenced a situation where someone doing extreme soaking healed at a pace he compared to the cheese principle, meaning a dramatic acceleration of the healing process.

Aajonus distinguished clearly between the ingredients he recommended for baths and those he was skeptical of or opposed to. He did not recommend Epsom salts for soaking in the context of someone asking about using them for acne scarring on their back, expressing concern that Epsom salts might potentially enter the bloodstream through the open skin created by the acne lesions. However, he did routinely include Epsom salt or sea salt in his standard bath formula, so this concern appeared specific to the context of broken or compromised skin rather than a general prohibition.

He never recommended honey in the bath. When the subject came up, he dismissed it as a waste of honey, and said that honey and butter should be applied to the skin topically rather than dissolved in bath water.

He was unequivocal about not adding anything that contained processed or toxic substances. The vinyl bath drain stopper was something he addressed specifically, advising that it be baked for eleven minutes in water at 211 degrees Fahrenheit and then dried for five hours before use, to cure any outgassing from the vinyl before it sat in a hot bath environment.

A plant in the bathroom during bathing was something he endorsed as helpful for oxygen support, citing the absorption of any potential outgassing from the tub during steaming.

Aajonus described using soaking in pools and baths during his own recovery from a serious motorcycle accident in which he sustained severe damage to his leg. He arranged with the hotel owner to stop chlorinating the swimming pool for five days, because chlorine would have been harmful to his damaged tissues. He exercised his leg in the deep end of the pool where his body was buoyant enough that almost no weight was placed on the injury. He described this as walking in very slow motion, almost tiptoeing through the water, to keep the leg moving and working without loading it.

The absence of chlorine was the critical variable. When the algae began growing in the pool at five days, the hotel owner wanted to add chlorine again. He argued that the algae was beneficial and should remain. After the pool was eventually treated, he moved his exercise to the ocean across the road.

The wound itself was kept moist through an elaborate layered dressing: gauze soaked in wet material placed directly over the raw tissue, a wet hand towel over that, and then a piece of plastic over the wet towel to prevent drying, followed by an ace bandage. The plastic did not touch the skin directly. This kept the wound environment continuously moist and allowed tissue regeneration to proceed, resulting in complete regrowth of the new skin within twelve days.

He described the same principle of moist dressings in other injury contexts, always with the goal of keeping regenerating tissue continuously hydrated so cellular division could proceed uninterrupted.

Aajonus described using clay on the body during a bath as part of his personal hygiene and skincare routine. He would stand up in the bath, apply the clay mixture all over his body, then get back down into the bath. By the time he had applied the clay across his whole body including his face (which also served as a shaving preparation), he was ready to get back into the tub, where he would take a brush to the skin to promote circulation, then apply his hair mixture and lie in the tub for half an hour to an hour. The clay pulled impurities out of the skin while he soaked.

He emphasized that clay for consumption was to be soaked in water rather than used dry. His instructions for Terramin clay were to mix approximately four ounces of clay with four ounces of good non-carbonated mineral water, specifically not carbonated because the carbon dioxide would destroy the soil bacteria in the clay that were part of its beneficial action. The soaking in water revived those microbes back to activity, and the clay was kept at a liquid-to-paste consistency, adding more water as it dried. For consumption, the clay soaked this way was then mixed into kefir or other food rather than taken alone.

For medicinal clay packs as described in We Want to Live, he specified mixing approximately one cup of clay with three quarters of a cup of water to reach a fresh plaster of Paris consistency and allowing it to soak for four days before use.

Aajonus described personal experiences soaking in hot springs and natural water sources with considerable enthusiasm. He contrasted spring water hitting the skin with municipal water, describing the sensation of natural spring water coming out of rock into a small lagoon as "unbelievable" on the skin. He compared natural water to food in its effect, noting that water rich with biological life and minerals from the earth had a completely different character than treated municipal supplies.

He described taking spring water from a friend's property, putting it in his bathtub heated to a high temperature, and experiencing something quite different from a municipal bath even before any additions. This was consistent with his broader framework that naturally occurring bacteria and minerals in water made it biologically available and supportive in a way that sterile or chemically treated water could never be.

When soaking in hot springs himself, he went through sport drinks rather than plain water to replace the fluid lost in perspiration, emphasizing that even during extensive soaking the hydration strategy was through nutrient-bonded fluid rather than plain water.

Because hot baths produce significant perspiration, Aajonus addressed what to drink during a soaking session. He did not recommend drinking plain water during a bath. Instead, he specified a sport drink, which he described as a pureed mixture of three cups or more made from at minimum two of four ingredients: tomato, pineapple, and other specified components. He recommended having pineapple before getting into the bath and then sipping the sport drink throughout the session.

For a 90-minute bath, he suggested two to three cups of the sport drink while in the bath. After the bath, another cup of sport drink was appropriate, and then possibly two to three ounces of water, but only mixed into the sport drink rather than drunk by itself. For a 40-minute bath, the quantities were proportionally reduced. The total for a full bath session was approximately one quart of sport drink.

He was explicit that gulping fluids was counterproductive. Gulping caused the water to rush to the kidneys and be eliminated without being distributed to tissues, so the method was always to sip, taking small amounts at intervals throughout the session.

Aajonus used the phenomenon of skin wrinkling during a bath as evidence for his position that water extracts nutrients from tissues rather than hydrating them. He described the conventional term "waterlogged" as a contradiction in terms, since something that is logged should be bigger, not shriveled. In his framework, the wrinkling is the water drawing minerals and nutrients out of the skin tissue, dehydrating the cells by acting as a solvent against them.

The solution was the bath formula. He stated that with milk, sea salt, and vinegar in the bath water, a person could remain in the bath for twelve hours without wrinkling at all, because the water already contained the nutrients and fats that satisfied its solvent hunger, leaving the body's own nutrients undisturbed. This was his demonstration that the formula was not merely a chemical neutralizer for municipal toxins but also a structural protection for the body during any extended soaking.

Aajonus recommended a hot bath with the standard additions as preparation before various physically stressful situations. Before a medical or bodywork treatment, he preferred a hot bath over other methods of warming and relaxing the body, such as heating pads or microwaved warmers, which he criticized for damaging cellular structure through electromagnetic fields. The hot bath with milk, vinegar, and sea salt or Epsom salt relaxed the body thoroughly, and he recommended using a hot water bottle at the stomach or sides during travel to maintain that relaxed state while in transit.

He also suggested taking a bath with the formula before sunbathing, specifically noting that it was imperative not to shower or bathe on the morning of a sunbathing day, since washing removes the natural oils that serve as the body's own sunblock. This was one of the few contexts in which he actively recommended not soaking rather than soaking.

When Aajonus addressed the question of what happens when someone sits in a plain water bath for an extended time and the skin begins to shrivel, he gave this as a direct demonstration of water's solvent action on the body. Water in the bath draws nutrients out of the surface tissues. The formula additions prevent this because they load the water with nutrients so it has no nutritional deficit to draw from the body. He used this as a teaching point about the nature of water generally and its unsuitability as a primary hydration fluid.

He connected this back to his general position that people are not dehydrated but rather delipidated, meaning what the body is missing is fat, not water. Dry skin, flaking skin, cracked skin are all signs of fat deficiency in his framework, not water deficiency. Soaking in a properly prepared bath, one that contains fats and fat-soluble components, addresses this by delivering fats to the skin surface in the same session that toxins are being removed.

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