Iris Holwerda

I am Iris, and Moss Balm Studio is the small spa journal I keep alongside the practice I run out of a second-floor room on a quiet canal in Utrecht. The room is small. The work is slow. The journal is where I write down what the work teaches me, week by week.

I trained as a massage therapist in Amsterdam in my early twenties and added a long course in clinical aromatherapy in Belgium the year after. I have been in practice for eleven years now. For most of that time the work was the work and there was no writing about it. The journal began three winters ago because I had begun to notice that the small things I was learning at the table were going nowhere — a quiet insight in the middle of a session would, by the next week, have faded out of memory. The journal is where those insights live now.

It became, over a year or so, the modest shared thing that it is now. The people in our quarter walk by the studio window and read the latest piece on a small printed card in the frame. Visitors from elsewhere find the site and read pieces I had not thought anyone outside the city would ever read. Both are welcome.

What the studio is

One quiet treatment room on the second floor of a small building near the Oudegracht. A single table. A window that opens onto a chestnut tree. A wooden floor. A low chest with a brass bowl of warm water on it. A few shelves with the small inventory of oils and folded linens that the work needs.

The practice is solo. I see four to five clients a day, no more. The first session is at ten in the morning. The last finishes by six. Between sessions there is always at least a forty-minute pause — for the room to settle, for me to walk to the back kitchen and drink something warm, for the next body to arrive into a space that is not still carrying the previous one.

What the journal is for

Mostly, it is for me. The discipline of having to articulate weekly what I have noticed has changed my practice in slow but real ways. The pieces that go up here are the ones that have been worked on enough to feel honest. The drafts in my notebook are about three times as long as anything you will read on this site.

It is also, quietly, for the small group of clients and herbal-medicine friends who follow it. Most of them are people who have been at the table with me at some point and recognise the practice they are reading about. I am grateful for all of you.

What you will not find here

Sales. I do not sell products. I do not affiliate-link the oils I mention. The brands I recommend are recommended because they are what I use; I have no commercial relationship with any of them.

Wellness shouting. The journal moves slowly because the work moves slowly. The pieces here are written over weeks; they do not respond to anything that is currently being argued about on the internet.

Medical claims. I am not a doctor. The pieces on this site are about wellness practice, not about medical care. For anything that needs a doctor, please see one.

How to write to me

If you want to write to me, the address is on the contact card in the studio window or written into the small printed cards I leave on the welcome shelf. I read everything that comes in. I answer as much of it as I can, slowly.

Thank you for reading. I am glad the journal has found you.