Nicole and Jose Silva are offering salty relief in Greene.
The couple launched Sen Bridge Wellness Center, a dry salt halotherapy center, at 101 Kofira Lane in Greene in 2022.
“My husband graduated from the Finger Lakes School of Massage in 2017, and he always said, ‘Oh, we should open a salt cave,’” Nicole Silva said. “Our property actually has a little cottage in the back, and we slowly but surely built this cave. It was a humongous project, then we opened it up in 2022.”
Silva, who said her mother is from Greene, returned upstate in 2015.
“I was pregnant for our very last child and I was 47,” she said. “We were down in Peru, where my husband is from, and wanted to have our baby in the States. We looked to see where we wanted to move to, and this beautiful octagon house was for sale, and we threw around the idea of buying and renovating it.”
The center, Silva said, provides multi-faceted alleviation in a unique setting.
“A salt cave does what going to the beach does; in effect, you’re breathing in salty air,” she said. “When people go to the seaside — which used to be prescribed by doctors — you’re breathing in all this salty air and, when salt hits mucus, it breaks it down and makes it more watery, so that you can blow it out and move it.
“The second thing it does is decrease inflammation,” Silva continued. “If your nasal passages or respiratory tract is inflamed, it will bring that down. So, someone with asthma or COPD or something with lots of inflammation can open up those airways, and then you’ve got good transport, because the mucus is liquidy. This is why everybody needs a salt cave: everybody has lungs and a nose. Also, skin conditions; if you have acne, those pores are inflamed and there’s bacteria growing in the pore. The salt is so fine — it looks like powdered sugar — that it goes into the pore, dries up the oil and takes that inflammation down. And, because it’s anti-microbial, it will work on that bacteria. For people with eczema and psoriasis, it gets underneath the plaques and takes that inflammation right down. Salt does a lot of things.”
Though Greene was an exceptional site for a salt cave, Silva said, the area’s climatic conditions made it a good fit.
“It isn’t something people know about, and putting something so unknown in a little town was a risk, but people love it,” she said. “We have a lot of allergies around here and cold winters with hot/dry inside (spaces) with the heat, and mucus membranes get thinner and dryer and inflamed, then you get cold and flu, so this decreases the time of that sickness.”
And, Silva claimed, time spent in the salty space has mental health benefits.
“The reason that probably 70% of our clients come is, it creates a relaxation response,” she said. “We’ve designed the cave to look otherworldly so, when you step in, you’ve left the outside world. You can relax in a recliner, we have soft music going and soft lights, there’s a little water fountain that trickles, so people become very, very relaxed. After about 20 minutes in, they get a nice little serotonin boost and a lot of people fall asleep. Everybody always comes out way more relaxed, so it’s great for people with depression and anxiety to just go in and spend an hour decompressing.”
Though the cave aesthetics are achieved with lighting and stylized sprayed foam and “big, chunky New York state rock salt on the floor,” Silva said, the true therapy is in the salt and its delivery system.
“We have a special machine called a halo generator — with halo being the old Greek word for salt — and it’s pharmaceutical salt, also sourced from New York, that goes into the machine and it grinds it up very fine and blows it into the room and swirls it into the air,” she said. “Some salt rooms are just bricks and lights but, without the machine, it’s not halotherapy.”
The center’s clientele, Silva said, is “really a pretty even demographic.”
“We have everything from little babies to very old people,” she said. “Some people just come when they’re sick, some people get packages and come once a week to relax and some people come more than once a week because of chronic conditions. Everybody needs it. But I encourage people to try to be aware of symptoms and how they return … because I’m not into charging people crazy amounts for coming here more than they need to.
“I have never had anybody not like it,” Silva continued. “People always love it, which makes me happy. I want people to feel like they got their money’s worth, and to feel better. I’ve had people go in very sick and come out smiling. A lot of people love it and come again and bring somebody back with them.”
The space is also open to small groups, Silva said.
Silva said she hopes to expand offerings for clients and practitioners.
“The philosophy for opening this was really to be able to create a place where other therapists could come and practice their therapy,” she said. “For a lot of therapists, it’s not especially feasible to rent a location, so they end up dropping out of massage or whatever their thing was. We have somebody that comes down once or twice a month and plays the crystal sound bowls in the cave and people love that. We have invited other practitioners to come in and do yoga or different things. And we are hoping to do an addition off the back of our home to have more spaces for more therapies.”
For more information or to book a session, visit senbridgewellness.com or call 607-323-1344.