Margit Halász

I am Margit, and Calm Stone Room is the small journal I keep alongside the practice I run out of a second-floor studio on a quiet street in Ljubljana. The room is small. The work is slow. The journal is where I write down what the work teaches me.

I trained as a massage therapist in my mid-twenties — first in Vienna, then in a longer course in Florence — and I have been practising for fourteen years now. For most of that time the work was the work and there was no writing about it. I started the journal three winters ago because I had begun to notice that the things I was learning at the table were going nowhere. I would have a small insight during a session with a particular body and then, by the next week, the insight would have softened and faded. The journal began as a way to hold the things I did not want to lose.

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

What the studio is

A single quiet room on the second floor of a small building near the Ljubljanica. One table. One window. 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 of the day is at ten. 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 through the 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 sit down weekly and articulate 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, more quietly, for the small group of clients and 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. Some are practitioners in their own right who use the pieces as a kind of long-distance conversation about the work. 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.

Hot takes. 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.

Treatments. 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.