Traditional Finnish Sauna
Tommi Ullgren & Teemu Arina
Tommi is consciousness hacker, impact investor, technology entrepreneur and sauna connoisseur based in Helsinki. He is dedicated advocate for health benefits of sauna enabling more people to get familiar with Finnish wellbeing traditions. At Biohacker Summit you’ll find him guiding participants to heavenly steam and perfect sweat at our Sauna Village / Thermogenic Spa on both afternoons.
Tommi Ullgren and Teemu Arina explore the enduring tradition of the Finnish
Sauna is a place to relax, to get connected to our body and consciousness, and to get connected to our true self. It can be a transformational experience because when our body gets heated, our consciousness gets elevated.
Summary
- Sauna traditions survived in Finland despite 15th-century European bans, where sweatbathing was widely suppressed by the church as a pagan practice associated with witchcraft. - A quality sauna maintains 70-90°C with high humidity and requires seating where feet are positioned above the stone level to ensure an even, full-body heat experience. - The spirit of the sauna, or löyly, relies on the balance of fire, air, and water thrown on a stove (kiwas) containing a high volume of stones to release vapor and heat. - Traditional practices include using a vihta (birch branches) for massage and circulation, often followed by a dip in an avanto (ice hole) as a form of ancient healing technology. - The sauna serves as a sacred "temple" for relaxation and silence, where individuals strip away social status to focus on inner consciousness and physical recovery.
Article
Traditional Finnish Sauna: Ancient Healing Technology, Culture, And Biohacking
At Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki, A National Ritual Was Recast As A Technology Of Survival
In Helsinki on 1 November 2019, the presentation *Traditional Finnish Sauna* at **Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki** did something more ambitious than celebrate a beloved national custom. Led by **Teemu Arina** and joined on stage by **Tommi Ullgren**, it framed the Finnish sauna as both inheritance and instrument: a sacred room of silence, a physiological tool, and what Ullgren called, without irony, “ancient healing technology”.
The argument was simple, but it carried the force of an old truth newly translated for a restless age. Long before wellness was branded, measured, and sold back to the anxious, the Finns had already built a system for heat, stillness, purification, and return. Sauna, in this telling, was not indulgence. It was medicine for ordinary people, a structure in which the body recalibrated and the mind, briefly, came home.
The Tradition That Survived A Ban
Arina began with history, and history sharpened the stakes. Sweat bathing, he reminded the audience, was once widespread across Europe. But by the fifteenth century, church authorities had come to view such practices with suspicion, linking them to paganism, witchcraft, and dangerous ritual. Across much of the continent, sweat bathing was suppressed.
It endured in Finland, in part because Finland stood at the edge of ecclesiastical reach and cultural conformity. In the north, sauna survived where other traditions were extinguished. What lasted was more than a way of getting warm. It was a worldview preserved in timber, stone, smoke, and steam.
That resilience mattered. It meant that Finnish sauna culture carried traces of something older than modern health science: a pre-industrial understanding that heat could heal, that ritual could regulate, and that restoration required both elemental force and human humility.
What Made A Sauna Good
The presentation resisted the familiar reduction of sauna to numbers alone, even as it offered exacting standards. A good sauna, Arina said, was not defined by bravado about extreme temperature or by rigid timing protocols. “What is a good sauna experience? It is not about specific timing or temperature; it is about feeling what is good for you. What is a good sauna experience for you might be different for someone else.”
And yet tradition, as ever, had its principles.
The ideal range, he said, sat around 70 to 90 degrees Celsius, with humidity high enough to make the heat feel alive rather than sterile. A proper stove, or **kiuas**, needed mass, at least 300 kilograms of quality stones, enough to hold and release heat with depth and patience. Architecture mattered too. Seating had to be high enough that the bather’s feet rested above the level of the stones, ensuring an even, full-body heat rather than the common imbalance of a roasting head and cold legs.
This was not mere connoisseurship. It was an anatomy of wellbeing. The room had to work with the body, not against it.
Löyly, The Spirit In The Steam
Then came the language, carrying with it the deeper metaphysics of the sauna. In Finland, when water was thrown onto hot stones, the rising vapor was not treated as a simple physical reaction. It had a name and a spirit: **löyly**.
“In a Finnish sauna, when you throw water on the stones, you are releasing the spirit of the sauna,” Arina said. “When the water evaporates, that is the spirit of the sauna.”
It was a striking expression for a biohacking conference, a gathering more often associated with metrics, devices, and self-optimization. But the room seemed to understand the point. Not every effective technology arrived in silicon. Some came in the balanced interplay of fire, air, water, and stone, refined over centuries and guarded in language that refused to separate the physical from the sacred.
A Temple Without Status
When Tommi Ullgren joined Arina on stage, the presentation widened from technical guidance into something closer to philosophy. A Helsinki-based entrepreneur, investor, and devoted sauna advocate, Ullgren spoke of sauna not as performance but as surrender.
“The sauna is a temple,” Arina said in introducing the ethos of the space. “You go there and you do not talk politics or work; you go inwards. It is the moment when you can truly relax.”
That image lingered because it cut against modern life with unusual precision. In the sauna, titles dissolved. Clothes disappeared. The social armour people wore in offices, on stages, and online no longer held. What remained was heat, breath, and the disciplined possibility of silence.
Ullgren described the practice as a route back to bodily awareness and consciousness itself. Heat, he suggested, could alter more than circulation. It could shift attention inward, making meditation, sound work, and reflection feel more immediate, even transformative. For a summit devoted to human optimization, this was a subtle rebuke: the body did not always need more tracking. Sometimes it needed permission to be felt.
Birch, Ice, And The Shock Of Recovery
The presentation also honoured the tactile rituals that made Finnish sauna culture more than a seated endurance test. Among them was the use of **vihta**, birch branches gathered and bound into a whisk used to strike or massage the skin. The practice stimulated circulation and released volatile oils from the leaves, adding both fragrance and therapeutic effect.
Then there was the plunge: **avanto**, the cut in the ice into which sauna-goers lowered themselves after intense heat.
For Ullgren, the hot-cold transition stood as one of the most powerful tools in the entire tradition. “Going from a hot sauna to an ice hole is the best stress medicine I have found. In just five minutes, the stress is gone.”
It was a vivid formulation, and one that captured the physiological intelligence embedded in the ritual. Heat expanded, softened, and opened. Cold sharpened, shocked, and reset. Between them, the nervous system encountered a kind of ancient interval training, one capable of moving a person from agitation to clarity in minutes.
The Smoke Sauna And The Fragility Of Authenticity
There was also a note of warning. Finland may have had roughly two million saunas for a population of 5.6 million, but the presenters stressed that the most revered form, the traditional smoke sauna, had become increasingly rare. Only a small fraction remained.
This mattered because not all saunas were equal, and modern convenience often hollowed out tradition while preserving its label. Tiny electric units with too few stones, low humidity, and poorly designed benches could imitate the appearance of sauna while missing its essence. The presenters’ insistence on stone mass, humidity, seating height, and ritual language was, in part, an argument against that dilution.
Authenticity here was not nostalgia for its own sake. It was a defence of function, of accumulated knowledge, and of a cultural technology shaped by centuries of use.
A Biohacking Summit Looked Backward To Look Forward
The setting of the talk gave it an added tension. Biohacker Summit was, by design, future-facing, a place where conversations moved easily toward neurofeedback, psychedelics, subconscious reprogramming, and even digital immortality. Arina used the latter part of the session to preview the June 2020 Amsterdam edition of the summit, organised around the themes of resilience, conscience, and transcendence.
Yet the sauna talk suggested that the future of human enhancement might not depend solely on novelty. It might also require recovering methods that industrial modernity had neglected or trivialised. Sauna emerged as a rebuke to the fantasy that progress always meant adding complexity. Sometimes progress meant returning to elemental conditions under which human beings had long known how to heal.
Ancient Technology For A Fractured Age
If the presentation had a central insight, it was this: the Finnish sauna endured because it answered needs that had never gone away. The need to warm the body. The need to still the mind. The need to gather without spectacle. The need to step outside status and productivity and remember a more basic rhythm of being alive.
“For us Finns, sauna is ancient healing technology,” Ullgren said. “Back in the early days, it was said that sauna is a poor man’s medicine.”
In that phrase, something larger than national pride was at work. The sauna was presented not as luxury but as access, not as escapism but as repair. In an era of expensive wellness and relentless stimulation, its power lay partly in its refusal to overcomplicate the matter. Heat. Water. Stone. Silence. Breath. Cold. Return.
At **Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki**, **Tommi Ullgren** and **Teemu Arina** offered more than a lesson in Finnish custom. They described a civilisational artifact that had survived prohibition, modernisation, and commodification because it continued to do what the best technologies do: change human beings, reliably and deeply, using the simplest means imaginable.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki