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Our Mission
A shirodhara system is an extension of a therapist's hands. With that in mind, we spent thousands of hours developing the best automatic shirodhara system possible: how the oil is warmed and regulated, the quality and consistency of the oil stream, how little oil each treatment asks for, and how completely the system fades into the background.
The result? A ShiroBliss system performs the same on its thousandth session as its first. It sets up in minutes and holds temperature to the degree; it cleans up without fuss and runs feather-quiet from first drop to last.
And it's beautiful - an instrument elegant enough to belong in the room it serves, designed with both the practitioner and the client in mind.
The ShiroBliss story
There is a particular kind of maker who builds not for the market, but because something essential is missing from the world. Rick Sanger is that kind of maker.
Rick grew up in a family of healers — his father a beloved obstetrician who delivered over ten thousand babies on Coronado Island, his mother one of San Diego's pioneering female anesthesiologists, who served twice as Chief of Staff at Coronado Hospital and practiced medicine with equal measures of precision and warmth for four decades. Service through craft was the family's core principle.
Rick inherited both the family's devotion to precision and its orientation toward healing — earning degrees in Physics from Pomona College and Computer Engineering from UC Santa Cruz, where mathematics and systems thinking became his native tools. He went on to spend twenty years as a backcountry ranger in the high Sierra — work that demanded that same rigor under a wholly different kind of pressure: the ability to remain calm, skilled, and effective in the most demanding conditions imaginable. For his service he received the Department of the Interior Medal of Valor, presented to him personally by President Clinton.
Rick eventually settled in Nevada County, California, a community unlike most in America. There, two international yoga ashrams and a respected Ayurvedic college have long woven the Vedic sciences into daily life.
Rick had traveled to India before, but it was through contact with India's healing tradition in his own Northern California community that he encountered Shirodhara — and recognized immediately, with both a healer's instinct and an engineer's eye, that this sacred practice deserved better tools than existed anywhere in the world.
In 2007, he built the first ShiroBliss system: engineering excellence in service of ancient healing. Elegant, automatic, flawlessly reliable, and even portable.
Nearly two decades later, ShiroBliss remains what it has always been: a beautifully engineered instrument in service of one of Ayurveda's most profound offerings.
ShiroBliss systems are built with care by a regional team of artisanal makers, have been refined over time, and are offered with the conviction that ancient healing deserves modern excellence.
We're glad you found us.
CRAFT
Made by hand
Since 2007, every ShiroBliss system has been built by local artisans — woodworkers, software engineers, and metalsmiths who shape each component by hand, one at a time. Nothing here comes off an assembly line; the care you feel in a finished system is a product of intentional craftsmanship.
A NOTE FROM THE FOUNDER
To be candid – I’ve been obsessing on this system for about 19 years. I’ve thought through every aspect – the pros & cons – how to make it easy to use – how to make it quiet. And like any engineer/artist, I am my own worst critic. But I am now convinced that this system is easily the best out there – the highest quality, the best thought-out, the most carefully crafted. No question. Additionally, many of the features that are now standard ShiroBliss simply aren’t available in any other system. For example:
-The system allows the user to specify the exact desired target temperature. Set & forget. There is no need to adjust a knob if the room is a little colder than usual. It uses a “PID” temperature control system (Proportional, Integral, and Derivative math to adjust heaters or coolers so they do not overshoot or bounce around) similar to that used in industrial processes – much more sophisticated than a simple thermostat which has inherent fluctuations.
-The system allows for flow rate adjustment during therapies without any disturbance to the upper bowl (no fussing with a valve that is attached to the upper bowl, or worse yet, hidden under the lower bowl)
-Ability to adjust lower bowl height to minimize “oil drop” from the client’s head to the collection bowl.
-Anti-pendulum system: the upper bowl can be moved freely, but will not “swing” by itself. When you are ready to let go, it will stay where you leave it!
-Safe. Safe. Safe. The system has redundant temperature limiting systems.
I hope this helps you in your search for your next Shirodhara System.
Rick Sanger
FOUNDER