I Can Do That
Rebecca Weston, Owner of Sacred Mountain Spa…
At the age of 50, Rebecca Weston had a revelation. “Up to that point, fear had kept me stuck. But when you turn 50, you realize that two-thirds of your life is behind you, and you only have so much time ahead of you. So, the question becomes, what do you want to do with what’s left? For me, I decided that ‘I can’t do that’ was no longer a part of my vocabulary, and I could do anything I wanted to. I had always wanted to be an esthetician. So, I decided to go back to school, which terrified me, but God just opened the way for everything to fall in place.” After graduation, Weston went to work for Sacred Mountain Spa in Mount Shasta. A year later, another life-changing opportunity presented itself. “I was there for a year when the owner came up and asked me if I wanted to buy the spa. She was ready to step away and having watched me, she felt that I would give it the same love she had. At the time, one of my clients asked me where I was going to get the down payment and I told her I honestly didn’t know. Then, when we got done with that session, she said, ‘I want to be that person’ and she wrote me a check for the down payment that day. March 1st will be 10 years that I’ve owned the spa, and I’m still get giddy I get to do this.”
From an outsider’s perspective, Weston’s positivity is both contagious and confounding, especially given the personal adversity she’s faced during that same decade. “I got certified in oncology esthetics because I had lost a lot of people close to me to cancer, my mother included. And when people are in treatment, there are certain ingredients that you don’t want to use on the skin. There are certain ways of doing massage for people who have lost their lymph nodes. Sometimes you must prop people up because they can get nauseated. I wanted to help and love on people and make them feel better going through treatments.”
Then, Weston got her own cancer diagnosis. “Until I got cancer, I didn’t really understand all that you feel and everything else that goes along with that. But I feel like it was also a gift because now I can really help people who have it.”
Not only is Weston a cancer survivor, she’s survived two major wildfires. Her house in Weed was directly in the path of the Boles Fire in 2014 and then again in the path of the Mill Fire in 2022. “Both times I was home, it was my day off, so I’m very thankful I was able to get my animals and get out. During the first fire, I had 15 minutes, and I had a friend who saw the fire coming, and so she and her son stopped by my house and helped me throw things in the car. I was able to grab all my photo albums, my antique pictures of my mom, all that stuff. But this last time I only had just enough time to grab my dog and my cat. And when I left, my heart was sad. I had to leave behind all my mom’s diaries that she kept every day from 1949 to a week before she passed.”
Miraculously, Weston’s home wasn’t destroyed in either instance, even though most of her neighborhood was devastated. “The first fire was hard coming back from because it looked like a war zone. I was out of my house for seven weeks. The second fire was only five days, but driving in was still traumatic. Your heart just breaks for people. And this last one, lives were lost. People lost their animals. I just prayed for everybody that I could, that they were doing okay or finding strength.”
But confronting those life and death moments has only reinforced Weston’s original personal commitment to let fear go. “Going through things, like with my cancer or the fires, I feel that our day is in the Big Book when it’s going to happen. If it’s my day, it’s my day and I will be OK, so, I can’t live in fear of that.”
All of these ups and downs in her life have also magnified for Weston what is truly dear in life. “After something like that you realize what’s important and what’s not. I mean, I love all my things. I love my house. I’ve worked hard to have my own place. But I also realized it’s just stuff. I can’t take it with me. In the big scheme of things, if I have my animals and my loved ones, that’s what matters.” •
Sacred Mountain Spa
2224 W.A. Barr Road, Mount Shasta (530) 926-2331 www.sacredmountainresortspa.com
