Almost nothing in the first ten minutes is what people expect, because most of it is preparation and most of that preparation is about heat. Here is the sequence, in the order it actually happens.
People who have not had it imagine the gel arriving in the first thirty seconds. It does not. The opening of a nuru session is unhurried and almost domestic, and the reason is that everything the hour depends on — warmth, a surface that can be used without care, a body that has stopped bracing — has to be in place before anything is poured. Rushing the beginning costs more than it saves.
She arrives, and the first thing that happens is the room gets warmer. Heating up, windows shut, and a minute or two of waiting while the air catches up. This is not fussiness. The gel is mostly water and water sheds heat quickly to a cool room; a session in a cold room is a session spent chasing temperature that was lost in the first five minutes. It is also the part of the process most often skipped elsewhere, and it is why a technically identical massage can feel like two different things in two different rooms.
While the room warms, the gel warms with it. It goes somewhere warm rather than somewhere hot — a little above body heat is the target, not more — and it will be brought back up again later in the hour.
The waterproof sheet goes down before anything is opened, and it goes down properly, tucked and flat, because a sheet that shifts mid-session is a problem that cannot be fixed without stopping. On a hotel bed that usually means stripping the top layer off and laying the sheet over the fitted one, then a towel layer above that. Five minutes, and it is the five minutes that decide whether you spend the rest of the hour thinking about the bed. There is more on that in the note on working on a hotel bed.
Nothing about this stage is a ceremony. It is closer to a kitchen than a temple, and the therapists who do it best do it briskly and talk while they do it, because the point of preparing in front of you is that you stop having to wonder what is being prepared.
Most sessions begin with one, and it is not purely hygiene. Warm water raises skin temperature several degrees, and skin that is already warm accepts the gel without the small flinch that cold skin gives. It also marks a threshold. You go in dressed and thinking about the day, and you come out in a towel with the day at some distance, and the massage has effectively started without anyone announcing it.
The gel is poured, not rubbed in. It goes on in a line down the back and it is spread by contact rather than by hand — a forearm or a side lowered onto it and allowed to move. The first sensation is almost always weight before it is slipperiness, which surprises people. Then the weight starts travelling and does not stop, and somewhere in the following two or three minutes the useful thing happens: you lose the ability to predict where the next contact will be, because the current one has not ended.
That is the ten minutes. A warm room, a sheet, a shower, a pour and one long first pass. Everything after it is variation on the last of those, at different pressures and on different parts of the body, for however long the session runs. If you are booking a nuru massage for the first time and want the whole arc rather than just the opening, the first-timer's guide takes it through to the end, including the part everybody forgets to ask about, which is how it finishes.