Death in the non-Native Sweat

An Art of Wellness POV

By now we've all heard about the deaths in the "sweat-lodge" in Sedona. Notice--I put "sweat-lodge" in quotes. That's because a sweat-lodge as practiced by traditional Native American people and the "sweat-lodges" that new-age leaders have been offering for years for money to people who seek another way to heal themselves are very different things. Therein is the problem.

Sweats have been practiced--as Body-Mind-Spirit traditions by cultures all around the world for thousands and thousands of years. In many parts of the world, as religions changed, and people lost  awareness that human beings are Body-Mind-Spirit beings, the traditions changed too. The benefits to the health of the body were clear, and though religions changed, many parts of the world kept going to sauna as a way to heal the Body--without the Mind or Spirit practices involved. Not until the latter half of the 20th Century did Science "prove" why heating up the body is beneficial: inducing sweating--the body's natural self-cleansing process--allows our bodies to expel accumulated toxins, but we now also understand the Science of metabolism, and how the increase of body temperature "turns on" the self-healing processes that healers understood (without our modern-day technology to prove it) long before the days of Hippocrates.

Some Native American peoples were also removed from their traditional ways for many years. Some found them again. And some handed down their traditions meticulously, quietly, down through the generations of their people. In the late 1970's, involved with many humanistic psychology and alternative health practitioners, I was invited by non-Native American people to come to their "sweat-lodges." I demurred. I'd already been a seeker and a traveller. I'd been fortunate to meet traditional healers around the world--and I felt that if I were to experience a tradition, I'd rather experience it with traditional people. A Native American elder I met pointed out how important it was to prepare spiritually, knowing the right ways, the right prayers, everything involved with the construction of the lodge, even before heating the stones and going into the lodge for the actual "sweat." She said something very powerful. She asked what it would be like if someone who was not of a Christian tradition that took communion put on the vestements of a priest, bought the chalice, the other tools, the wine, and without the correct preparation or spiritual training, sang the prayers, performed transubstantiation then offered communion. "People would be offended," she said. "Yet non-Native people do not feel there is anything wrong with performing our traditions."

Later, I worked with Native American people of different tribes, and was fortunate to be invited to traditional sweat-lodges in different parts of the country. Different tribes have different traditions. They "do sweats" in different ways. But a sweat-lodge is a very serious spiritual practice and undertaking. Native people have traditions of giving, and if you come for value, you give value of yourself in return. It is a matter of respect: respect for Self and respect to the People you have come to. But I have never been to a traditional sweat where they charged money for it.  And while I've been in sweats where we were crowded close together in small quarters, they were never so crowded that the lodge leader was not able to keep a very strong awareness of each individual in the lodge--many things can happen in a sweat. Whatever reasons the sweat is happening for, whatever reasons the seekers have in coming, the Body-Mind-Spirit welfare of each individual--and the group-- is a very serious responsibility of the lodge-leader.

In the first year after the acute toxic chemical exposure that injured my brain and body, and blinded me for years, I was being bounced around clinic doctors who had only drugs and a board and care to offer me. No real help, no real relief. My Indian friends brought me food, healing herbs, and took me twice a month to a lodge at a California reservation. I'd sweated there with them when I was well. When I became very sick, they cared for me and worked on me. I probably would have died that year without the healing I experienced there. I'd done a lot of work for their people over the years and they asked nothing of me in return. Later, when I got to one of the two medical toxicologists in the entire state of California at the time, he told me that I needed to go into a sauna as often as I could--to help my body remove the toxic overload. Without the healing of the sweat and the leaders who knew how to help my Body-Mind-Spirit, I do not know if I would have survived. I am grateful.