A sweat lodge is a small, closed structure in which water is poured over heated stones to make intense heat and steam, used for purification and ceremony by many Native North American peoples. Therapeutic Shamanism respects it as a powerful wild practice but does not teach it: for domesticated modern people its effects tend to fade, and the ceremonies of particular living peoples belong to them.
What is a sweat lodge? #
A ceremony of heat and steam. Inside the lodge, water is poured over heated rocks, and American Indian peoples have typically used it to cleanse the body.1
It is also more than a steam bath. The writer and theologian Vine Deloria Jr, of the Standing Rock Sioux, contrasts tribal religions with those of the Near East, which build temples to separate worship from the natural world. Tribal peoples, he writes, hold their ceremonies in natural surroundings, and “The sweat lodge and the kiva are designed to represent the larger cosmos”.2 Deloria is writing of tribal peoples in general, and they lived in very different ways: the kiva, for example, belongs to the Pueblo peoples of the south-west, who are farmers, whilst others lived by hunting.
Is the sweat lodge a shamanic practice? #
It is one of the powerful ways shamanic cultures had of shocking people into a deep, right-brain, shamanic state, alongside ceremonies that may have gone on for days, prolonged fasting or dancing, hallucinogenic plants and vision quests. These are “wild practices”. They connect us to our wild soul and to the undomesticated, more-than-human world, and for hunter-gatherers, who already lived that way, there was no conflict between what such practices opened up and the rest of life.3 See What is a vision quest?
Why does Therapeutic Shamanism not use sweat lodges? #
For the same reason it does not build on vision quests. In domesticated modern life, the effects of such big experiences tend to fade. Paul Francis did sweat lodges, amongst much else, through his twenties and thirties, and they had their place in waking him up; but the good effects gradually wore off, a few weeks or months back in ordinary life usually being enough, and he saw the same in friends and students. That is not a criticism of the sweat lodge itself, which can be powerful and useful if done in the right way. It is a recognition that domesticated people struggle to integrate such experiences into daily life.4
His own path shows the same thing from another side. For all the years he had spent in therapy, meditating, doing sweat lodges, encounter groups, shamanic journeys and much else, he had still not met his Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer Soul by his late thirties, and did not know it was missing. That came only through an initiation his GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this told him he needed. Until then, for all his hard work on his personal and spiritual development, he was “a tree with shallow roots”.5 See What is a rite of passage, and what did we lose when initiation disappeared?
What about borrowing another people’s ceremony? #
That is where care is most needed. Cultural appropriation is when people from a dominant culture adopt the customs, practices and ideas of a culture that has been oppressed, without its permission and without acknowledgement, respect or real understanding. In the shamanic community it is a highly sensitive issue, and rightly so, given the history of colonial exploitation.6 Therapeutic Shamanism is built on core shamanism, which is not culturally specific, and keeps its practice as culture-lite as it can; it has never been based on any particular indigenous culture.7
The sweat lodge has been at the centre of this concern. Deloria wrote of non-Indians paying attractive fees that pulled traditional healers away from their own communities, and of “an unusual number of Indian fakers” touring suburbia “offering to perform ceremonies, primarily sweat lodges, for anyone with the money to pay.”8 See What is ‘plastic shamanism’? and Is Western shamanism cultural appropriation?
Are sweat lodges safe? #
They are physically demanding, and they can be dangerous when badly run. The archaeologist Vicki Cummings lists raising the temperature of the body, as in a sweat lodge, amongst the ways people reach altered states, and notes that it can bring on nausea, dizziness and a raised pulse.9 In October 2009, three people died after a sweat lodge ceremony near Sedona, Arizona, run by a self-help author for more than fifty paying participants; he was convicted of negligent homicide in 2011.10
