8. Sweat Lodge

For the intercultural awareness requirement of my Observation and Interviewing class, I had to choose a cultural experience to write about. The one stipulation was that is had to be a wholly new experience. There were a couple of fairly tame suggestions – eg going to a church or to a restaurant where I would be the only representative of my cultural group. However, none of the suggested experiences would have been wholly new. So I asked around and eventually a friend told me that he had heard about Native American Sweat Lodge ceremonies in Marin County. I researched online and found out that Sweat Lodges did indeed take place on Sundays in Marin. The following text (with its personal/intercultural awareness bent) is taken from the paper I wrote for the assignment:

I had very little idea of what to expect. The friend who suggested the Sweat Lodge to me had never been to one himself; he had just heard of someone else who had been. What is more, the website giving directions and instructions was down on the Sunday I intended to go. Fortunately I had written down the directions, and I remembered that participants were required to bring food as well as their own cutlery and crockery for a feast after the ‘sweat’. So, I left San Francisco at half past three, bound for the Golden Gate Bridge and Marin County. On the way I stopped at Safeways and bought a large chocolate cake. My own cooking skills are limited and I did not want to risk poisoning anyone.

I eventually found the address at which the sweat was due to take place. The house was a large bungalow perched on the side of a hill. It was surrounded by decking and one wall was composed of sliding windows overlooking the forest. I parked my car alongside a number of others in the car park and approached the house. I was about to knock when the door opened and an elderly man with Native American features hobbled out with the help of a walking stick. I asked him whether I had come to the right place to participate in a sweat lodge. He appeared not to understand so I repeated my question more loudly. Then the man nodded and told me to follow him.

We descended some muddy steps beside the house to a small, flat clearing in the forest. There was a fire burning in a circle of stones. A few meters from the fire stood the wooden frame of a low, circular tent. The frame was made of sticks tied together with twine. Between the fire and the frame was an altar comprising the skull of a buffalo and a number of small talismanic objects and trinkets. The fire was being tended by Santiago, the ‘fire man’. There were two young white men standing around the fire; they nodded a greeting to me. The elderly Native American man whom I had followed – I later found out that his name was Fred – took a seat in a chair beside the fire. No one spoke for quite a while, until eventually Fred asked me and the other two young men to fetch the blankets from his car up in the car park. We duly did this.

At this juncture I was primarily intrigued to see how things would develop. I was surprised by the lack of communication among participants but I did not feel that it was my place to initiate interaction and so I held by tongue. I hoped that the other visitors to the sweat lodge would turn out to be Native Americans rather than white Americans. I was aware that, if the other visitors were white Americans, I would feel a slight sense of having been cheated of the real experience. What is more, I would begin to feel part of some new-age cult rather than witness to a ritual preserved by Native American tradition.

Over the next half hour, other visitors arrived in ones and twos. My fears appeared to have been well founded; not a single visitor was a Native American, though there was one man from Guatemala with distinctly indio features. A number of these visitors appeared to be sweat lodge habitués; some appeared to know Fred quite well. We were instructed to cover the tent frame with the blankets to form a layer two blankets thick, then a dark green canvas sheet was thrown over the whole construction. After that we were told to get changed. The girls, of whom there were four, went up to the house while the boys changed around the fire. I had bought a pair of swimming trunks with me, though I had not known for certain that I would need them.

Having changed, we all assembled in a circle around the fire. There were fourteen of us. Fred asked us our names a couple of times and was able to remember each one with barely a mistake. He then began to explain a few things to us. There were four flags marking the four compass points around the clearing. The flags were colored red, white, yellow and black. Each flag represented a quality (enlightenment and innocence were two), as well as a race. As Fred explained this, I found myself wondering why certain colours represented certain qualities, why these qualities had been chosen in the first place, what the evidence for the symbolism was and how I could be certain that Fred wasn’t making this up. My own cultural mindset is one which questions the basis of belief, both my own beliefs and other people’s. Sometimes I am not questioning whether beliefs are true; I question whether they are genuinely held and therefore true for that person. Although Fred was a Native American, no one else there was, and hence I was more suspicious about the authenticity of the ceremony than I might otherwise have been.

Layout of Sweat Lodge (click to enlarge)

While Fred explained the significance of the flags, one of the late arrivals had installed himself and his suitcase next to the altar. He was a gangly young white man with curly hair. He carefully opened the suitcase and removed a number of small parcels wrapped in cloth. With an expression of extreme reverence he opened each parcel, revealing the various pieces of a pipe. He held each piece aloft and closed his eyes with a beatific expression, then he carefully refolded the cloth before fitting the pieces of the pipe together. The procedure was formal and grave; the young man putting the pipe together took his role very seriously. I found myself wondering whether this was genuinely an ancient ritual sanctified by time and tradition. Did the boy performing the ritual believe in what he was doing? If so, then what exactly were those beliefs? And if someone truly believes in what they are doing, then is there anymore that needs to be said? Must people be capable of justifying their actions, or is it just my own cultural mindset which leads me to think that?

When the pipe had been constructed, we walked around the fire in a clockwise direction, taking care not to cross the energy line running perpendicularly through the fire, the altar and the sweat tent (or lodge). I got to my hands and knees to enter through the small doorway of the tent, saying ‘For all my ancestors, ho,’ upon entering. Then I crawled round the very dark interior of the tent until I was wedged between two people with my back to the wooden frame and blankets of the tent wall. Once everyone was inside, Fred took his place by the door flap and the fireman began to carry glowing rocks from the fire and slide them through the flap towards a hole in the ground in the middle of the tent. When four or five rocks were in the hole, the fire man also entered the tent, then Fred closed the flap. One lady had been charged with the task of sprinkling cedar needles on the stones, a task she performed with some relish. Cedars are evergreen; the action symbolized continuity in life. Then a number of the more experienced sweat lodge visitors began to chant what I assumed were Native American songs. The refrains were short and frequently repeated; at times they sounded more like ululations, but they were nevertheless melodious.

At this point the pipe, stuffed with redwood bark, was passed around the tent. We were told to hold the clay bulb in one hand and inhale from the pipe stem which was as long as my forearm. I inhaled dutifully a few times. The smoke was acrid but had no distinctive flavor or psychotropic effect, as far as I could tell. At this point more glowing rocks were added from the fire outside. Water was liberally sprinkled on the stones, raising the humidity and causing me to start sweating. Nevertheless, as a devotee of the Scandinavian sauna, I did not find it very hot in the sweat lodge. It was more memorable for its stuffiness and dampness, the total darkness, the cramped conditions, the fact that an insect crawled up my shorts (I caught it en route), and the lack of any fresh air in a tiny space with fourteen people. However, I never actually found it unpleasant. The sweat lodge symbolizes the womb of the earth and I certainly felt some intimation of that.

There were a few more rounds of songs; I was surprised that everyone appeared to know the refrains. Then we started with the prayers. Each individual in the lodge spoke in turn, thanking the Creator and Life Spirit for his blessings, sharing something about their life and also, in most cases, asking for help with something. It seemed a bit like a form of group therapy in unusual conditions, and in which each individual is hidden by the darkness and hence more readily able to speak their mind without fear of embarrassment. Furthermore, I felt that the heat and the darkness also facilitated a sense of bonding among individuals. It is certainly easier to feel part of something bigger than yourself when your sweaty limbs are entwined with other peoples’ and when you can only hear and feel but not see.

However, even in darkness I was aware of myself as an observer. I am not comfortable in crowds and, although I like team sports and consider myself a social being, there is nevertheless often a part of me which is detached. For me, spiritual experiences occur most readily when I am alone, frequently in the mountains. But I also realize that for some people spirituality is about community and togetherness. So, in my prayer I asked to be able to avoid the excesses of detachment and the pitfalls of cynicism to which I know I can be prone.

Midway through the prayers there was a break during which the door flap was opened and a bottle of water passed around. During the break, participants were encouraged to tell jokes, the dirtier the better. I must confess that I did not find the jokes in the slightest bit amusing. They did not accord in any way with my own sense of humor, but then I enjoy funny stories and spontaneous humor much more than labored jokes. It may be argued that humor is a cultural construct but I must confess that I have a hard time accepting that. When I hear a bad, smutty joke my reaction is ‘that is not funny’, rather than, ‘that would be a very funny joke, if I came from your cultural perspective.’

Fred closed the flap in preparation for the remaining prayers. The lady with the cedar needles used her prayer to thank Fred repeatedly for having allowed her the great honor of scattering the needles on the stones. By this stage I had started to tire of the proceedings and my mind wandered back to my childhood. I grew up in the countryside midway between London and the sea. We had a garden and an orchard. In autumn, rotting fruit lay thick on the ground. I remember a time when I constructed a number of rituals using the rotting fruit, rituals into which I then initiated my brother. I remember building a large pyre of apples and murmuring incantations and setting light to twigs, then we both ceremoniously urinated over the smoking pile. To my child’s mind, that meant something. I don’t remember what, maybe the end of the season of fruitfulness, or maybe my own mastery over nature. In any case, sitting in that sweat lodge I wondered how different my own little rituals were from the symbolic scattering of cedar needles on a hot stone.

After all the prayers had been said there was more singing, then we crawled out of the sweat lodge into the cold night air. We changed back into our clothes, then we deconstructed the lodge and folded the blankets. We made our way to the house where everyone presented the food they had bought. My own chocolate cake was not the most lovingly prepared of offerings, but it was nevertheless well received. Once the food was on the table, we were invited to eat, but we had to respect the order of seniority; Fred and the fire man would eat first, then the rest of us, and finally some children who had materialized.

I took some food and found a seat near Fred. We talked a little and he asked me about myself. There were many questions I would have liked to ask him but it didn’t feel like quite the right time. Fred made a number of references to his promiscuity as a young man and he encouraged me not to be reticent on that front. During dinner a silver bowl was placed on the water cooler and we were told in no uncertain terms that Fred could not charge for the sweat lodge but that any contributions would be very welcome. A succession of $20 dollar bills fluttered their way into the bowl and it did cross my mind that this might just be a way for a libidinous older man to procure sexual partners and to make some money at the same time. However, I banished that thought from my mind. Apart from his predilection for bad smutty jokes, there was nothing inappropriate about Fred. Based on our brief conversation, I liked him. He seemed a calm and balanced person, and I have always felt that it is a hallmark of the sort of intelligence that I value to ask questions and to be interested in other people.

In retrospect, I am still not quite sure how genuine a Native American experience I was a part of. Nor am I sure how much that matters. If people believe in something and wish to honor certain traditions genuinely and with a pure heart, why should it matter that their own Native American ancestry is either non-existent or not at all evident? However, I believe that I took something else away from this experience too. The experience confirmed the thought which, I am just beginning to realize, is my own primary concern in the field of psychology and therapy: I am primarily concerned with the lack of meaning in life, and people’s attempts to find it. I think that lack of meaning lies at the root of many psychological problems. Sitting in the sweat lodge and listening to the chanting and the earnest prayers of a group of young white Americans made me think that what people desperately want is a sense of meaning in their lives. As Nietzsche said: Man can live with almost any ‘how’, so long as he has a ‘why’. One way to achieve a sense of meaning is through feeling oneself a part of a spiritual community. I hope that, for these people, the sweat lodge will answer that need, if not indefinitely, then at least for the time being. However, I don’t think it would work for me.