A Sweaty And In Tents Rebirth

The Native American spiritual ceremony that nearly killed me...in a good way

Recently, I spent a few days visiting Stanford University, which I do twice a year as part of my consulting work for their Office for Religious and Spiritual Life.

While there, I encountered something a bit unusual at a used bookstore in nearby Menlo Park: an entire “Native American” section with books on the history, culture, practices, and religions of various North American indigenous groups.

It was one of those things that you don’t even notice as absent elsewhere until you actually see it somewhere.

Refreshing. A pleasant surprise. But a bid saddening also in the realization that this is such a rare thing to see.

Even among the books that were there, I didn’t see a single one that was written in the current millennium. Many of them were first published as far back as the 1930s.

And I didn’t need the publication page to tell me that: terms like “primitive people” were used liberally and unabashedly. But, ya know, at least there was some effort to document these people, even if marred by morally questionable language and intentions.

I disciplined myself enough to walk away with just one book: an anthology of spiritual classics from the Indigenous groups native to the Northeast coast of the United States and Canada. It was part of a series of books from a publishing house that I know to be well-respected in the academic community, so I figured it must have some integrity to it.

It's something I look forward to reading because I live in the Northeast of the US and I know next to nothing about Native American spirituality, despite the fact that one of the most spiritually significant experiences of my life occurred in the context of a Native American ritual practice known as a “sweat lodge.”

Sweat lodges are (I think) more commonly associated with Native American groups out West, but (again, I think) the Ojibwa, which extended into parts of the Northeast also (maybe?) engage(d) in this practice.

In any case, the sweat lodge I participated in did take place on the West coast of the US at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA, named after the Esselen group native to that region. I’ve written a bit about my experiences at Esalen in some prior posts, and I even once referenced my sweat lodge experience in an essay I wrote for Wayfare Magazine.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about more recently, in light of my recent efforts to re-interrogate certain past experiences from my life, the spiritual significance of which I think I’ve been downplaying and underselling for many years due to some strange apprehension I’ve had toward owning up to being spiritual in any sense of the word.

But the fact is, it’s hard to describe my sweat lodge experience as anything other than a “religious” or “spiritual” experience.

The Full Nine Months

The land on which Esalen resides is special. It is breathtakingly beautiful. It is the steepest meeting point of land and sea in the contiguous United States. It is one of very few places in the world where freshwater, saltwater, and geothermal water all converge in one location (most, if not all, of the others are in Japan, I believe).

Spiritual icons like the Dalai Lama have acknowledged the sacredness of the location, and numerous individuals report witnessing and experiencing all sorts of spooky, paranormal, and spiritual stuff there.

Which brings me to my own experience participating in a sweat lodge on one of the very last days of my two-month-long stay at Esalen as an 18-year-old.

Before getting into that, though, I feel compelled to drop a series of (huge) disclaimers—integrity, ya know?

I’m not an expert in sweat lodges or Native American spirituality. The sweat lodge I participated in was led by a white guy, albeit one with lots of experience doing sweat lodges with Native Americans in the area. Most of the participants were white as well. Only one of them (in addition to the leader) had any prior experience with sweat lodges.

All of that’s to say, I have no idea how “authentic” my one sweat lodge experience was, and I don’t know much about the practice in general other than what I was told that day by the guy leading it. Who was, again, not a Native American. That said, here’s what happened.

I and a group of about a dozen others walked over to a grassy area on campus to find something like a campfire with a bunch of hot coals sitting outside of a thickly insulated tent.

In addition to the person who would lead the sweat lodge, there was a firekeeper tending to the coals. The two of them kicked things off with a little preamble to what we’d be getting into.

“The sweat lodge is a purification ritual that also symbolizes rebirth. That’s why we will all be crawling on our hands and knees into the tent and out of it the same way when the lodge is over.”

“Once we’re inside the tent, some of the hot coals will be brought in, and we will pour water over them to fill the tent with hot steam. We’ll repeat this a few times throughout. In between rounds, you are welcome to take a short break outside of the tent and have some water. However, if you think you’re able to, I would recommend doing the full nine months in the womb without breaks. It will last two to three hours in total.”

Might as well get the full experience, I thought. And so, I braced myself for nine months of who-knows-what-to-expect.

The tent was very dark inside, with just enough light to faintly see one another and the steam…but barely. There was a narrative arc to the sequential rounds involving a welcoming in, communicating with, and thanking of spirits, who were then sent along their merry way. There was chanting and drumming.

And there was, of course, blistering heat—about 120-130 degrees (F) of it, I was told.

I felt a bit disappointed throughout. The sweat lodge had been talked up quite a bit in the days leading up to it, but, like just about every other religious ritual I had participated in throughout my life, I felt pretty much nothing from this. I didn’t feel the presence of spirits or anything particularly special or uplifting from the chanting or drumming. I just felt hot. And a bit bored.

I hung in there pretty well for the first few rounds. The last round was a different story.

The heat was intense enough, but suddenly it was getting hard to breathe. I spent the last 20 minutes or so in there with the side of my head on the ground desperately trying to suck in as much of the little trickle of cool air coming in through the bottom of the tent as I could.

It truly felt like fighting for my life at the end. But I made it through the nine months.

As expected, we were invited to crawl out of the tent one-by-one, uttering a Lakotan phrase, “Aho Mitakuye Oyasin,” which means “all my relations.”

In other words, “we are all related.”

Emptied By The Womb

After nearly three hours of hellish heat and the element of sensory deprivation induced by pitch darkness, one might expect to feel something cathartic and energizing in those first moments of reentering the world in a true rebirthing experience. That’s what I expected, at least.

But what I experienced was almost the opposite.

The dulling of my senses became, in a sense, even more pronounced. Yes, the sight of sunlight draped across the surrounding trees and glinting off the ocean was overwhelming in its beauty. I could acknowledge that. But more than anything, I felt numbness, blankness.

It was different than the blankness I felt in the tent, though. It wasn’t a blankness accompanied by the internal narrative of “this is dumb, this is boring, I don’t feel anything.” It was a trancelike blankness.

Everyone else rushed over to the main lodge on campus to get something to eat and drink (we were told to fast that morning so as to go into the sweat lodge completely pure).

But I didn’t feel hungry. I didn’t feel thirsty. I didn’t feel much of anything. I wasn’t thinking much of anything. I just found myself wandering around the site around the tent for a bit, occasionally reaching out to touch the branch of a tree, without really any conscious intention or understanding of why I was doing so.

In that same trancelike state, I at one point reached down to touch the earth and came up wiping my dirt-covered fingers gently across my face.

I can think of few occasions in my life that left me in greater need of a shower by the end of the day (although, truth be told, I really can’t remember if I did take a shower that evening—yikes).

When I went back to the main lodge to join up with everyone else, they found my little face markings amusing and made some playful comments about how I had gone fully primal. I smiled softly but didn’t respond. In fact, I didn’t say anything for the rest of the day or night. I didn’t eat or drink anything (not even water) for the rest of the day, which, in retrospect, was probably pretty dangerous considering how much liquid I’d sweated out of my body.

And let’s be clear: I love eating. Like, probably a bit too much, if we’re being really honest. And the food at Esalen is famously delicious. But in the strange afterglow of my sweat lodge experience, I just didn’t feel hungry—which, I suppose, doesn’t usually stop me from eating anyway.

In that moment, though, I simply didn’t feel like I needed food or water or even speech or thought. I felt a very deep sense of contentment, as though I didn’t need anything and perhaps never would need anything again. It’s the emptiest—physically and mentally—I’ve ever felt in my life. I’ve had qualitatively similar experiences since then, usually associated with being around trees, but none as intense as this.

A Pregnant Nothingness

I don’t know how typical this kind of response to a sweat lodge is. But I do know now that the act of “emptying out” is a common one across many religious traditions. It’s the reason why Jesus is said to have wandered in the desert for 40 days, why the Prophet Muhammad prayed and received his revelations in a cave, why Hindus and Buddhists meditate with eyes closed, why the image of “uncarved wood” is so central to Daoism, and why fasting in such a lauded (and often compulsory) spiritual practice across most religious traditions.

That with which we identify—our thoughts, our bodily senses, our desires that we view as needs—must be silenced so that something else can come through.

In some traditions, that “something else” is often experienced ecstatically and energetically: the shakti of Hinduism, the awe-inspiring and blissful encounter with the Judeo-Christian God, etc. Maybe it’s for this reason that I never interpreted my sweat lodge experience as a “spiritual” or “religious” one. How could numbness or blankness be spiritual?

But in certain religious teachings and texts, this sought-after “something else” is experienced in such a way—it’s the pregnant nothingness that is the ground of all being in Buddhism, and which has some resonance with the Christian mystical theology of Mesiter Eckhart.

So why wouldn’t I interpret my own such experience as a deeply spiritual encounter with some deeper level of ultimate reality?

Why? Because I’m a bit of a bonehead when it comes to spiritual matters, even if I’m something of an armchair expert when it comes to religion and theology. Lately, I find myself trying to bridge the gap between the two. And this experience strikes me as central in importance with regard to that goal.

So, here’s to learning more about Native American spirituality.

For someone who knows quite a bit about religion, I’ve been embarrassingly unaware of the blind spot that is my lack of knowledge about the religious traditions of those to whom the land on which I plant my own feet belongs, those to whom I am indebted for one of the most important spiritual experiences of my life.

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