The Sweat Lodge Experience: Is It for You?

The New Age Self Help Movement, popular now in the US, promises healing, spiritual awareness, and financial success to those who complete the Sweat Lodge experience. Sweat lodge retreats are popular all over the United States.

A sweat lodge is a ceremonial sauna used for centuries by North American Indians and other cultures for purification, cleansing and healing of mind, body, emotions and spirit.

The sweat lodge can be a tent like structure, covered tightly with wood, tarpaulins, branches and blankets. A large fire is built outside the structure surrounded by hot rocks.

When the rocks are hot enough, they are brought into the structure. Water is poured over them creating heat and steam. People enter the hot steamy tent, and the outside flaps are closed. The lodge becomes hot, dark and steamy and the sweating begins.

For centuries different cultures have promoted the healing benefits of sweating through the use of steam baths and saunas. They believed that raising the body's temperature high enough to produce sweat promotes good health and good luck..

Sweating is the body's cooling system. When the body becomes too hot, liquid made mostly of water mixed with salt and small amounts of waste is secreted through small sweat glands in the skin.

New Age gurus also believe sweating is good for you and can point one towards the road of success. Sweat lodge retreats are now big business.

Sweating in the sweat lodge is said to:

- remove toxins from the body.

- cleanse and improve the skin.

- lower stress and improve the mind.

- aid in weight loss.

- ease pain and stiffness.

- strengthen the body's cardio vascular and immune system.

- aid in treating alcoholism and bad habits.

The moisture and the darkness of the sweat lodge is supposed to resemble the womb of "Mother Earth." Native American prayers and music are offered to the gods along with quiet time for meditation.

Participants are encouraged to stay inside the structure for 2 hour rounds to experience the full effects of the steam lodge's cleansing and purification. However the experience is not supposed to be an endurance test.

Sweat lodge risks:

- isolation in remote areas away from medical facilities if something goes wrong

- prolonged exposure to high heat and can cause heat stroke and dehydration,resulting in death.

- pesticides used on firewood can give off toxins.

- existing health problems. The health and fitness of participants should be assessed first.

- program leaders not trained properly in the sweat lodge experience.

- those with claustrophobia will have a difficult time.

Some thing went terribly wrong at a sweat shop retreat in Sedona, Arizona run by self-help, motivational guru James Arthur Ray in 2009.

Three participants died from heat stroke and hyperthermia. Twenty-one others were hospitalized and treated for heat exhaustion.

Ray was subsequently arrested and presently is on trial for manslaughter.

Sources:

http://www.pureinsideout.com/benrfits-of-suana.html

http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2009/10/22/jammes-james-arthur-ray-is-selling-but-not-talking/

http://www.livescience.com/sweat-lodges-deadly-cleansing.html