Native American Sweat Lodges

Early settlers to North America have chronicled the sweat lodges used by many North American Indian Tribes.  Their purpose was two fold:  to clean themselves and to purge their bodies of evil.  The white man saw the sweat lodge, with its sacred and religious implications, as a threat.  Even after the Indians were subdued, Christian missionaries and government officials systematically denied the use of the sweat lodge, interrupting a continuity that lasted thousands of years.  Enforcement depended upon how great a threat they felt from a particular tribe. 

There are three basic forms of the sweat bath in North America: the hot rock method, direct fire chamber, and a more sophisticated type (which has no name).  Sweat lodges were used for meditation and cleansing the soul, but were also used as a remedy for almost all illnesses known to North American tribes. 

I was in San Juan Capistrano on a recent Saturday to visit my neice Alison, who is now living there.  We visited, shopped, ate and talked.  She told me about her new favorite thing to do.  Visit a North American sweat lodge.  She goes once a week and she says when she is finished she feels like a new person.  Alison says the temperature is 150 degrees.  Ouch.  That's mighty hot.  She is in the lodge for 2 hours without towels or water.  Much better than a sweat box for losing weight, and her skin looks fantastic.  There is danger in sitting in that heat for that length of time, as you've heard about people dying!  With my high blood pressure I certainly wouldn't try it. 

I told Alison that I'd never heard of the sweat lodges.  She told me they're everywhere, and sure enough, I went on line and found that they indeed are easy to find.  If you wait long enough, what's old becomes new again.  Yoga is thousands of years old, yet it's the hottest "new" form of exercise in the 21st century.  I don't know if sweat lodges will catch on the way yoga did, but for a certain type of person, one looking for ways to enlighten the body and mind, it may be good.  I'm not sure I could take the heat, but anything that's been around for thousands of years must have some benefit.