TO THE LAKOTA INDIANS OF THE AMERICAN PLAINS, ONE OF THE MOST sacred rituals is the sweat lodge. Using heat, steam, and smoke, the lodge is designed to purify your body, mind, and spirit—or at least clear your pores out really well. Traca’s been to a few of these and raves about them, but the kids and I were completely new to the experience. So it was with some apprehension that we all accepted Rahaman’s invitation to attend an authentic sweat lodge ceremony at the Sharda Centre.
On a purely physical level, taking part in the ceremony is a challenge. For one thing, it requires you to sit on the ground inside a small domed space, surrounded by intense heat and total darkness for three hours or more. As someone who finds it difficult to get comfortable in my reclining coach-class seat (sipping ginger ale and watching in-flight movies), I had my doubts that sweat lodges and I were going to be new best friends.
If you’ve heard about people dying in sweat lodge ceremonies, it has happened. In the most notorious and recent case out in Sedona, Arizona, two people died and many more became seriously ill while participating in the same ritual Rahaman was planning. I asked him if there was any actual danger and he smiled.
“Not for us,” he said. “They used plastic tarps in that tragedy, yeah? Plastic doesn’t breathe. We’ll be using canvas. Blankets and canvas only.”
True to his word, he spread only broad sheets of canvas and a patchwork of colorful blankets around a curved tree-branch frame outside the center. At sunset, it was time to get started.
The ceremony began with a proper smudging; Rahaman burned sage and wafted it with an eagle feather around each of us. Next we needed to heat the rocks that put the sweat in the sweat lodge. The Lakotas refer to these egg-shaped lava rocks as “stone people,” and they were baked in an intense outdoor fire for over an hour. By the time we were ready to enter the lodge, there were nineteen of us, a full house for this small space. Most of the participants were local Kiwis who came for a cleansing each month. There was also Rahaman, a few other newly arrived WWOOFers, the ready-to-sweat Marshall clan, and an intense-looking Maori warrior, his face covered with swirling patterns of dark tribal tattoos.
The Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand, and like the Lakota, they were royally screwed over by the invading Europeans. Though they once ruled this gorgeous part of the world, today it’s rare to see one of them with full face tattoos out in public. It’s even more rare, according to Rahaman, to have one of them attend your sweat lodge ceremony.
When the sun had disappeared behind the tree line, we crawled into the lodge on all fours, first the women, then the men. Logan was right beside me as we took our spots, shoulder to shoulder, around the pit where the stone people would attempt to make my previous epic jungle sweating look like a mild case of granny perspiration. Once we were in position, ritual items were passed around the circle without explanation. First cedar branches, then deer antlers. Then one by one, the stone people began to arrive. An assistant delivered them on their own set of antlers and they were blazing red, so hot they were almost translucent. After half a dozen trips back and forth to the fire, the assistant sealed the tent flap behind him and Rahaman took over: chanting prayers, tossing water on the stones, filling the space with steam, and plunging us into total darkness. I was breathing like a fish out of water, sweating with an urgency I had never experienced.
Wankan Tonka …
Wankan Tonka …
Wankan Tonka …
Wankan Tonka … hey hey.
We called out to God, the Great Spirit who is in all things. We welcomed all our ancestors, those living and those who came before us. We chanted at the top of our lungs, completely invisible to each other in the utter blackness. To a night-vision camera, we would have made quite a sight: nineteen mostly naked people barking out Lakota prayers, sweating as if we were all trying to wring a cup of water out of our underwear.
Three times during the ceremony, the tent flap opened and water was brought in, cooling things off a little. In any other context, I would have considered the communal wooden ladle we passed around to be a petri dish of liquid contamination. But in the sweat lodge, I just drank it. Rahaman referred to it as “the Sacred Water of Life,” and that’s exactly what it felt like to me. The fact that it touched every sweaty hand and sweaty mouth on its way around the circle to my sweaty hands and lips … I tried not to think about that.
Once we were all watered and ready to go, more stone people were brought in from the fire outside. Then the flap was sealed … water on the stones … into the void … Wankan Tonka.
It’s disorienting, being suspended in total darkness like that. At times, I couldn’t sit any longer, so I moved onto all fours, my face a foot from the stone people, chanting into the steam-filled space loud enough that my relatives in Denmark—living and dead—could hear me. It felt like dissolving. Unable to see boundaries of any kind, your voice mixing with so many others like a single sound, your mind completely absorbed in heat and vibration and blackness … it was transcendent. There was no me. There was only us.
The grand finale of the whole affair was the pipe ceremony. Two pipes were passed around the circle near the end and everyone had a chance to smoke them. Rahaman made a short speech about the sacred nature of tobacco inside the lodge and the dangers of tobacco on the outside. He told me later that he had said this for Logan and Jackson’s benefit, but he needn’t have bothered. Neither kid took a puff of a communal pipe when they found themselves holding it in the dark. Or so they said.
All told, it was a powerful experience that ran the gamut from the sacred to the ridiculous. At one point, the group was set loose to pray and chant at will, and the guy next to Logan held nothing back. In addition to blessing every deity from Allah to Zeus, every tree spirit and star nation, every housefly and dandelion, he ripped off a bizarre litany of sounds, like speaking in tongues or baby babble. Whatever it was, I’m sure it was not an earthly language. “Foopa. Swaa. Swoopano. Fubano-swapa-tawny-wabban. Foopa!” He shouted in this way for a solid ten minutes.
Logan sat beside me, invisible, gone … but I could hear the smile on his face. I could feel him choking back the laughter. When it finally erupted, softly, politely, just a burst of unrestrained delight that only I was listening for, it sounded to me, at that time, in that place, like the kind of prayer the Great Spirit would enjoy.
Traca said, when it was all over, that she’d barely been present for most of the chanting, so caught up in the ceremony that she all but disappeared in the steam. As for the kids, they probably won’t be doing another one anytime soon, but they made it. After four hours, through the heat and haze, they crawled out with the rest of us and rose up into the night. By then it was after ten, and the contrast between inside and outside could not have been more stark. Our skin was hot and drenched, our scant clothing soaked. But the New Zealand air was cold and crisp, the sky vast and arched overhead, the stars thick as ancestors above. It felt like rebirth, every inhale a deep grateful gulp, every exhale a sigh of release.