spirit:

(Author’s Note: The following is one person’s view. In no way does the author speak for, or represent, all indigenous peoples, or even one other indigenous person.)

Long ago, Wesakeychak, Muskrat, and Star Woman worked together to create human life on Earth. Over time, these pesky human critters populated most inhabitable land areas, and, in some places, actually tried to develop rational societies. The sweatlodge is one example of a social institution designed to help these often pesky and sometimes troublesome humans to “fit in” to the larger world, the world of Mother Earth, and the Universe.

Women are the originators of life; new human life comes into the world through women’s bodies. As part of that process, women have a twenty eight day menstrual cycle, which, if you are living in an extended family village setting, without electricity, usually happens for all the women more or less at once.  Women, normally on a much higher level, spiritually, than men, experience a “spike” of spiritual power, and retreat for the first few days of “flow”, in order not to destabilize the already insecure males in their activities. Women, as mothers, know that men need to feel included, and needed; women have to be very creative in order to facilitate men’s feeling of being “counted in”. If you understand that men are just large children, it helps with making sense out of male behaviour.

When groups of women would “retreat” for a few days, (notice how important the roles of post-menopausal women are!!! The only women left to manage business!!!) they would build small shelters, and hang around together, fasting and participating in spiritual rituals. This activity is the original source of the “lodge” type ceremonies, particularly the “fasting lodge”, but building on up to the incredible lodge-type ceremonies such as the sun dance.

Oh yes…the sweatlodge. This article is supposed to be about the sweatlodge, but there is only one way to understand the sweatlodge and that is through direct experience. The reason is simple. Each and every person who enters a sweatlodge experiences it in their own unique way. It’s impossible for anyone else in this world to tell you what your own experiences are, or will be. It’s for you and you alone. 

In my (Cree) culture, we believe that humans have four “parts” that are woven together to make a whole person: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. The sweatlodge exists on all four levels, simultaneously. The actual physical characteristics of a sweatlodge may take many different forms, (how the frame is built, how it’s covered, where the doorway or doorways are, where the fire is in relation to the lodge, how many rocks go in the fire, etc.) and the protocols involved may change from place to place, (what sacred objects are present, when and how they are used, who walks where, or sits where, or says what, etc.) but some elements are always present: fire, rocks, water, a lodge, and some humans. The range of experience can vary from strictly physical, (like a steambath with the lights out, what we, at Saddle Lake, call a “cowboy sweat”) to overwhelmingly spiritual (the complete disappearance of the physical world….now try to explain that one)

We humans have this big brain that we are just learning how to play with, and it has a tendency to take over and dominate our lives; the sweatlodge has built-in systems to temporarily interrupt this “brain-dominance”. When the doorflaps are closed it becomes absolutely dark, and we can no longer rely on visual contact. The ceremony may be conducted through song, with rattles; these sound types and frequencies disrupt normal “sound” environments. The directness and intensity of the heat from the often red-warm rocks rings our internal security system bells……and a space opens for our emotional and spiritual elements to come forward.

My elders say that we are crawling into the womb of Mother Earth, when we crawl into the sweatlodge. Our Mother is so enormous that it is hard for us pesky little humans to “see” her, to talk with her, to listen to her….inside the sweatlodge, we meet our great mother; inside her womb, nurtured, safe, we feel her love for us.

In a humble way, I ask the Rock Spirit to help me with my words: if I have offended anyone in any way, please forgive me….I am the first to acknowledge that I am a fool, and that my understanding is so far from complete that the distance is immearsurable.