8/28/10 – Summertime – the Heat

The Heat: One time, I participated in a sweat lodge at a summer gathering. The sweat was lead by a woman who had done sundance for many years, and she had been trained in sweat lodge by a Lakota elder. I remember feeling the heat of the stones and our huddled bodies inside the lodge, as well as the steam condensing and running down my skin as water was ladled onto the stones. I was at first uncomfortable, and then, encouraged by the leader’s and other participants’ meditations and prayers, felt oneness with the hot air, the earth, the elements. As the lodge went on, my feeling of oneness and euphoria actually increased, to the point that I was wishing for more stones, more heat, more steam, more time in the lodge. It seemed there was no discomfort, only a different kind of environment that just took some focus.

(What I have learned, then and more recently, about safety and respect regarding sweat lodge: Money is never exchanged for ceremony in native tradition. Common sense is welcome. Overthinking one’s issues can be counterproductive. It is important to sweat with a trained elder so that the proper prayers can be intoned, and the appropriate spirit helpers and protectors can be called upon. If an improperly trained person leads a sweat, there can be a risk of ill health or unhelpful spirits who might add imbalance. Also, the strength and effectiveness of a ceremony are diluted over time if it is conducted improperly. I don’t know anyone (non-native) doing sweat lodge who does not in their heart admire the native traditions that created it and handed it down over generations. So why not take the extra step to safeguard those traditions and the integrity of the sweat ceremony by searching out a trained native american elder? Your efforts might also support and shore up the beautiful native traditions that have helped keep this continent abundant and balanced for so many generations, and that are surely instrumental in leading us through the current global crises.)

I have carried the teachings of that sweat lodge with me for a long time. A month or so after that sweat, I moved my household in the Boston area. On my moving day, the temperature was between 100-103 degrees in that Boston humidity. The friends I had help me, and the guy with the van that I hired, were extremely uncomfortable, but I remember skipping up and down the front steps, dripping sweat of course, but with unflagging energy, feeling that oneness with the heat. I felt no difference between that summer day and myself.

Heat is purifying, it’s true. I’m part Scandinavian, and some of my ancestry speaks of saunas and steam baths. I’m sure the Scandinavian parts of my ancestry learned the benefits of sweating from the indigenous people whom they met—the Sami (Laplanders) in northern Scandinavia. Sweating is great. Some people call skin the largest organ of the body. Others call skin the largest excretory organ of the body. When I do deeper massage work on people, sometimes they sweat, and sometimes in the sweat, you can smell the toxins that they have been in touch with, such as commercial solvents that get absorbed by the skin if they have done construction work. Sweat contains urea, lactate and trace minerals, including, I’m sure, some minerals/metals that should not be in the body. I keep thinking sweating has to do with clearing out the lymphatic system (so important to overall health, especially in freedom from and treatment of cancer) So I looked it up. The way sweat glands create sweat is by secreting fluid they get from interstitial fluid (that’s lymph!), and secreting that into little ducts around the sweat gland. So sweating, by my reckoning, is essential to good health, by pumping more fluid through the lymph system, allowing it to cleanse itself.

All this background is leading up to my opinion: I really think it’s normal and important to spend the summer sweating. I think that sweating in the summer heat is a natural sauna, a natural way of purifying the body of toxins that it builds up over the other three seasons. But air conditioning in the summer is such a norm in the affluent Western world, that no one questions why we do it. I find air conditioning to be expensive and unnecessary—part of the sense of entitlement of the western world. I’m not trying to justify my stinginess about the electric bill. I really think that sweating through the summer is healthy. Is it a coincidence that the rise of AC use has coincided with a rise in degenerative disease in the US and the West? If we let ourselves sweat a little more in the summer, don’t you think we could slow global warming a little bit by using less energy, and also be healthier? Could we stop complaining about how hot it is, and start accepting it for what it is? A great opportunity to heal.