Appropriately Naked In April - Part II

The Sweat Lodge would be the second of these little exercises that would come along in April to conjure up some deep demons. I woke up paranoid about my hydration level since everyone had so heavily emphasized it the night before and I had drunk no water. While my sister zenned out, threw my things in the car, then emptied about a gallon of water down my throat. That filled about half an hour of the morning.

There was a community breakfast with others who had stayed the night on the compound from the Wailing. About half of them had stayed, the other half had gone home. One girl came back, a young cute girl who'd just gotten back from traveling around Europe, and the rest were just new folks arriving for the Sweat. Of the two other guys the previous night one had stayed. Another also showed up with the new group. Sage was the name of the man who attended both with me and later in the day he proved to play a very influential role in the rest of my month.

After breakfast we made our way to the Meadow through some winding forest paths. The entire compound was gorgeous. A perfect setting for such a spiritual retreat. Forested everywhere, little cabins and yurts strewn about here and there, hidden in groves and deep down out of sight paths. Of course, it was decorated as well with Tibetan flags, Buddha statues, and a variety of dream catchers, gates made of unprepared branches, you get the idea. I felt quite at home there.

In the Meadow was a fire pit stacked with rocks. We had an opening ceremony building the fire and lighting it, then did a round of introductions like the night before stating our names and reasons for being there. It was less of a collection of awe inspiring confessions this time, as much as it was a gathering of people out of curiosity to what a Sweat was for the most part. Again, I was among that group, but the authenticity of the ceremony still held for me.

Following introductions there was an element to the ritual I hadn't anticipated. We all sat down on a blanket with cloth and string among a host of ingredients and made ourselves some prayer bag talismans. It was a neat process, kind of like arts and crafts infused with the symbolism of ceremony. The ingredients were things like cedar, sage, cornmeal, tobacco, dried flowers, things like that. Each had a meaning such as home or family in cornmeal, purification in sage, or masculinity in tobacco. The meaning of the bags were to represent either what you were trying to attain or let go of. Externalizing the meaning to make it present for you as your body is challenged in the heat of the Sweat.

We then went through a gathering of blankets and putting them on the willow branch framed hut. It was a brand new hut replacing a nine year old one the residents there had been used to, so there was an emphasis on this particular Sweat even for the old dogs because of that. Once it was complete the ritual of entrance began. The hut was clothing optional, so most of us opted out of them. Wearing our talismans we went to each direction; east, south, west, and north, then placed lavender, tobacco, and sticks from the old hut into the fire that cooked our stones before crawling into the Sweat Lodge.

I found myself, while crawling in and finding my seat on the dirt floor, loving getting the dirt on my hands and knees. When I did sit, I grabbed a scoop of it off the floor and rubbed it into my skin. More people crawled into the hut so we had to scoot down occasionally to make room. Every time we did, I found myself taking up another scoop from in front of the few inches I'd scooted into and rubbing more on my face, chest, or shoulders so that I always had a piece of the dirt directly in front of me rubbed into my skin.

When we were all in, the stones came in glowing a deep red from within, and sat in the pit in the center. Then the front flap dropped down and we were all plunged into complete darkness. The level of darkness where even after ten minutes of sitting in it I still couldn't see my hand in front of my face. Just the glow of the rocks. The woman leading it poured scoops of water over the rocks to create the steam and heat the interior. It was an interesting first round.

There were to be four rounds total. In the first the heat intensified, my body coated itself in sweat dripping off me, I spit out phlegm that came up, and moaned, wailed, and whispered out summonings along with everyone else as we conjured up spirits to help guide us through our journey. It was an eerie scene. Something that easily could have felt staged for a creep show if it didn't feel so genuine amid the heat, sweat, and steam. Sitting naked among nine other naked strangers in the dark sweating together. I found myself rubbing more dirt on me, and whispering into the heat for Alastair, the pirate captain of the 16th century I had seen facing mutiny back in my hypnotherapy session. This all went on for some time.

It eventually died down. The flap opened again and the first round was over. Someone had to pee, and someone else needed more water, and soon all of us were filing out into the cold air again. I had to pee bad as well. My thought in guzzling all that water in the morning was that it would come out through sweat, but apparently that wasn't to be the case. It was kind of hilarious to me, though, to see all these naked people spilling out to every edge of the Meadow pissing in the bushes, whether squatting or standing, while others sprawled themselves in the grass to cool off.

When I was done, I turned to go back into the Lodge but when I took a few steps away from the dirt in the forest I couldn't help but drop down into it full body and completely cover myself. It was as if I just couldn't get enough dirt on me. I rubbed in in my hair, on my face, in my beard. I ground it into my arms and legs, my chest. Once I felt sufficiently covered, I crawled back into the Lodge. Ten more stones were brought in, and the flap was dropped back down again.

In this second round was the time to voice our prayers. Essentially this meant we went around, in order of our circle, and voiced exactly what it was we were purging from ourselves in this Sweat. This was the round that held the intensity.

For one, the heat was the most intense this round by far. It was so thick and palpable that often I had to lay out on the ground fully to take advantage of what I'm normally fighting when I camp out at nights on the road sides. The earth has a habit of sucking the heat out of your body which is why a bedroll is necessary, or at least a thicket of branches under you to give you some loft like what I usually do these days. Instead, I laid out on the earth this time to let it have some of the overwhelming heat my body was absorbing. When I felt I could take some more, I'd sit back up and could feel my head enter what seemed like an upper atmosphere of heat in the Lodge.

More than the heat, though, the intensity came from the prayers. They were composed of the dislodging of pent up guilt long buried in each person. Whether deserved or undeserved guilt. Voicing of things that had happened to them that previously had been too traumatic to speak of until the heat and the darkness both blankets you and smothers it out of you. I was one of the last people in the circle, so I sat and listened, sometimes on the verge of tears, as each person spoke or screamed it to the Lodge.

When it was finally my turn I, of course, had planned out what I was going to say. I opened my mouth, though, and found myself saying things far beyond my comprehension of understanding as I said them. I had to think back at what I'd said afterward to make sense of it.

I had intended to speak to my bad sexual habits. The bad sexual mojo I was calling it. But as I talked about it I found myself tapping a root that dove into a deep ancestral connection to this upheaval. Scouring over fucked up internet porn, toying with men using their attraction to a straight man as manipulation to gain sexual power, charging them to simply look or touch my body, bringing that false power into my relationships with women and exploring it through handcuffs and blindfolds. I've written more in depth about that history to put up later, but at this time it was the sudden connection that hit me to where all of that was funneling into me from.

I began talking about my father and his fucked up sexual behavior, and my mother's father with his many known infidelities with women as he traveled around the world. And his father before that claiming that "every red blooded American male has a right take a mistress", and down the line. In the darkness, in this vision of messed up male sexual ancestry, I fell all the way down the family tree, I so meticulously researched over the past decade, to the kings of antiquity that I am descended from. King Henry I of England and his brutal conquests, King Alfred of Wessex, Charlemagne and his conquest of France and Germany, and down to the Romans. I saw this connection of them raping scores of women with armies of men, raping lands of whole nations and cultures, and seeking conquest after conquest through out generations to best their fathers by killing thousands.

This vision went all the way down that line then all the way back up it again, through the ages, through my great grandfather, through my grandfather, through my father and landing in me. The message as it landed in me seemed to hit me square that now it was my turn. Would I perpetuate it, or would I finally work it out healthily and heal it at long last? I was hoarse in saying all of this, and tears were welling up in my eyes. It hit me as a reason as to why my life has been so easy so far. It seemed it was to add no extra burdens to this already titanic weight of culminated male ancestral history to clean up.

I felt spent when I was done spewing. The heat had fully engulfed me and I had to lie back down immediately once I was finished to cool off. Thankfully I was close to the end of the circle, and after three more women spoke the flap opened again and we could step back outside. I stumbled out and lay in the grass for a few minutes.

The third round was much tamer. It was a round of calm. Once the rocks were in and the flap was down there was a little bit of talk and then silence. I laid on the ground and just meditated in the dark. The heat wasn't nearly as intense either. We all just lay there in silence for a good long while.

The fourth round was light hearted. It was the round to go around again and tell what we were filling the space we'd just emptied with. With all that purging you need something positive to fill that hole with or it will simply come back or cave you in. I didn't connect as well with this round, but spoke of having a family and children and my coffee shop in a community. We then all sang for a little while and eventually opened the flap again.

There was a potluck dinner in which I got a chance to talk with the cute girl about her travels. I talked with some other interesting people as well, one of which was Sage. He was very excited about having another guy in this group of women doing spiritual work and told me about a men's group he'd been to that was meeting up two weekends from now. It sounded neat and we swapped info. I told him I wasn't sure how it would pan out since my temporary coffee shop job wanted me on Tuesdays and Saturdays, but I'd keep it in mind.

On the ride home Wendie and I were both silent. She had had a very intense day in the Sweat Lodge, and I was still mulling over both the Sweat and the Wailing. When we got home she went to bed and I took a long bath thinking again about that strange draw to Peru in the Wailing. It became very clear to me that ditching everything now to fly straight there was not the way to go. That part of the reason for being there was getting there. With that thought, I dried off and went to bed.