The Sweat Lodge

I went to Mexico to draw, to fill sketchbooks and notebooks. To write, and to figure out my life because I hadn't actually looked this far ahead. That's all going well. It's hard to describe what I've been doing this past 9 months, as an 'adventure' because to be honest, I don't do much.

While nobody except maybe a few tax-auditors are likely to look over the work most professions produce. Unless I guess, you make hamburgers, ramen, cafe lattes, crepes etc. and art. But back when I was making art in a studio back home, I would find myself telling people at parties that found my job interesting about how the work of an artist involved a lot more TV watching and eating Doritos than many would assume.

And my time in Mexico is much the same, except eating Doritos here is kind of pointless. But I was bestowed with both the opportunity and the honor last Sunday to be invited to join in a Temazcal, or more descriptively known as a sweat lodge. I of course accepted the invitation and did something interesting, at least, that is to say, I don't find my daily life that interesting or assume it isn't because it takes place mostly in my head.

So we caught a bus from the center of town where I live, out, out, out to the outer edges of Guadalajara, arriving late to be just in time for the lighting of the fire that would heat the stones that create the steam that I won't say induces, but exacerbates the sweat in the sweat lodge.

Alejandra ran me through the do-not's of the ceremony, and allow me to then provide my layman analogy of what a sweat lodge is, which is a purification ordeal. The obvious analogy is a sauna, but it is also dark and people sing and play instruments. Furthermore, my prior experience with saunas, I generally lasted about 5 minutes before I decide it's time to submerge myself in the cold pool.

This will subsequently seem misleading, but I stayed in the sweat lodge for an hour and a half. Which consisted of 3 of 5 actual sessions where the exit was sealed and the rocks wet, and the songs sung. However my brief was that the sweat-lodge would run between 3-5pm.

So I was sitting where I was told, a little nervous, but my concerns were whether I could sit cross legged on the ground for a long time, since I have always struggled with my flexibility and sitting on the floor. And also I guess the indignity and disrespect of maybe having to interrupt the ceremony to make an exit if I was feeling woozy. Then the doors were closed.

It's an incredible experience. Intensely unpleasant.

So maybe the first thought on it is a callback to a hypothetical I used to, and still do ask people. Which was:

You're at a party, and a shady guy who calls himself 'stretch' offers you a choice between two freebies. The first is basically xtc, it will give you 10 minutes of sheer bliss no matter the circumstances. The second is the opposite, absolute despair, 10 minutes where you feel the worst you have ever felt in your life, before you promptly recover. Which do you take?

A minority of people, including me... well to be honest, I prefer to reserve my nervous system and brain receptors for their natural purposes. My most honest answer is shamefully, the weasel one of passing on both. Most people, reflecting life or the portion of life I've experienced, are pretty keen on MDMA. I only have interest in the 'absolute despair' pill, it's the only one I'd consider.

I asked a Tinder date in Mexico this hypothetical, who picked the MDMA, claiming she'd experienced absolute despair and absolute bliss and definitely prefers bliss. I responded at the time, that I wasn't sure she had her mathematics right, but I wasn't sure I had mine right either.

What I mean by that is, if you are a relativist, so on a cold winters night, stepping into a warm tavern and having a hot meal and some mulled wine is just the best thing in the world, and on a hot summers day partaking in the exact same experience of warm tavern and hot meal, then becomes the worst thing you can think of. That's generally my approach, 'better' and 'worse'.

If you are an absolutist, (and apologies, this approach is foreign to me, so it's hard for me to conceive of and describe) that's taking the view not of moment to moment, but taking the sum total of moments in your life as the endgame. So it isn't now is better than just before, but things are 'good' or 'bad'.

As a relativist, this means most of what I'm going to experience is my normal state, so I take absolute despair because it will calibrate 10 minutes as being worse, possibly 'the worst' and then my normal life will always be 'better' than that experience. In which case, taking some pill that induces the pinnicle experience, then becomes a curse upon the rest of my life.

Alternatively, if you are absolutist, you only get so many chances in life to experience anything at all, so if you get a chance to experience absolute bliss, you take it, and if you can avoid any despair, you avoid it.

...so the doors are closed, and I should point out, I was already drenched with sweat just from sitting in the lodge before hot stones were placed in the pit. Steam starts to expand off the rocks, people are singing and I am just trying to keep my shit together.

Steaming is a literal method of cooking. I assume everyone has the experience of pouring out pasta water into a strainer, or opening a microwave dish, and immediately burning their hand and exclaiming 'ah fuck!'

I was in pitch blackness, but I felt like I was sitting under the Australian sun on a 40 degree day. I no longer really practice mindfulness, but I have done a fair bit of it, and so I was moving my consciousness around my body. I could feel my heart beating in my chest, my toes in the dirt, and my lips having the humid air dragged over them, and the skin on my face and shoulders cooking.

It was taking all my concentration, my attention, just to sit still. Alejandra in a panic had mouthed at me from across the lodge, that my watch was on. She evidently didn't recognize that it's a Casio G-shock, and would survive the sweat lodge even if nobody else did. I glanced at my watch several times, trying not to move my wrist in such a way as to set off it's back-lighting. I was doing so to make deals with myself.

I have enough experience from running of what it's like to get light headed, and lose consciousness and what not. I figured I would be safer crying out in panic, than losing consciousness at what I presumed at this point was going to be a 2 hour sauna session. What I was mostly doing was trying to get stock of what the time was, to gauge how long I could endure sitting upright, before I might resort to laying down, where there was less steam and less heat. If I did that immediately, or too soon, I had no line of retreat.

I had helped carry the buckets of water, and knew there were around 7 PVC buckets to go through in the 2 hours. So I also wanted to figure out how long this first bucket would last, how hot it would get before it would somehow be refilled, probably by the guy outside whose duty it was to tend the fire, open the doors and keep things real in the real world.

The other thing I had to do, was each time it got worse, as in, hotter, steamier. I gave myself the conscious instruction to imagine it would get 3 times worse. To always, always anticipate that this was not as hot or bad as it would get. And thus to save my precious line of retreat, of going to ground.

While I was doing all this, everyone else was singing and shaking shakers, and beating drums.

Then the elder, running the session, took his dipper and started dousing us with water, one by one. It was unexpected relief, one of the great gifts in my life for which I am eternally grateful. At this point, I was still under the impression this was one long sauna session. I figured, the experience had to eventually taper off into a steady state, a steady temperature. You can't just endlessly douse rocks with water, they lose their residual heat and stop producing steam. Then the elder called out 'Doors please' and the blankets front and back were lifted. Light poured in, air flowed. My second unexpected relief.

I initially thought that maybe I looked like I was dying, and the elder had declared an emergency. It became apparent though, that in order not to routinely kill people, the sweat lodge runs through several sessions. Some people even sitting out a session or two.

Taking a leaf from Josh Waitzkin's book, I decided to take the recovery time seriously, and lay flat on my back breathing in as much air as possible and calming my heart rate down as much as I could. When water was offered I drank, but also tipped a lot over my head, more or less the same as I do running marathons.

Then I reset, back to sitting ready for the second session. Now a profoundly different experience.

For one thing, I had new expectations to be betrayed by. In one sense, anticipating how bad it could get, as new stones were pushed into the pit, I could panic. For another, the second session could go longer, or get hotter, and thus if I felt I knew how bad it would be, I could find myself without mental reserves. But I no longer had to manage with any expectation that I had hours to endure, not minutes. A lot more minutes than I'd ever spent in a sauna, but still well shy of solid hours.

This second time, I went to hell. Part of the reason I'd eagerly signed on, was that that day was the anniversary of the suicide of my oldest friend, James. I had been catching up with him in the months before, and I'd seen stuck on his wall in his old room, papers with numbers to call if he was in a bad place and so forth. One of them read the short message 'breathe deep and pray to no-one.'

James was raised Catholic, I can recall as a child, the one time I had the misfortune to attend mass with his family when I slept over on what must have been a Saturday night. I can't recall what age I would have been at the time, but I feel it would have been an act of restraint on my part to not blurt out after the congregation was discharged into the light 'what the fuck is with all the kneeling on those fucking wooden boards?'

I'm fairly confident, James was not Catholic at his end, but I'm told Catholic guilt goes deep, and I imagine even after discarding one's faith, when it's been inculcated as a kid, you probably still look over your shoulder expecting God to be there for the rest of your life.

And It is my layman understanding, that if you attempt or commit suicide in Catholicism, you go to hell. Also probably if you are just an unbeliever like me, post the revelation of Jesus Christ, and I've certainly heard of the guy, I go to hell.

So here I was, in Hell, Hell light. Not one of the 'Hell House' theatrical productions teen christian evangelists apparently do in 'Merica. But more just experiencing what it feels like in a basic atmosphere where breathing is pain, not relief, and there is no relief, and imagining this as unending.

I had professional reasons for going there too, as I am sketching out a script for a comic set in Hell, about how Hell just doesn't work, is an entirely pointless exercise. Inspired by civil disobedience movements like Gandhi's work in South Africa where they got arrested to destroy the fear of prison.

Anyway, one point is that if you are immortal and eternal in construction, pain then conveys no information. It is just pain for pain's sake. I should point out that I do not understand the actual intentions of the Indigenous people's ritual of the sweat lodge, I was just getting from the experience what I could.

Drawing hot, suffocating breaths, where the pain means nothing, and there is no recourse, and imagining that just being the basic atmosphere in hell, an environment calibrated to one in which no human being could survive, unless they couldn't die. Hell by most literary accounts, is probably overthought, and overengineered. One does not need much for it to be unbearable torture, just crank up the temperature and humidity, bury people in dirt with just a handful of air to gasp at and experience permanent claustrophobic suffocation.

The sweat lodge, was not hell, because in an environment where pain is meaningless, I wouldn't be sitting on dirt, but on the hot rocks themselves, such that there would be no relief in going to ground, no relief anywhere, ever.

The second session ended quite quickly, at least to my perception, I was doused in water what I felt was quite early on, which I then thought if there were no seconds, would make this session worse. But it ended after I think, or perceived, only two songs.

By the time it ended though, I'd been blessed with release from a nagging fear of the soul. That James was in Hell. Sure, only for on the scale of things, a blink of an eye before I joined him. But join him I would, and join him I must, for there can be no Paradise where someone I love is excluded. And that's the thing, once one person you love is consigned to a lake of fire, it's game over for the whole afterlife system.

I realised while cooking in that steam, that there could be no salvation for me, no paradise offered that excludes James or anyone for that matter. Nor could I be admitted to any paradise where I am given a reunion with James as necessary for my paradise, while James suffers for eternity simultaneously for his sins, for then there can be no souls, our essence are but programs, duplicated.

And no good person, dealing with eternity can watch their friends thrown into the fire and think of their own salvation and secure it at any cost. The suffering cannot escape, unless empathy can be escaped. I picture a paradise of cool breezes and people given an eternity to contemplate the suffering of those who were not permitted through the gates, so suffering cannot be escaped except for those few who care for no one but God. Who have the resolve to wash their hands by saying 'I warned them' to the sinners.

Thus, while I can appreciate that most people would conceive of Paradise and Inferno as night and day, to me they have no meaningful difference, something I've known for quite some time. Both are merely cruel meaningless forms of torture. The only paradise, release, is oblivion.

And so the second session ended and I no longer just knew it, but felt it. Having felt the frailty of my resolve in the minutes of steaming in the sweat lodge, the knowledge that I as a frail mortal pack of meat, could not last an hour in such conditions as those, would have no recourse but to endure much much worse in any conception of damnation. I could not be damned, I could not be saved and the same was true for all of us, whether they have the courage to believe it or not.

So I lay, and the guys around me lay where we could fit, as if we were all in kindergarden taking a nap. The purification was a re-calibration for me, laying drenched in sweat in dirt, I didn't care, the dirt sticking to me, painting me in a thin coating of sweaty mud, didn't bother me, nothing bothered me because I could breath, cool 32 degree air. I could drink room temperature water. The elder excused himself and his partner lead the next session.

The guy beside me, who sat closest to the firepit where the experience was most intense, requested for a pair of eagle wings for the next session. I had a hunch looking at the matron running this one, that it would be longer, harder than the second session and to brace myself. Here was someone that calibrated time possibly based on childbirth.

The doors shut, and the third session began. The guy in front of me flapped the wings, circulating the air inside the sweatlodge such that it was as hot at my feet as it was around my head. A new experience, an even harder one.

I was conscious of, and intune with my body. I found curiously that I could induce panic in my chest by thinking about panic, and just as easily think it away. Like I had my hand upon some panic knob.

Alejandra sang, and I still somehow had the presence of mind to think that this was an easier way to hear the girl of my affections perform, than sitting through a free jazz gig. She told me afterwards that she wanted to keep on singing that song, it had more words, more verses, but she sensed the mood was that it needed to end soon, and she obliged. I counted four songs in this session, which the matriarch kept calling for.

Somehow from lying down and sitting up, I'd repositioned myself such that the guy sitting near the pit was now blocking line of sight between me and the elder running this session. If she tried to douse me with cool water it was all hitting him except for a few droplets that landed on the edges of my arms and legs. This session was longer, was harder, for the wings and the lack of water dousing. I resolved to lay down. There are sacred directions, I could only move around the tent clockwise I think, so I didn't want to risk shaming the other guy by trying to move around his body.

The session eventually ended, the doors opened, but I was done after three. In halting bad Spanish I asked if I could exit, but probably said 'Can I am exit, please' and crawled out, kissing the dirt several times as I left, with the other participants taking my arm to steady me/keep me from falling into the fire pit.

Outside the door I was helped to my feet, where I just stood until I felt I could stand for my own volition. Then asked in which direction I should exit, and followed that direction until I could get my towel.

It took me hours and liters to get rehydrated to the point I could use a bathroom again. I noticed myself thinking again, became aware of my own consciousness, when I saw a hummingbird feeding. Not my first, but hummingbirds are rare enough it was pretty special.

I would later think that it would be even more special had the first thing I became conscious of was a giraffe, not native to Mexico that only I witnessed, before it snuck off. I would read much more meaning into that.

Alejandra lasted five sessions, in other words, all the sessions. It was not her first sweat lodge, I suspect she does it most months. I was asked by a participant if I would do it again, I politely told her that it's difficult because I would return to Australia in a few months, she told me a few more times I could do it then.

I don't think I will, because I feel I got what I needed to out of the ceremony. I am already committed to running five more marathons to get a green t-shirt by the time I'm 40. I feel for me, to rejoin the sweat-lodge again would be an act of masochism, not purification.

I regard all spirituality as such. It is a mine-field for hubris. To think that opening a third-eye permits for the closing of the other two. There is a feel, an energy best described as greed in my experience among spiritual practitioners. The experience for many is not often enough, just as it is, they have to reach for more.

I'm not referring to this specific custom, or these specific people. But more the people who will take a strange phenomena like deja vu, and try and pull a justification for telekinesis, telepathy, prescience through it.

For me the sweatlodge was that pill of absolute despair, but in a physical rather than emotional sense. In my first year of Uni, when my then partner dumped me, my first long term and intimate partner, it was James' number in my little black address book I had called in my absolute despair. I spoke to his mum through gasping tears, and she arranged for me to come to dinner and dispatched James to come pick me up and give me a lift.

That's probably the closest situation I've been to an emotional sweat-lodge session, when I get dumped. I don't think I'm in any actual danger, but it's the despair combined with an inability to escape it.

I don't know how many times I got the call from James, when he was drowning in despair, and subsequently bought him a few more days, weeks or months. He shared the despair around, which is to say the love, but I suspect I got the call and answered a few times, before he stopped calling anyone.

A year on, I sat on a cinder block, in the very yard-like back yard of a loving strangers house, feeling like a 32 degree day was crisp and fresh, as my sweat drenched singlet started to actually chill me to shivering. I had experienced perhaps, a pretty good opposite of XTC, of Heroin. A brief trip to hell, before coming down to Earth again. It is great to be alive, amazing.