Sweat Lodge Ceremonies

Buffalo double sided shamanic drum. Designed for use in a sweat lodge. Available from my website or by commission.

The transformative healing power of a change in temperature.

Although I have only attended a couple of sweat lodge ceremonies in this life experience, my soul remembers their transformative energies deeply.

Heat along with cold, are my favorite ways of bringing my body back into balance. I regularly sauna and cold plunge. During the time when I was working with my bowel cancer tumor a couple of years ago, I worked deeply with heat then cold immersion combined with breath work.

I would treat my sauna practice like a sweat lodge ceremony. Beginning with breath work, I would set intentions to connect with the energy held in my tumor, to learn and integrate the lessons it had brought me. I sent love to my whole body including my tumor, and asked for all that no-longer served me to be released and transmuted. I paid particular attending to my tumor and visualised the love I was sending it, dissolving it slowly. I was taking a number of herbs in one form another at the time, and I added my intention to their activity to increase their effectiveness. I asked for guidance from Spirit.

After a good 30 minutes in the sauna, I would then cold plunge. Then as they say, rinse repeat. At the end of my session I would be glowing with life force energy! I was in full acceptance and gratitude of all that is; in full trust and faith in Spirit. I experienced such deep joy, peace and feelings of well being.

I was also regularly doing longer cold baths following breath work and spending time cold water swimming. A couple of days before my surgery I traveled to Derbyshire with a friend to swim around and under a waterfall. I had never felt so alive! My surgery went well, I have very little post surgery pain relief, I kept up the breath work in hospital and my recovery was trouble free.

I gave my body every opportunity to heal and believed in my bodies ability to heal itself. I elected to have the surgery but by the time I went into hospital, I was symptom free, and feeling healthier than I had in many years. The tumor the doctors removed was measured as being smaller than when measured during scanning. This can happen as the scanning is not super precise, however, as I was symptom free and my bowel movements normalising I totally believe the efforts I had put in had an incredibly positive effect on my health.

Sweat lodge ceremonies have been in practice throughout history across many cultures and many do still have active participation in them. We are perhaps most familiar with sweat lodges being part of Indigenous American culture, or we perhaps call to mind northern European sauna practice followed by a dash across snow to an icy dip.

However, Ireland also historically had stone 'sweathouse's' used up to the 19th and early 20th century for curing illness as reported in a recent article in The Irish Times, by Rosanna Cooney, commenting on the resurgence of sauna use. "...when people came to this exact spot (somewhere in Co Tyrone) in search of relief from arthritis, rheumatism, and every other ailment you could think of, from deafness to sore eyes. With friends and family, they would light a turf fire inside the chamber of the sweathouse, waiting for the walls to absorb enough heat before letting it die and scraping out the embers."

"They were part of a group effort to keep the community well, as people gave up time, energy and resources to protect others. There are stories of talented healers using the sweathouses to cure every ailment that could afflict a population with little access to healthcare. There was a famous family of bloodletters, the Lynches in Shancurry, Co Leitrim, who used the sweathouse to break a fever, and a widely respected folk healer, Martha Douglas, who was said to sweat patients in her parish of Clogher in Co Donegal for “12-24 hours” before giving them a concoction of herbs. “After three or four days the patient was completely cured. Old Martha never told the secret of her cures, which died with her.”

Sweat lodges of the first nations of North America and Mesoamerica combined physical heat bathing with deep spiritual, social and ceremonial purposes. Joshua J. Mark writes in his article published by World History Encyclopedia, October 2023, "The lodge is a low, dome-shaped, structure heated by rocks which produce steam as water is poured onto them, raising the temperature to induce heavy sweating amongst participants and physical and spiritual cleansing.....The sweat lodge is part of the seven sacred rites of the Sioux, and the Lakota refer to the rite of purification, in which the lodge plays a central role, as inipi ("to live again")" He goes on to write, "The sweat lodge is also an important aspect of the Sun Dance and of many other ceremonies in different nations. As with all civilizations, each nation likes to lay claim to being the first the gods favored with some important gift or discovery and so it is with the Origin of the Sweat Lodge from the Piegan people of the Blackfoot Confederacy. This origin story not only explains how the sweat lodge came to be but also how intimately the sun, moon, and stars – and, by extension, all of the universe – are intimately connected to human beings. It also emphasizes, as many Native American tales do, the cultural value of the primacy of communal over individual good."

There is symbolism of course in the shape of sweat lodges or houses. Round domes, with dark interiors are representative of the womb of Mother Earth. The hot stones represent ancestors, with herbs added to the water used for pouring over the stones, along with prayers and song.

The Nordic/Baltic use of heat or 'sweat-bathing' for healing is found in their traditions of sauna use. In Russia the term for this practice is "banya". Both appear to also have a connection to physical and spiritual healing, community, and important life transitions. However, there appears to be more focus on daily life, rather than as seen in the much more spiritually focused ceremonies found in Indigenous American sweat lodges.

Within the Native American sweat lodge ceremonies the use of a frame drum was important to support movement towards an altered state of being. The beat of the shamanic drum assists participants to focus on and move energy, but also to allow Spirit to work through them. The beat of the drum helps to facilitate visions and messages from Spirit and deepens the participants relationship with Spirit. Elders within these communities do ask for respect of their lineage teachings, with cultural appropriation a concern among many.

Having been very intuitively and naturally drawn to working with hot and cold, and combined my personal small rituals with the use of herbs (I've previously studied herbal medicine) and energetic, physical, spiritual cleansing, its no surprise to read of such a long cross cultural use of these tools for healing. My absolute love and passion for the frame drum and their power of healing which they are constantly sharing with me, is now being added at home to my practice of cold plunge in the bath. I need to invest in a home sauna to take that practice to the next level as I can't see my local gym taking too well to my drumming poolside!

I continue to seek out authentic sweat lodge ceremonies where I can. I shall definitely be taking one of my sweat lodge drums with me next time to work with as part of my own preparation and with permission, to try within the lodge.

I work with spirit drums constantly, they are very much a permanent part of my existence now. I could not imagine life without them, or a spiritual healing practice that didn't include them.