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Sweat Lodge – Coaching Lesson

Hi, I’m AJ. Welcome to the coaching video for Sweat Lodge. Let’s get started. A sweat lodge is basically a process, a system, a method of purification. So the Native Americans used this ritual, basically, as a means of purifying both their bodies and their minds. So let’s talk about this idea of purification. What is purification?

Purification is the removal of toxins, of poisons, of harmful substances within us. Now if we’re talking about the body then we’re talking about, y’know, harmful chemicals. If we’re talking about our mind then we’re talking about negative, limiting beliefs. And if we’re talking about emotions then we’re talking about toxic emotions, painful emotions, resentments, bitterness, those kinds of things.

And the reason that the Native Americans used this purification ritual of a sweat lodge, and the reason that purification in general is still a great idea now, is because that we are always accumulating, meaning adding, toxins: physical, mental and emotional.

Let’s talk about physical first because it’s the most obvious. So physically we are as we live accumulating toxins. That means we’re taking them into our body and some of them stay in our body and they cause us harm. They hurt our bodies. They cause us to get older faster, lose energy, all these negative effects.

Toxin is a kind of poison and that might literally be a poison, in other words we do get exposed to toxic chemicals, pesticides, for example, that are in our food now. Or some kind of pollution or dangerous chemicals that are dumped into the water and that we get exposed to eventually. Or air, with cars and factories putting all these poisons and toxins into our air.

So we’re getting exposed to all of this stuff all the time. There’s really no escape from that now. Our environment has become more and more polluted because of industry, because of a variety of reasons.

And it’s in our food. It’s in our water. It’s in our air. And these things do gradually added and built up in our bodies. And that’s why it’s useful to have some kind of physical purification every now and then.

We’ll talk about how often a little bit later.

So the next question is how can we purify our body? And there are a large number of ways to purify your body. Now one of them is the sweat lodge. And why is the sweat lodge effective? If we look at it scientifically, what’s happening biologically that makes a sweat lodge a positive experience, a helpful experience for your body, a purification process?

Well, the first thing is that you sweat, as the name implies. A sweat lodge causes you to sweat a lot. In this little small area, it’s super hot and you start pouring sweat. And your skin, in fact, is one of the best ways for your body to get rid of toxic substances. So one purpose of sweating, of course, is to make you cooler. You’re hot and you sweat. It evaporates and your body gets cooler. That’s one function of sweating.

But another function of sweating is it’s one great way for your body to eliminate a lot of poisons, a lot of toxins. Because your skin is quite large, right? If you look at the surface of your skin, your legs, your body, your torso, arms, neck, face, head, everything. That’s a lot of area. And so your body can really get a lot of poisons and toxins out fairly quickly through your skin. It’s a very efficient way for your body to get rid of toxins, to purify itself, to clean itself.

And that’s why many traditions have this sweat idea, this…some kind of technique or method to cause the body to sweat more, to sweat a lot. Sweat lodge is what the Native Americans used. In Northern Europe there’s the whole tradition of a sauna, which is very similar to a sweat lodge. I mean it’s basically the same idea. You go into a little enclosed area that’s very hot and then you start sweating a lot.

Sometimes, both in the sweat lodge tradition in North America and in Europe as well, they alternate. Like say they go into this hot environment and they sweat and then they go and they jump into some cold water or some snow or something like that. It rapidly cools the body down. And then they go back into the heat again and then the body sweats even more. Of course, they’re drinking lots of water as they do this so they don’t get dehydrated. And so a lot of toxins can get released in that way, help the body cleanses itself using these methods.

Another method, a quite popular method now in the United States for physical purification is juice fasting.

Now a fast means, of course, fast can mean to go quickly, but used as a noun fast, a fast, is a period of not eating. That’s basically what it means. It means a period of time where you don’t eat. Now a pure fast is just water. Just, you only drink water and you don’t eat any food at all. That would be called pure fast or you might call that a water fast. That is also a way of helping your body purify, to get rid of physical toxins.

Now if you have a lot of toxins, if you’re not very strong, a pure fast, a water fast, can be kind of hard. It can be very tough on your body because your body will start releasing a lot of toxins and you might start feeling sick. Some people have no problem with it and other people can have lots of problems.

So a juice fast is a little more gentle but it’s the same idea. You don’t eat any food. You don’t chew any hard food. You only drink vegetables juice. Usually it’s some kind of green vegetable juice, like cucumber juice with maybe some carrots and other things added in. Different people use different vegetables in their juices. But that’s all they do.

So you’re only drinking juice only…fresh juice, not from a can or something. You actually make the juice and then you immediately drink it. It’s best, of course, to use organic vegetables when you do this. In other words, no pesticides, no chemicals put on the vegetables. And you can do a juice fast for…oh, you can do them for a very long time.

There is a great documentary called, what’s it called, “Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead” I believe is the name of it. It’s about this Australian guy who was fat and was sick. And he got some disease. And he became very worried, very concerned. So he decided to do a 30-day juice fast. So for 30 days he only drank vegetable juice. It’s an amazing documentary.

The health changes, the positive health changes that he has in that time, that 30-day time, it’s just…it’s amazing. It’s stunning, actually, when you see the changes that happened to him. And then another guy in the movie also does it and even more dramatic, it’s amazing. So juice fasting is one way the body purifies and cleans itself. And it’s a little more gentle than a water fast.

Exercise can also, certain kinds of exercise, can also be physically purifying. Especially when you get out of a city, you get away from all the pollution in the air. You get out to some very clean environment, like up in the mountains, something like that, out in the woods somewhere, maybe on or near the beach.

And, y’know, if you go for like long walks, that’s another way.

Because when you exercise, again, you get your blood moving more throughout your body and that gives your body a chance to release toxins, poisons, and then sweat them out. You’re exercising, you’re sweating more usually. So, again those toxins start coming out more. So these are all ways. You could also do a yoga retreat. Yoga has…certain kinds of yoga have practices that are designed to help the body purify.

So that’s physical…physical purification. It’s important to purify physically because otherwise our bodies start getting tired and weaker and weaker. I feel like right now I kind of need a physical purification. I’m feeling a little bit tired physically lately so it’s a good topic for me right now. It’s getting me thinking that I should do one of these things, or maybe several.

Now our next category, you can just put them together, mental and emotional. So mental and emotional purification: equally important. Again, we accumulate, take in, a lot of toxic thoughts and feelings. Where do we get these things? Number one, media is probably the worst one, movies. For example, you watch enough movies and television you see a lot of violence, right? You see a lot of people being shot, killed, fights, mean, terrible arguments…all kinds of stuff which is just common in media.

We don’t even think about it anymore. But yet all those little images, y’know, a lot of them they get stuck in our head and it’s a kind of toxin, I think. Also we get certain kinds of negative beliefs, they might come from the media, they might come from our own experiences. But we start thinking, oh I can’t do this or this is bad or, y’know, we start getting all these little negative things, usually about ourselves and what we can accomplish or do. Especially when we have failures, when we have difficult things or bad things happen to us.

Emotionally as well, y’know, all the little frustrations of life, all the little stresses of life start building up, building up. Little by little, we don’t notice them but they get worse and worse and worse and they kind of get into our bodies and our minds and our feelings. Stress is big one, of course. We all have different kinds of stress. That builds up.

And then there are kind of emotional pain…emotionally painful situations, emotional hurts. And those can really go deep sometimes. And they are definitely a kind of toxin, especially if you’re not able to or you don’t forgive and let go or do some kind of healing about it, then that also becomes kind of toxic within you, in your mind and your emotions.

And worries…and then a very simple one which is maybe the most common of all. I see it in my life all the time. It’s just kind of mental habits. Y’know, because usually we go and we’re just living our lives every day. We can get into a rut. Getting into a rut means getting into a habit where we’re just doing the same thing every day, again and again. Get up and work, come home or get up, get on the internet, do this. And it becomes very repetitive and then we get into this habit and we kind of get stuck in these mental habits.

And we get these certain repetitive thoughts and certain thoughts that we just keep thinking them again and again and again. Or these things that we do every day, we just keep doing them again and again and again. There’s really no reason for that. It’s just we develop this habit and then it becomes comfortable and then it becomes really easy.

So we need to purify all that stuff periodically, every now and then. It’s very, very beneficial to try to sort of flush all of that out of our minds and our emotions. Just as with our bodies, we want to get the toxins to come out. It’s also useful to get all this mental and emotional garbage to come out. And all these habits that aren’t very useful to us.

And there are methods for doing that as well. Again, most of them are very ancient, very old, in many parts of the world. We’ve already mentioned one, which is fasting, juice fasting and water fasting. They certainly affect our body. They also affect our minds. So I’ve done both water fasts and juice fasts and the thing I noticed the most, the benefit that I enjoyed the most, was that my mind got so clear and calm.

It took about four days usually for me. Y’know, the first couple of days kind of grumpy and not feeling very good.

But by the third or fourth day of fasting, I noticed that I just…my mind became clear. A lot of my little habits and habitual thoughts and distractions sort of just disappeared and I just felt kind of calmer and more open and clear. Like, again, like I’d purified my mind and emotions. So fasting, it affects your body but it also helps your mind.

An obvious one is meditation. Just meditating for an hour a day is useful, or 20 minutes a day, whatever, is useful day to day. But for purification we need to do something more intense, so a meditation retreat is probably the best thing to do. That’s where you go off to somewhere away from your normal life, your normal home, your normal location. And maybe it’s for 4 days, maybe it’s for 8 days, maybe it’s for 10 days, maybe it’s for 30 days…you just meditate every day.

And I’ve done…I’ve done this a 10-day retreat where, it was challenging again, but, again the thing I loved was at the end of the 10 days my mind just seemed so clear, like I had just let go of so much mental garbage. And, again, mind and body are connected. So even though meditation is really mostly mental than emotional, I also noticed that my body felt better. I felt more energetic. Because when our minds are full of garbage, it makes us tired physically. So they each help each other. So a meditation retreat is a very, very fantastic thing to do to mentally purify.

A nature retreat is a…is an easier one. It doesn’t require quite as much discipline. And that’s where you just go off, get away from the city. You get away from the town. You get away from civilization as much as you can. And you just go off into the mountains or the beach or whatever. And you just hang out in nature for, again, for a week or more.

You might go camping. You get a tent and really go up into the mountains and bring all your food with you. That’s my favorite thing to do because then you really get disconnected from all the garbage of civilization. But you don’t have to be quite that extreme. You could rent a little cabin or something and just…just something quiet.

Turn off all the cell phones. Don’t even bring your cell phone. Don’t bring your computer. None of that.

Just out in nature; and quiet and peaceful. Go for little walks in nature every day. And, again, you’ll find that you start to purify. First, your mind seems like it’s going crazy the first few days. And that’s just the process of your mind releasing all this stuff.

It’s kind of like sweating, but mentally. But then what you’ll notice is that it gets calmer and calmer and calmer. And after 4, 5, 6 days…it’s just like a big breath of fresh air, mentally and physically and emotionally. Just feel calm and clear. It’s a wonderful feeling. Hard to describe but you’ll experience it when you do it.

I guess the last two I have are fairly simple. For emotional, one big thing is just to forgive. Forgiveness is a big one. Some people hold on to some pain or hurt that they suffered because of someone else. And some people hold on to these things all their life. Unfortunately, in my family there’s some situations like that. And it’s terrible. That is the worst possible thing, y’know, feeling that resentment and bitterness towards somebody years and years and years is a terrible thing.

It’s like a poison inside of you and you just have to let it go. I’m not saying it’s easy. Sometimes it’s not, sometimes it is. But it’s necessary for your own mental health. And that’s a whole ‘nother topic we could talk about, forgiveness. So, y’know, go get some books about forgiveness but just do it. Do whatever you need to do to let go and forgive all the people that, y’know, have caused you pain in the past, so that you can move on and sort of clear that out of you.

And finally, a media fast. I’ve mentioned this in other lessons before. That’s where, even during your normal day, you’re still going to work, you’re still with the kids, whatever. You’re still doing those things.

But you just, you turn off all media. You don’t watch television.

You can block all the news, internet websites, there’s actually plug-ins and programs you can get, cheap or free, online and then you can just put in all the news websites, all the stuff you usually read and your computer will block those things for a certain amount of time, you decide. Don’t read any books, nothing, no media at all. Again, you’ll find that you really will calm down a lot just by doing that.

Okay, finally, let’s end by talking about schedule. How often should you do these things? It’s really up to you, but, y’know, most people recommend 4 to 12 months. That’s what I recommend. So every four months, if you’re really feeling stressed out or you’re physically feeling terrible, you might want to do these kind of purification techniques or methods quite often. Maybe every 4 months, maybe even every 3 months for a while, until you start feeling much better.

On the other hand, if you feel quite good mentally and physically, you might do it less often, maybe just once every year. So it’s really up to you. But it is nice to do them periodically, y’know, at least once a year. And it becomes a kind of ritual, a kind of thing you do consistently year after year. Just, y’know, each year you clear out all the junk mentally and physically and start fresh again. It’s a great habit to get into.

Alright, so that’s your assignment. Why not do that now. This month choose a physical purification method that you want to do and do it. And choose a mental and emotional one and do that, too. And you can combine them. You can do them at the same time or you can do them separately. But do them both this month. Tell us about it on our site. See you next time. Bye-bye.