The wonderful ritual of sweat lodge
I did my first sweat lodge in 2016 with the Lakota people in preparation for a three week hike through the Anaconda–Pintler Wilderness. It was a transformative experience for me. The heat in combination with darkness was far more challenging than I would have expected and triggered yet unexplored trains of thought.
This weekend I completed my second sweat lodge as part of one of my best friends’ Bachelor weekend, this time in a very different location: the hilly suburbs of Zürich.
The experience of sweating, suffering and chanting together, an ancient ritual, seemed to form an immediate bond between a group of men, some of whom were friends, some of whom did not know each other before.
We should prescribe the reintroduction of rituals like the sweat lodge as an inauguration of meaning into some of our more shallow interactions.
