Love Sedona

The Sedona Sweat Lodge Tragedy, Part XII: Charge As Much As You Like, And We’ll Decide Whether to Attend!

On Thursday, October 8, 2009, two people died and others were hospitalized during a sweat lodge ceremony held by personal growth speaker James Arthur Ray. In this post, I’ll outline my opinion on the high price of some spiritual retreats.

 

 We’ve discussed the approach of either having no charge for spiritual events (and thus surviving via donations) or having a reasonable charge for them. The third says that a growth facilitator can set his or her own price, to see what the market will bear.

 

This of course is what James Arthur Ray did, and what every other personal growth industry personality does in a free society. In fact, one of the reasons it is an industry is because substantial money changes hands, whether it be for CD’s and DVD’s, books or workshops and retreats. Make no mistake: This is big business.

 

The argument for this way of thinking is as follows. First, in order to become successful at personal transformation, it takes considerable time, effort and training. You wouldn’t begrudge an educated engineer or highly-experience carpenter the right to charge more than someone with less education or experience, so why should growth speakers be different?

 

 Second, much of what James Arthur Ray and others do is offered…for free. That’s right. Ray and many speakers today make numerous appearances at no charge to the public. This is in spite of the fact that the appearances around the country cost a lot of money. Aside from their time, there’s the expense of travel and accommodations, and in some cases, they’re paying for the room where their talk is presented.

 

This doesn’t make them saintly, of course. It just reveals how their business model differs from the priest, the rabbi and the minister. Namely, it’s business! So their model works a lot like the free offers you get on the internet. They attract you to a website, and there, if you’re interested, you’ve got a chance to find out about products that offer more, but also cost more.

 

If you can’t ever be reconciled with the idea that it is a business, of course, read no further. But I dare you to read further. See, I think I can offer some decent reasons why professionals in personal growth actually need to act like business people, and why personal growth provides the most service to the world as a business.

 

 I’ll do all that in my next post.

The Sedona Sweat Lodge Tragedy, Part IX: Were They Sick Before They Entered?

On Thursday, October 8, 2009, approximately 50 people entered a sweat lodge ceremony, and within hours, two people lay dead. In this post, I’ll speculate about what could have killed two people and sickened dozens more at James Arthur Ray’s event, held at the Angel Valley retreat near Sedona.

 

Previously, we discussed the sweat lodge size or construction as the possible source of poor ventilation or of noxious fumes. Neither would be routine: Even the county fire marshal commented that people here do sweat lodges all the time, without any such problems.

 

Another possibility is that it wasn’t the sweat lodge alone but the condition of the participants which led to their demise. Although a day of fasting for a healthy person could create a lot of mental upset, the truth is that the body typically handles it just fine. So it is hard to imagine that the short fast could have weakened otherwise healthy people this much. What’s more, it appears that the fast was over, making the matter of how long they fasted for a moot point. If James Arthur Ray was smart enough to have a nurse present at the sweat lodge, he was also smart enough to check on the health of people who signed up for the event. Or so we hope.

 

For that reason, more promising is the speculation that people may have unknowingly been carrying the H1N1 virus. In other words, someone in the group had Swine Flu. With the flu widespread and highly contagious, and so many people coming from so many places, one can easily imagine that someone brought it with them. Joining together for several days at an isolated retreat center, it’s also quite easy to imagine how it could have spread.

 

A sweat lodge is a cleansing process and a healing ritual which promotes detoxification through intense heat. However the flu is potent. In particular, it makes it very difficult to keep liquids in the body. It’s easy to imagine how someone who had the flu (and possibly didn’t know it, attributing their state to the fasting) would be adversely affected. Even a person who had the flu and knew it would be tempted to join the lodge for its vaunted healing effects. (Not to mention the fact that apparently, everyone else was going in.)

 

  

The Sedona Sweat Lodge Tragedy, Part VII: Did The Lodge Structure Cause the Deaths?

The first hypothesis about what might have gone wrong concerns the size and conditions of the lodge at Angel Valley. Sweat lodges are make-shift by nature, temporary structures constructed of basic elements. Native peoples used sticks and branches for the super-structure, and blankets and brush as a covering. Building the lodge is part of the ceremony, and as it is being built, large rocks are heated in a fire pit throughout the day. When sufficiently hot, the stones are placed in a dirt hole at the center of the lodge floor. Water on the stones creates a steamy, intensely hot, mostly enclosed environment.

 

Most commonly, a sweat lodge for a small community would be a small structure. It is clear that the James Arthur Ray sweat was for a considerable group. It appears that all of the events participants were involved, a number in the range of 50 people. In order to fit 50 people, sitting cross-legged, you’d need either a very wide structure, or to have people sitting in a tight spiral formation.

 

In such a situation, the first challenge is ventilation. In order to preserve the heat in the lodge, the only hole is the entry. Such an entry is small – you’d have to crouch to get in it – and photos from Angel Valley suggest the same. For a few people, that’s fine. For 50 people, a two hour ceremony could drastically diminish the available oxygen. The consequences are obvious.

 

The second challenge for a large group is the variation of the heat. In a normal small lodge for a small group, everyone is hot, but equally so. To accommodate 50 people at Angel Valley, it takes a lot of hot rocks to warm things enough. Yet the heat experienced by those close to the rocks could have been quite different than those far away, or near the lodge opening. Multiply that by two hours, and you can see why some could have been stricken before the whole group realized it.

 

What’s more, entering a sweat lodge is to participate in a sacred ceremony, so participants probably remained silent. People were focused on their own inner experience of the intense outer heat. Moreover, a sweat lodge is supposed to be uncomfortable. It takes an unusual amount of heat to facilitate the cleansing of the body, which the fasting the group did also accelerates.

 

With that many people silently, but willingly, suffering, the Sedona sweat lodge tragedy starts to look less improbable.