James Arthur Ray Situation: Sacred Sweat Lodge, Old School: A Difference Between Prayer and Pomp
Oct 21st, 2009 | 54 responses
Two men, 38 and 40 years old, died,
a third person, a 49 year old woman,
passed away this past week…
All three died after participating
in a sweat lodge …
which is meant to be deep prayer
over all gathered in nakedness there;
no clothing to mark status,
everyone as they were when they
came hot and steaming
from their mothers
long ago.
The three died,
and two dozen are ill,
after, it seems, inhaling toxic fumes
and/or becoming overheated
in a sweat lodge put together and led,
not apparently, by Native Americans
for whom sweat lodge is precise memory;
a gathering of the
wounded and the strong…
but rather this sweat lodge was made
by someone who allegedly charged
Ten Grand for five days of what turned out to be
The Days of Sickness and Death.
I asked my brethren what they thought occurred.
One brother, a wisened White Mountain Apache/Nez Percé
said, ‘Good. Serves that a-hole right. Sick of this second wave
of white men copying us; They took everything
we had the first time, land, baskets, bows, and just
have come back in the last 20 years to steal
from us again; the only thing we have left
… our way of seeing and being.’
Another of my brothers, Luis, a young-old Choctaw, gentle,
a healer and a pray-er, had tears in his eyes.
He said, ‘I’m sorry that they were hurt, that
they died. That somehow we didn’t know, for
we could have come and helped them.’
Tarp he said, or tyvek or plastic
are the wrong things to cover
the sapling bones. Only cloth,
and hides, blessed by the old people,
only the things that can breathe,
so the people within can breathe…
for all that hot air can,
if fire not tended just right,
burn the lungs.
I told him I saw my own lungs once,
they are like angel wings, so fine and
paper-thin little hollows and refuges,
filling and emptying of warm but not hot air.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘like that,
the poor little wings inside the body
can burn, become hard and not be able
to rise and fall on the air… injured wings.’
We just sort of fell into prayer then, sitting in the
little glass kiosk that protects people
from the weather while they wait for the bus.
Luis prayed so softly and I joined in,
just looking at each others’ hands.
In that part of town of tire-iron coffee for a quarter,
and no one owning a car, and men laying on the sidewalks…
and dark tanned women pushing grocery carts filled with tin cans,
no one would notice two old people praying.
But, in the kiosk with us was a mother with her two
little ones and ten thin grocery bags full of cheap food.
And she looked over at us, and nodded
in maybe agreement or approval,
but most of all, her children crept over and stood
before us in perfect reverence, trying
to say the words we were saying, right after we said them.
It’s something like that, the difference
between praying in a lodge constructed of
sudden mercy and strength delivered soft…
vs producing prayer like its an
event, somehow…
rather than just some glass kiosk
all scratched up with glass cutters
from graffiti guys,
and behind you the sun dropping below the Rockies
shining sunset gold
onto two little raggedy boys just now learning
how to pray from an old man –
who really knows how– and by heart.
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54 Responses to “James Arthur Ray Situation: Sacred Sweat Lodge, Old School: A Difference Between Prayer and Pomp”
Thanks Leebot for your balanced response I was thinking there might be some “incoming” based on the length and strength of my little diatribe. I'm going to respond to some of what you wrote below.
“anything sincere, useful and good can be exploited and corrupted by charlatans”
Not only can it, it will be, and more personally, while we expend our energies looking for the charlatans without, –what about the charlatan within? We can strive to be ethical and caring, but we can also become weak, perhaps momentarily, and there you are out on a limb, exposed, and the mob just outside and inside wants their piece of flesh. It is not so much that it is done intentionally, but there exist lucani/holes I mean in each individual's experience, whether one is teacher or student.
“how to mitigate risk”
Well, in fact, I think we all try. We don't usually sign on for more than we can handle, unless of coarse we sign on naively or with bravado– like joining a military at war or a challenging spiritual/psychological coarse. The problem is that it is not a static thing– we can only see based on where we are at and that keeps shifting beneath us, again whether we are teacher or student.
Given the degree to which we admit our wrong doing we can work on our healing. I think this is also available to Ray, but he has to accept the responsibility and weave his sorrow and transformation humbly into the fabric of his life blanket. If he doesn't we now know him for who he is, and none of us would be willing to pay the price or accept the basic false bravado in his teachings. To not use this experience as a teaching moment for his own redemption would mean a total denigration of the experience and a waste of the lives given for him to have it (I only mean in terms of what the deaths could mean to/for him). As all things represent opportunity, to underscore a new age but also ancient point, so is this that, and thusly, represents and opportunity to see through his new age/ego driven/success-oriented macho flawed persona and change by dint of sorrow and deep efforts to understand and take responsibility to become a more authentic, heart-centered, deeply spiritual person, also flawed, but more wisely and consciously oriented.
how do we fine-tune our “picker outer”
Our “Picker outer” is informed by our experience and our intuition. It is not always correct, either, though one could say, “I avoided that event for some reason” and have that be good enough. But we could as easily be responding to our insecurity/fears which could prevent us from moving further down the line of our experience until much later. It is not a race, so likely this works out well, but still there are those who fear a great deal…….maybe for them, a fully dressed, lights on, sauna, with magazines strewn about, light talk allowed, underscoring the normalcy of it all– would be a place for them to start.
Sometimes we don't see a telltale flaw until down the road in our experience. We wouldn't have spotted this thing that bothers us about the teachings or the teacher until later. sometimes it is designed that way. All things have contradictions, and we wouldn't be able to handle them on the front end………so they come later. What looks like small, actually tiny print, becomes, down the road, very large print, which we sometimes can no longer over look. This happens with all our experience. There is no safe place to stand without safety becoming our primary mode of existing. so we proceed with caution, with one foot in the light and one foot in the dark, moving forward, feelingly.
Thanks for listening………..I think I have used up my nickle….
Oh dear, Spirits for Sale costs $295 for the DVD. It's not available on Amazon or Netflix.
Thanks spirasol for this beautiful poem
Did not know this — James Arthur Ray wrote occasional essays for the blog Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-arthur-ray