Local practitioner hosts sweat lodge

Local visitors prepare to enter a sweat lodge. The event was organized by local health practitioner Sweet Medicine Nation. photo by Jim Mitchell The use of sweat lodges for purifying the body and the spirit probably dates to prehistoric times.

East of Sisters, amid the scattered junipers, Sweet Medicine Nation draws up to 40 people per session to take part in the sweat lodge experience. Professional people, doctors, lay people, mothers at home, psychologists, and others are drawn to the ceremony.

"I've had Buddhist monks, Catholic priests, and nuns come to do lodges for years," Sweet Medicine Nation said. "I've been in a lodge with the highest elders of the nations, the first people. I've gone in the lodge with every culture. In the lodge we're no longer separate. We're all one."

The sweat lodge looks like a dome tent with a pit in the middle of the floor. Heated stones are put in the pit, then hot water is poured on the stones to create steam and cause occupants to sweat.

Sweat lodge ceremonies involve certain rituals, depending upon the tribe or individual conducting the ceremony. Purifying with sage or tobacco smoke before entering the sweat lodge is common.

When Sweet Medicine came to Oregon it was as a wife and young mother at 19.

"I was a mother, going to school, trying to make a career, trying to raise my children. I went toward medicine because I've always had a fascination with that," she said.

Sweet Medicine Nation is Chickasaw/Chocktaw Indian. She was adopted by the Lakota people when she was 24 and started practicing their ways.

She describes the sweat lodge as "one of the first rites of passage -- because of its quality of taking us to another dimension of thinking that aligns with all the parts of us."

She said, "Originally women were barred from the sweat lodge because they had their bleeding time. When the wars came on and the men were being killed, the women started picking up the honor to finish the commitments of their husbands and their sons and their fathers. That's how women got into the sweat lodge."

She noted that, "In the tribal ways, you always do a purification before something big in your life ­ a wedding, graduation, facing a life-threatening illness. We get a lot of women who have had breast cancer come out to do lodges."

Sweet Medicine has worked extensively with severely ill patients -- those with AIDS, cancer, etc. Since 1991 she has worked with Project Quest, a Portland counseling and support system for all primitive practices and support for terminal illnesses.

Sweet Medicine is a member of the Four Winds Foundation, an educational, non-profit organization "dedicated to serving, living and teaching the Natural Ways."

The Foundation sponsors regular sweat lodge ceremonies as well as classes on primitive skills, children's camps, women's retreats and more.

For more information call 408-0966 or 312-3376.