When people follow “spiritual advisors,” usually they just waste time and lose money & friends. But occasionally they lose their lives. A third person has died from following James Arthur Ray at a retreat for his “Spiritual Warrior” program:
A woman hospitalized after spending time in a sauna-like “sweatbox” has died, bringing the total fatalities to three, authorities said late Saturday.
In addition to the deaths, 18 others were injured at the October 8 event at Angel Valley Retreat Center near Sedona, Arizona. [Wikipedia adds "eighteen others were hospitalized after suffering burns, dehydration, breathing problems, kidney failure or elevated body temperature in a large sweat lodge."]
The latest victim, Lizabeth Neuman, 49, was a Minnesota mother of three. She died at the Flagstaff Medical Center, the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office said.
There were up to 65 visitors, ages 30 to 60, at the resort attending the “Spiritual Warrior” program by self-help expert James Arthur Ray, according to authorities.
Participants spent up to two hours inside the sweatbox, a dome-like structure covered with tarps and blankets, the sheriff’s office said. Hot rocks and water are used to create steam in the enclosed environment.
Why can’t people think for themselves? Why do they think they need a spiritual guru to help them? And why in the fraking world would someone go into a “sweatbox” for two hours?
My impression is that sweat lodges aren’t any more or less dangerous than a sauna – when done right. But Ray is an idiot; worse, he’s a dangerous idiot.
Most sweat lodges are built to handle just 12 or so people. Ray packed 60+ people into just over 400 square feet of space. That meant he had no way on monitoring who was sweating too much, who was looking dazed, etc.
Sweat lodges were originally rough buildings, and they’re still built fairly loosely so that they can breathe and ventilate a bit. Ray covered his with blankets and tarps.
What’s worse is that Ray charged over $9,000 for this “Spirit Warrior Weekend” newage (rhymes with ‘sewage’). If you went through the normal course of classes and seminars he recommended before you reached this point, you might have spent as much as $30,000.
Anyway, Theresa over at Making Light has expended 9,000 words covering this story.
“The secret” to wealth is to find gullible, desperate people and get them to pay you a bunch of money.
Works with new age woo and religion!
I thought this was a travesty, but then i read a comment “It’s just life weeding out the gene pool” lol id have to agree if you go to that and pay that much money and die. Your really kind of aren’t going collect a whole lot of sympathy when your that dumb.
http://whatstheharm.net I keep pointing people to that, but since it endorses critical thinking it isn’t that popular.
I’m not defending woo-woo stuff, but why do people do anything like that that requires that kind of endurance for no visible reward? All woo-woo aside, it’s like someone doing a solo 24 hr mountain bike race, or the Iditarod, or the AT (or Long Trail). We do things like that mostly because we’re too damn stupid to stop and that by persevering, it will somehow make us a better, stronger person. (So says the guy who once went on a seven hour, all-off-road mountain bike ride with a single power bar and two water bottles and bonked so hard he vomited bile).
Ask yourself if you’ve ever kept doing something hard, with no real reward because you thought it would be wussy to stop.
I’d be surprised if the purpose of the sweat lodge wasn’t some kind of physical and spiritual cleansing. In that case, the point of it all was to get closer to God.
…and for Ray to make a lot of money, of course.
“…but why do people do anything like that that requires that kind of endurance for no visible reward?”
As an Ironman triathete, I can tell you there is a big difference between training for and pushing yourself in endurance sports and intentionally dehydrating yourself in a “sweatlodge” for two hours.
The former requires planning, perrsistence, training, has a tangible goal – the finish line. Most importantly it’s unlikely to result in death.
The later require little more than stupidity and has no tangible goal – but presumably is done with an intention of gaining insight in to an imaginary friend in the sky.
You’re half-right. Being a triathlete takes deep dedication without a doubt and a race is different than a non-competitive endurance “event”. However, there is no real difference in my mind. As a sport class racer (hey, we’ve all gotta start somewhere), I have to say the finish line is a pretty personal goal. Unless you win, show, or place, it’s completely intangible; there is no reward other than the doing it. Being an athlete is just another form of masochism; how many would look at us and ask: why the hell would you do that?
What would you say about end-to-ending the AT? Day after day of exertion and solitude (with bits of hunger thrown in, to boot) with no reward other than getting to the top of Katahdin.
Also, death is always possible when pushing the bounds of endurance; dehydration, hyponatremia, heat stroke (or conversely hypothermia) etc. A sweatlodge is no more inherently deadly than swimming 2.4 miles.
“I have to say the finish line is a pretty personal goal. Unless you win, show, or place, it’s completely intangible; there is no reward other than the doing it.”
This just isn’t true. There are health benefits – and the finish line is an actual tangible goal. At least it seems awfully real each time I cross it – actual tape to break – real clock there measuring my time. Yup pretty tangible. Not just an attempt to get closer to god.
“Being an athlete is just another form of masochism”
You really believe this? Then we probably don’t have much to talk about on this topic.
“Also, death is always possible when pushing the bounds of endurance; dehydration, hyponatremia, heat stroke (or conversely hypothermia) etc. A sweatlodge is no more inherently deadly than swimming 2.4 miles.”
Death is very unlikely from endurance sports. Just sitting in a sweatlodge for a reasonable amount of time probably has a similarly low risk. Doing what these peopls did carries a much higher risk of death – as evidenced by the fact that some died.
> …but why do people do anything like that that requires that kind of endurance
> for no visible reward?”
Commonly, we act in life by wanting something (a visible reward), then striving to get it. It’s been occasionally pointed out that there are drawbacks to this strategy. Sometimes we don’t get what we want. Sometimes we get it, but then lose it. Sometimes, even before we lose it, the joy of having it disappears.
Therefore, for a very long time, there’s been the alternate strategy of just doing something, attending to the actions itself, rather than a desired reward. The quintessential example of this strategy is a practice known in Buddhism as “sitting,” in which you… uhhh… just sit.
(Of course it’s possible to do sitting meditation while still desiring some reward, like God or Enlightenment or Bliss or Holiness or something. Though it looks the same externally, that’s different from just sitting. Still, it turns out that sometimes, the very practice of sitting can eventually lead one to recognize, question, or discard the desires he initially brought to it.)
> As an Ironman triathete, I can tell you there is a big difference between training
> for and pushing yourself in endurance sports and intentionally dehydrating yourself
> in a “sweatlodge” for two hours.
Sometimes, maybe not. Someone doing a perceived “spiritual” discipline may explicitly believe that the effort reduces desire and I/my/me thinking (and the inevitable suffering that comes with it). Atheletes may not think in those terms… but still their efforts result, at least temporarily, in a quieter mind, so the consequence is similar.
“…still their efforts result, at least temporarily, in a quieter mind, so the consequence is similar.”
This is hogwash. I train a lot. It never results in a “quiter” mind.
Bill wrote
> I train a lot. It never results in a ‘quiter’ mind.
Not a ‘quitter’ mind, a ‘quieter’ mind.
Are you suggesting that when you’re in the midst of pushing your body to an extreme, your thoughts remain filled with plans for the future, regrets from the past, and analysis of personal problems? You may not be aware of its absence… but I’d be amazed if you’re able to perform well athletically while holding on to all of the usual mental chatter.
“Not a ‘quitter’ mind, a ‘quieter’ mind.”
Typo on my part – I knew what you meant.
“Are you suggesting that when you’re in the midst of pushing your body to an extreme, your thoughts remain filled with plans for the future, regrets from the past, and analysis of personal problems?”
That’s exactly what I’m saying. Often the solitude of long training increases this. And that’s a good thing.
I’ve done sweat lodges before. Of couse, I also did them on a head full of peyote with the goal of getting blitzed holodeck style.
It was stupid but still somehow safer than what these wackjobs are doing.
I’ve sat through sweat lodges before as well. And in the middle of winter, LOVE them. But this is beyond wackjob. Milking people for money is horrible practice (belief is apparently never free), but purposefully endangering people, to me, is nothing short of assault, or in this case murder.
I lived in nearby Cottonwood, AZ for a year and spent a great deal of time in and around Sedona. It’s a very beautiful place (at least it was before it turned into a small city), but unfortunately it has a well-deserved reputation for this sort of thing. Sedona has always been a mecca for New Age kooks, rich celebrities, and the con artists who prey on them. It was only a matter of time before people started dying.
Sweat lodges are perfectly safe if done properly. They are no different than a steam room or sauna. Two hours is too long, though.
So is rock climbing, Bungi jumping skydiving and a lot of other things. Usually when you hear about acceidents you find that the cause was someone who decided to cut corners on safety to make some more money.
Scandinavians would lap this up. Me? I’d probably be one of the casualties.
Sweat lodge ceremonies are a lot of fun – no matter the sauna, I can’t seem to get quite the same effect that a sweat lodge gives. They’re great for the skin, and they’re amazing when it’s cold out. That said, the times I’ve done it we had always been under the supervision of someone who had supervised at hundreds of the ceremonies, and was always very attentive to the needs of those going through the sweat. None of the people I’ve ever seen supervising would EVER take sixty year old tourists through a two hour sweat. It’s recklessness and negligence, pure and simple.
Tony Hillerman wrote several times about sweat lodges in his very entertaining Navajo series of novels. Sweat lodges have been used for years as a religious cleansing ritual by Native Americans with few adverse effects.
What happened here seems almost the same as drinking poison laced Kool-Aid.
Re: “Why can’t people think for themselves?”
The answer is simple: Thinking is just too hard for some people to do. They’d much prefer that someone else do their thinking for them.
Re: “Why do they think they need a spiritual guru to help them?”
Again, simple: Life doesn’t make sense to people who’ve decided that thinking about it is just too hard to do. So they cast about for someone who appeals to them emotionally, then they latch on with all their might.
Re: “And why in the fraking world would someone go into a “sweatbox” for two hours?”
Because they hear it’s a “traditional” native American practice, and we all know how spiritually superior the native Americans were! (Don’t we?) The trouble is, they really have zero clue how the native Americans actually did things … they just hear about the practice, then set up their own imagined version of it. They miss little details, such as that the native Americans’ sweat boxes were not airtight.
You’re not going to believe this, but a good friend of mine did this one time.
I’ve been friends with him for a long time, but he has recently gone off deep end with his faith. Some guy he knows does this ceremonial “sweatbox” a couple times a year. He lives on an acreage and does it in his backyard. My friend admitted he would never do it again, but actually believed it was a great spiritual experience. Needless to say, he thinks I’m still a Christian. Although I would have thought he was batshit crazy even as a Christian. I need to find new friends.
how can you take anyone serious who has the word guru in their title?
This is one case where I would assume there were more Obama supporters then Republicans. This New Age crap seeps thru affluent liberal communities, and also regularly appears on PBS with the likes of Deepak Chopra
as a liberal obama supporter, new age hippies annoy me plenty. Just not as much as bible thumpers.
When I visited the Yucatan I did a Mayan sweat lodge ceremony, but it was only about a half hour, and of course they have been doing it for centuries and told us to leave if we felt ill. It was very relaxing like any sauna would be, but I could not imagine two hours of it.
Update on the story – one of the survivors speaks out http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,568900,00.html
It certainly makes Ray sound like a criminally irresponsible bastard.
Apart from that, I was struck by one participant recounting how, at the time people were vomiting and passing out, and while she herself was nearing collapse, she had “crawled to a spot near the opening of the sweat lodge, praying for the door to stay open as long as possible between rounds so that she could breathe in fresh air.”
It’s amazing how peer pressure can disable common sense. She’d rather pray than just walk outside. Amazing.