Saturday Sweatlodge

Yesterday we had a sweatlodge for parents and students of Kusi Kawsay school in Pisac.  Yes, this ancient ceremonial way has journeyed South from its origins in North America and landed in South America.  Two parents from our school, Roman and Fielding, have kindly organised an open lodge to be held every Saturday morning in the garden behind their house.
I got to be the firekeeper, the one who transfers the red-hot rocks from the blazing fire into the lodge, a womb-like dome structure made of thin branches over which are placed canvas cloths to make the interior pitch dark and to keep in the prodigious heat and steam.  There is a hole in the earth in the center of the lodge around which sit the participants in a circle, in this case about twenty of us.  Hot rocks are placed in the hole to which is added ladle after ladleful of water.  The steam produced has the effect of a sauna, but a sweatlodge is much more than a simple sauna, it is a also a traditional ceremony in which the participants come together in a way that is both profoundly spiritual and undeniably physical. 
This particular lodge is based on the Blackfoot variation of the Northern United States in its physical design, and the way the ceremony is divided into four rounds, but it also manifests as a fusion of Andean culture and that of various North American tribes.  All indigenous cultures use the altered state induced by singing to affect healing entry into subtler states of being than the merely mundane and our lodge featured songs from the Blackfoot and Lakota peoples as well as healing melodies from our own Andean region.
There is also a time for verbal prayers and when my turn came I introduced the group to the Lakota phrase, used in all their traditional ceremonies; "Ho-mataqui-asin" which translates as "all my relations".
All tribal peoples who have not lost their traditional roots have the common understanding that everything is related to everything else, that fundamentally all is one.  This is also expressed in the Mayan greeting; "In-L'akesh" which means "I greet you as another one of myself".
Our modern industrial culture has largely lost this basic orientation and understanding with the unfortunate results we see and feel all around; alienation, disregard for the environment, painfully short-term thinking; the quarterly report over regard for seven generations into the future as practiced by many native peoples.
It was a pleasure to come together in this way with young and old, feel our essential human oneness underlying our everyday roles as students and teachers, parents and children and for a little while step out of time into the timeless ceremonial world.