Years ago my grandfather went to the steam baths. These were not the steam baths of today, anemic cubes of tile with a little spritz of hot vapor every now and then. No these were the old time Russian Baths. These were the real thing. The steam was so thick you could barely see through the moist fog. It was hot in there, not warm and tolerable like the wussy steam baths in the modern health clubs. In the old Russian Baths, you really sweat.
The Russian-style steam baths permeated the East Coast. They catered to the European immigrants and the stout hearted Americans who sought them out for solace and comfort. Old men would sit in there for extended period, meditating in silence or talking silently with their friends and associates. Younger men, that is any man under forty, would also enter the baths, but they would leave a lot earlier than the older gents who could just suck up that hot, wet air. Some of these old time Russian baths are still around.
Sometimes I went with my grandfather. It was an experience, as a pre-teen or young teenage kid, watching these men sit naked or wrapped in sheets. There they were hunched over, save for the ones who for extra stimulation were bathed by some old guy who seemed to live inside the steam bath. He would soap up their bodies with a real sponge, and then swirl a bouquet of hot Eucalyptus leaves in the air and then rub them over the the wet, gleaming skin. It was good for the stimulation. The toxins would ooze from your pores.
Even junkies and assorted drug addicts visited the baths to sweat all the toxic residue from their pores. The steam bath population was comprised of a democratic society. In Los Angeles, as a somewhat older me, the Pico Baths, still remain, a homage to another era. The Pico Baths has the sauna, of course, they all did, but the real attraction was the steam bath. Hot steam. The real thing. Peel the plaster off the walls. No messing around.
I remember sitting in there and shortly before he died, John Belushi was being treated to the Eucalyptus treatment. There he was, splayed out on the wooden table like a giant white whale, getting soaped for treated for all to see. He didn’t care, and in the tradition of the time, no one else did either. It was his attempt to clean out, I suppose. If nothing else, the man knew how to live before he died.
Even before I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, I knew the Indians had the sweat lodges. It was a cleansing proposition, clear the body so the mind and spirit had a better view. Sweat all that crap out of you. It made sense. I knew the story. And while I had Indian friends, I never asked to be part of a sweat lodge ceremony. I understood it was their thing and the Anglos who begged in were tolerated maybe, but still interlopers. I stuck with the health club, even though it was nothing like my grandfather’s Russian baths or the Pico Baths, in Los Angeles.
But here we are in search of spiritual enlightenment and chasing the buck. That’s the set up, it seems, for self-help gurus who utilize the sweat lodge so their paying clients can achieve some form of enlightenment. It is a way for some self-help gurus to demonstrate to their clients that they can achieve strength and confidence by mastering physical discomfort. My grandfather, on the other hand, walked across Europe to get on a boat to come here, so he could find relaxation and not adversity in the steam baths. He would have been surprised to find death waiting for him among the white tiles and hot steam.
But death came to some poor schmucks, sure enough. For close to $10 thousand apiece, for the “Spiritual Warrior Retreat, patrons had the rare privilege of seeking success by overcoming hardship, only to find out that they couldn’t quite pull it off. They died instead. One wonders why, when feeling a little woozy, they didn’t make for the door, or the lodge flap, whatever it was. Apparently, from reports listed both in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, they were dissuaded from doing so.
Now I subscribe to the age old axiom there is a sucker born every minute. In this case, no doubt there are people who benefit from the “spiritual warrior” experience. I can only imagine what lame souls they may have been before they saw the light of all creation, reaching that cathartic moment amid the communal B.O. where they realized, “hey, I can turn my life around.”
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With self-help gurus, it seems the kind of experience takes some of life’s speed bumps and proclaim that any progress their subscribers achieve are to be regarded as great spiritual triumphs. Now certainly the argument can be made that life is an endurance trial. That one can only prevail by surmounting past mistakes and overcoming adversity. It is at best questionable whether adversity can be manufactured in a sweat lodge or any other controlled circumstances where the full impact of what you may face in the harsh world is never fully realized. It is adversity light.
Adversity is organic. Failure, embarrassment, and destruction are endured when the world comes down around us. We fail at business, get divorced, suffer the loss of a loved one, lose our jobs, watch Bernard Madoff walk off with our money, or we near retirement age only to find that Wall Street has turned our investments into garbage. You don’t suffer that kind of loss in a sweat lodge. You may lose your life, but at least you are not left to scrape up the shattered pieces of what used to be your life and try to reassemble them into some workable manner.
The Indians didn’t go to the sweat lodge to overcome adversity. They had enough thrown at them before they ever got near the sweat lodge. The Indians went into the sweat lodge for the same reasons my grandfather went into the Shvitz. They went to sweat, to purify themselves in small ways, clean the toxins, think and either share some camaraderie or to be left alone. It was a way of getting out of the house, losing the wife and family for a couple of hours so you could get your thoughts together.
My grandfather didn’t go to the steam baths to garner spiritual enlightenment. Besides the sweat and relaxation, he may have gone for business tips. These old cockers would sit around talking shop, offering financial advice in everything from stock tips to evaluating real estate and other prevailing markets. There were no business channels back then. Neil Cavuto, and Jim Cramer, the dozens of others, were not around to bolster the markets with bad advice. There was the Wall Street Journal and a few other things. That was it. And these men, sitting around in steam, talking investments, this was your financial network.
If they had only known that their daily practice of meeting in the steam baths would someday be an appendage to the whole self-help guru thing, an $11 Billion industry, they would have choked on the slimy mucous hockers they used to raise up from the back of their throats and spit into their sheets. These guys had lived tough and overcome all sorts of adversity to make their way in the world.
They had endured pogroms, plagues, the Great Depression, in some cases Two World Wars, and countless business challenges. They didn’t need to hear how to overcome obstacles from some wiseacre who had no clue what real adversity was all about. They would have looked at someone lecturing them, imploring them to become the spiritual warriors they were meant to be as deranged and in need a swift kick in the ass. And they would look at those who bought into this program, who paid thousands for the privilege of sweating, as a bunch of suckers with too much money to spend.
James Arthur Ray is the gentleman who presided over the sweat lodge sessions where three of his clients died. He has proved to the world that he, too, can overcome adversity and rise to the challenge. Despite the fatal loss of three of his flock, he has taken to the road again, where more lucky souls will benefit from the secrets of his success. As for the deaths of three people and all the negative headlines…hey…no sweat.
