The Fourth Door
Connecting the Dots
Face down in Alaska. Sitting up in Tennessee.
Revised
A Lakota elder gave me the honored guest seat in his sweat lodge — the hottest place there is. I'd been getting ready for it for years without knowing.
The fourth door opened, and the steam came pouring out.
Around the pit, people were down on the ground — faces to the earth, trying to find one breath of cool air near the bottom of the lodge.
And Bert Rooks, Lakota elder, looked across the cooling stones at me and said to all of them:
"Here we all are laying on the ground dying from the heat, and Kevin is sitting calmly with his legs crossed."
Bert didn't give compliments. He pointed out your failures, out loud, in front of everyone. What he said about me that day was about as close to a compliment as he ever came.
But I want to tell you the truth about that day.
It was hot for me too.
If you've never been inside an Inipi, let me take you in.
It's built like a giant willow basket turned upside down, then covered with blankets so no light gets in. You enter on your hands and knees. When seated, the roof is just inches over your head — a low dome that holds every bit of the steam down on you.
In the center is a pit. The stones are carried in, red hot, some as big as melons, as many as twenty-one of them. The door closes. The dark is complete. The singing starts. Water goes onto the stones, and the steam comes. And it is hot.
In the ceremony there are four rounds, four doors. Between them the door opens and lets a little of the world back in. Then it closes again.
A twenty-liter bucket of water. Five gallons. By the end of the fourth round, every drop of it has gone onto those stones.
I've sat in dry saunas in Japan at over one hundred degrees Celsius (212 °F). The lodge is hotter than any of those.
At the end of the Inipi, you crawl out the way you came in, on your hands and knees. Reborn, the Lakota say.
That day we were in Tennessee. Bert sat where he always sat, next to the door on the right as you come in. Across from him sat the singer, the one who knows the songs best, and leads them.
And me? Bert gave me the honored guest seat.
All the way in the back, directly across from the door. The hottest seat in the Inipi.
I know what one might be thinking. How was Kevin sitting there so calmly, when everyone else was flat on the ground?
As I said, it was hot in there. And here is, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story.
Truth is, I wasn't always the one sitting up.
In the nineties I was living in Alaska, and from there I started going to the Tracker School, with Tom Brown. Seven or eight classes, over the years.
My first sweat lodge was at Tom's. A giant Inipi, maybe a hundred of us inside. It wasn't anywhere near as hot as the lodges that came after, but I still remember it to this day. The beginning of my journey, one of many.
One of Tom's big lessons was that cold and heat and thirst and other discomforts are, mostly, figments of the mind. Not the fire itself — you still don't put your hand in the fire. It's the story the mind tells about the heat.
Tom also taught us a meditation. Breath to heart. You learn it lying down, but it's meant to be a moving meditation — a trigger you carry with you, walking, running, skiing, any situation where calm is needed. Tom taught us to take a deep breath and hold it, until we could hear our hearts beating in our ears. Then blow it out, hard, until our lungs were empty. Three times. And to use it whenever we needed to come back to center.
While living in Alaska, I was introduced to an Inipi group near my home.
The group had a lodge leader, and they would go to South Dakota to dance.
There I first learned that you don't do the Sun Dance just once. You dance four years in a row, and in between you sit in the lodge. It's the Lakota way of facing heat and thirst and physical discomfort, the things our culture is afraid of. After four years, you're not afraid of dying anymore. I lived in terror through my four years of Sun Dance, but more of that later.
I got there early in the day and helped split wood. I was told that if I wanted to sit in somebody's Inipi ceremony, I'd better come and help prepare for it. Chop firewood, help organize.
Years later, Bert would say the Inipi isn't a drive-in. You don't just show up, sweat, and run away.
I went to that lodge in Alaska at least half a dozen times. And it was hot in there. One day, seeing my discomfort, one of the other participants told me there was a little cool air right down close by the earth. So I lay flat, face to the ground, sucking whatever cool air I could get into my body.
I don't think there really is cool air down there. But it gives the mind something to grab hold of.
Did I want to get out and run? Yes. But did I? No. I wanted to be there. I knew that if I could just suck in some of that cool air, I could make it.
Heat and I were not friends yet.
Then I moved to South Dakota, met Bert, and was sitting in his Inipi ceremonies. Which brings us back to where we started: Tennessee, and the honored guest seat, opposite the door.
The heat hadn't changed. What changed wasn't my body either. It was years of practice I didn't know I was doing for this day, and for any day when discomfort comes.
By that day in Tennessee, I'd been practicing the breath to heart meditation for about eight years. The first couple of years, intensely — lying down every night and working through it. After that it gets ingrained. It's just there.
It didn't take the heat away. The heat was still there, every round.
What it took away was the story. The I can't. I have to get out. With the story gone, the heat was just heat.
I felt it was working. But it was in that back seat, at that fourth door, hearing Bert say it out loud to the whole lodge, that I knew for sure.
Aha, I thought to myself. It works.
This year has had its own heat. Life has been handing me some hard lessons. The day I found out the house had been given away, I sat there and did the breath to heart about a dozen times. And it brought me back to the calm place I found, years ago, lying on the ground, learning how.
Mitakuye Oyasin — all my relations.
— Kevin