The Center for the New Age
The Center for the New Age and our psychic readers welcome you to Sedona, Arizona. Sedona is home for many psychic readers. The beauty and metaphysical energies here inspire our love, art and work of psychic reading, aura reading and metaphysical studies. We and our psychic readers enjoy sharing Sedona with you through conversation, psychic readings and holistic bodywork.
We invite you to visit the Center for the New Age, across from Tlaquepaque, to experience our Sedona Arizona way of living and learning. Come to the Center for the New Age to get your psychic reading by the finest psychic readers.
Our psychic readers are available for a number of different types of psychic readings. A psychic reader can be a spiritual healer using his psychic reading abilities as an intuitive healer. Some psychic readers are psychic reading channelers. Other psychic readers are adept at past life regression, a very interesting psychic reading exerience.
A psychic reading can help you discover your psychic abilities. Find your life's path even guide you to clear energy blockages.
Sweat Lodges, the Real Thing
Sweat Lodges are not meant to harm people; rather, to heal them!
In light of the recent, tragic events in Sedona surrounding the calamity at the ersatz sweat lodge that brought death to three individuals, we thought our October newsletter should provide information concerning the authentic Native American sweat lodge experience.
The Sweat Lodge Ceremony, now central to most Native American cultures and spiritual life, is an adaptation of the sweat bath common to many ethnic cultures found in North and South America, Asia, Eastern and Western Europe and Africa. The influence of European culture with its corrupting effect on native society, encouraged the Sweat Lodge Ceremony as a way for indigenous peoples to re-purify themselves and find their way back to traditional ways of living. By participating in this ceremony, they could repair the damage done to their spirits, their minds and their bodies. Sweat lodge essentially translates into returning to the womb and the innocence of childhood. The lodge is dark, moist, hot and safe. The darkness relates to human ignorance before the spiritual world and so much of the physical world. This is a place of divine refuge and mental and physical healing; a place to get answers and guidance by asking spiritual entities, totem helpers, the Creator and Mother Earth for the needed wisdom and power.
A traditional sweat lodge is a hut of slender withes - branches or twigs of aspen or willow, or other supple saplings, lashed together with raw hide, or grass or root cordage, although in some areas the lodge is constructed of whatever material are at hand, from a mud roofed pit house to a cedar bark and plank lodge. The ends of the withes are set into the ground in a circle, approximately 10 feel in diameter, but there is no set size for a sweat lodge. That is determined by the location, materials available and the builder. The withes are bent over and lashed to form a low dome framework approximately 4 – 5 feet high at the center. The pit in the center is about 2 feel in diameter and a foot deep. The floor of the lodge may be clean swept dirt, or natural grassy turf, or may be covered with a mat of sweet grass, soft cedar boughs, or sage leaves for comfort and cleanliness, all of which are kept away from the central pit. Lodges in former times were covered with the hides of buffalo, bear or moose. Today, the animal skins have been replaced for the most part with blankets, old carpet, canvas and tarps to retain the heat and the steam.
In many traditions, the entrance to the sweat lodge faces to the East and the sacred fire pit that is outside the structure. This has very significant spiritual value. Each new day for all begins in the East with the rising of Father Sun, the source of life and power, the dawn of wisdom, while the fire heating the rocks is the undying light of the world, the eternity. It is a new spiritual beginning day that is sought in the sweat ceremony.
Common to all traditions and the sweat, is the ideal of spiritual cleanliness. Many sweats start with the participants fasting for an entire day of contemplation in preparation for the sweat while avoiding caffeine, alcohol and other unhealthy substances. Prior to entering the sweat, the participants usually smudge with sage, sweet grass or cedar smoke as a means toward ritual cleanliness. And then participants crawl into the lodge in a sun-wise (clockwise) direction, bowing in humility to Great Spirit and in close contact with Earth Mother, taking a place in the circle, sitting cross-legged upright against the wall of the lodge. There are no rows; no hindrance between the participants and the fire pit and the entrance.
When all are inside, the sweat leader calls upon the doorkeeper to drop the flap covering the lodge opening. The lodge becomes dark, and at this point the lodge leader announces that all are free to leave the lodge at any time if they cannot endure. A short contemplative silence ensues after which the flap is raised, and the leader calls upon the fire tender to bring in the heated stones from the (external) sacred fire.
The Stone People spirits are awakened in the stones by heating them in the sacred fire until red hot. They are swept clean with a pine or cedar bough to remove smoking embers that would cause irritating discomfort in the lodge. One at a time they are placed in the shallow pit inside the sweat lodge. After four to seven stones are in the pit, depending on the tradition, the entrance is closed and sealed by the Sweat Lodge Keeper who generally is also the fire tender.
Aglow with the luminance of the red hot stones, the ceremony begins in the Lodge. The sweat leader sounds the Water Drum and calls forth the spirit guides in prayer from the Four Directions. The sweat leader dips water and pours it onto the hot stones in the pit, producing large amounts of steam, usually one dipper for each of the four directions or until he is told by the spirits to stop. He then begins his prayers, songs and chants.
As the steam and temperature rises, so do the senses. Messages and vision from the Spirit World are received through the group consciousness of the participants. One at a time, as a talking stick is passed, all the people inside get an opportunity to speak, to pray and to ask for guidance and forgiveness from the Creator and the people they have hurt. As they go around the circle, they tell who they are and where they are from or their clan, so the Creator, the Spirit People and all there can acknowledge them.
A sweat is typically four sessions, called rounds or endurances, each lasting about 30 to 45 minutes after which the leader announces the opening of the door and participants may emerge, if desired, to cool off and remove the sweat from their body.
Traditionally, it was only the men who would sweat. As time has passed and the lodge has evolved, other levels have been embraced. These days, women sweat also. Sessions can either be a mixed sweat or men and women separately, with strict protocols regarding modesty and dress inherent in the ceremony. This is a sacred place to pray, meditate, learn and heal and that must be the focus…. a way to not only cleanse, but to release anger, guilt and shame in a safe way, and to bring people together as ONE.
We have 15 readers and healers at the Center for the New Age. We have no Sweat Lodge facility, but we do have psychics who provide life guidance and/or healings, and Vortex Tour leaders who can provide you with an experience in the Red Rocks you will not forget.
Please call our Concierge at 928-282-2085 for more information or to book any of our many offerings.