Dateline: James Arthur Ray and his Spiritual Warrior Retreat

I was watching Dateline that I DVRed Friday night October 22, 2011 where 3 people died in a sweat lodge in Sedona Arizona. I spent a lot of time in Sweat Lodges with Native American Medicine men and a lot of mostly white people during the 1980s and I also did a vision quest of no water or food for 4 days and nights during this time. I think the people died because each of them didn't feel that they had the right to exit when it became to intense. And I think the leader James Arthur Ray had a higher tolerance for heat than the ones who died. I have been in many sweat lodges and some people who lead sweat lodges make them very very hot to where if you sit up the steam will literally scald off your flesh. Though I have been in sweats like this I usually am laying down on the straw at this point as I don't like my skin scalded off. I also in these instances would usually put a towel over my face to filter the air so it didn't scald my lungs as well. Some people who are on power quests often would sit up or even try to stand up to gain their power. But these were always physically exceptional people who could survive something like this and knew it. The problem was that during this particular sweat many of the people likely had not been in a sweat lodge before. To take 50 or 60 people into a sweat lodge and make it this hot for 8 rounds isn't something almost anyone could easily survive. 4 rounds that hot is usually the most anyone can easily survive without becoming so altered that they would need to go to the hospital. Most human bodies have limits of endurance and if you go past that some people are going to die. My sadness about this is that the people who died didn't seem to understand that their lives were threatened by this experience. My only thought is that they hadn't eaten anything in 36 hours already and so were already hallucinating because of this and were incapable of adult decisions any longer. I think this is the best way to address what happened to the three that died. So with no food and very little water if any no one  could make a good decision to keep themselves alive. The fact that the people running the sweat didn't understand this is sort of beyond my present belief system. When someone is running any group it should be tailored to the weakest in any group not the strongest. Otherwise people die like they did in this sweat lodge.

The other problem I can see with all this is that Sedona, Arizona is at 4423  feet in altitude at the city manager's office and likely from 4000 to 5000 feet in the general areas of Sedona already so when you put a lot of people in an enclosed sweat lodge there will not be enough oxygen for that many people to breathe enough oxygen. So this likely was a factor too.