I don’t deal well with enclosed spaces–particularly enclosed spaces where I’m surrounded by strangers. And as a native New Englander, whose ancestors are the Jews of frozen rural Ukraine, I’m not built for heat. So when I found myself crammed into a tiny, unventilated, pitch-black room with a pile of glowing hot stones and eight other sweaty men, it pretty much provoked a response of automatic panic .

The chanting and drumming started inside the tent also didn’t do much for my aversion to loud noises. All of my thoughts were focused on just waiting the experience out. Then the prayer leader used his sagebrush to splash some water on the stones, and the tent got unbearably hot and humid. All of a sudden, I was grateful for the dark—it meant that the others in the tent couldn’t see me crouching with my face in the dirt and a towel over my head, gasping for breath.

As if out of spite, the prayer leader splashed with his sagebrush again. And again. The temperature must have been pushing 150, and I felt like I was drowning in bubbling hot molasses.

When it was over and the tent flap opened, I slumped against the opening and gasped fresh, open air. Pretty much everyone else looked better off, and I couldn’t decide whether it was my poor lung capacity or my various other anxieties. The prayer leader asked how all of us newbies were doing and all I could manage was a giggle and the thumbs up.

One round down. There were three more to go, and I was seriously doubting my stamina.

Fortunately, there was a break between each round. For this break, the prayer leader asked us to go around and say our reasons for entering the sweat lodge. I said it was partly out of curiosity and partly because I wanted to see if I could find a moment’s peace. Most of the experienced sweaters said that they wanted to pray in support of those who were dancing and fasting. As we worked our way around the circle, I was already trying to calculate when I could bail out of the lodge with minimal loss of dignity. And then everyone turned to the two youngest people in the sweat lodge; two boys, one of whom was fourteen or so, and the other of whom couldn’t have been older than ten.

The older one explained that his father and his uncle both had serious drinking problems, and had been away from Piñon on a several-day bender. His uncle had just returned, 15 minutes before the boy entered the sweat lodge. As he began to cry, he said he was praying that his father would return safely as well.

It took this kid crying for me to stop thinking of the sweat lodge as just a new experience, an experiment for me to play on myself. It meant something to him that people were there to support him. And as the older men in the sweat lodge consoled him and said they would pray for his father, something in me broke. I couldn’t walk out on this kid, even with my weak lungs and phobias.

It became clear that I was going to be in that sweat lodge for four whole rounds, or until I blacked out.