Round two of the sweat was easier now that I knew what to expect. Before round three, the prayer leader let us leave the tent and take in some cool evening air before returning. A white man in his mid-sixties with a scraggly white beard didn’t return. I took in a few deep breaths, drank some water, and chatted deliriously with some of the men I was sweating alongside. By the time we had to go back in, I was still light-headed, but high enough on endorphins that I was almost excited to return to the sweat.

In round three, listening to the people around me pray in Navajo and English, I decided that I would need a mantra of my own to keep my mind focused. And so, for the first time since my bar mitzvah, I prayed with real focus and concentration. In fact, I did the only prayer I remembered:

Shema Yisrael Adonai eloheinu Adonai echad.

It probably sounded absurd. I didn’t care. I just kept repeating it over and over to myself, and focusing on it helped me breathe. By the time round four finally rolled around, I wasn’t worried anymore.

And then five more people packed into the tent. By the time we were halfway through the prayers, the prayer leader had splashed some more water on the seemingly endless supply of hot stones. It was hotter in there than anything I had experienced. I could no longer pray; I was focused entirely on the effort of just breathing steadily. It took everything I had, and so I forgot myself in it. That’s when I finally understood why Native Americans have prayed in sweat lodges for eons. Once your breathing and the prayers are all that is, you feel like you’ve given yourself up the universe for a short time.

When the prayers had ended, we staggered out into cool night air and shook each other’s hands. The sky was overcast, but when I looked over the edge of the plateau on which the festival took place, the desert floor seemed to be dotted with stars. They were the street lights and house lights of a town so minute and scattered we hadn’t even noticed it during the day.

It wasn’t long before the prayer leader had an announcement: there were still stones left on the fire, and the two young boys who we had sweated with wanted to lead two more rounds of prayer.

I was exhausted, my limbs were rubbery, and I was soaked with so much sweat it was as if I had just showered in it. I took a few more swallows of water and went in for round five because why the hell not? I guess I failed to recall that total forgetting of self that had characterized round four. And so, like most of the other sweaters, I opted out of round six.

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.