Reports of transpersonal experiences of non-Native practitioners of the Native American sweat lodge ceremony

Participants in the Native American sweat lodge ceremony sometimes report transpersonal experiences. A literature review revealed that this significant human phenomenon has not been studied psychologically or addressed in the scholarly literature. The purpose of this research was to remedy this deficiency with three objectives: (a) to identify the types of transpersonal experiences of non-native practitioners reported during the sweat lodge ceremony, (b) to develop a taxonomy of the reported experiences, and (c) to compare this taxonomy to Grof's taxonomy of transpersonal experiences. To that end, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 30 non-native practitioners of the sweat lodge ceremony to elicit reports of their experiences.; Content analysis of the interview data revealed 32 types of transpersonal experiences which were organized into a taxonomy with 18 categories and 18 subcategories. The largest category, "encounter experiences," contains six subcategories representing different types of experiences with "animal spirits" and "spirit beings." The next largest category, "psychoid experiences," contains five subcategories representing different types of experiences that have physical correlates in the objective world, such as "physical spiritistic phenomena," "answered prayers," and "extraordinary healings." The third largest category, "visual phenomena," contains four subcategories representing different types of visual experiences, such as "seeing lights" and "seeing forms in hot rocks." The remainder of the categories represent other transpersonal experiences ranging from "visions" to "extreme joy and peace."; A comparison of the taxonomy with Grof's revealed two significant findings. First, his taxonomy does not account for all the reports of transpersonal experiences of non-native practitioners of the sweat lodge ceremony. Specifically, only 14 (forty-three percent) of the 32 types of experiences are represented in Grof's taxonomy (or phenomenological descriptions of those categories). The more common types of transpersonal experiences not represented in Grof's taxonomy include: "answered prayers," "seeing lights" and other visual phenomena, "flying/astral travel," and "sympathetic resonance with the earth." Second, Grof's taxonomy includes many types of transpersonal experiences not experienced by sweat lodge practitioners. Specifically, 32 (seventy six percent) of his 42 types were not experienced by practitioners.; The implications of this research are twofold. First, the entire range of human conscious experience has yet to be mapped. Second, different spiritual practices---such as the sweat lodge ceremony---tend to elicit certain types of transpersonal experiences and not others.