To Find Peace Again, I Had To Get (Really) Sweaty

There is no nice way to put it: the tail end of 2023 destroyed me. On Thanksgiving of last year, I experienced a trauma that quite neatly undid what I understood to be true and real; the fabric of my life spooled out and looked very different than what I thought it had been. As a big believer in therapy (I had already been in sessions for months), my inner reflection took on a new meaning; I began to truly understand what a trigger is, and the idea of regulating my nervous system became the center of my waking hours.

I am months removed from that experience now, but I still go through hits daily as a result of it. I spent the month of December disassociating from most of my life—I don’t remember most of it. But one day in January, I began to realize that if I wanted to move forward and blossom as a new person, I had to start to work to get to that place. For me, that work began with warmth, heat, blankets, and sweat.

I’ve always been interested in the idea of cleansing our bodies of toxins and, until this year, took it much more literally than I do now—say, for example, you wake up hungover, and it seems like taking a hike in the sun might be a good way to sweat it out. The idea of cleansing my mind and heart of toxins became appealing, and I started reaching for what was sometimes the only thing that felt healing: heat.

I started slowly, spending as long as I could alone, wrapped up in blankets and doing nothing—no phone, no TV show, no book, just me and my thoughts and my blankets. Inevitably, I would doze in and out, and in those hazy stages of partial and half-consciousness, I began to have honest conversations with myself about what I wanted next. If it became too much, I could sink into my blankets, and slowly, I felt myself returning to… me. I began to joke I was in my cocoon era, with the goal of emerging as a butterfly.

From there, I started researching infrared saunas after reading that sweating under infrared lights offers emotional benefits. I still don’t know if it’s true, but I know my experiences during and after a few 30-minute sessions were revelatory. I was introduced to parts of myself I didn’t know existed. I began to realize that something extraordinary was happening when I just let myself sweat it out, and I began to trust that the world was still a good place tentatively and to trust others.

Hot yoga classes took things a step further; I allowed myself to cry openly when needed the first few weeks I went. Sometimes, this was because something inside me was cracking open. They say we store trauma in the hips, and each time I found myself in a hip-opening posture with sweat pooling at my temples, behind my ears, and rolling down my arms, I found myself opening a little bit more—physically, of course, but inside myself as well.

The idea that sweat can be healing isn’t new. Indigenous communities in North America have long held sweat lodge ceremonies to cleanse and purify the body; in a way, I feel like my experiences of intentionally sweating have cleansed and purified me inside and out. I’m not someone who has typically enjoyed getting super sweaty in general, but aligning my mind with my physical actions in pursuit of feeling cleansed has been instrumental in my healing. It’s allowed me to offer others compassion, love, and trust at a rate I don’t think would have been possible otherwise.

Sweating it out can happen in a lot of ways. If hot yoga classes aren’t in your immediate plans or aren’t a financial possibility, there’s a lot to be said for going outside on a sunny day and taking a good, long walk. We already know walking is good for mental health, and adding the extra component of walking to the point that you’ve worked up a natural lather might be the extra addition you need while recovering from your own traumatic or difficult experiences.

My exploration of heat-seeking surprised me initially, but I’ve come to understand it more over time. Much like many of us want to eat soup when we feel sick, or the quickest cure to feeling a little better is putting on a pair of comfy socks, intentionally but softly, connecting with the heat made me feel almost like I was in a womb. Instead of being alone, instead of crying endlessly and feeling like healing was impossible (and I did plenty of that, too), I was somewhere where I was protected and cared for, my needs were met, and I could be safe. It turns out that that specific feeling was exactly what I needed.