Jeannette Waegemakers Schiff, PhD - Distinguished Contributor of the Month
Jeannette Waegemakers Schiff, PhD is a researcher and assistant professor of Social Work at the University of Calgary. She will be speaking at the Fourth Annual Canadian Conference on Spirituality and Social Work that takes place from May 26-28, 2005 at King's College, University of Western Ontario, London. The title of her workshop is, "The Impact of the Sweatlodge Ceremony for Mental, Emotional, Physical and Spiritual Healing".
From the conference agenda, Dr. Schiff’s workshop reads as follows:
Traditional healing as "practices designed to promote mental, physical, and spiritual well-being are based on beliefs that predate western European, 'scientific bio-medicine'. Recognition of the importance of traditional healing practices for native peoples (Royal Commission on Aboriginal People (1996)) has accelerated a reversal of the historic efforts to eradicate native traditions and created an upsurge of interest in traditional healing practices, including the sweatlodge ceremony. Increasingly sweat lodges are incorporated into healing programs that serve aboriginal people. Sweat lodge ceremonies have also been compared to group therapy processes (Colmant and Merta, 1999; Walkingstick-Garett and Osborne, 1995), although these comparisons minimize the importance of the spiritual element of sweat lodge ceremonies. Despite the fact that traditional healing practices have been valued by native peoples for as long as oral tradition has been alive, there is virtually no research on the efficacy of these methods. This presentation describes the results of a pilot study on the impact of the sweat lodge ceremony on the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual domains of individual participants. The study format includes both quantitative and qualitative components. Results indicate that there are measurable changes in spiritual, emotional and physical well-being.
When asked about her pilot study, Dr. Schiff made the following comments:
We just recently completed this pilot study on the impact of the Aboriginal sweatlodge ceremony. The data was collected from a series of 10 sweatlodge ceremonies at one site. There were 42 participants - 70% Native or Métis, from the general community. We were looking at whether we could measure a change in well-being as defined in aboriginal terms - physical, mental, emotional or spiritual. Our measures were taken immediately pre and post sweatlodge ceremonies from volunteers who naturally came for individual reasons.
Although we observed some instances of marked positive change in participants’ pain, most people were in general good health and thus the measures of physical well-being did not change significantly. However, the emotional and spiritual measures showed that participants were more alike on factors that reflect interconnectedness and feelings of belonging. This is important in that in an Aboriginal worldview, healing begins with the spiritual dimension. There also appears to be greater cohesion among participants in post sweat responses - i.e. respondents were more alike, despite the fact that many attended different ceremonies. This suggests an underlying spiritual component that transcends individual ceremonies. We plan to expand the study to a multi-site longitudinal investigation - the primary objective is to explore measurable effects of Aboriginal sweat lodge ceremonies on targeted groups of people.
