Next, they take different slips of paper and write down the things they think about themselves and put the slips in the bag. After sharing, they will tear up the negative judgments and toss them out. One girl, who is not atypical, has four papers to throw away. They say "stupid," "ugly," "fat" and "an embarrassment to my family."

The girls from the Discovering Possibilities class are just one of the groups coming through Jim Pritchard's sweat lodge. Pritchard, a Cherokee, alternates groups of boys and groups of girls, holding "talking circles" in a teepee behind a young men's halfway house in the west part of the Salt Lake Valley. The sweat lodge is nearby, a framework of bent willows smothered in blankets, with a pit in the middle to hold hot stones.

One recent evening, Pritchard held an introductory sweat and the participants — novices and regulars, adults and teens — started perspiring in the summer heat even before they got inside the lodge. As the sun sank, everyone went into the teepee to talk about their intentions. They spoke of behaviors they wished to change and prayers they wanted to offer.

The sweat lodge turns out to be a service of gratitude and contrition, not so different from a service at a church or synagogue. But it is also physically hard — and Pritchard likes to remind young people that they've come through something difficult when they have sweated.

In the lodge, you sweat more than you thought it was possible to sweat and you emerge feeling light, as if skin and muscles are stripped away and all you have left to inhabit are your pale clean bones. Some people say they feel pure after sweating. Some say they feel forgiven — and some worry that they don't deserve to be.

Pritchard says he's seen many people lay down their heaviest burdens in a sweat, drop the unproductive and angry ways they so desperately want to drop, only to pick up all the bad stuff again as soon as they leave.

Mike Marcum, the head of psychiatry at McKay-Dee Hospital in Ogden, sweats often with Pritchard. He says the experience lets you shed the filter of your ego. For young people, especially, he says, it can be a rite of passage.

Marcum says cognitive behavioral therapy tries to correct negative thinking, and can be highly effective. "But it is not necessarily as open as psychotherapy used to be," he notes. "Some folks want something more. Something that feels transforming.

"Sweat lodges tie back into an area that Carl Jung would have called 'archtypical.' They go back into our collective unconscious, into the dawn of civilization. When you are in that dark space with the drums and the songs, the prayers, the heat — you tie into something elemental, something that helps you open."