Dancing with the Fire
by Michael Sky
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Table of Contents
FIRST STEPS
By consciously manipulating whether a particle, such as a protein molecule in a neural membrane, is a wave or not, I expect that we will be able to change our bodies at will. I expect that with that gain in sensitivity and consciousness
new messages will be received and our evolution will be speeded up so fast that it will make our heads spin. Perhaps we will be able to heal ourselves simply by thinking positively
about ourselves. Perhaps we will be able to regenerate new limbs, increase our intelligence, and even live for 500 years or more.
If we can learn to live together as a species, we will not just survive this world, we will create it as well as other worlds beyond our present dreams. The intelligence of the body quantum is absolutely unlimited.1
Fred Alan Wolf
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said, “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”2
Lewis Carroll
I always knew that somehow, someday, I would walk on fire. I found myself thinking about firewalking from time to time,
6 • Dancing With the Fire
looking for `firewalk’ in the indexes of likely books, and trying to imagine what it must feel like to place my bare feet on a bed of glowing, red, hot embers and through whatever magic it entails, not to burn.
Living in Boston, I could only assume that my firewalking would have to wait until I traveled off to some exotic locale where such irrational activities passed for normal. Meanwhile, the same part of me that felt attracted to firewalking had also undertaken an exploration of unconventional healing practices. This eventually
led me to teaching about such things, which in turn led me to regularly telling small groups of people about firewalking and what I saw as its special lessons. I had come to view firewalking as a graphic example of how the mind and body might better interact, and as a way of inspiring the belief in and pursuit of human
potential. And, I suppose, talking about firewalking was a sensible alternative to actually doing it.
In early 1984, I was leading a weekend workshop and feeling
frustrated at the end of the first day. I thought to myself that if I could light a candle in the middle of my talk and hold my hand in the flame, unburning, this would prove my assertions and catalyze
the workshop experience. That evening a good friend called and asked if I had seen the latest issue of “New Age Journal,” for, believe it or not, someone out in California (where else?) was leading people through firewalks.
Over the next few days, I read that article a dozen times, my mind spinning around and around its implications, for this man named Tolly Burkan totally upset my theories and expectations.
Where I had always assumed that only the high adepts of advanced metaphysical practices could walk on fire, Tolly was taking groups of average Americans, unscreened and unprepared, and successfully leading them across the coals in just four hours. As far as I could glean from the article, his techniques were unbelievably
simple.
I sent away for more information. When I received his itinerary,
it included a flyer announcing his first firewalking instrucFirst
Steps • 7
tors’ training, upcoming in May. While the flyer listed as a prerequisite
that participants must already have walked on fire, I felt my calling, and applied anyway. They accepted me.
*******
Tolly Burkan and his wife Peggy Dylan wanted to teach us every aspect of successfully leading firewalks. Since their own approach had been to travel around from place to place, building fires wherever they could, our three-week training would consist primarily of ten public firewalks with a lot of traveling in between, so that we would get a taste of life on the road. Thus, although our group of ten students came together in Sacramento, we spent our initial two days journeying in a motorhome up to Seattle for our first firewalk. This two-day waiting period actually helped me, for I could see little difference between this group of people—all of whom had already walked on fire—and myself. I did not feel like their spiritual or psychological inferior, and I could thus reasonably
expect to do as well as they.
Alas, on the day of my first walk, all reason and logic abandoned
me. As the day wore on (firewalks always happen at night, which really means that they happen for an entire day) my body became uncharacteristically tense; a low level anxiety took over and gripped me. I was not hungry and I did not feel like talking. I kept thinking of the thousands of people who had already done this. I kept looking at my fellow trainees and seeing of our essential
sameness. My mind would be somewhat reassured, but my body grew tenser still.
Midday they showed us a brief news clip of Tolly walking across an amazingly hot-looking bed of coals, and my stomach lurched in protest. I felt as if I had just witnessed an accident victim sprawled bloody across the pavement. I continued to fast and I talked even less. In a notebook I wrote, “I feel like I’m in an airplane, about to parachute into enemy territory.”
8 • Dancing With the Fire
At this point, I felt twisted by a combination of fears. I worried that I would severely injure myself. Even worse, I might chicken out, a horrendous thought given the time, expense, and self-esteem I had committed to becoming an instructor. Or, worst of all, I might walk on fire, fail painfully, and limp home a crippled
and embarrassed wreck. As evening approached, I found my mind less able to issue up reassurance, and more focused on my fears. My body grew tenser still.
Finally, the workshop began. Fifty or so people gathered, mostly looking as if they had just been told they had four hours to live. Tolly had an intense, yet entertaining style. Working the crowd, he first terrified us with what could go wrong, and then exploded the tension with his wonderful sense of humor. After an hour or so, we went outside and together constructed a large pile of wood, kindling, and newspaper. Then we circled about it, holding hands, while Tolly doused it with a gallon of kerosene and set it aflame. In moments, the fire blasted us with such heat that everyone took two steps away from the scattering sparks and billowing smoke. Definitely not a summer-camp fire, nor even a homecoming bonfire. We beheld an inferno, and if it was designed
to frighten, it succeeded.
Back inside we went, and for the next two hours Tolly prepared
us for walking. I remember agreeing with most all that he said, while at the same time feeling concerned that I did not really hear anything new. Clearly, I had hoped for some powerful technique
or super meditation that would change me from “one who burns” into “one who doesn’t burn” but as time passed I felt distinctly
unchanged and increasingly vulnerable. Things gradually took on a surreal air. It felt as if we were all doing drugs together or, again, as if we were all in a plane behind enemy lines, lost in our separate thoughts, contemplating doom, barely breathing.
Finally, the time came. We returned to the fire, which had calmed somewhat into a large pile of glowing embers and smoldering
hunks of wood. We held hands, chanting softly as Tolly took a heavy metal rake and carefully spread the coals into a path
First Steps • 9
some twelve-feet long and six-feet wide. With each pass of the rake, sparks flew off in every direction and what little breath we had left became filled with smoke. The heat was still so intense that people moved away from rather than toward the fire, its red-orange glow pulsing, menacing, yet oddly inviting. My mind finally emptied and quieted; I surrendered to the singing and felt transfixed by the fire. My body trembled out of control, as if it were somehow freezing on this warm spring evening. I could feel through their hands the similar shaking of those on either side of me.
Tolly laid down the rake, stepped up to the fiery path, and, with just the briefest pause, walked quickly across the coals. I registered that he took six steps and that he seemed okay, when suddenly another person walked across, and then another. I noticed
my head shaking, side to side, as I watched feet sinking down into glowing, red, hot coals. People continued walking, one after another, and our singing steadily picked up, becoming
more excited, more vibrant. My mind went blank, while my feet, acting on their own, carried me slowly toward the top of the path. My trembling increased and I sang even louder. Suddenly, I was at the top of the path. Moments later I moved—seven quick steps—I had walked on fire!
I felt overwhelmed with joy and found myself applauding
each succeeding walker. The energy between us continued to rise, higher and higher, becoming more and more excited. It was all so beautifully stunning—the fire, the circle, the singing, the stars, the moon—and the wonderful feeling of grass beneath my happy feet. At last a strong shout of joy exploded through the group. Some people hugged, everyone laughed, and then slowly we all filtered back inside.
The funeral parlor had transformed into a circus. A tangible
wave of relief rippled through a room filled with happy chatter and excited giggles. We took some time for sharing our experiences, and miracle stories abounded. I became aware of a
10 • Dancing With the Fire
spot on my left foot that felt a little hot, just slightly painful. Some other walkers seemed distressed also, including a fellow trainee who would turn out to have several bad blisters.
Later, as I called home to assure my wife and friends that I had survived it, feet intact, I began to feel a little let down. Obviously
it had been a long, exhausting day. Somehow I had expected
more difficulty; it just seemed too easy. I mean, if anyone could do this, then. . . .
*******
My second walk came two nights later at the same location.
I collected the release forms that night as people entered the room, and felt myself tense slightly as a pretty young woman
named Kathy3 arrived, moving slowly on a pair of crutches. I would only find out later that Kathy was a social worker for handicapped rights, that she worked in her spare time on a suicide
hot-line, and that she had a bumper sticker shouting “Expect A Miracle,” but I could tell the moment I saw her that she was a determined and self-sufficient woman who was working hard to overcome the limitations in her life.
As I watched her throughout the evening, it became apparent
to me that Kathy had come to walk on fire. So I worried when, just before going out to the fire, her husband asked if people with cerebral palsy should firewalk and Tolly recommended against it. I sensed that Kathy did not take kindly to, nor listen to, people telling her what she could not do.
For myself, this second walk was much the same as the first, though slightly colored with the memory of pain. I felt the same tension throughout my body and the body of the group. The fire seemed just as hot, and the path Tolly raked out looked a tad longer. My mind was every bit as incredulous when the walking began, and I experienced the same sense of shifting to a magical, otherworldly reality. I did manage, however, to walk before most
First Steps • 11
everyone else, and thus felt double elation as I reached the other side, unburned.
At some point Kathy started moving toward the fire, walking
on her crutches really, her legs and feet stiffly dragging behind.
The electrical tension in the circle increased tenfold. Ever so slowly she moved, shuffling into and through the fire, so slowly that at times she seemed stationary, up to her ankles in glowing embers. Each step was a major victory, first carrying her into the heart of the fire, and then slowly carrying her out toward safety. Just at the end of the path she stopped, suddenly, and in the next moment she started screaming.
We carried her immediately from the fire and into the house, and later to a hospital, both feet severely burned, the skin already blistering and peeling. Somehow the firewalk continued, as one crazy person stepped forward in the midst of the terror and started the flow of walkers again. The mood afterwards was subdued, however, as we had little energy for celebration given what we had witnessed. I remember feeling torn. On the one hand, I felt finished with firewalking, and wanted never to take part in such a tragedy again. At the same time, I kept trying to believe that things do happen for good reason and that Kathy’s experience might become an important contribution to my understanding
of firewalking.
Kathy would later say that she had been doing fine, feeling neither pain nor the slightest heat, all of the way to that final step. Then she looked down, and the image of her feet buried in burning
embers overwhelmed her, causing her to think she was doing the impossible and to hear her lifelong admonishments: “You can’t. You’re unable to. You mustn’t.” At this point she began to burn. She asked that we not feel sorry for her or responsible for her actions, and she demonstrated her personal power by healing
in a fraction of the time that her doctors had predicted. She felt truly grateful for the whole experience and stressed that she had in fact walked on fire successfully for all but one step.
12 • Dancing With the Fire
A newspaper reporter present that night had timed the walkers
with a stopwatch. He said the average walker took between a second and a half to two seconds to get across the coals and that Kathy had been on them for a full seven seconds before she screamed. So she had indeed firewalked the equivalent of some fifty feet (at that time, a Guinness world record) without burning, and without even lifting her feet out of the fire. Through her extraordinary
courage, Kathy had demonstrated what I would come to see as the two primary lessons of firewalking: yes, we can walk through extreme heat without burning; and yes, the fire is hot, we can get burned, and whether we burn or not depends more on our state of mind than on how we walk.
I would experience many other “firsts” during the remainder
of my training. One night I had my first “cold” walk: I walked through the coals and not only did I not feel any heat, I actually felt cold—an incredible sensation—as if I were walking through snow. The next night I had my first real burn, a screeching pain that sent me to bed with my foot wrapped in a cold, wet towel, seriously debating the value of continued firewalking. I also parachuted
out of my first airplane, sat through my first sweat lodge (another ancient ritual), and rappelled down my first rock face, as Tolly and Peggy found different ways to lead us through the lessons of the firewalk. Most importantly to me, one night I chose to walk first—to offer the final words to the group, to prepare the coals, and then to initiate and model the experience by going first. That night went so well I felt confident that I could create firewalks on my own. I felt ready, and excited, to go home and get started.
*******
It began raining early in the morning of Memorial Day that year, and the rain kept up through most of the day. My wife Penny and I were living with two friends in a suburban neighborhood in Concord, just west of Boston. We planned to have the firewalk on
First Steps • 13
our front lawn. We called the local fire department and told them we were having a holiday cookout with an Hawaiian luau-style wood fire. I began to see the rain as a plus, as it would keep our neighbors indoors. I went to the supermarket and bought a case of charcoal lighter, if necessary to keep the fire going.
For the rest of the day we all just sat around the house, shut in by the rain, and quietly freaked out. Someone would stare into a book for ten minutes without registering a word. Or someone
would put water on to boil and then stand empty-headed before the tea cabinet trying to remember why. We paced a lot, moving from one room to another with no discernable purpose. We managed some courageous gallows humor, which sometimes worked a giggling release and other times only served to deepen the gloom.
Our good friend Jonathon just happened to show up that afternoon, in town for the holiday. Jonathon is an engineer and the most logical, rational, linear, left-brain I have ever known. When I told him our plans for the evening, he at first became excited, for he only heard the part about my demonstrating the walk. As I slowly made it clear to him that everyone might walk on fire, his eyes bugged out and he started looking for the exit. I asked if he would like to serve as firetender, staying outside and keeping the fire going for us while we were inside preparing to walk. He gladly said yes, happy that he could take part and witness
the walk without feeling compelled to do something so utterly
outrageous.
Evening finally arrived, as did my friends. Once again I found myself sitting in a roomful of people waiting to have root canals without anesthesia. However, this time there was no one present (myself included) who really knew that it would all work out. Fear feeds on fear. If you look to your old friend for reassurance
and instead see fear in his eyes, you will tend to feel frightened,
which he will spot in your eyes, further frightening him, which further frightens you, which further frightens him . . . and so it went.
14 • Dancing With the Fire
By this time I had come to understand two basic facts about people that almost always hold true at the start of a firewalk. First, we feel disinclined to intentionally move in the direction of pain, unless we have clear social approval, as, for instance, in the case of athletes or dancers. While we might understand and even applaud
the marathon runner’s contorted features and occasional shin splints, we consider it quite stupid to intentionally step on a fire and then suffer injury. Second, we have a deep, cellular, instinctive
relationship to fire and its burning nature: virtually every life-form on this planet knows better than to move in the direction
of fire, so again, anyone foolish enough to even consider such a practice probably deserves any resulting pain.
Yet my friends and I had our reasons, strong enough to carry
us forward in the presence of our doubts and fears, for there we were. Despite a clumsy and halting presentation on my part, the evening progressed and our moment with the fire approached. I told them to take a little break while I went outside to see how the fire had managed in the rain. I found Jonathon keeping his lonely vigil, umbrella overhead, and I took a rake and poked clinically through the fire, attempting to determine whether we had enough coals to do the walk. I felt suddenly blasted with the heat (the fire had done quite well in the rain), with the fire’s electric, glowing, orange burst of energy, and my stomach seized up with the undeniable
danger of our enterprise. I took a deep breath, put on a happy face, and went slowly back inside, attempting to emanate all-knowing reassurance. My friends later said that I was white with terror.
We proceeded out to the fire. The rain had lightened to a soft and cooling presence, and a wonderful blessing and balance for our undertaking. We formed a circle, holding hands, except for Jonathon, who stood dry and sensible beneath his umbrella. The singing began. I took the rake and began spreading the coals: all this earth is sacred, every step we take, all this life is sacred, every step we take. As the fiery carpet first spread out before them, I heard a tangible group gasp. Nothing I had said could
First Steps • 15
have prepared them for the intensity of the heat, for the explosion of sparks and smoke, for the solid red-orange sheet of pulsing embers. Minds boggled, bodies trembled, and our singing grew louder, viscerally driven.
I stood before the coals, thinking: “Either it works, or it doesn’t, here goes….” I walked across, no problem! I was then stunned to see one friend following immediately after, and then another, and another. Whereas the walks during my training had all progressed slowly, half of our group had walked in the first thirty seconds. Whether they had an extreme desire to walk on fire, or an extreme desire to be finished with walking on fire, they were all smiling, and in the space of a minute we had shifted from unthinking terror to exhilarating joy.
I looked over to Penny, who had not yet walked and who was visibly shaking. I had had a dream just before returning home in which Penny had stepped forward and burst into flames. I was hoping that wouldn’t happen. For her part, she had always steadfastly
maintained that firewalking was not her sort of thing at all, and that if her husband hadn’t had the temerity to land one in her own front yard she might have forever remained among the blissfully uninitiated. But there it was, and walk she did, smiling brightly all the way into my waiting arms.
We had by then reached the magical shift that most firewalks
achieve: the fire had become friendly and inviting, the singing
inspired, and the group intensely bonded, with a strong sense that anything was possible. As if to affirm it all and top it with a final encore, Jonathon stepped up to the fire, umbrella still raised overhead, and strolled across the coals with wonderful aplomb, the perfect ending to an unforgettable dance. We were well on our way to an adventure that, years later, continues to provide a wealth of such moments.
FIRST STEPS
By consciously manipulating whether a particle, such as a protein molecule in a neural membrane, is a wave or not, I expect that we will be able to change our bodies at will. I expect that with that gain in sensitivity and consciousness new messages will be received and our evolution will be speeded up so fast that it will make our heads spin. Perhaps we will be able to heal ourselves simply by thinking positively about ourselves. Perhaps we will be able to regenerate new limbs, increase our intelligence, and even live for 500 years or more. If we can learn to live together as a species, we will not just survive this world, we will create it as well as other worlds beyond our present dreams. The intelligence of the body quantum is absolutely unlimited.1
Fred Alan Wolf
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said, “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”2
Lewis Carroll
I always knew that somehow, someday, I would walk on fire. I found myself thinking about firewalking from time to time, looking for `firewalk’ in the indexes of likely books, and trying to imagine what it must feel like to place my bare feet on a bed of glowing, red, hot embers and through whatever magic it entails, not to burn.
Living in Boston, I could only assume that my firewalking would have to wait until I traveled off to some exotic locale where such irrational activities passed for normal. Meanwhile, the same part of me that felt attracted to firewalking had also undertaken an exploration of unconventional healing practices. This eventually led me to teaching about such things, which in turn led me to regularly telling small groups of people about firewalking and what I saw as its special lessons. I had come to view firewalking as a graphic example of how the mind and body might better interact, and as a way of inspiring the belief in and pursuit of human potential. And, I suppose, talking about firewalking was a sensible alternative to actually doing it.
In early 1984, I was leading a weekend workshop and feeling frustrated at the end of the first day. I thought to myself that if I could light a candle in the middle of my talk and hold my hand in the flame, unburning, this would prove my assertions and catalyze the workshop experience. That evening a good friend called and asked if I had seen the latest issue of “New Age Journal,” for, believe it or not, someone out in California (where else?) was leading people through firewalk.
Over the next few days, I read that article a dozen times, my mind spinning around and around its implications, for this man named Tolly Burkan totally upset my theories and expectations. Where I had always assumed that only the high adepts of advanced metaphysical practices could walk on fire, Tolly was taking groups of average Americans, unscreened and unprepared, and successfully leading them across the coals in just four hours. As far as I could glean from the article, his techniques were unbelievably simple.
I sent away for more information. When I received his itinerary, it included a flyer announcing his first firewalking instructors’ training, upcoming in May. While the flyer listed as a prerequisite that participants must already have walked on fire, I felt my calling, and applied anyway. They accepted me.