Walking on hot coals is not in our DNA! We were keynote teachers at a "No Mind Festival" in Sweden. The grand finale was to do a firewalk. Ed began to get mentally prepared and reminded himself each day that he would be walking over red-hot embers. As frightening as it appeared, he knew it was a way to confront his fears head on.
Deb had hurt her knee so could not participate. But Ed recalls: "I was anxious to do it but had huge moments of hesitation. It is something I have always wanted to do as I love to confront myself--I always ski the edge and have bungee jumped in Greece. Now it was time to firewalk. Confronting fear is my way of dealing with the unimaginable. Maybe it's because I was a scaredy cat as a kid, I was not the daring type."
"We had a long pre-training session, learning how to condition our minds to do something that sounds and looks impossible. Peggy Dylan, our brilliant firewalking teacher, was confident we would all be fine and she instilled that faith and confidence in us. I had no doubt and was the first person to walk the hot coals. I loved it, walking then dancing on the fire nine times."
It was awesome the amount of awareness such a challenging experience demands, as it takes us far beyond our normal limitations and into a place that the ordinary mind can barely comprehend.
As Peggy Dylan says in our book BE THE CHANGE, "People have walked on fire for thousands of years in many different ceremonies, and the purpose has always been to use the walk as a prayer, or as a way of transcending whatever is ill to create greater well-being, which is also the purpose of meditation. It is used to gather power and energy, to gather a sense of capacity that comes when we transcend our human restrictions, as we step through the barrier of fear before we take that first step onto the coals. We have no idea what is going to happen when we walk on fire. But there is also no way to know what is going to be happening in five years or even five minutes. What the firewalk teaches us, is that when we step forward in trust, faith, and courage, then there is a benevolent aspect of the universe that steps with us.
"In that place of trust, no matter how challenging the world looks or how challenging our personal lives may be, we can just feel the fear. I will take a group of four hundred and collectively we drop into that fear. We acknowledge the fear, acknowledge the sense of failure, the sense of I can't, I won't, and I've always failed in the past. And then we transcend it into hope, capacity, and a positive form of movement.
"One of the beauties of firewalking is that you cannot pretend those are not hot coals; you stand in front of the fire and it is real. Your delicate feet are real feet. You are stepping through fear and knowing in your body that what you think will happen does not have to happen. In other words, there can be exquisite positive outcomes from events that you previously thought would have a negative consequence. This is indelibly printed on the subconscious. I can do remarkable things, I can step through fear and manifest beauty, manifest joy, manifest healing, and it is in the body.
"Even though we cannot consciously comprehend what we are doing, when we step onto the fire our bodies are in a state of connection with all that is; we are touching the same place we go to in meditation, the place of stepping into the unknown."
Although in our daily lives we do not normally walk on fire, we are constantly confronting the unknown. We can either shudder in our boots or we can walk forward, fearlessly!
Are you a firewalker? How do you deal with or confront your fear? Do comment below. You can receive notice of our blogs every Tuesday by checking Become a Fan at the top.
You can order a copy of our latest book at: BE THE CHANGE, How Meditation Can Transform You and the World.
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Ed and Deb Shapiro's new book, BE THE CHANGE, How Meditation Can Transform You And The World, forewords by the Dalai Lama and Robert Thurman, with contributors Marianne Williamson, astronaut Edgar Mitchell, Jane Fonda, Michael Beckwith, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Byron Katie, Jack Kornfield, Ellen Burstyn, Dean Ornish and others.
Our next BE THE CHANGE talk and workshop: March 12th and 13th in Boulder, Colorado. Call: Gloria at 303 449 3066
Experience our 3 meditation CD's: Metta- Loving kindness and Forgiveness; Samadhi - Breath Awareness and Insight; and Yoga Nidra - Inner Conscious Relaxation, available at: www.EdandDebShapiro.com
Deb is the author of the award-winning book YOUR BODY SPEAKS YOUR MIND.