Fire walking: Rites of Passage
Sunday September 21st
Over the weekend my son, Vytas, and I travelled out to Western Massachusetts to participate in a sacred firewalking ceremony. Vytas intentionally stepped up to his own deeply held fear and then stepped into that fear by literally placing one foot in front of the other through hot coals, as his Rites of Passage. Firewalking gave him the opportunity to face his real and overwhelming fears, then to connect with the more powerful emotion of love to guide him forward. Love trumps fear and keeps us from spinning between flighty, fighting, or freezing in front of a huge 1200 degree fire with coals raked out before you.
We were guided by master firewalker guide Karina B. Heart who has been facilitating firewalks for over 12 years guiding hundreds of people in countless firewalks. She prefers to guide people across the coals through the power of love and shies away from the pumped up adrenaline approach to fire walking. She didn't attempt to hide the fact that connecting with either the emotion of adrenaline or love will help you step through your fear and walk the coals. She shared how while effective, adrenaline is quite taxing on the mind and body and takes a while to leave our systems. I appreciated her emphasis on love because after the ceremony, firewalking becomes a metaphor in your memory for working with fear. Connecting with love in the face of life’s hot issues is not only more sustainable, but brings us closer to those around us.
My son, like his friends and classmates are approaching puberty, they’ve been told and are pretty clear that things are about to change. They can see the gap between where they are in life and the college kids who come back in the summers. As he enters puberty there will be numerous events that will provoke the same kind of fear that he experienced watching that fire blaze and then the coals being racked out before him. My hope is that just like walking hot coals, he will believe in his ability to connect with the feeling of love to do many things that were once thought to be impossible.