Wednesday - 04/28/2021 — Did I ever tell you about the time I walked on burning coals? It was a number of years ago when I took one of those weekend seminars for women, called “Dancing with Your Dark Side.” The hundred or so of us who took the course discovered connections we hadn’t been aware of before we began to come to grip with those “secrets” we all carry around with us—a heavy burden indeed, until we find that we’re not alone, we’re not the only ones, there are others who can understand what we’ve been through because they’ve been there themselves.
The culmination of the event was a fire walk. We each carried a big chunk of firewood down a grassy hillside to the middle of a field, where two assistants took our logs and stacked them in what would become a pyre. Then we all returned to the conference house while those assistants burned the logs and spread the fiery coals into a long pathway of embers that were hot enough to melt a car engine.
I’m greatly simplifying the entire process, but Edwene Gaines, the woman who led the seminar, taught us through a gradual and well-planned route, to embrace our fears and then to be willing to move through them. I was terrified, but as we walked around and around the embers and gradually peeled away to walk, one by one, along that burning pathway, we each waited for a signal from our inner self that said it was time—and it was safe—for us to do this. My sign came as I tilted my head back and saw a meteor shoot across the night sky. The trail it left was an exclamation point. “Yes! I can do this!” my heart responded. “Despite my fear, I can do this.”
If you’d like to read more, here’s an article I found from a fellow firewalker that speaks to what I went through. https://alifeaftertrauma.com/have-no-fear-i-am-a-fire-walker/
I not only walked through fire, I have the tee-shirt to celebrate it.
