Into the midst of this massive leap, Gaia has offered an ancient ritual — that old evolutionary mutant, the firewalk — a potent ingredient in this co-creational soup and an apt metaphor for the challenges before us. These days fiery paths seem to loom on all sides, challenging situations, threatening dire consequences....
We each have our health firewalks, our relationship firewalks, our job firewalks, our financial firewalks — each area bringing its own set of difficulties and worries, its challenges and threats, its fires to master. As a planet we stand before some awesome firewalks: a few dozen festering wars, the twin demons of cancer and AIDS, economic disarray, growing ecological emergencies, and almost fifty years of living with the fact that simple human stupidity could unleash a fire mighty enough to burn this entire planet to a cinder.
We might like to take a few steps in the opposite direction, hoping that if we avoid these fires for long enough they will just go out. Yet a voice keeps whispering within that it will not happen that way, that now we must find the courage to step into the fires, creating resolution through our actions. Somehow a solution resides in the heart of each fire. Ultimately, all of our paths lead, with Virgil's, into the center of the heat.
There is another story of a Chinese sage who was asked, "How shall we escape the heat?"—meaning, of course, the heat of suffering. He answered, "Go right into the middle of the fire." "But how, then, shall we escape the scorching flame?" "No further pain will trouble you!"....The same idea comes in [The Divine Comedy], where Dante and Virgil find that the way out of Hell lies at its very center. —Alan Watts
The firewalk offers an effective and compelling model for resolving challenges, both personal and planetary: squarely and honestly face the fire; affirm your connection to the Earth, to her elements, to your fellow travelers; join in the rituals of wholeness; say yes to your fears and let their energies boil into excitement; listen to your own inner guidance, open to a clear intention and, when your moment arrives, step forward. Even better, let go into spontaneous and ecstatic dancing.
All of manifest creation is energy in various vibrational patterns. All energy in the universe comes into form and changes form (transforms) through patterns, through systems.... Sacred ceremonial is humanity's most highly developed meta-system for the conscious transformation of energy. —Elizabeth Cogburn
Maybe you will get badly burned. Maybe you will create a miracle. Surely you will discover something new about yourself and just as surely your discovery will support the evolving consciousness of our world.
Unless otherwise noted, all text is from the book, Dancing With the Fire (Bear & Co, 1989), by Michael Sky.