Firewalking Instructor Training Pinecrest, California - September 25 through October 2, 1993 © 1993, by Ilmar Island Saar Get a closer look, 69K

On the first night, Tolly Burkan, founder of the Firewalking Institute for Research and Education, became angry and upset with his staff at a group meeting following the first firewalk. It seems they built the fire over sand and that was something you never were suppose to do. Supposedly the sand shifts as people walk over it and there is possibility of someone tripping or coals burning the top of people's feet. He went on about this for 20 minutes or more. He said that if it wasn't for the TV crew, he would have canceled the event. The interesting thing is that no one complained of burns before his criticism. Afterwards, 70% of the participants (including myself) started to complain that their feet started burning as he was talking and eventually developed blisters. Up until that time, I don't think anybody knew any better. We thought we did pretty good. I developed a big one on my left big toe.

I found this to be very interesting. Is this an example of autosuggestion?

On Monday morning, day three, we did a breathing process called rebirthing. This is similar to Lamaze, which is a breathing exercise for pregnant women, except you do the breathing exercise for about an hour and a half. I consists of rapid inhalation, followed with a normal exhalation.

The object of this exercise is to experience temporary ego death, and oneness with god, a condition you were very familiar with, before birth.

In this process you can experience not being your ego. That will permit you to see it and subsequently confront it. To see how it stops you from succeeding. How it rips you off. At that point your ego dies, and you don't know who you are. You still have an ego, as one might have a car, but you are not your car. It is there to serve you.

That is not to say that you don't know who you are, but that you no longer have a preconceived notion of what it means to be you. From that place, anything is possible.

I had done rebirthing before. About 10 years earlier, and this time I experienced very different results. I started to experience ecstasy after about an hour and then suddenly, boom, nothing. What happened? All the tetni (uncomfortableness caused by involuntary curling of the hands and feet) and labored breathing were gone all at once, as well as the ecstatic feeling that started to develop. Breathing at that rapid pace became easy, and my consciousness was normal. How strange?

Day four started with Tolly telling us "Today is a good day to die" (symbolically that is).

We were instructed not to eat anything until diner, except to drink four cups of salt water as a purge. The purpose of which was to clean out your system. We were also encouraged to drink as much water or diluted fruit juice as humanly possible.

I had chronic diarrhea all morning.

That afternoon was the time for the Indian sweat lodge. This is like a sauna in a dome tent made of sticks and blankets with pit in the middle of the ground floor. The tent is designed to be a tight fit for fourteen people. You sit in a circle on the inside of the tent shoulder to shoulder, skin to skin, and completely naked. This is to symbolize being in the womb of the earth.

Rolf, the leader of the sweat, lives in Sweden and came specifically to the seminar to lead the sweat. He studied under a famous American Indian medicine man.

The sweat first started with a prayer. Then the staff brought in six glowing red hot rocks and put them in the pit and closed the door to seal off any outside light. Heather (another staff member from Massachusetts) then placed sage and sweet grass on the rocks and Rolf said prayers in an Indian dialect.

It really did seem like we were in the womb of the earth with those glowing rocks in the center.

We then started to pass the prayer rattle and each of us said a prayer as it came around. We did this five times. It got very, very, hot! I felt like I was going to die. Some people started to hallucinate. I couldn't wait to get out.

Afterwards, I crawled to the ice cold river that flowed close by and laid in it for about a half hour.

Visually, everything was spinning, but I did not feel dizzy. I felt really at peace, and not in the least bit cold. I felt more at peace and at one with God, than I did with the rebirth. Especially since I was in the river. Looking up into the spinning pines, sky, and the wonderment of nature.

People kept offering me water or Gatorade (an electrolyte replenishment fluid), but to their amazement I was not thirsty. I was only in awe of the peacefulness and of the dazzling display before my eyes.

In retrospect, I'm glad to have tried it, though I may not have said that while in the tent. The object of this exercise was to have died and be reborn anew.

That night, we did a firedance. By this time my blister that I received the first night popped after the Indian sweat. I really wanted walk, and I was concerned about my toe. So, I put a bandage around it and did it anyway. It was a blast!!!

The goal was to cross the fire 108 times. By the tenth time, everybody started dancing as they crossed the four meters of red hot coals barefoot. We crossed choo choo style (holding the person in front of you at the waist), crack the whip (holding hands in a long chain while running), and just general frolic. I started looking for the hottest flaming coals and then tried to stomp them out.

It was a magic, an ecstatic communion of souls. Not only with the other participants, but also with that of the fire's. A transcendence of common reality, into the super-natural.

No one burned that night, not one. And to my surprise, my Bandages were not harmed either, only they got very dirty. That kills my theory of your mind telling your living cells not to accelerate to a higher energy level, and thus not burning. Because the bandages were not living tissue.

Now I came up with a protective field theory. I postulate that your mind commands a protective force field around your body to protect it, and that field extends far enough to protect hair, clothes, bandages, etc. This phenomena is also documented in many books, including the *Bible.

To me, this day and especially the firedance was the high point of the seminar.

The following day was pretty mild by comparison and that evening was the night for the anastenarides firedance. A Greek Roman Catholic ritual performed every May in Langadas, Greece, in honor of Saints Constantine and Helen. In it's true form, it's not a dance for fun, it's a dance expressing their faith in the saints and in God.

Physically, it looks like a circle of fire 2½ meters in diameter. People start dancing around the fire and then jump in or dash across at it will. One has to be careful not to bump into another participants while in the fire. You continue to do this until you extinguish the last coal, as the anastenarides believed that by reducing the firewood to ashes, all evil will be placed under control and that the successful firewalking will usher in a year with less illness, death, failure of the crops and other problems.

We were instructed on the first day, not to walk at least one night, and to see how that feels. This was the night I decided not to. I decided this before I even knew what was going to happen. I stayed true to my word (to myself) as I watched the others dance, but it was difficult. Everybody looked like they were having such a good time. I felt like someone had placed a dessert in front of me that I loved, but I was on a diet, and would not permit myself to eat it. I must admit, there were times when temptation almost did me in.

Lucky for me, we did it again the next night. As we were suppose to produce and present our own four hour firewalk seminar that evening and with only 45 minutes to prepare it, over dinner. The fire team committee choose to build the anastenarides firedance fire pit, again.

Tolly broke us up into various committees (i.e. introduction, fire team, ceremony, main lecture, etc.). I was on the main lecture committee. In all there were nine people on my team. We had the largest team and the largest amount of time to cover (2 hours).

With nine leaders in the group, we fought for the better part of a half hour on how to do it. One member defected and went to join the fire team. I felt I was the least experienced of all of them since all of the remaining seven were teachers, healers, and seminar leaders. I forcibly suggested that with only 17 minutes left, we better subdivide into three subcommittees; opening, middle, and end. Being the least experienced I placed myself in the opening committee with Phil, a hypno-therapist and lecturer from Santa Cruz, California. I also elected myself as master of ceremony for the entire two hour segment, as I didn't know how else to contribute.

It went surprisingly well, and with only 17 minutes of preparation. Everybody was able to contribute by speaking at some point, and mostly people drew on there life experience as seminar leaders and teachers, and applied it to personal development and firewalking. I was also able to do the closing part which got people rallied up into state to do the walk itself. I called it my "num" raiser.

(!Kung bushmen of the Kalahari in South Africa believe they can walk over the fire, without burning, because they have raised there n/um (energy) higher than the fires. Further, they experience an enhanced consciousness called "!kia" which permits them to heal their infirmed).

This was one of the first times I was able to talk in front of a group, and was able to overcome my gut wrenching fear.

When I was about 23 years old I attended a rally that was given by a motivational speaker named Zig Ziglar. I immediately fell in love with the idea of public speaking and helping people. The only problem was that public speaking was also my greatest fear. Try as I might, even after going to Toast Masters and attending the Dale Carnegie Course for public speaking, I never got over the fear. I basically went into my head, and almost pretended that the audience was not there, and stumbled through my speech.

This time was different. I was still nervous, but I was able to channel my nervousness into excitement. I felt generally comfortable with the audience, felt like I was in control, and was able to ad-lib the whole thing without freezing up (as I did with the videotaped talk show interview exercise earlier). A definite first!

The next day we repelled 70 meters into a cave with ropes. This was easy for me, I had lots of fun trying to do tricks I had seen people do in the movies as I descended into the chasm. Many others (the true heroes) did not have the same experience, as they grappled with there fears, terrified of the prospects of trusting the equipment, the staff, and mostly themselves. Finding that nothing terrible happened to them, and to experience themselves as being much more capable than they had given themselves credit for. They might have even enjoyed it!

Upon returning from the cave, we had lunch and afterwards did various physical feats. We'd karate boards and bricks in half, bent a 3/8" (7mm) x 2 meter steel rebar (pole) by placing one end on the tender part of your throat, and the other end on someone else's, then walk towards each other until the rebar collapses into a "U" and you hug your partner, and finally taking a very large needle and allowing it to pass through your hand by realigning your atoms and doing so without pain, blood, and eventually without a hole (the perfect hole it left closed up, with barely a trace, after about two hours).

The final evening was the night of the forty five foot (15 meter) firewalk. I was the third person to attempt it, and as I walked across, the "num" of the fires was beginning to exceed mine, so I jumped off. It had melted the Band-Aids off my feet, so after a while I excused myself and returned to my room to wash my feet and apply new Band-Aids. But, by the time I returned they had finished and were making videotaped interviews of the few who attempted the walk and successfully made it all the way across. Not to be out done by the fire, I quickly walked across it as everybody was returning to the seminar room after we were dismissed. This time it felt like walking on ice cubes, not fire, and the Band-Aids held intact.

Throughout the whole seminar we did many right brained intuitive and " getting in touch with your feelings" processes. If I described these to you, this letter would be twice as long and I probably couldn't describe what happened well. It's one of those "you just had to be there" type of things.

By the end of the seminar, many of us have grown very close, and have made friends that we will probably know for a long time. I was especially impressed with the quality of the participants. Most were noted therapists, psychics, and business leaders. People who I made close friends with included a person named Chris form Milwaukee. He owns a public relations firm. This man expressed so much love in his eyes and was so slick, one would have sworn he was the black incarnation of Christ. He also had already scheduled, and has enrollments, for his first firewalk seminar to take place just four days after this seminar.

Jim and Susan are a couple who plan to have a sea kayak and aboriginal firewalking business in Australia. Of the group, I made closest friends with these two.

Tina is a psychiatrist from Sweden and wants to do seminars with her boy friend.

Paula, Barbara, and Carol are all from Marin, California and are all psychics and healers, and are all friends. I joking and lovingly called them the witches of east bay, as in the movie (though Marin is really north bay). Carol has her own phone in radio talk show in San Francisco. On Tuesday afternoon she excused herself from the group and did her show "live" from the phone at the lodge's office.

Ojela is a new age author and publisher from New York.

Dave is quite a character and an entrepreneur in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Theresa and Brandt are therapists from Santa Fe, New Mexico.

There were many others, 35 in all, and these were the people I felt closest to. I was proud to be one of them.

Mostly the seminar was about leadership training and in particular, how to conduct seminars. Only about 10% had anything to do with firewalking. Bottom line, what I learned about firewalking is that if you realize the danger, respect the fire for what it is, are willing to assume the worst, expect the best (intention), and have enough faith to take the first step: YOU CAN DO IT!

So why would anybody want to walk on fire anyway?   Click here for related story.

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