Fire Walk

As many of you know, I am a seeker.  The search has lead me to many amazing places and many precarious situations.  Much of what I've done has often been referred to as mistakes by others, typically, not by me.  I've been arrested in five countries.  I did a weird mission for the CIA.  I had a brief fling with the military.  All of these things have added color to my life and sometimes deepened my spiritual understanding.  When that happens I feel like I have profited most.
So, a year ago I was doing a sweat out in BFE, Idaho.  Afterwards I was talking to Watomi, the resident shaman.  He began to talk to me about fire walking.  He was a strong advocate for the power it had to burn away vestigial baggage that people lug around, hindering their lives and development.  Although his words sounded true and compelling, the idea of walking on 1100 degree coals freaked me the fuck out!  I couldn't even entertain the idea in a hypothetical way.  It was really terrifying to me to simply think about it.  Now, I want to put this in some context.  I'm not simply a giant coward.  I've kayaked class V rapids, I've skydived, I've skied double black diamond slopes, I've climbed 5-9 pitches...generally, I've done some pretty scary and extreme shit.  This crossed some boundary, though.  I felt physically uncomfortable just hearing about it.  When we left the sweat, it came up between Wendy and me and I tried to converse about it in a calm manner.  I gave it the same amount of credence as I would someone who wanted to talk about their run in with Bigfoot.  I might listen with curiosity, but I wasn't about to swallow the ideas whole.  Besides, weren't there ways to burn away vestigial baggage without inviting yourself to become the guest of honor at a barbecue?
Over the last year I thought about how the idea of walking on 1100 degree coals terrified me.  TERRIFIED ME!  This felt very foreign and the magnitude of my terror caused by simply imagining it told me something:  I had to do this!  If something caused my psyche to do Olympic level backflips, I better take a deeper look.  So I did.
When Jacob Nordby posted,  http://yourawakenedself.com/igniting-your-inner-fire-with-heatherash-amara/
on his Facebook page I immediately felt those foreign pangs of acute terror.  I decided to stare them down this time.  I decided to commit to doing it.
What was weird was as soon as I decided to walk on fire, and I don't mean decided to think about it or decided to maybe do it or decided to talk about it, but decided to do it, I felt calm and powerful.  I felt the future fire burning away my vestigial baggage.  I felt the hypothetical future fire cauterizing my psychological wounds.  I felt the burn of the flame cooling around me.  I felt the relationship between quantum matrix and observer crystallizing.  I felt the power of my mental projections, my stories, my mythology weakening.  I felt like I was teleported to my center and there I found calm.  I felt like I found the volume switch on life and was able to turn it down.
I felt all of these things from simply deciding.  I hadn't even told anyone yet.  I hadn't committed out loud.  Technically I could change my mind and no one would know.  But I didn't.  I immediately told people.  I felt like telling would make it even more real, even more of a solid commitment.
Now I've committed and I feel like doing so has had a profound impact.  Of course the actually walk will certainly be even more so.  However, I'm so impressed by the centering and powerful effect of simply deciding to walk.  Because of this, I wanted to share, so that if any of you out there experience a similar terror from the idea of barbecuing yourself, perhaps this is an opportunity rise like a phoenix.
Namaste bitches