Thirty of us gathered in the upstairs room of a local hospice, subdued as we contemplated the imminent laying of our raw flesh onto fire. Steve from Peterborough arrived to give a pep talk to prepare us for what awaited us in the car park below.
We sighed empathetically when Steve told us he had failed maths O-Level three times
He was, he said, an expert fire walker, trained by the man who trained the most famous fire walker in the world – the American motivational guru Tony Robbins, an incredible-hulk of a man known for whipping people up into frenzies of self-belief and positivity. On YouTube you can see him booming, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ as he steers a terrified Oprah Winfrey along a path of red-hot coals. Fire walking, Robbins says, is all about ‘using fear before it uses you,’ a skill that, once acquired ‘will be the incremental step toward unlocking an extraordinary life.’
Steve from Peterborough told us that Robbins had thought the UK unready for fire walking; the implication being that Britons were less inclined to go ‘whoop! whoop !whoop!’ on demand, let alone embrace the flames and unleash our extraordinary lives. But Steve believed in us and set about motivating us, UK-style. We were going to ‘let everything go’ he said, as we walked purposefully across the coals – no mincing like this or running like this – just walking purposefully. ‘How are you going to walk?!!’ ‘Purposefully?’ we mumbled.
As we walked, we were to ‘think good things;’ meaningful things that were personal to us. It was at this point that my mind slipped, quite unexpectedly, from sceptical and fearful to emotional. It became clear that, as I stepped onto the coals, I would be thinking of my son when he had needed me most, as a baby.
The room was quiet. We were mostly the over-forties, a fair amount of Sallys and Peters and Johns and, demographically, I guessed that we weren’t top-notch corporate lawyers and thought-leaders, more likely teachers and care workers and middle-managers. The men weren’t ripped and the women weren’t Instagram-ready.
Steve from Peterborough, who’s a bloke in his fifties, remarked on our ‘time of life’ and suggested that we have all experienced the loss of close friends and family to cancers and other evils and we might like to think of those people now. Raising money for the hospice, after all, was the reason we were all there.
We rehearsed variations of ‘let’s go!’ – the shouts that we would each do before stepping onto the coals and belted out the motivational words that we’d say while walking. Then someone said ‘look’ and there was a collective hush as it dawned that the fire was lit and ready in the car park, just outside the window. ‘And I have such dainty feet,’ I thought, much in the manner of Anne Boleyn thinking ‘I have such a little neck.’
But we were motivated now! We sighed empathetically when Steve told us he had failed maths O-Level three times and applauded when he revealed that he’s now a whizz at economics and profits and loss. After fire walking, he said, ‘you feel like you can conquer the world’. People take on new challenges! start new lives! ‘Any questions?’ None of us asked anything that might kill the mood, for instance, ‘does it hurt?’ or ‘will I be left with charred stumps for feet?’
We hurried down the stairs and out into the darkness where a fire was golden and crackling, and the coals were glowing. Our supporters, a hundred or so of them, were gathered round. I took off my shoes and socks and, on weak legs, joined the queue. Thinking positively, I walked erratically and too fast, but definitely with purpose. The biggest shock was that the hot coals actually felt like hot coals. Afterwards my feet felt burned but in fact were unscathed. Steve took the temperature of the coals. 900 degrees. He was proud of us and I felt a surge of love for my fellow fire walkers, heroes of the hospice car park.
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