Written By: Cyndle Plaisted Rials | Photos by: Lauren Morey
Imagine: The sky above the trees is dark, endless, winking with distant stars. The cool night air kisses your skin. You stand before a stretch of hot coals, ecstatic with all you’ve spoken and received in the hours before and the desire for transformation.
Drums pound around you like a heartbeat as others dance and whoop and cheer for you, ancient sounds of community and deep humanity. You gather your strength. You muster your courage.
And then you step forward onto a path of glowing embers, hoping to reach something new on the other side.
Maybe you’ve heard of firewalking before, thinking it’s something people did “in the old days,” like a crazy initiation into an obscure religion — that’s what my dad thought when I told him I was going to do it. He’s wrong. It’s a thing.
I’ve been on a spiritual journey over the last couple years, deconstructing my evangelical Christian upbringing and finding a place that feels right between that and other practices that call to me, including tarot, a deeper connection to Mother Earth, rituals, and more. On this journey, I’ve met amazing, like-minded people.
One of those people is Mistee Boyd, an energy healer and massage therapist, and so much more. She operates a business called Whole Heart Therapies, and in that capacity she has created many spiritual healing experiences for those that feel called to them. We met in November 2021 at a belly dancing class and through my connection to her I’ve delved into some new spiritual practices. But also some slightly scary ones.
Like firewalking.
It was something I’d been intrigued by for a while, but there was always some reason not to go. The morning of her June firewalk, though, Mistee posted that there were a couple spots left, and I said, “Fuck it,” and told her I was going, before I thought too much about it and lost my nerve.
How’s it work, exactly?
Every firewalk is different, and every facilitator puts their own stamp on the basic framework from the tradition they’re taught. Mistee was trained in the Sundoor tradition in June of 2022, and through the firewalks she’s facilitated, she has honed the experience she wants to give participants.
“Music is super important to me — it’s part of bringing in that air and feminine space feeling fully supported,” she says, her water-blue eyes shining. “The elements all want to be together and balanced: Earth — the land and wood. Air — the music. Every fire throughout history in my mind had song, had dance, had storytelling. Those are the traditions of our ancestors. Every culture, every religion has some sort of chanting or music when they’re holding reverence and space.”
My firewalk was the climax of a five-hour experience, and I can only describe it to you in a way that can’t possibly contain all that the experience was. It started with a group of 11 people, all of them strangers to me, but some known to one another, along with three facilitators, including Mistee, and a didgeridoo player.
Upon arrival, we were cleansed with sage, and then joined in a circle inside, sharing a bit about ourselves and why we were there, placing our offerings on the altar. Mistee told us about the three piles of wood that would be built for the fire: First, the Serpent pile, representing everything we want to leave behind. Second, the Condor pile, where we call in all the things we want to draw into ourselves. And finally, the Puma pile, the things we want to manifest on the other side. We went around the circle, adding words to each pile one at the time, the words and phrases we added growing more and more personal the longer we went on. Typically we’d be building the fire manually, speaking each word to a piece of wood as it’s added onto the stack, but as it was raining, our fire tender built the stacks alone.
Mercifully, the rain halted just as we finished, and we went outside with our lists of words for each pile. Mistee called out in a powerful voice the strings of words for each stack of wood. For the Serpent pile, we heard words like “fear,” “guilt,” “regret,” “mother shit,” “father shit,” “anger.” For the Condor pile, her voice echoed across the field with many more words, including “grace,” “patience,” “love, love, love!” And for the Puma pile, things like, “strength,” “forgiveness,” “fulfillment,” and “joy.”
We danced around the wood to the didgeridoo and drums with swaths of brown paper that we’d add to the pile, then we set the wood piles ablaze. Our large group was split into smaller groups, to share more deeply the things holding us back, the things we wanted the fire to burn away. We collaborated on developing affirmations for each person that spoke to the things each person wanted to work on changing or believing.
With the affirmations created, we started the next piece of the ritual. When it was my turn, I sat in a chair before the fire, an arrow across my lap, feeling like an ancient priestess on a throne — ageless and timeless. The others gathered around me, each with a hand placed on me. They repeated my affirmations in different inflections, shouts and whispers, singing. I shook with energy as their words, my words, permeated my body and mind. I opened my eyes to see my own face, strange and foreign to me, reflected in the mirror Mistee held, and I repeated my affirmations.
By the time everyone had a turn in the chair, the sky had darkened, and it was time for the “arrow break.” It’s a little hard to describe, but you tuck the blunted point into the notch of your collarbone, place the fletched end in a hole in a board Mistee holds, and then thrust your body toward the board, with the idea being that the arrow bends and snaps from the sudden speed and force. Instead of puncturing you.
“Arrow breaks are part of the tradition,” Mistee says. “I’m the only one I know who offers them on their own too — it’s a powerful experience all by itself. That part of the ritual in our firewalks came from Fiji. It’s that final piece that cracks whatever … we’re humans, that’s where we communicate from. As soon as you do that, ‘Raaaaahh’” — she thrusts her chest forward, arms out, eyes closed — “your feet are ready to hit the coals. That is the passion, the kinetic energy you need to step across those coals and receive.”
I can attest — the thought of the arrow break was scarier than the thought of walking across hot coals. As I danced around the fire waiting to feel ready for the arrow break, emotion clutched at my throat, choking me up. The next time I circled toward Mistee, I was ready to break. I don’t remember what she said to me as I stood before her, but I roared in answer. The souls around me chanted “Pu-ma! Pu-ma!” and I sunk my weight into my bent knees. I tensed every muscle in my body and lunged forward. The arrow snapped. Now it was time to listen for the call of the fire.
“The fire is the teacher, the fire is the guru, the fire is the messenger — someone is just facilitating your connection to it,” Mistee explains, leaning forward and throwing her gray-blonde dreadlocks over her shoulder. “You give your honor, blessings, word, and hopefully a new way to listen. She calls to you when she’s ready for you.”
The structure of the ember-filled path participants walk is an important consideration for the safety of all, which the team put a lot of prep work into. First the ground needs to be prepared, both spiritually and physically. “You have to ask the land if it’s ready to be burned and give itself up,” Mistee says. “That land is scorched for layers and layers down. I had two places that I was supposed to host firewalks but the land told me it wasn’t ready.”
The earth under the path needs to be cleared of rocks, because rocks hold heat differently than wood. After it’s cleared, it has to be packed down, a solid surface for the coals. When it comes to the day itself, the fire tender has a specific role at the walk — they need to know the wood, its burntime, and how to build stable stacks. It all takes practice. Mistee’s husband, Tony Raitt, is currently learning the skills of a fire tender so he can work in tandem with her.
“There’s a technique [for the coals]; you pull everything to one side, wrist flick, there’s a certain way to step into the fire to move everything. I thought I burned off my eyebrows more than once,” she laughs. “You can’t have big chunks, so after the flick, you get the red in the middle of the bed and bang it down with a flat shovel. That’s where the facilitator and tender work together, and we ask the fire if it’s ready for humans to start walking.”
There’s a strange feeling in liminal experiences like this — when you connect to the spiritual world, you’re slightly outside of time. As a facilitator, Mistee knows this experience well. “In real time it’s so hard. You lose time in the ether, connecting to other people’s guides. You can be a firewalk facilitator, take an online training, know the ropes. But it’s much different to hold the space of being connected in the spiritual realm. I can only speak to the second, because that’s who I am,” Mistee says. “In that energetic space, most other guides get really quiet. It’s only the fire who speaks. It wants its own attention. When people are just walking around in a circle, no one is going to walk over the coals that day. It’s an equal energy exchange — showing up with all our shit, asking it for what we need, and feeding it our energy.”
I danced and whirled around the coals, a breathy, humming song rising in my throat, something that came from deep inside me, from somewhere old and instinctual. I was rounding the corner to the beginning of the path and my feet pulled me inside the circle, a space only the one who walks can occupy. I danced before the coals, my head bowed, hands in prayer, thumbs touching my third eye. Suddenly the night blew open and all was stillness. I stepped forward over the embers that pulsed with heat and reached the other side in a handful of steps, elation washing over me as someone embraced me.
The biggest question everyone has when my firewalk experience comes up in conversation is: “Did it hurt? Were your feet all burned?” And the answer, at least in my case, is no. Walking across the coals felt like walking across any other surface, and my feet were unscathed, a testament to the careful preparation and care of Mistee and her team. The ways my walk across the fire affected me were not visible.
“I hope people leave with a newfound sense of self, of what they’re capable of, realizing most limitations are ones we place on ourselves,” Mistee says with passionate reverence. “I feel like the fire brings people whatever they need. For some people that’s community, ceremony, connecting to traditions of the ancients, connecting to their inner selves. And for each person, what they need out of it is so unique and individual. And the fire is the teacher.
“Every time you light a candle, a match, sit fireside with friends, to have that reverence to know you are fully capable of summoning that spirit, that element; its soft warm glow or its ferocious burning of anything in its path. When you’re ready to change, shift, shine the light in the dark corners, the fire illuminates that.”
As for who should try a firewalk, well, there are many good reasons to do it. “Anyone that feels called should participate,” says Mistee. “If you see that word and wonder what it means to you … The fire calls you. There’s this inner knowing: ‘This medicine is something I should try.’ Even people who just want to say ‘I did this cool thing …’ How much you want to honor and revere the sacred part of the ceremony is up to you.”
Whole Heart Therapies
Run by Mistee Boyd
