Into the fire

by Amy Pate

Photo by Phonethip M. Liu Freshman Jack Beuttell walks slowly across glowing hot coals during a firewalk held on campus in conjunction with the honors seminar "The Copernican Revolution: 1543 to the Present." More than 30 students, faculty and guests participated in the firewalking seminar.

The students and professors stood, barefoot, around a bed of glowing coals, waiting in the cold drizzle for the first person to take the plunge through the fire. Two students played drums, providing a rhythm others clapped or chanted to.

Sophomore Kristin Milam made her way to the head of the fire. Looking past the 12-foot-long bed of coals, she calmly and purposefully walked across them, head erect and face glowing.

Others followed her, occasionally emerging with embers stuck to the sides or bottoms of their feet. They walked through the fire. Then they danced, somersaulted and strolled through it, defying the old adage about playing with fire and getting burned.

And that was exactly the point of the whole exercise -- to move beyond preconceptions and fears to achieve the seemingly impossible.

"I think this whole thing was amazing. It really changes your perspective," said sophomore Jeff Allen, who wrote the paper that spurred the event. "I wasn't even concentrating on the fire. I was concentrating on the energy around me. When it was over, I was disappointed."

"An additional motivation for the exercise is for each of us, individually, to feel the powerful emotions that can lead us to want to substitute non-scientific explanations for scientific ones," explained David Weintraub, associate professor of astronomy. "From physics we know why firewalking is possible. But even my professional colleagues thought it was a crazy idea."

The students in the honors seminar "The Copernican Revolution: 1543 to the Present" probably didn't envision walking barefoot across glowing coals when they signed up for the class. Neither did Weintraub, who teaches the course which focuses on the different explanations of phenomena from scientific and religious perspectives. However, a term paper on firewalking by Allen caught the imagination of the group and inspired sophomore Sam Chase to research the topic on the Web.

The result "was a grassroots effort to persuade me that our class should bring a firewalking teacher to Vanderbilt to teach us about and how to 'firewalk,'" Weintraub wrote in a letter to parents of students in the class.

After Weintraub found funding from a Templeton Foundation grant for the development of the course and received permission from University officials, the Metro Fire Marshall and Davidson County, the walk was on.

Before firewalking, the students participated in a four-hour seminar led by Ariel Frager and Danny Pharr, firewalking instructors with Wings of Fire, a Portland, Ore.-based organization. During that time, they watched a video clip from Stars Wars, participated in small-group discussions on fears and overcoming them, and broke arrows.

The arrow-breaking activity served as a prelude to the firewalk, as an exercise in overcoming fear by doing something instinct says is irrational, even when the mind understands it. Each student placed the point of the arrow at the base of the throat, and the butt was placed against a book held by Pharr. With breath held, each student would then move forward, breaking the arrow.

Before heading outside to the fire, Frager stressed the volu ntary nature of the walk. "You know if it's safe or not. You know if it's safe for you to do or not. If any part of you says 'no,' it's a 'no.' You need to make sure," Frager said.

Pharr gave some last-minute advice, "Don't focus on every footstep. Focus on where you're going."

More than 30 students, faculty and guests attended the seminar, most of whom made the walk. Many went through multiple times. None of the walkers suffered injuries from the walk.

"This is a great physics experiment," said Didier Saumon, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy. Prior to firewalking, Saumon did calculations to determine to his satisfaction that it is physics, not anything mystical, that makes firewalking possible.

One explanation as to what makes firewalking possible is that coals are not good conductors of heat. Therefore, the foot isn't in contact with the coals long enough to have the skin temperature raised high enough and at a significant depth to cause burns, Weintraub explained. However, people have been burned while firewalking, so nobody should try it without a trained instructor and medical personnel present.

Photo by Phonethip M. Liu An arrow-breaking exercise, pictured above, served as a prelude to the firewalk.

"At first, I wasn't going to do it," said sophomore Meredith Dickens, who came at the invitation of Allen. However, after deciding to walk, she went through five times. "I was a little bit addicted," she admitted. "I didn't feel anything on my feet. I really broke through fears."

"I'm really glad I did it because now I have an adventure to talk about," said Lauren Cox, also a sophomore and the guest of Chase.

"I don't think any of you are going to sleep for a while," Frager told the group. "You're going to be thinking about this, processing this, for a long time."

Milam talked about the importance for her, of going first, before anyone had made it safely through the fire. "It was important to me that I didn't have any justification," she said.

Frager and Pharr instructed the students to write on an index card "I can do anything I choose. The impossible is possible." The students then signed the cards and were advised to keep them somewhere visible.

 

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