Spiritual Enlightnment Through Fire Walking the Coals

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/fea/lifetravel/stories/DN-firewalking_0906gd.ART.State.Edition1.238cc6d.html

By JASON SHEELER / The Dallas Morning News
jsheeler@dallasnews.com

Ann Curry, Ann Curry, Ann Curry, Ann Curry. With a 10-foot path of 1,200 F coals bridging spiritual enlightenment and me, all I can think of is the Today show newsreader. Nine hours after arriving at Flower Mound's Firewalking Institute of Research and Education, the moment has arrived. I've forgotten the chant, maybe something about adoring fire, and am told that if I fear my feet melting off, they will. Focus remains on Ann. After a day with chanting, dancing, board breaking and over-sharing, I am thinking walking on fire is tired over matter. "LET IT BE EASY!" a poster insists at check-in. The daylong seminar takes place at the rambling, natural stone home – a compound, really – of Charles Horton, master instructor and general manager of the institute. Described in the 54-page notebook as a 40-year-old "self-made multimillionaire" with more than 50 "retail financial outlets" across the U.S., Horton is way revered by today's participants.
Gathered in a living room with saddles affixed to barstools are soft-spoken housewives from Vancouver, granola grad students from New England, saucer-eyed senior citizens, all wondering when we're going to meet Charles. There are several official-T-shirt-clad, Up With People-types who don't mind direct questions. "Can I hug you?" a 40-something blonde asks me. Uh, sure, I say, offering a handshake-and-one-arm, Bill Clinton hug. She's not having it, pouncing for a boundary-invading squeeze, leaving me violated. "OK, it's time!" she announces. "Hurry!"
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Participants walk on burning coals at the Firewalking Institute headquarters in Flower Mound.
09/04/09
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Off the 20 of us go, filing past the house's garage holding a silver 7-series BMW and stepping on stones across a stream to a converted barn, which emanates thumping gay-bar music. We're split into small groups, and I'm assigned to Team Prashant.

"OK, guys, first of all, you've got to move fast today," the long-lashed Indian-American tells us as introduction. "This isn't B.S." He pauses, looking each of us in the eyes.

"You can get hurt," Prashant says soberly. He hands us waivers.

After agreeing to not bring a lawsuit even if negligence can be demonstrated, the Hugger tells us Horton is waiting for us inside the barn. But he just doesn't believe we're excited enough.

Uh-oh.

"OK, guys, huddle up," Prashant tells my group, which includes a bearded college student from Boston and a pretty actress-type with tattoos who plans on getting into motivational speaking. "Down with the good girl, up with the best girl," she inexplicably tells us several times, as if she's test-driving e-mail signatures. Also in our group is a Peter Boyle-ish retiree who shares that fire-walking is on his bucket list.

"Here's the deal," Prashant says in a stage whisper over thumping I recognize as Marky Mark. "Charles must hear how excited we are to be here."

"Is he going to turn down the music?" I ask.

"So we have to get really pumped up," Prashant says, ignoring my question. The other groups suddenly start screaming and bouncing, as if they've seen Robert Pattinson at Forever 21.

Our turn. As I halfheartedly wave my hands around, walking in place and realizing I wore the wrong shoes, Bucket List starts screeching, "I'm a Maasai warrior! I'm a Maasai warrior!"

The Hugger isn't pleased with the volume or the aerobic output of our group. "Jason, you need to loosen up," Prashant tells me, which is something I usually hear only from therapists and dates. "You're never going to be one with the fire with your hands in your pockets."

Take two. I get a little more air, throw in a gangsta-rap fist pump and pretend to yell.

The doors swing open to unleash disco lights and C + C Music Factory's "I've Got the Power." Everyone starts dancing; I crave vodka sodas and Marlboro Lights.

Horton, in black pants and guayabera shirt with an embroidered red dragon climbing down the front, takes the stage and fills us in on why he's qualified to charge us $399. He's the owner of 60 subprime cash stores and tells us he's sold other businesses for "10 figures." Gasps and applause. My Spidey Sense tells me this may all be about money.

"How many of you were raised with the concept that 'money is the root of all evil?' " he asks with a voice that could have inspired Ian Fleming "My belief system says that's absurd." Horton fills us in on his mobile-home childhood with a dad on the run from the IRS. Starting a check-cashing business as a teenager, he went on to make some major money with a payday loan company and attended seven Tony Robbins seminars. Throwing in a quote from Donald Trump, he promises we can achieve Black Card status, too, and we need only work 15 minutes a day for $1 million a month. He does. I see dollar signs in everyone's eyes.

"And," he adds, "with money you can go to poor countries and give them drinking water and stuff."

He asks us to stand up to get some energy. And chant:

I FEEL GREAT TODAY!

I FEEL TERRIFIC!

I FEEL HEALTHY!

I FEEL HAPPY!

I HAVE THE POWER!

YES! YES! YES!!!

Horton asks us to get to a "Level 10," which involves dancing and screaming as loudly as we can for three minutes. The kick in the pants: It's a competition, and we will be judged by our weakest link. My team turns to me. I nod toward Bucket.

To demonstrate a Level 10, a blond guy in a Rastafarian-style cap gets onstage and just loses it, Oprah's My Favorite Things-style. We go team by team around the room. After Team Prashant hits about a 6, Horton says, "There is ONE person who didn't give it their all."

Sigh.

"You'll do better next time, Jason," Prashant tells me, unable to look me in the eyes.

"Let's talk about comfort zones," Horton says. Don't be shy, he implores: If someone comes within six feet of you, you need to meet them ("except in the men's room," which inspires nervous laughter). I flip through the spiral-bound notebook. We will go on to cover debt management, preprogrammed beliefs, quantum physics, pattern interruption and something called Above the Line Thinking that may somehow involve "profit" for the body.

After a 20-minute barbecue lunch, things get physical. We learn to break boards with karate chops, and the blond Rastafarian forces an embroidery needle through his hand. "It doesn't hurt!" he beams, waving his impaled hand around proudly, as if he'd won a Pinewood Derby or financed a 52 percent loan. Every so often we stop to get our energy on, with the chant he borrowed from Sam Walton and some Level 10-ing, which is always followed by intimate sharing on topics like the Secret and writing exercises such as, "Where did the head trash come from?"

We head outside to Horton's front yard, where a bonfire will become a 10-foot trail heading away from fear, economic insecurity and commercial flights. "The fire will tell you if you are to walk," Horton earnestly promises. He says something about someone ending up with "pizza feet," letting the graphic metaphor hang in the air. Backlit, he simultaneously takes on the air of Joel Osteen and that guy from Flipping Out.

The wind causes the fire's tongues to lap at our legs, providing scary foreshadowing. To get us in the mood, "This Is the Moment" pours out of the outdoor speakers – what up, Donny Osmond – and Prashant turns to me and asks if I am going to walk.

"You've really grown today," he tells me. "I think I saw you smile once." As he extends his arm, I go in for a hug, realizing too late he only wanted a knuckle bump.

The coals reach optimum walking level. Horton stands on them for what seems like four minutes and then Bucket asks to go first, yelling something about high school and good sex. Following him to the foot of the bed, wincing from the thorns in the grass, I stare at the lavalike runway.

Besides Ann Curry, I can't think of much else. Good Girl-Best Girl or someone beside her yells something like, "You go, Jason!" and I look past the end of the path at Horton's dragon and start walking. Briskly, lightly, keeping my eyes open and trying not to stumble and thinking about what it would be like to fall face first into 1,200-degree coals and where did I put my shoes and what kind of emergency care the Flower Mound fire department offers and skin burns at 130 degrees doesn't it? – I hit water.

Horton sprays my feet down and says congratulations. Wow, this feels incredible, I think, feeling legally high. I briefly panic and do a foot check, that awful pizza line rolling through my head. My right foot has a little pain below my big toe, and I start to whine to Prashant that I got burned. Feeling around on the ball of my foot, I find a burr.

Gathered around the orange-black runway, in a huddle for one last time, that "What have you done today to make you feel proud song" swirls around us, causing me to have embarrassingly noticeable goose bumps. "Ask yourself what else is possible," Horton intones, speaking above the superbig chorus. "What preconceived notions are holding you back?"

Thinking of all the universal absolutes I rely upon daily to get me from home to work to Gossip Girl, I realize I might not be done here. I go back for another trip across the coals. I may not be walking on water, I think, but it's close.

You're fired: The next Ignite the Secret seminar is Oct. 21 at the institute's headquarters in Flower Mound. Tuition is $299 until Sept. 21, when the price goes to $399. For more information, click to www.firewalking.com. In the meantime, try glass: Thrive in ’09 will be held by the institute at Studio Movie Grill (11170 N. Central Expressway) from 1 to 3:30 p.m. on Sept. 25 and aims to show you how to “think, speak, sell, market and succeed at anything.” The cost is $15 and includes a glass walk, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Don't try this at home: No participants were harmed during the reporting of this story. The worst injuries founder Charles Horton says he has seen are blisters similar to the result of new shoes and no socks.

"It's 1,200-degree coals, of course there is danger," he says. "At my events a few people have gotten a little blister or kiss, as we call them, much like the type you get while walking more than you are used to or like the ones you get from working in the garden. Participants are fascinated that they are gone the next day.

"The biggest injury I have had at an event is someone twisted their ankle in my backyard. You don't pay 100 percent attention to what you are doing normally. When you walk on red-hot coals, you pay 100 percent attention."

How does it work? Some, such as the guys at Howstuffworks.com, suggest coals transmit heat very slowly and ash provides good insulation. But Tony Robbins and Charles Horton will say it's all you – mind over matter. .