Fire Ceremony.

Last updated: January 2024

The fire ceremony is humanity’s most ancient ritual—dating back to a time when the world was lit only by fire. Fire keeps darkness at bay and protects us, but it also transforms. In some sense, rather than seeing fire an antidote to the dark, it’s useful to also see it as testifying to the darkness.

The candle is not lit
To give light, but to testify to the night.

—Robert Bly

We use the fire ceremony for personal healing, and for healing the earth and all of her creatures. There are no rules for the fire ceremony—you can make it whatever you are called to.

Prepare for the ceremony by gathering toothpicks (or other burnable material such as tightly wound pieces of paper) and a candle. Also bring with you a bowl of water. While fire and spiritual practice asks of us an ascension, we must remain grounded in our soul work which is symbolised by the water. Light your candle and then open sacred space with an invocation to the four directions in whatever way makes sense to you.

In this fire ceremony we will begin by letting go of our past. We shed our stories, perhaps starting with the personal that we have inherited through our DNA and our ancestral karma and moving outward to include the dark history of humanity—greed, judgment, violence, anger. Pick up one of your sticks, and gently blow those stories into it. Hold the stick to your candle and as it catches fire, sense how these energies are being transformed, transmuted and released by the fire, given back to the Mother in a new form, one which she can use for new beginnings, rebirth and growth.

Holding your next stick, blow into it all of the pain and suffering that humanity is experiencing right now. Blow the collective darkness and heaviness into the stick. And when you are ready, hold it to the fire, that we may wake up and dream a new reality together. Allow it to burn in the fire.

This symbolic gesture sets in motion the energies and the intentionality that transforms the way this lives within each one of us. It releases all that has haunted us in the past and continues to haunt us today. Let it be transformed by the fire.

Now pass your hand over the flame, and draw that transformed energy to your forehead—to your third eye—to awaken your vision, what the shamans call your yachay (yatch-eye). Pass your hand over the flame again and bring it to your heart, that it may awaken compassion, beauty, and joy— your munay (moon- eye). Once again, pass your hand over the fire and bring it to your belly, healing your gut instinct, and awakening the llank'ay (yank-eye), the ability to create and manifest.

Continue to sit in stillness for as long as you can, then take the ashes and add them to the soil in a place that is sacred to you. Add the water and bless the earth as you pour it.

It’s important to hold this fire ceremony within the larger context and remember that at the end of this dark time there will be light. There is no need to chase that light right now. It will come. It is the dawn of a new humanity. The story doesn’t end with us.