Fire Walk With Me by Dan Rubinstein

Late evening, the waxing moon a sliver from full. A three-metrelong stack of cross-hatched split cedar has been doused with kerosene and set on fire. Now it has burned down to a bed of red-hot embers. Tongues of flame dance on the coals, which radiate about 800 C of heat, and plumes of grey smoke drift into the dark sky.

I am east of Ottawa, near Casselman, at a rural retreat owned by the family that runs Fang Shen Do, Canada’s largest chain of kung fu schools. For the past two hours, as the wood snapped and crackled, 30 of us have sat inside the adjacent pagoda listening to grandmaster Jacques Patenaude and his son Martin talk us through the ritual we are about to experience.

“You have an incredible force inside you,” says Jacques, a short, stocky Franco- Ontarian. Starting with one student in a church basement in 1979, Jacques channelled the angst of his youth — which saw him fighting in the barns on his parents’ Embrun dairy farm — into building a martial arts empire. “It is the exhilaration of living. Some people make prisons in their own minds, but if you know who you are and what you want — if you focus and avoid distractions — you can harness this power to do anything.”

Wearing a black T-shirt with the words “From fear to power” written on the front and “I walked on fire!” on the back, Jacques springs to and fro when he speaks and has a penchant for quoting Bruce Lee. “The teacher tonight will be the fire,” he tells us. “We are only the providers.”

People have walked on hot coals since at least 1200 BCE. From Iron Age India and Taoist Japan to Eastern Orthodox festivals in present-day Greece, the practice has been considered a rite of passage, a test of faith or courage. A way to overcome fears. Tolly Burkan brought it to North America in the 1970s, opening an institute for fire-walking education and research in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains; self-help guru Tony Robbins was one of his early disciples. Robbins convinced Oprah to try it at one of his “Unleash the Power Within” seminars. She called her midnight walk one of the most incredible experiences of her life.

Almost all my fellow walkers train at one of the Patenaudes’ 22 dojos in Quebec and Ontario, including the flagship across from the bus depot on Catherine Street. Most say they have come for personal development. “J’aime beaucoup le barbecue,” quipped one participant. “C’est mon cadeaux,” says another, brought blindly by his brother without knowing the destination. “It’s a symbolic way to help me tackle challenges in my relationships,” offers a soft-spoken young man. (Later, I would learn that he is one of the Patenaudes’ star students, the winner of several mixed martial arts prison fights against inmates in Thailand.) A guy with a shaved head and piercing eyes drove all the way from Toronto. “My life is a complete disaster,” he says to me. “I have to do something. This can’t hurt.”

Actually, it can. “People have been seriously injured by participating in fire walking,” read the waiver that I signed upon entering the pagoda. “There is an inherent risk.”

In the home stretch of a long project, a non-fiction book about the transformative properties of walking, I am here seeking metaphorical closure. Over the past three years, I have walked with dozens of strangers to gain a deeper understanding of this elemental act. My first journey took place in the snow and ice of the boreal forest in February. I explored urban jungles and braved the worlds of business and politics. I even ventured into an art gallery and a church. Now I am ready to cross a threshold. To confront my biggest opponent — myself.

“The coals are hot,” Martin announces from outside, through the open sliding door. “Super hot.”

“How many people,” Jacques asks with a wink, “are we going to burn tonight?”

As children, we are taught to avoid fire, but wood is not a very good conductor of heat. When you walk across a bed of embers, your feet don’t stay in contact with the coals long enough to burn. That’s the theory, anyway. Jacques has done it 300 times since 1991, for distances up to a dozen metres, and has been singed five times.

“Don’t look directly at the fire, and don’t run,” he tells us. That pushes your feet deeper into the embers and increases the likelihood of injury. “But don’t go too slow,” he adds.

We line up outside the pagoda. The sound of West African drumming and rhythmic clapping fills the air. Martin rakes the coals, sending a shower of sparks into the night. We are told to extend our arms forward, palms up, and to repeat the mantra “cool moss.”

My mind is clear when I reach the edge of the fire. Nothing flashes in front of my eyes. No wave of emotion or fear. After an instant’s hesitation, I simply step forward — “cool moss, cool moss” — and six footfalls later I am standing on the damp grass on the other side. There was a small pinch on the arch of my left foot, but no other pain. No strong sense of catharsis either. Just the feeling that once I started, it was easier to keep moving than to stop. Dan Rubinstein is an Ottawa-based writer and editor who usually walks on surfaces that are not aflame. His first book, Born to Walk: The Transformative Power of a Pedestrian Act, was published this spring by ECW Press.