In Focus

How fire therapy helped me get my life back on track

After a terrible break-up left her feeling powerless and sleeping badly, Kate Spicer was eager to try out an ancient fire ritual for emotional healing and life transformation. She could never have predicted its power…

Friday 31 January 2025 10:11 GMT
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Burning issue: many people find fire rituals the perfect way to let go of negative feelings
Burning issue: many people find fire rituals the perfect way to let go of negative feelings (Supplied)

There are seven of us shuffling anti-clockwise around a fire burning in an oil drum in a garden next door to the Queen’s Park Rangers’ Loftus Road stadium. In my open palm, I am holding four symbolic objects: a seed pod, a crumb of fragrant resin, a dried leaf, and a piece of wood. After shuffling around several times, offering each object to the flames, we sit back on rickety garden chairs. To my left is a tall, thin man in a Russian hat, with a cigarette case full of pre-rolled cigarettes. A gentle, well-spoken middle-aged woman called Emma, who is the evening’s event facilitator, requests that smokers do not toss their butts into the fire, for it is now not just a fire; it is a “sacred fire”.

What better place to dump your troubles than in the flames? When a friend told me about a monthly fire ritual that took place in a garden in Shepherd’s Bush, I was immediately curious. I knew exactly what I wanted to throw in the fire. In the last third of 2024, a break-up had left me hanging on to my sanity by my fingernails, constantly moving and sleeping badly.

Not exactly depressed, but I felt trapped by feelings of powerlessness and victimhood. At the end of the year, I resolved, “Enough”. I called the keeper of the Sacred Fire in London, a nice lady called Emma Diggle. Could a ritual in her Shepherd’s Bush garden exorcise my last terrible year and purify the new one?

Diggle is one of 10 “fire” facilitators in the UK for a US-based, non-profit organisation called Sacred Fire, which has been training fire keepers for over 20 years. After 18 months of training, she must commit to facilitating regular community events on a donation-only basis. She also works with people privately; her work is particularly popular with people trying to work through grief, which is how she found out about the organisation in the first place.

“After my father died in 2021, to get through the grief, I used to burn a lot. The ritual of giving the fire something to burn away was useful, powerful and simple, and I felt more connected to Dad because he used to love bonfires and lighting fires.”

The point of Sacred Fire’s work is, according to its UK-based global director, Sylvia Edwards: “To create connection and take us back to when the hearth was where we told stories, cooked, and connected.” Sylvia gave up her career in arts education to oversee Sacred Fire’s over 60 fire keepers in eight countries. “In the modern world, we are increasingly isolated and disconnected. Physically, we are disconnected from nature and emotionally from ourselves and others. The spirit of fire brings us back to connection to self and others.”

How does she think about the fires in Los Angeles and Malibu, I wonder? “We have Firekeepers in LA. We were all praying. Fire is a force that can connect us but it is also about transformation. Fire is telling us that our relationship with each other and the natural world is out of balance. There needs to be a deep change in the way we move together. The world is also alive, not just us, and it has a say-so in what we experience.”

For these keepers fire is not solely a chemical event involving the rapid oxidising of a fuel in the presence of oxygen. It is a teacher and has a spirit. And this urge to reconnect with nature and ancient rituals, is on the rise. Edwards says that their organisation alone has experienced a 50 per cent rise in interest in the last year.

To sit staring into an expertly built fire, to be guided to contemplate it and consider your thoughts and feelings that come up. During the meditative ritual, I found the fire to be both soothing and a delight, entranced by the flames licking around the strategically placed logs. The smoke is corralled upwards by the fire keepers’ expert technical skill at building the hearth and fire itself. It is both transfixing and transformative.

Thomas Peto tending a fire at an event at Wasing Park, Berkshire
Thomas Peto tending a fire at an event at Wasing Park, Berkshire (Mira Khanya)

Psychotherapist Thomas Peto has worked with fire professionally for over a decade at festivals and private events. Diggle had said he is the best-known fire keeper in the UK and first worked with him at a festival. Peto has created sacred fires for audiences of thousands. “I get wheeled out for big ceremonial burns,” he says. “I’m like a roadie for the fire. I make sure it’s in tune and can sing its song.”

Peto explains how the effects of fire gazing aren’t just spiritual; there is a pure physics to the release process too. “We are an energetic field, and our heart creates an electromagnetic pulse. As charged bodies, when we come in contact with another charged body, there is an exchange. Look at the charge differential between hot and cold air. We are ionised fields, and there is a natural flow between us and the fire. In this flow, you release into the fire, and receive.”

The demand for what he does has increased so much in recent years that he is in the process of creating a “fire keepers collective” where people are trained in how to work therapeutically with others, as well as techniques to manage the fire that keeps everyone safe yet connected to it. “You’re not just chucking logs on,” Peto laughs.

‘What better place to dump your troubles than in the flames? ‘
‘What better place to dump your troubles than in the flames? ‘ (Mira Khanya)

The Sacred Fire people talk about “medicinal fire” and I am keen to see if it can help my mental health. Going around the circle, the idea is to offer thoughts as we stare into the fire. In the first and second rounds, I say nothing. On the third, I speak up and offer some unexpressed anger, a sense of injustice, and an urgent need to move on in a positive way. We go round again, this time the woman to my right talks about the “worst year of my life” and something bad that had happened to her child.

Another woman talks about being bullied by selfish siblings. A man described a change in his health and circumstances and the fact that he had a plan to navigate it.

“Fire releases changes and transforms,” Peto later explains. “Look and listen, and the fire starts to behave like a sentient creature. It teaches you. It’s up to you how you want to view it. Still, the placebo effect is very powerful; if you give the body the path to heal itself, it does.”

As we go round again, people start to also offer thoughts calmly in return, and their triumphs and gratitude. In answer to the woman who felt bullied by her siblings, I say that we all play the roles we are expected to play in the family psychodrama. When a woman talks about her cousin who was in a coma after a car accident, I experience a much-needed dose of perspective on my own breakup bunkum.

A fire circle at the 2024 solstice event at Wasing Park
A fire circle at the 2024 solstice event at Wasing Park (Mira Khanya)

After 90 minutes, the sacred fire is closed by us shuffling once more, anti-clockwise, and throwing another small twig of offering. Mentally, I pile all the woes of 2024 on the flames and hear a satisfying sizzle, which feels as if the last of my worries were shrivelling up and disappearing.

Weeks on, of course, nothing has materially changed in my life, but my head feels clearer (even without doing Dry January). Peto sums it up well, “I create and hold a place for intention on transformation. It’s a form of hypnosis, looking into the fire, and the body will release. The problem is that often we don’t know what to release into. The fire is a focus for release.”

He then adds: “Fire is not just symbolic, it’s a technology. But even as a symbol alone, it is undeniably the most powerful there is.”

Find out about Sacred Fire events here

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