Burning Brightly
I’m not afraid of the fire any more, because I know now what I didn’t know then.
Fire imagery has been present in my life for as long as I can remember. And for as long as I can remember, I’ve been afraid of it.
As a little girl raised in evangelical Christianity, fire meant hell. Fire meant the bad place where people went if they didn’t obey Jesus. Fire meant wrath and punishment and suffering.
As I grew older, I tamped down the fear of hell by following all the rules. If I followed the rules, I was safe from the fire. So I studied the Bible. I went to church. I prayed. I believed. I belonged.
Through my studies I found that fire was also used in the New Testament to symbolize the Holy Spirit. Tongues of fire appeared over the heads of the apostles at Pentecost. Fire was not just punishment. Fire was sacred inspiration.
Fire was also the light of our testimony, our witness to a dark world. Fire was light but that light was judgment, showing other people where they went wrong. To shine the most light and do the most good, I kept my fire pure and strong and unwavering.
Fast forward. I spent 39 years in evangelical Christianity. I went so deep into my faith, burned so brightly, I came out the other side. I like to think I took Jesus with me and left a lot of heavy cultural baggage behind.
Leaving my church, then evangelicalism, then my church again, then the tradition I had loved, felt like being slowly burned alive. Leaving felt like dying, but also like coming to life.
All the parts of myself that I had suppressed in order to belong to a culture that did not fully honor my personhood or my womanhood re-emerged.
Most days I walked around feeling like a girl on fire. I even drew a caricature of myself with flames for hair. So much overwhelming aliveness and passion and freedom raged inside of me that I half expected to set off sprinkler systems.
The intensity of the fire scared me. It’s hard to leave old conditioning behind. I started to worry that the fire would burn me up or, worse, scald the people I loved and cost me the relationships I valued.
I was also afraid because I had stopped hiding, stopped compromising myself and making myself small to fit in. I was burning in plain sight for all to see.
I found an outlet for all this fiery passion blogging here on Medium. For two years, I did what I’ve always done. I took feelings and words and heart and braided them into stories, to connect with readers but also to make sense of what was happening to me.
For the first time in my life though, I found that even words were not enough. No matter how many words I poured out onto my keyboard or into my notebooks or into the ears of trusted friends, the words never stopped the fire from burning.
I felt stuck. I understood that to put out the fire was to put out my soul, and such an extinguishing would cost me dearly. Letting the fire rage out of control was irresponsible though and unhelpful. I wanted to contain the blaze, to put it to good use like I’d been taught, but it refused to be tamed.
I needed direction. I needed the support of a community who could stare directly into me without blinking. I needed to get out of my head and learn how to manage all that raw energy.
Around this time, I started doing yoga again, along with my usual meditation practice. At first, yoga was just a way to calm my restless body so I could sit still. Then I found that when I moved my body in a conscious way, I found a cool refuge.
I signed up for 9-month yoga teacher training with a spiritual bent at a local studio. The first immersion weekend I sat in a circle with about 20 strangers. I was terrified.
I had decided that I would put it all out on the table. This was a place where I would dare to be seen and heard and risk the consequences if it killed me.
I had lived in hiding for 39 years without knowing it. Then I woke up one day and realized that I was loved and respected for someone I was only pretending to be. I would not sleepwalk through yoga teacher training too.
I wanted to find out if I could show up fully as myself in all my messiness and glory and find other people who could do the same for me. I would risk belonging in favor of not abandoning myself.
From the start, we were given the opportunity to open the circle by sharing from our hearts. My hands shook as I cracked open my chest and held out the hot lava inside and asked for help containing it.
I shed tears, but I was not comforted or pitied. People did not scooch away from me or pat me on the knee or ask me to please stop being so vulnerable, because I was making them uncomfortable.
Instead, one-by-one, they cracked open their own chests and showed me the lava inside them. They shed tears. They asked for my help. And I knew that at last I was in the right place with the right people for the work that needed to be done.
Over the past seven months, the spiritual teachings, principles, and practices of yoga teacher training have challenged me but also brought me healing and comfort. They have also empowered me and given me a voice.
We’ve learned a lot about how to teach yoga classes. More importantly, we’ve learned how to live yoga. Again and again, we’ve shown up one weekend a month to sit in that circle and shed our baggage. We’ve faced our fears and learned the discipline of tapas: staying in the heat and letting the practice do its work.
I have taken a lot away from this experience, more than I think I even realize. What the experience has not given me though is a container for the fire. But I see now what I didn’t see before.
The fire is not being poured out on me. The fire is not mine to use to fix myself or other people. The fire is not raging through me or burning me up from the inside out. The fire is not an outside force to be feared or fought with or sought out.
What I see now is this: I am the fire.
The fire is who I’ve always been through all forty-two years of my life. I don’t have to be contained. I don’t have to be afraid. I can just be.
I am the fire, and I am burning bright.
