The change from Summer to Fall can be quite a challenging one. Shifting gears from extended weekends back to longer work hours, school starting again, and ever so slowly, feeling the touch of cooler air and shorter days can be a downright bummer. I usually make a list of things I love about Fall, to help me get psyched. My schedule is full (more classes in Brooklyn! check my website), and my private clients are back in town, friends are returning from summers away, so there’s lots to look forward to. But since my first experience with Burning Man in 2000, I’ve added a fire ceremony into my intention setting.
Burning Man is a one week experience of experimental community living set in a stark desert in Nevada. Really out in the middle of nowhere. There are so many levels of amazing-ness that one can have at the Burn. Fitting to what I study with Douglas Brooks and Rajanaka Yoga, the Burn is also an experiment in Radical Self Reliance and Radical Self Expression. Its an art festival, hippie gathering, city of fantasy, music and dance party, and Kula-Gone-Wild within the boundaries that being in the desert instill upon you. It is one of the most radical experiences of Freedom you could ever have, even though its not really free, it costs money, and there are plenty of terms to agree upon. But hey, that’s embodied life anyway. I’ve gone twice, and I have only seen or heard a pin-head of what it conjured up for some folks. Its one of those trips that leaves such an imprint, and deeply shifts every person from inside out, and its radically different every year. Sorta like your yoga is, and can do.
Fire is a powerful metaphor of, and tool for transformation. The Tantric traditions view fire as the space of our own Consciousness, where all things liquefy together. Our yoga practices can be used to ignite the fire of Consciousness with the intention to heat, and inevitably melt away what’s no longer needed so what remains is purified, streamlined, and crystalized. “Fire has a nectar at its core” as taught by my teacher Paul. Sometimes we do need to cast off the old ways, tired relationships, and attitudes that have held us back from simply being our best.
These practices of igniting “tapas” or heat into what you are doing are not only about burning away or purifying — like there’s something ‘dirty’ or ‘impure’ about you — rather, consider tapasya as a burning into newness. The burning is never about simply nothingness to the Tantric practitioners, for nothingness isn’t possible in our embodied life, nor is it respectful to the Divine that has chosen our loveliness and all it entails as its form. It is paradoxically both a burning away, and a burning toward.
Burning Man taught me many things, aside from how life affirming it feels to live with thousands of like-minded beings focused on radical self expression and self reliance, keeping safe, yet exploring the boundary of fun. One thing I have come away with is a knowing that I can transform anything burdening me through practices of burning and melting. Once the heavy is heated, melted, and dissolved to ash, what remains re-coaleses and becomes the source of power for transformation. This is the practice of asana, as well as meditation. So at the end of this week, on Saturday, 50,000 will gather around a 40′ effigy of a man and watch it burn from very explosive and celebratory beginning, all the way down to the last ember 12-24 hours later. Watching it go out is like cleaning and purifying the diamond of your heart.
What i really learned from the Burn is this little saying “burn where you are”– you don’t have to be in a desert to experience the same kind of power of your own transformation. It can happen here, right where you are, whenever you’re ready to stoke your inner fire to do so, with any ritual you design. So every year at this time, planning for the remainder of the year, I burn. I burn sitting in a place of respect and love for myself and the work I’ve done, and I burn away what will simply not serve me in serving and collaborating with the world as fully as possible. And I burn continually toward, and into, my own refinement, polishing and reshaping who I am.
Love to my playa family.
Little fact: Black Rock Desert is transformed into Black Rock City. Once built and at full capacity, it becomes one of the 10 largest cities in the state of Nevada. Then it is dissolves, like the fire itself, and there is no trace of it. Until next year. Happy Burn!
