Courage Doesn’t Always Roar or Walk Over Hot Coals
Several years ago, my sister and I did a remarkable thing — we attended an Anthony Robbins three-day convention. That wasn’t the remarkable part. The remarkable part was we let a stranger convince us to walk over hot coals.
After witnessing a rollercoaster of tears and recriminations, on and off stage, I realise now we may have been in a cult-like state. How else to reconcile taking feet that could barely manage Crocs through a simmering mass of potential first-degree burns?
Was it the ear-splitting music? The sight of grown men and women dissolving into weeping puddles of vulnerability? The hollered admonitions to “live with unbridled passion!”? Or a need to push away the thought that this was performative art — an imitation of private pain that could not help me exorcise the impenetrable loneliness of grief?
I had questions — not least about the come-to-Jesus moment currently happening on stage.
I wondered what a more private session with these manifestations of pain would look like. Under the guise of Ringmaster, I did sense something in Anthony Robbins. Maybe it was a glimpse into his own “Why,” albeit a why transformed into the ability to pay his bills. Was help any less valuable because it came with an entourage, wealth, and flattering camera angles?
As an audience, we all had one thing in common: we wanted someone (anyone?) to help stop the anguish — or give us permission to execute the answers we already knew we had: to leave a marriage, to stand up for ourselves, to reach out, to leave a toxic job — to confront grief head-on.
But maybe that was the point. Public accountability. Like the hard date-stamping of a new diet or regime. Megaphoning our intentions to family, friends, and social media. Did we not often publicise intent to ward off the spectre of not finishing what we started? That it would make it harder to throw in the towel under wider scrutiny? Was it the same for grief? That if I didn’t admit publicly to not coping with my widowed state, I would succumb to inky depths and just give up?
Was that the reason for my presence at a performance-led self-help convention? Public accountability? A signposting to worried family and friends — to a worried me — that I needed to publicly accept the necessity of changing my state? A change from denial to acceptance? Date-stamp the start of my journey from devastated hurt to healing?
Maybe.
Bur walk over hot coals that final day, I did. There may have been hollering. But I made it and collapsed on the other side, a hot, sweaty mess of cathartic exhilaration.
I later had a cup of coffee with Running Over Hot Coals. We agreed to never do that again. It was amicable. There was cake.
Some days, navigating grief is like running over hot coals. It’s a narrowing of focus to the moment, to one’s breath, and then just going for it. No thinking about all the simmering, scary days ahead, just the one in front — while family and friends cheer from the audience.
Other times, it’s the small and unremarkable private moments, without public participation. A private audience of one. Treating oneself with kindness when getting out of bed and taking a shower is the courageous decision that day.
