Sacred Fire Carrollton

11/01/2026

Huichol Art Sale - https://mailchi.mp/e2d13173dca1/october-30th-mens-fire-9318159

11/01/2026

Huichol Art Sale - https://mailchi.mp/bce654b0cd93/october-30th-mens-fire-9318135

10/26/2026

Men's Fire Friday @ 7 pm - https://mailchi.mp/df327d752c1e/october-30th-mens-fire

10/16/2026

October🍁Fire Fest: Saturday @ 4:30 pm - https://mailchi.mp/5b8265676914/july-24th-community-fire-9317957

10/12/2026

October🍁Fire Fest: Saturday @ 4 pm - https://mailchi.mp/42659abd7bfd/july-24th-community-fire-9317901. Come join us for an afternoon and evening fall celebration–beginning by offering some tending loving care to Come join us for an afternoon and evening fall celebration–beginning by offering some tending loving care to ‘Dinilawigi-atsilvu’ (‘Place Where the Council Fires Are Held’), followed by a potluck meal and then a Sacred Fire gathering. A wonderful celebration of gratitude, community, and heart connection!

10/06/2026

Thriving in Tumultuous Times: A Teaching Fire with don David Wiley on Saturday, 7 - 9 pm 🔥. An elder in two ancestrally-related traditions from Mexico, don David will provide a time-honored perspective on how to meet challenges and live well. With time for questions from the audience. We hope you can join us! - https://mailchi.mp/326017fe0864/july-24th-community-fire-9317834

08/21/2026

"The map is not the territory." Coined by philosopher Alfred Korzybski in 1931, it's an elegant insight that is even more critical to acknowledge nearly 100 years later.

What does it mean? Simply that our mental 'maps' of the world are not the world itself. And as we increasingly rely on digital technologies to form those maps, our conception of reality becomes all the more abstract and removed from the complexity of the "blooming, buzzing confusion" of nature–to borrow a phrase from the psychologist William James.

Where the mental maps become even more simplistic and distorted is when we engage in "self-diagnosis." As Tanya Byron and other psycho-therapists are attesting (Coincidentally there is a very similar perspective in a current New York Times piece–albeit more about young women), people are being influenced by social media to self-diagnose themselves as being traumatized, having autism, being anxious, depressed--you name it.

Everyone seems to be searching for a diagnostic label to justify...well, that life can be tough sometimes.

While Tanya Byron seems to be 'triggered' by the overuse of the word 'trigger,' (!) my pet peeve is trauma. It seems that everyone who is offering any kind of workshop about self-improvement has to organize it around the 'T word.' And in a self-fulfilling prophecy, the more attention we give to the subject, the more it becomes reified–to the point that nearly everyone begins to feel (or at least think they feel) traumatized all of the time.

As Byron points out in this interview, it's not that there aren't real mental health issues to deal with in modern life. Indeed, as we are less connected to our bodies, our emotions, other people, or the natural world–in general, more isolated–we are showing signs of less resilience. This has impact on people of all ages, but it seems to be most devastating for younger generations brought up on devices.

At Sacred Fire one of the reasons we promote sitting around the fire is precisely to get beyond the mental maps (and the digital 'ghosts' of the mental maps) to the felt experience of being with other people. We bear witness to each other as we share our joys and sorrows. As we let go of (or at least soften) our ideas of ourselves and others, we begin to experience our common humanity. It’s simple practice and yet quite profound. And it has a good track record–at least about 800,000 years!

When suffering, we should always seek help. But sometimes the help is as simple as gathering with others, and bearing witness as we share what matters. That’s ‘thinking out of the box.’ Or more aptly, getting beyond the mental boxes that are often the very source of our suffering.

See:

The clinical psychologist has had enough of people adopting mental health labels to describe normal feelings such as grief, disappointment and sadness

08/10/2026

Modern life is characterized by the "atomization" described in this New York Times article–an accelerating phenomenon in the U.S., but also being experienced to some degree throughout the world. The good news is that Fire is the original cure for this ill. Come join us around the fire to see for yourself! See:

A nation of us versus them and them and them.

07/25/2026

None of us were able to make it 'across the pond' this year, but Lawrence was fortunate to attend the last two Fire Speaks events in that region of the world. This is a wonderful effort to raised funds for next year's Fire Speaks in the U.K.– an amazing experience of wisdom, tradition, and transformation.

See:

Dear Friends, We have recently returned from an extraord… Sylvia Anna Edwards needs your support for Help Us Keep the Sacred Fire Burning in the UK!

07/17/2026

One of the great conceits of the modern world is that we are very smart and earlier peoples were rather child-like or “primitive.”

And yet, when you really step back from that assumption and think of how real the possibility of death was in pre-historic times, this seems ludicrous. In fact, as many of our elders point out, we nowadays simply have a lot “insulation”: technologies and other forms of artifice that make many stupid, unsustainable ideas seem like they work…for a while at least.

Pre-historic peoples did not have such luxuries. For survival’s sake, they had to be astute observers of the natural world around them. Their survival also depended on a deep level of inter-dependence. If they did foolish stuff, they died very quickly.

The corrollary that their spirituality was just “make believe” is also ridiculous. They only did stuff that worked!

The video below illustrates the brilliance of pre-historic peoples and the importance of fire at the center of it all.

Yes, there is great irony here in that the video is AI-generated and has some distracting AI 'hallucinations' that make some of the tools look suspiciously modern–not to mention the features of the people! The title is way too melodramatic. But the story is one that is increasingly documented by anthropology.

Mind you, this view of what life might have looked like 40,000 years ago in northern Europe is largely scientific and materialistic in its assumptions. There is nothing about Fire as a spiritual presence in all life that is about heart, connection, and emotional expression—although it does veer a bit into that direction as it talks about the important ‘social glue’ that fire afforded. If the video could include the spiritual aspects of Fire…well, it would be a blockbuster! Or at least catch like wildfire!

Let us know what you think of this. And many thanks to our Firekeeper teacher, don David Wiley–who first brought this video to our attention!

See:

What was it really like to survive a freezing night in prehistory?...