Almost 10 years ago, Cassandra Enns-Bullied sat for seven hours and watched her Stonewall home burn to the ground.
After grieving the loss of her home, she found solace in a warrior goddess class that included walking across fire and other reflective types of therapy.
“I had to find a way to get my power back,” said Enns-Bullied, a certified holistic therapist. “In my case, it was literally taking my power back from fire itself by walking across it.”
Enns-Bullied and her husband, Dale Bullied, were so inspired by these types of therapy that they traveled to Texas in 2017 and did intensive training to become fire walking instructors. This meant they had to walk through fire 108 times. They then opened a business in the Interlake called Walking Thru Fire in Winnipeg Beach and now help people work through trauma and move forward through empowerment.
“It’s a lot of hypnotherapies, shadow work, meditation, aromatherapy, and talk therapy,” Enns-Bullied says. “We offer a lot of services, but the main aspect is the firewalking.”
The day before the fire walk is filled with healing activities.
It is eight hours long and includes:
– Group meals.
– Group experience-sharing sessions.
– Various types of therapy.
– A board-breaking ceremony.
“You write everything you are going through on a board, break it, and cast it into the fire,” Enns-Bullied says. “By doing that and then walking across it, you are genuinely stomping out the griefs and traumas that are weighing on you.”
Enns-Bullied said most of her clients are women aged 35-55.
“Many of these women have felt unworthy in their lives and experienced significant trauma and have been abused and want to heal from those traumatic experiences,” she says. “Once they do this, they start to find a greater sense of who they are and find sisterhood with others.
“It’s intimate and life-changing.”
One of Enns-Bullied’s long-time clients, Shawna Legault, can attest to that. She has done the fire walk three times and is doing one more before winter sets in.
“When I initially signed up, I was looking to do something different with a group of friends and I don’t think any of us knew what we were going into,” Legault says. “It ended up being a very deep process for me, and has healed a different part of me every time I go.
While her initial walk was born out of curiosity, a personal loss brought her back.
“My sister-in-law committed suicide, and that was hard on my family and me,” she says. “I did a walk about a month after that, and it was massively healing.”
“It just helps you deal with trauma and address things you block out or don’t want to deal with,” she continued. “People hold onto things they don’t need and this gives them a path to follow so they can release these things in their life that aren’t serving them anymore.”
Legault says while the fire walk is the main event, she found the board-breaking ceremony particularly powerful.
“The process of writing down everything you want to release and then breaking that board was a physical feeling I can’t describe,” she says. “When it broke, and I threw it in the fire I felt a massive relief.”
Enns-Bullied says they typically do between one and three firewalks per month in groups of eight. They don’t invite family members, spouses, or friends to attend the walks.
“We have found in the past that when there is an audience, it affects a person’s ability to be vulnerable,” she says. “Most of the women who do it do it with bliss and then cry and scream and break down and get really exhilarated by what they have accomplished.”
Enns-Bullied said there isn’t any pain, going so far as to say a blister in your shoe hurts more than walking across the fire.
Legault can confirm this.
“100 percent it does not hurt at all,” she said. “There are no injuries or burns or anything like that. In my second ceremony, I walked across the fire three times and didn’t get burned.”
For Enns-Bullied, helping people with this type of therapy is her life.
“I have taken these courses and experienced these things for my journey and love passing that along to my clients,” she says. “I hate when anyone is hurting and sometimes it takes someone to be there to help them with that.”
“This is my heart and soul.”
You can learn more at walkingthrufire.com.
