Walking barefoot over hot coals, an ancient religious ritual popularized in recent years as a corporate team-building exercise, has once again brought a group of colleagues together through their shared grief. burned feet.
In the latest instance of the incident, 25 employees of a Swiss advertising agency were injured while walking on hot coals in Zurich, officials said. Ten ambulances, two emergency medical teams and police from multiple agencies were deployed to help, based on Zurich police. Thirteen people were hospitalized shortly.
“We deeply regret the incident and we are doing everything we can to ensure that our employees get well soon,” said Michi Frank, the company’s chief executive officer, Golbach, said in a press release. The company declined to provide further details about the event.
The awareness that walking on burning coals required a special inner state prompted its transformation from a mystical spiritual tradition into a capitalist self-fulfilling project. This practice seems to have emerged separately thousands of years ago as a religious tradition in various places around the word.
In Greece, traditions include singing, dancing and walking on fire, celebrate the rescue of icons from a burning church. It seems that unrelated traditions also exist in Bali, Fiji, India and Japan.
Travel journalists popularized it, sometimes in a mystical sense. “The Secret Is Concentration,” The New York Times report in 1973 from a fire walk at a temple above Kyoto. “Mind, body, and environment are in perfect harmony and all chains of cause and effect become simultaneous, or they are not, and nothing will ever be.”
In the years since, it has become a game in film and on television, notably as signature group activity at seminars led by Tony Robbins, life coach and motivational speaker. head.
“Now let me show you how to walk on fire,” said Mr. Robbins notification. He organizes a long line of people to walk past a short row of burning coals while leading the participants to the call and response “Say yes!”. and yes!”
“Purpose of the walk in fire,” he explain at a 2017 event, “just a great metaphor for doing things you once thought were difficult or impossible and showing how quickly you can change”.
Sometimes the metaphor is a little too real. Dozens of attendees walked on coals at Robbins seminars in 2012 and 2016 injured, some hospitalized with third degree burns.
The spokesman for Mr. . Robbins told The Washington Post after the 2016 episode.
Pop culture sometimes mocks the liberating potential of walking on fire. In a year 2007 episode of the NBC sitcom “The Office,” Dwight Schrute attempts to blackmail his boss, Michael Scott, by not wafting through hot coals during a corporate retreat, but instead, still stood on it agonizingly until he was promoted. In “Ace Ventura 2: When Nature Calls” (1995), Jim Carrey’s character overcomes coal simply by toss someone else stood on them and stomped on him.
But other depictions have shown the potential for psychic transformation, including the final season of the first season of the CBS reality show “Survivor” in 2000. With that, reports of injuries have increased. In 2001, a dozen Burger King employees were injured at a corporate retreat in Key Largo, Fla., where hot coals walk.
Is this a spiritual failure? No possibility. With proper guidance and preparation, walking across hot coals is not as dangerous as it seems, experts say.
“For the vast majority of people, maybe a blister the size of your little fingernail is the worst thing that can happen to you,” physicist David Willey said in a recent interview. phone on Thursday. Mr. Willey, who taught for many years at the University of Pittsburgh, shared world record for the longest walk on hot coals.
Mr. Willey says the promises made by company retreat organizers are often unfounded.
“They’re telling you it’s all on your mind, and this will give you the strength to keep going,” he said. “It’s not in your mind. Everybody can do it. And I don’t think the confidence you get from it will necessarily last that long.”
Mr. Willey said that coal at 1,000 degrees was safe to walk 20 feet or more, and added that he had walked on coal at that temperature for 495 feet without blistering.
Above his website, he writes that when walking briskly, your bare feet come into contact with coals for only about a second, not long enough for heat to transfer from the coals to human skin painfully. Both charcoal and leather, he said, have far lower thermal conductivity than metals.
But mistakes can lead to injury. These include curling your toes and clamping a lump of coal between them; walking on coals that are too hot; choose the wrong type of wood, as some will be hotter than others; and performing walks on the beach, where your feet can sink into the sand, Mr. Willey said.
The organizer of the event in Zurich, Thomy Widmer, said in an interview with the Swiss news agency Blick that he warned participants not to “jog or run over” the fire, but to cross it in a clip that resembles a steady and rapid “military step”. Mr Widmer said he felt sorry for anyone injured but denied that he was responsible for the accident. “It could be a great event,” he said.
Emma Bubola and Derrick Bryson Taylor Contribution reports from London. Christopher F. Schuetze Reporting contributions from Berlin.
