Ignite in Retrospect
Intentionality was the watchword by which we kept the flame at the Ignite Your Inner Flame Retreat. The art we share is one with inherent risks; fire is an awe-some power with as much potential for destruction as beauty, and so it must be wielded with care. Kiki and I therefore cultivated a series of intentions, or pillars, to structure our rigorous daily practice at the retreat. Uniting all the intentions together was the lineage of shared safety practices that every Fire Keeper learns in order to maintain the integrity and safety of our art and community.
This post is a journey through intention and image documenting our time together on the beaches and in the jungle of Dominical, Costa Rica.
Pillar 1: Ground In
We ground in to the space we are in—the Danyasa Eco Retreat in Dominical, Costa Rica—and we ground into our temple bodies. For we know and we value that a depth of grounding into this Earth and our physicalities allows us to explore, expand, and grow wider and deeper and more expansively into our Spirit, our soul self. To ground down, to root, is how we rise higher.
We ground down into the Earth, into space and place in time, and we paid homage to all those who have walked this Earth before us. We expressed gratitude to the Indigenous peoples and the wisdom keepers and those who lived and thrived. We walked this land with respect and intention and with the highest good and understanding in mind. For grounding ourselves within this space of gratitude and centeredness allows our aligned intentions to flourish and be shared, enabling the webs of community to strengthen and expand.
We are stable in this place of rootedness, and we are reminded that all we must do is surrender to the gravity that roots, holds, and magnetizes us to this earthly existence.
A grounding circle on a moonlit beach rooted the Fire Keeper sisters into land, community, and self. 📷: Aisha-Zakiya Boyd
Pillar 2: Ignite Your Inner Flame
An intentional belief guiding the Ignite Fire Retreat is that inside each one of us there exists a soul fire of Being, of consciousness. This inner flame is an expression, a holding of your true nature, your authentic self.
This inner light can never go out; it may burn low or flicker; it might become smoldering, like hot coals. It may be an ember waiting for fuel and a breeze to alight. It may be blazing like a bonfire, bright, and ready to ignite the flames of others waiting in the surrounding area.
No matter what, while we are alive, our inner flame burns bright. We gathered in retreat to treat ourselves and remember, in community, how brightly we can burn together. When we ignite our flames, we see the way we can light up this world.
None of us burns brighter than another, and one flame does not outshine any other. Rather, one flame shines bright and another amplifies it, and we shine all the brighter together. There is no competition as to who is brightest; there is instead collaboration in illuminating this world with our brilliance, together.
The Ignite Retreat was a space for each Fire Keeper to remember and celebrate this essential knowledge. When we ground into this belief, our whole world transforms, and we begin to joyfully ignite all those around us, for our brilliance brings joy. And that transforms our experience of this universe.
Above left to right: K8 Fuego, Sofiah Thom, Jessica Kirschner, and Erin Grimm📷: Aisha-Zakiya Boyd
Pillar 3: Expressive Flow
The full moon is a time of bright brilliance, when we are pulled magnetically to the illumination in the darkness. It is a time when our expressive flow is welcomed.
Here in this space, the flow state, which is the state of pure consciousness, of ecstasy, of allowing the eroticism—which is the essence of being alive—to flow. In this state we open up the channels, the floodgates of ourselves, and remove blockages through movement, conversation, art, and expression. In flow, we find richer expression of sharing our inner lights, of sharing our authenticities, and we dive deeper into this internal experience shared outwards. This is the oneness, this is the authentic expression, and this creates belonging.
Photo 1: Full Moon Circle📷:Erin Grim
Photo 2: LD Holley; Photo 3: Sphinx; Photo 4: Wild Angel and Kiki; Photo 5: Amndtrn, Gaea, and Rachel 📷: Aisha-Zakiya Boyd
Pillar 4: Sisterhood
The Ignite Your Inner Flame Retreat is a unique space, where we invite femme humans to have an embodied experience together. We do this not to exclude anyone, but to embrace the full spectrum of femme experiences, from AFAB to trans and beyond. We thus cultivate a place for sisterhood—a word that has grown crunchy, perhaps even overused, and that has been stigmatized.
We take a stand for true, authentic relation, embracing collaboration without competition and openness without aggression.
We meet all where we are, and hold the experience of gathering in a non-sexualized space where we allow our sensuality, pleasure, and eroticism to run wild outside objectification, beyond the demands of others for any preconceived expectations of the femme.
So within this sisterhood container, we have a unique opportunity to cultivate a new experience of what it means to be around, among, and supporting of and supported by other womxn. We begin to resculpt how we can show up and create within this space. We begin to redefine what it means to be feminine, how our softness and our vulnerability are strengths. Our softness is not weakness, it is unruly and unregulated and truly an asset to this planet.
This sisterhood space is one that is carefully co-created so we can hold sacred our shared bonds as much as our differences. Where we hold sacred the communications that we have with each other, and we hold sacred the bonds of confidentiality, belonging, and love. We are chosen family. We embrace our chosen sisters as their true selves, we unite within the new paradigm of feminine understanding and celebration that arises to find balance within the non-dual chaos of our universe. The Ignite Your Inner Flame Sisterhood is truly a sacred space where our magic can be better understood, developed, and celebrated in the context of working with fire and flame.
Above left: Sisters Rachel & Foxy Shakti 📷: Aisha-Zakiya Boyd; Above middle and right: Gaea & Kristin and Michelle &Teisha📷: Erin Grimm
Below three 📷: Melissa Robin
Pillar 5: Belonging
A crucial intention guiding the Ignite Retreat was cultivating a deep sense of belonging. Belonging is a deep desire for every human, right alongside love. When we journey toward knowing our own authentic self and our own unextinguishable inner flame, we begin to belong to ourselves, and in turn, we begin to allow ourselves to belong to this world. And when we allow ourselves to belong—to our world and our own bodies—we find ourselves in greater matrixes of belonging with and to other humans, who are mirrors of ourselves. In this process, communities are forged and belonging is deepened, within and without the self; with and without others.
At the Ignite Your Inner Flame Retreat this year, I witnessed a sense of belonging that was profoundly authentic and organic. Our Fire Keepers saw themselves in others and began to soften their edges, taking the leap into allowing themselves to belong to the group. Especially when individuals did not at first feel the belonging—or kept themselves from feeling it—the most courageous thing I witnessed was when a Keeper allowed me to witness them, letting me see their exquisite self. In this seemingly small act, I found and deepened that place of belonging deep within my own heart, and I felt this connection radiate ever outward.
Belonging satisfies a deep piece of ourselves: to be one with the universe.
Circles of Belonging📷: Aisha-Zakiya Boyd
Pillar 6: Oneness
Oneness is a state of being we mutually surrender to when we courageously dissolve the boundaries within and among ourselves and begin to share experiences from a curious and loving space that illuminates our similarities and begins to bridge our differences.
At the Ignite Your Inner Flame Retreat, our oneness became apparent as we flowed in community, as we supported each other, both in fire safety, and in our emotional spectrums, allowing for all to feel held, in turn; to support and be supported, and to collectively support the expansion of each individual into the greater oneness that is palpably felt in our personal connections to each other and to the world, and to the universe itself.
1: Gaea; 2: Gaea&Jessica; 3 Amndtrn & Foxy Shakti📷: Aisha-Zakiya Boyd
3: Rachel; 4 Bridget; 5: Ten📷:Erin Grimm
Pillar 7: Aligned Intention
Our deepest self speaks softly in the voice of our intuition, our deep inner wisdom, our truest self. It’s a process, a courageous process indeed, to strip down the layers of masks we’ve worn to fit in, to step out of the boxes we’ve squeezed ourselves into in fear-based attempts to belong. When we strip off those layers and uncover who we are at our core—in short, when we find our authenticity—we begin to see, listen, taste, hear, our deepest self speak. When we align with these whisperings, when we can quiet the external world, we allow ourselves to speak from the inside, and aligning with this inner voice brings us to our authentic self. Here, we can listen to our intentions for the world, we can listen to the intents and align our actions to them. Through this alignment we can begin to womanifest the world we want to live in—without attachment to preconceived outcomes, free of fear.
Alignment with intention brings us to inspired action, prompts us to show up, and to act in every moment as the human we desire to be.
And this human we desire to be can and should be a reflection of that world we desire to inhabit. Through aligning with our deepest intentions, we show up as our authentic expression. From this place of integrity, we can also discern when we go out of alignment, and we can courageously take those steps and actions, forge those neural and material pathways to return to alignment—thus entering into even greater alignment with ourselves and with the ultimate forces of the universe, which are, indeed, love.
Here, in this space of loving sisterhood we experienced in the Ignite Firekeepers community, our aligned intentions collectively created our reality. We stood strong and remained aligned, and the resulting magic was real.
Gaea and Kiki—Dreamers Aligned, Intentionally. 📷: Aisha-Zakiya Boyd
Pillar 8: Authentic Expression:
In the Ignite Fire Keeper community, authentic expression is birthed from the fire. The fire demands that we show who we truly are, it mirrors our inner flame. And when we hold the fire as a sacred Fire Keeper, we are called to show up as our authentic selves. We can demand nothing less of ourselves moving forward, because we know the true depth of being created when authentic expressions of the self merges within a group of others authentically expressing themselves.
Our authentic expression is a direct relating and knowing of who we are deep down inside. Our authenticity is known and discovered through curiosity and play in safe spaces where we truly feel like we belong and where we can express and be ourselves. This authentic expression is fostered and awakened and inspired, and it snowballs when others authentically express who they are from the inside out, allowing yet others to witness in turn. When we witness others in their authentic expression, and we see them being full of joy in who they truly are and bringing that as a gift to the world, we are inspired to do the same and let our deepest joys and pleasures out to play.
It is literally unlike anything else—your authentic expression is unprecedented in this world—and it is at the core of your reality.
Christina Marie and Wildling Kate radiate authentic expression 📷: Aisha-Zakiya Boyd
Pillar 9: Ritual Performance
When we perform, we have the opportunity to express authentically that which we experience inside our earthly temple bodies having a human experience. We get to express this unique truth from the inside outward, and it is this outward expression, this performance that allows others a glimpse into who and what and how we are, thus forging deep bonds of true understanding, cross human, cross cultural, cross barrier. This ritual expression is a sacred time and space set aside with an inspired set of actions supporting a sacred intention to flourish and create a bridge between the mundane and the divine. When we look at our performances—our inspired actions—as ritual, we allow for that bridge between the earthly and the divine to become easeful and engaging for both performer and audience.
Our Ignite Fire Keeper final show, held at sunset on the beach, was a journey to get to. The four stages of flow—struggle, release, flow, and rest—are apparent in everything we do, and the journey to our performance was exactly that. We began dreaming into performance pieces within our four pods, each aligned with one of the four stages of flow: spiral, infinity, circle, and wave.
As the inspiration and excitement of potentiality of what can be created grew, we then entered deep into the struggle, especially during the dress rehearsal. We had had an exquisite sun rise burn and so had been up almost the entire day, so when our time to ground in to the structure of our performance—playlist, setlist, props, dipping order, safety, and songs—we entered the Struggle. Tired and cranky, it was hard to mitigate emotions as they flared up staging and blocking this ritual performance that held such deep meaning for all of us.
Nevertheless, we rooted our performance in the difficult masculine structure to allow for the feminine, Shakti flow of expression to unfold. We held each other up through the struggle, allowing one another’s emotions to be raw and real and not needing to change, and we helped one another release into nonattachment, so we could enter flow the next day.
After a night of rest and rejuvenation, we were able to joyfully set up and flow into an ecstatic performance that was witnessed by 300 or more people. Our performance touched so many—31 women on fire expressing themselves authentically, together. Whether or not we were on the stage at the same time, we all shared the same stage and flowed into oneness, the true intent of any ritual performance.
📷: Aisha-Zakiya Boyd
Pillar 10: Share Your Light
Your light is unique and brilliant, especially when you dive into your authenticity. You share your light in every moment—rather, you have the choice and the capacity to share your light in every moment. This is an incredible gift.
When you share your light with others, you invite them to partake in the co-creation of everyday experience.
You share your wisdom, you share your inspiration, we share with each other, so that we may remember how our ignited flames burn brighter together. When we share our light and uniqueness with the world, the world is enriched, for we engage actively in co-creating a world built on shared experience, collaboration, and expressive magic that unites us all and illuminates our similarities along with our differences.
So share your light, the world needs and asks you to. It matters, and it matters more than ever.
At the Ignite Your Inner Flame Retreat, witnessing everyone share their light with each other, sharing their brightness with the world, was heart-filling. We all allowed one another to witness that unique brightness burning within each of us, and created belonging and a genuine expansion of love. It was palpable, the desire to continue to share this precious magic with all who are ready. Sharing our light is one of the most potently creative and magical things imaginable, and when we experience the shared light, it becomes our lived reality.
📷: Ten
Watch our 50 min final Ignite Fire Keeper Ritual Performance HERE!
Tracks: (we do not own the rights to this music. Also note, the top notes of all the sound is off in the recording).
"Tucana - Instrumental" by Mt Wolf
"The Forbidden Fruits" by AURORA
"Iko Iko (My Bestie) (feat Small Jam) " by Justin Wellington, Pedro Capo, Small Jam
"Altered Frequencies- Phutureprimitive Edit" by Phutureprimitive, An-ten-nae
"Varshaver - Marvel Years Remix" by Balkan Bump, Marvel Years, CloZee
"Ring of Fire" - Ethos
"Show Me Love" - Hundred Waters
"Imperium" by Madeon
"Free Your Mind" by Big Gigantic, Jennifer Hartswick
"Harmony" by CloZee
"Do You?" by TroyBoi
"Omri" by FEARSTbeats
"Lapis- An-ten-nae Remix" by David Starfire, Shrii, An-ten-nae
"Time + Energy" by pluko
"Corners of the Earth (feat RY X)" by ODESZA, RY X
Original Performance Featuring the members of the Ignite Your Inner Flame Retreat 2022:
Aisha-Zakiya
Amndtrn5thsnd
Amanda "Sphinx" Prentice
Angela "Wild Angel" Alfieri
Bridget Cook
Christina Marie Sprayberry
Erin Grimm
Skyote Guinn
Gabriella Zielke
Gaea Lady
Grace Devalk
Jessica Kirschner
K8 Fuego
Kate Stephens
Katherine Elise
Kelly Kinney
Kiki Mason
Kristin Mackie
Laine Orobana
Laurelle Day "LD" Holley
Liz Campanella Breen
Melissa Robin
Michelle DeSantis
Natalie Stone
Paola Umaña-Vega
Rachel Fry
Sierra Romeo
Tai Kojro-Badziak
Tania "Teeheehee" Hughes
Ten Cano
Teisha Lynne Coleman
Blog content created by Gaea Lady & Kiki Mason
Writing, editing, formatting, and production by Amandatron5thsnd
Photographers: Erin Grimm, Aisha-Zakiya Boyd, Ten Cano, Melissa Robin
