As the calendar turns and a new year approaches, many of us feel the pull to reflect, release, and begin again. Yet modern New Year’s traditions often move quickly, focused on goals, resolutions, and self-improvement, without giving us space to truly mark the threshold we’re crossing. In this episode of The Dancing Willow, Elliott sits down with her Uncle David Elliott for a deep conversation on ceremony, intention, and the living relationships that help us move through life with greater clarity and trust.
Author, teacher and healer David Elliott has spent close to three decades facilitating breathwork and teaching others to do the same. He leads retreats and trainings several times throughout the year, including a retreat during New Year with a focus on ritual and fire. At this retreat, David offers a fire walk that invites participants to consciously release the old and step into what’s next.
The Fire Walk
Fire plays a central role in David’s ceremonial work, especially at the turning of the year. When we approach fire with respect, clarity, and presence, it becomes a teacher, helping us burn away what no longer serves and illuminate what’s ready to emerge.
During the New Years retreat, when snow blankets the ground in the mountains of New Mexico, David leads a fire walk. He exchanges with all of the elements at play in the ceremony long before January 30th, starting with harvesting Aspen wood from his ranch in Tres Piedras. He chooses Aspen for its soft feel under the feet, despite the fact that it burns extra hot. While harvesting the wood, chopping and preparing it for the fire walk, he is constantly asking the wood to turn into “soft buttery coals”.
The day of the fire walk, David sets up a ceremonial circle and when the ritual begins, all participants have space to interact with the fire- burning handfuls of offerings, honoring ancestors or those who have come before, and papers with what they are ready to release or call in.
Once the fire is hot and the group is ready, the fire walk begins. David forms a line of coals while the group stands on either side with their hands up, ready to hold space and keep runners on the path. There is someone (usually a sturdy man) waiting to catch the runners at the end of the fire walk and a group prepared to wash their feet in warm water. The group chants, “My body will do whatever is must to let me walk on fire.” Whenever the person is ready to walk, they will get to the front of the line with David who orients them to not look at the burning hot coals at their feet, but at a star- fire in the sky. Once David feels that they are ready, he changes the chant to the word of that individual’s choosing. These are usually things like love, sacred baby, abundance, courage, trust, the list goes on. As they are marching in place, chanting their word, looking up to the star, when the time is right, David releases them to run across the hot coals.
This act of ritual, transmutation and magnification embeds this experience as a rite of passage taking you from one year into the next with intention. It has been something that has shaped Elliott from year to year, helping to anchor the year.
Beyond Resolutions: Choosing a Word
One of the aspects of the fire walk that can be easily brought into your everyday life is the act of choosing a word. Rather than setting rigid resolutions, choosing a single word to guide the year ahead can be simply transformational. This word is not a demand placed on the future, but an invitation, a compass that gently orients decisions, actions, and attention over time.
Words hold power. They shape how we speak to ourselves, how our nervous system responds to challenge, and how we interpret our experiences. A guiding word allows for flexibility, growth, and deep listening. It meets us where we are, rather than insisting we become someone else overnight.
If you want to magnify your word to help the universe co-create this new vision with you, you could work with simple elements, plants or directions in an at home ceremony.
The Simplicity of Everyday Ceremony
One of the most grounding themes in this conversation is the idea that ceremony doesn’t require elaborate tools or specific traditions. What matters is sincerity and relationship. Ritual can be as simple as lighting a candle, offering gratitude, or stepping outside to acknowledge the land beneath your feet.
David encourages listeners to work with what they already feel connected to, whether that’s fire, water, plants, stones, or the directions. Ceremony becomes meaningful when it arises from genuine relationship rather than imitation. It’s not about doing it “right,” but about doing it honestly.
This perspective opens the door for anyone to create rituals that feel authentic, accessible, and alive, rooted in daily life rather than special occasions alone.
Creating Your Own Threshold Moment
As we stand at the edge of a new year, the invitation is not to rush forward, but to pause long enough to feel where we’ve been and where we’re going. Ceremony, as David shares, is a way of speaking with life itself. It is a living language that reminds us we are not separate from the elements, the land, our ancestors, or the unseen forces that shape our becoming.
You don’t need a fire walk to mark a threshold, though the essence of that ritual can be woven into your own life in quieter ways. Choosing a word, lighting a candle, writing down what you are ready to release and offering it to flame, water, earth, or breath. Standing under the night sky and orienting yourself toward something larger than fear or habit. These acts, when done with presence, have the power to recalibrate the nervous system and clarify intention in a way that goal-setting alone often cannot.
Ceremony slows us down enough to listen. It allows intention to move from the mind into the body, where real change takes root.
Stepping Into the Year Ahead
As you enter the new year, consider what kind of relationship you want to cultivate with yourself, with your work, with the land, with the unseen. What word wants to walk with you? What are you ready to let go of so your hands are free to receive what’s next?
This conversation with David Elliott is a reminder that transformation does not come from pushing harder, but from listening more deeply. Ceremony helps us remember how to do that.
If you’re craving a more embodied, intentional way to begin the year, this episode offers a powerful reframe, one that honors endings, welcomes beginnings, and trusts the wisdom of the body to carry us forward.
Listen to Ceremony as Living Language wherever you tune into The Dancing Willow, and step into the year ahead with presence, reverence, and trust.
Connect with David
- David’s Website- https://www.davidelliott.com/
- Free Breathwork Meditations on Spotify by David: https://open.spotify.com/artist/7lnGKrOWAuKvNoxEleY8Vm?si=FCABvuzQTwi4zWc-h2XP1A
- Freedom from Anxiety Meditation: https://www.davidelliott.com/freedom-from-anxiety/