Tolly Burkan Creator of the Firewalking Movement

Tolly Burkan is known as the founding father of the international firewalking movement. Tolly’s approach to firewalking has resulted in a global phenomenon of over three million people attending firewalking classes.  Due to his pioneering strategies, firewalking seminars are now regularly offered on six continents.

Since the early 1970s, Tolly has gained his reputation by creating innovative, cutting-edge methods for developing human potential.  In that decade, he also created the world’s first firewalking class and began teaching firewalking to the general public.  In the 1980s, he founded the Firewalking Institute of Research and Education, started working with large corporations and began training instructors.  The nineties and firewalking.com transformed his work into a mushrooming corporate trend. Even companies such as Microsoft, American Express and Met-Life now routinely include firewalking in their executive empowerment seminars.

Tolly has taught firewalking to many celebrities, including Andrew Weil, M.D., Geraldo Rivera and Anthony Robbins. His public seminars have such a broad range of appeal that they draw attendees from across the country and around the world.  Tolly recently demonstrated mind over matter on national television by influencing slot machines in Nevada casinos during one of his peak performance trainings covered by Inside Edition.

In addition to being the first person to ever offer firewalking in public seminars, Tolly Burkan was also the first person to offer public seminars that taught ordinary people to walk unharmed, barefooted on shards of broken glass, the first to teach public classes that included metal bar bending, barehanded brick breaking, arrow snapping and many other esoteric practices usually reserved for a select few. Tolly emphasizes that all these displays of personal power are merely external metaphors reflecting an inner state of heightened awareness and empowerment.

Tolly has authored seven books that are available in many languages, and has been featured in over 50 books, hundreds of magazines and newspapers, and on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.  He regularly appears on all major television networks and has been a guest on Donahue, Regis and Geraldo.