With three near-death experiences, three marriages, three art careers, and a passion for walking on fire, Lakeside resident Ted Shaw has got a story or two to tell.
Shaw and his wife Ana own Fusions Art Gallery in San Antonio Tlayacapan, showcasing their artwork along with other local talent. They also happen to be life coaches. When people ask Shaw what he does, he replies, “I am many things to many people.”
While working part-time for corporate America, Shaw was busy nights and weekends painting and selling his paintings. Living and raising a family in the small refinery town of Pasadena, Texas, he and his family then moved to Ft. Worth where Shaw worked for a sign company, eventually creating his own successful business.
At the height of his career, Shaw’s life imploded. “My marriage failed, and during that process I realized I had become tired of being creative on demand. My children were grown and out of the house, so I just packed everything – including all of my artwork – sold a bunch of my equipment, and went back to my hometown of Pasadena.” Once there, he joined his brother’s roofing business. The business was successful, but along came an unfortunate blow: His brother got cancer and died within the same year.
That traumatic experience created another chance for Shaw to start over again – this time in sales. Once again, having reached a place of success teaching sales techniques, his life took yet another major turn with his second divorce. “She emptied my bank account and I was left with nothing.” Shaw goes on. “If I hadn’t have had three boys alive on this planet, I would have pulled the trigger.”
Having journeyed through that dark time, he realized that she was the best worst thing that ever happened to him, since it brought him to look inside himself. “It took me a year to recover. I thought, if I’m not going to kill myself, I may as well get up, dust myself off and see what I can do. As a child, my mother used to tell me to pay attention to my imagination. I now can see that I was quite metaphysical back then, but my community could not support that notion, so I put it aside and didn’t pay anymore attention to it.”
Shaw recalls hearing about fire walking and while searching for information, found a fire walking website. He talked with the instructor and showed up at the next fire walking event, looking for “a great spiritual awakening.”
Fire walkers don’t actually walk on fire; they walk over embers that are 1,200-degree Fahrenheit. Shaw stood by the row of embers and listened to the instructor say, “I’m just the facilitator. I’m here to make it as safe as possible, but the fire is going to be your teacher. The fire is an elemental force of nature. It’s not like people. People will lie and deceive. Elemental forces of nature do not. So if the fire invites you to walk, it’s not going to burn you.”
As crazy as this sounded to him, Shaw decided to give it a go. “If the fire invites you,” says the instructor, “you’ll feel it pull you into the fire. But, make sure it’s not your ego talking. If it’s the fire, you’ll feel an urging from the back.”
Says Shaw: “I stood beside the fire. It was dark. There were these red hot embers. All of a sudden I felt like I was going to lose my balance and fall forward. I caught myself. Wow, what was that? I felt the same urging from the back. The next thing I knew, I was on the other side of the fire. I spun around. What just happened?”
Eager to repeat what just happened, Shaw found a place on the edge of the fire. “My ego kicked in and I thought, I don’t need an invitation, I can walk anytime I want to. So, I started walking, and then – ouch – I got my first ‘fire kiss’ on my foot. Embarrassed, I managed to get off those embers as quickly as I could, grateful for the cool grass. The fire master appeared next to me and whispered, ‘The fire will tolerate no arrogance.’”
That night, Shaw didn’t have a great spiritual awakening, but a great experience. So he began attending their monthly events. “I would carry wood, clean the fires; do whatever I could to be around that energy, around those people, around that philosophy, and around that elemental force.” Shaw is now one of the few master fire walking instructors worldwide.
Years later, a dream that Shaw had during a feverish strep throat episode and near-death experience brought him back into his art. “In my dream I was standing in front of an easel and within a crowd of people, and I’m painting abstract circles full of color. I would hand them to people and they would look at them and connect with these colors, and get clarity about decisions they’d been struggling with.
“I was in this place where energy was moving. I saw people as color – and it was amazing. I felt so great in this dream, especially when I watched people connect with those colors and the changes it made in their lives.”
Thus began Shaw’s third art career: painting aural portraits. He also happens to be a life coach. “Our minds are way more powerful than we realize,” he says. “I teach people through fire walking, through aural portraits, through every channel that I can tap into. I teach them to get in touch with their minds, because if you can get control of your mind, you can do miracles.”
Fusion Art Gallery, Centro Laguna L-13, Carretera Chapala-Jocotepec 206, San Antonio Tlayacapan. See Fusion-art-gallery.com.