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Your Burning Man self,
this week.
Bonfire Pulse is a weekly self-portrait through the 10 Principles of Burning Man — Larry Harvey's 2004 articulation of the ethos that built Black Rock City. Sunday at 06:00 UTC, Bonfiyah re-scores your alignment using last week's library entries. One principle becomes this week's Focus. Three Practice Moves follow. A reflection tool, not a verdict.
Fair-use disclaimer. Bonfiyah is not affiliated with or endorsed by Burning Man Project. The 10 Principles of Burning Man were written by Larry Harvey in 2004 and are presented here under fair use for educational and personal-development purposes. The canonical source is burningman.org/about-us/10-principles/.
Why a self-reflection tool, and why this scaffold.
Bonfiyah's library is a year of conversations. A year of conversations is, among other things, a record of how you actually showed up — what you gave, what you withheld, what you participated in, what you opted out of. That record contains information that a calendar entry, a journal page, or a self-report survey cannot reach. The information sits inside what you said, on whose behalf, and in what spirit.
Bonfire Pulse exists because that information is most useful when it lands as a weekly reflection prompt rather than a 6,000-word retrospective. The 10 Principles of Burning Man sit at the right altitude for the prompt — concrete enough to score against, broad enough to apply to a doctor's appointment, a family dinner, a fundraising pitch, or a difficult conversation with a sibling. The framework was written for a city that exists for one week a year; it scales surprisingly well to a personal life lived in calendar weeks.
This is not a personality framework, not an ideology, and not a religion. It's a set of communal commitments — Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-Reliance, Radical Self-Expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation, Immediacy — that have proven durable across two decades of Burning Man and across the broader regional-event ecosystem. We use them as a reflective scaffold because they cohere, because they translate, and because they avoid the diagnostic register that other frameworks force.
The 10 Principles
Larry Harvey, 2004. Verbatim.
The principles below are reproduced from burningman.org/about-us/10-principles/ as written by Larry Harvey in 2004. Bonfiyah is not affiliated with Burning Man Project; the principles are presented under fair use for educational and personal-development purposes.
Principle 1
Radical Inclusion
"Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community."
Principle 2
Gifting
"Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value."
Principle 3
Decommodification
"In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience."
Principle 4
Radical Self-Reliance
"Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on their inner resources."
Principle 5
Radical Self-Expression
"Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient."
Principle 6
Communal Effort
"Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction."
Principle 7
Civic Responsibility
"We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws."
Principle 8
Leaving No Trace
"Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them."
Principle 9
Participation
"Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart."
Principle 10
Immediacy
"Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience."
Source: Harvey, L. (2004). The 10 Principles of Burning Man. Burning Man Project. burningman.org/about-us/10-principles/. Reproduced under fair use for educational and personal-development purposes.
How a week works.
Step 1 · Sunday 06:00 UTC
The backend re-scores
All library entries from the prior calendar week (Monday 00:00 UTC through Sunday 05:59 UTC) are passed to the LLM with the 10-Principle rubric and your accepted AI consent posture. The model returns a 0–100 score per principle plus a one-sentence rationale anchored in specific quotes.
Step 2 · The radar
A ten-axis self-portrait
The iOS app renders a radar chart with one axis per Principle. Tap any principle to see the rationale and the quotes that drove the score. The radar shows this week's read overlaid on the four-week trailing average, so movement is legible at a glance.
Step 3 · This week's Focus
One principle, chosen for movement
The principle with the largest week-over-week delta (positive or negative) becomes the Focus. Not the lowest score — the most movement. The Focus card shows the principle, the delta, the rationale, and a quote that anchors it.
Step 4 · Three Practice Moves
5 min · 30 min · stretch once
A daily 5-minute move, a weekly 30-minute move, and a "stretch once" move are generated for the week's Focus. Each carries check-off / snooze / dismiss controls. Snoozed moves resurface next week; dismissed moves don't come back.
Composite bands
Apprentice · Initiate · Practitioner · Adept.
The composite weekly score (equal-weight mean of the ten principle scores) lands in one of four bands. The bands are intentionally non-judgmental — most weeks for most people land in Initiate or Practitioner, and that's the point. The bands exist so movement across a quarter is legible, not so any single week reads as a grade.
0–34
Apprentice
Showing up. The week's recordings cohere weakly with the principles — usually a logistics-heavy week, a difficult stretch, or a quiet one. Not a problem; a signal.
35–59
Initiate
Engaging. Several principles register clearly; others sit quiet. Typical week for most people doing real work in the world.
60–79
Practitioner
Steady. Most principles register clearly across the week. The Focus tends to surface as a fine-tuning, not a course correction.
80–100
Adept
Rare and usually contextual — a workshop week, a retreat week, an event week. The Focus tends to surface where you're at risk of trading one principle for another.
2026 annual theme
Axis Mundi — the world-axis overlay.
Burning Man Project announces an annual theme each year. The 2026 theme is Axis Mundi — the cosmological idea of the world-axis, the point where heaven, earth, and underworld meet. The image is the centre-pole, the mountain, the tree, the spine.
Bonfire Pulse layers a quarterly reflection prompt tied to the annual theme on top of the weekly radar. The 2026 quarterly prompts orient around grounding, verticality, and the relationship between everyday practice and what one is aimed at. The overlay is a one-screen reflection that surfaces every thirteen weeks; it doesn't change the principle scores.
The annual theme overlay rotates with the canonical Burning Man theme each year. We don't generate themes ourselves — that's Burning Man Project's role.
Privacy posture.
Scoring runs server-side. All Bonfire Pulse inference happens on Bonfiyah's backend. The iOS app renders the radar, the Focus card, and the three Practice Moves — it does not run the LLM itself.
No new consent surface. The content fed to the LLM is whatever you've already accepted for AI processing under Bonfiyah's existing AI consent flow. No separate consent is required for Bonfire Pulse.
No third-party tracking. Bonfire Pulse adds no analytics, no telemetry, and no third-party calls beyond the existing AI provider Bonfiyah already uses for cross-recording inference.
Entries are deletable at any time. Delete a library entry and it is excluded from all future Bonfire Pulse runs. Past scores are not retroactively recomputed; you can wipe the entire Bonfire Pulse history via Settings → Privacy → Delete Bonfire Pulse history. Deleting your account cascades and removes Bonfire Pulse history as part of the standard account-deletion flow.
Off-switch in Settings. Settings → Notifications & AI exposes a per-feature Run + Notify toggle for Bonfire Pulse. Run off disables the Sunday scoring entirely; Notify off keeps the scoring but suppresses the morning push.
What Bonfire Pulse is — and isn't — for.
It is for: a weekly reflection prompt anchored in your own conversations. A check on whether the week looked the way you wanted it to. A way of noticing patterns over a quarter that are hard to see from inside any single week. A scaffold for personal-development practice that doesn't require a self-report survey or a journaling habit.
It is not for: clinical assessment, therapeutic intervention, self-diagnosis, or assessment of other people. Bonfire Pulse is explicitly a personal-development reflection tool. The scores are best read as week-over-week movement and a prompt for reflection — not as a verdict on character, values, or wellbeing. If you are working through anything that warrants clinical attention, please speak with a licensed professional.
The 10 Principles are a set of communal commitments, not a personality framework or a moral hierarchy. A low score on Decommodification this week does not mean you are a worse person than someone with a high score; it usually means you spent the week negotiating a contract, which is exactly the kind of thing the principle is in tension with by design.
Fair-use disclaimer.
Bonfiyah is not affiliated with or endorsed by Burning Man Project. The 10 Principles of Burning Man were written by Larry Harvey in 2004 and are presented here under fair use for educational and personal-development purposes. The canonical source is burningman.org/about-us/10-principles/.
"Burning Man" and the 10 Principles are the property of Burning Man Project. Bonfiyah uses the framework as a reflective scaffold for personal development; we do not assert any affiliation, endorsement, or commercial relationship. If you are involved in producing Burning Man or a regional event and want to discuss the framing, please reach [email protected].
FAQ
What is Bonfire Pulse?
A weekly self-portrait through the 10 Principles of Burning Man. Sunday at 06:00 UTC, Bonfiyah re-scores your alignment 0–100 per principle using last week's library entries, picks one principle as the week's Focus, and proposes three Practice Moves (daily 5 min, weekly 30 min, stretch once). A personal-development reflection tool — not a clinical or therapeutic instrument.
Is Bonfire Pulse affiliated with Burning Man Project?
No. Bonfiyah is not affiliated with or endorsed by Burning Man Project. The 10 Principles of Burning Man were written by Larry Harvey in 2004 and are presented under fair use for educational and personal-development purposes. The canonical source is burningman.org/about-us/10-principles/.
What is the 2026 "Axis Mundi" overlay?
Each year Burning Man Project announces an annual theme. The 2026 theme is Axis Mundi — the cosmological idea of the world-axis. Bonfire Pulse surfaces a quarterly reflection prompt tied to the annual theme, layered on top of the weekly radar. The 2026 quarterly prompts orient around grounding, verticality, and the relationship between everyday practice and what one is aimed at.
Is this a clinical or therapeutic instrument?
No. Bonfire Pulse is explicitly a personal-development reflection tool. It is not a clinical or therapeutic instrument and is not intended for self-diagnosis or assessment of other people. If you are working through anything that warrants clinical attention, please speak with a licensed professional.
Where does the scoring run? What touches my library content?
All scoring runs server-side on Bonfiyah's backend. The iOS app renders the radar, the Focus card, and the Practice Moves — it does not run the LLM itself. The content fed to the LLM is whatever you've already accepted under the existing AI consent; no separate consent is required. Off-switch in Settings → Notifications & AI.
Can I delete my Bonfire Pulse history?
Yes — Settings → Privacy → Delete Bonfire Pulse history wipes every prior week's radar, Focus, and Practice Moves from your account and Bonfiyah's backend. The source library entries are untouched. Deleting your account cascades and removes Bonfire Pulse history as part of the standard account-deletion flow.
What are the tier bands?
Composite weekly score (equal-weight mean of the ten) maps to four non-judgmental bands: Apprentice (0–34), Initiate (35–59), Practitioner (60–79), Adept (80–100). Most weeks for most people land in Initiate or Practitioner, by design — the bands are for legibility across a quarter, not for grading a week.
Tell me when Bonfire Pulse adds the quarterly Axis Mundi prompt
The Q2 2026 prompt lands on June 22. Subscribe and we'll send you the prompt and the methodology note when it ships.
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