The Courage To Fly

I hope you'll read my latest piece in our enewsletter about courage.Here is an excerpt of the piece, "I’ve wanted to fly on the trapeze ever since I was a young boy watching my first circus under the Big Top that had been erected in my rural New Hampshire town. Those “daring young men and women” were magical. They defied gravity and soared like birds.But I had a problem: acrophobia, the fear of heights. My condition was not as severe as my mom’s; she couldn’t step onto a stool to change a light bulb. As long as I knew that I was connected to something solid – a bridge, a ledge, or even strapped into a ski-lift chair, I was OK. The condition took hold, however, whenever I so much as thought about parachuting, hang-gliding, or – flying on a trapeze that was higher than a playground swing.Last summer Llyn Roberts and I were teaching a “Shapeshifting” workshop at the Omega Institute in upstate New York. I mentioned that I wanted to add something new to my life. A martial artist for many years, I wanted to try a different sort of challenge.  We were walking across the campus and Llyn pointed at a huge flying trapeze structure that had recently been erected in an open field.“How about that?” she asked.“Wow,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to try it. But I hate heights.”“Perfect,” she grinned.Now here I was, three months later and six decades after seeing my first circus, starting to climb up a narrow ladder to the flyers’ platform, 25 feet above the floor of a warehouse that had been converted into the Emerald City Trapeze School in Seattle WA. I was ready to perform magic, to shapeshift myself into a flying human."Read full newsletter and article "The Courage to Fly" -  here...