I stand on the gritty blue mat that keeps us from bruising ourselves further when our muscles or our brains give out and we fall from the lyra. I’m thinking about those last few seconds I could have held myself up on the lyra while Andy is on to explaining our next aerial feat.

I am snapped out of my whirring brain when the word ‘pike’ is mentioned. My brain scurries and I pay careful attention to the rest of the instructions, hoping to get the gist of what I missed.

“…pike. And then you are going to hang from your knees, pull yourself up the side of the lyra, twist your hips, and sit in the hoop.” Andy is explaining as he demonstrates.

I hang back and watch a couple of women do the move easily but I still am quite leery about this pulling myself up the side of this metal hoop. I step up and hoist myself back up on the lyra and immediately get stuck getting into the pike.

“Crunch your abs” Andy says.

I try but nothing seems to be happening. Where have my abs gone? After several tries hanging and flopping from the hoop trying to get my feet onto the bottom of it and pulled through the space between my head and the hoop, Andy gently helps me. I am so embarrassed to be the one who has to have physical assistance. My fantasy of being proclaimed a natural and begged to become a part of the aerial arts troupe are blown to smithereens.

“You don’t have to do the pike.” Andy says once I get my feet on the bar and I am hanging upside down like a crippled bat.

Have I even exhausted the teacher?

“The heck I don’t.”  I think to myself.  The pike shall not defeat me. I stretch my legs out over my head and behind me and quickly hang my knees over the hoop.

“Okay, now let go and swing yourself up into the hoop.” Andy says.

This seems to be taking much longer than the others took.

I cling to the hoop with a death grip.

“Go ahead. Let go and swing. I will make sure you don’t fall.” He says.

I imagine myself plowing Andy over and belly flopping right on top of him, my squishy mass smashing his graceful muscled body. I try to erase the embarrassing vision from my mind and release my hands.

I swing back and up and catch the hoop surprisingly a good distance up the arc of it. I finally get myself sitting in the hoop and the group claps; I assume in relief that they don’t have to witness any more of my elephantine efforts.

Leave your gun at home.

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot with lofty expectations the first time out of the gate…or even the second or third time. In fact, please, never shoot yourself in the foot. Aim for a reasonable goal and keep it in your sights. In this case, my goal was to just have fun but I blew that out of the water with all of the negative thinking, high expectations, and comparing.

Take a compliment!

Andy encouraged me a lot which I took to mean I was the class dummy; the person everyone feels a bit embarrassed for. A good teacher loves to teach and loves to help you through your learning. When they compliment you, they mean it. When we don’t take compliments it is refusing to accept good thoughts about ourselves and is throwing a gift back at a friend offering gifts. Accept the compliment and thank your teachers. They get a kick out of your success no matter how small the success or how hard you both had to work to get there. Thank you Andy.

Tune in next week for part 4 of Flying Lessons when I meet The Devil Fabric and Lucille Ball and Arnold Schwarzenegger pay me a visit.