It started on the night of June 6, 2000. I was asleep and I heard this beeping noise. I lived with six roommates in a large two-story house, so hearing someone’s alarm clock or some other disturbance at 3:20 AM wouldn’t be unusual. I saw one of my roommates running up the stairs. She said in a very flat voice, ‘Fire.’

Everything happened very fast. I got our roommates out of the house and made it out to the street, literally by the skin of our teeth. Very small injuries, but we made it out. 64 fire fighters. The place was destroyed. Every single possession gone. Very tragic, as you can imagine, to wake up in it and to survive.

I had two epiphanies out of it. The first was in the immediate days following the fire. I realized that because you have nothing, you have everything. Everything I lost was just stuff. I had my family and friends and life and health. That was all that mattered. That was my first aha.

My second aha took many years to evolve because of my fear of fire. If my friends had a candle, I’d have to ask them to put it out. Being in a house with a fireplace was out of the question. At night I’d wake up several times, checking the stove and the iron and the pilot light. It took me five years to warm up, pun intended, to being around fire again, but the fear wasn’t gone.

So I got this wacky idea. What if I pushed through that and became friends with fire?

I had friends who were fire dancers. I had been a dancer my whole life. I said, ‘Ok, maybe I could take on this new form of dance called Poi, where you spin flaming balls around your body. I’ll just learn first without fire.’ After about eight months, I finally made the choice to light them. That was a huge aha moment for me.

Someone once said to me, ‘Courage isn’t the absence of fear, it’s action in the face of it.’ Moving through that fear to the other side is such a beautiful thing.

Now, I teach and perform fire dancing. I still have that fear every time I light up my poi. It’s like skydiving. You’re out of the plane, thinking, ‘Why am I doing this? This is crazy. I’m spinning fire around my body. It took everything I own from me.’ And yet I have this feeling of joy. Being able to dance with something that’s so dangerous and scary. And then to be able to bring joy to other people? That’s a huge gift.

Aha moments are available to us often in our lives. Mine gave me the opportunity to start over. To reboot. I think the key is opening yourself to it, listening, and being aware of what life is trying to tell you. It’s extending these little invitations. In my case, it was a daunting and scary one.

But I said, all right, I’m going to take it on. Why not?