On my blog entry entitled Healing Metaphor: Riding on an Airplane, a reader posted the following comment:
With all deference to your metaphor (it was wonderful, btw!), as someone with a crippling phobia of flying, I am asking you to please do a blog post soon on how you overcame this fear. ~ Karen
I am not saying this will work for anyone else, but this completely cured me of my fear of flying…
A few years ago, I was spending a lot of time in yoga and meditation as I explored what it feels like to stay present. I encountered different people who believed in past lives and reincarnation, which I thought was a bunch of bunk for two reasons: 1. I had been raised Protestant and was taught that this life is my only shot; and 2. As someone who was struggling with suicidal urges as I healed from child abuse, I didn’t even want to complete THIS life much less come back for more!
I was going to be flying soon and was COMPLETELY FREAKING OUT about it. I decided I had enough with my fear of flying and just wanted to understand why – Was I abused on an airplane? Was I dropped as a baby? Was an airplane a metaphor for being out of control of where I was going? (The last one was the explanation I was leaning toward.) I prayed that G*d would show me why so I could work on healing it, and this is what happened…
I began my meditation with the intention of dismantling my reason for being afraid to fly and regressed into flashes of memories from a past life (what I suspect was my last life). I was in a man’s body and saying goodbye to the woman I loved as I boarded the plane. The plane was over water (I was always more fearful of flying over water) when it began to shake and started going down. Other people were screaming, but I knew there was nothing I could do. I saw her face as the land came rapidly toward the window.
Then, I was floating away from the wreckage, and I was completely OK. I was slowly returning to wherever souls come from – floating upward as I looked at the wreckage in a detached way. I was calm and peaceful. The best way I can describe the feeling is knowing at a heart level that I am OK.
I was a bit freaked out by this meditation because it forced me to question everything I had ever been taught about my faith. I wasn’t sure if I could believe it. I figured that my upcoming plane trip would answer some questions, and I was right. The next time I flew, which included flying over water, I was 100% calm and OK. Just like that – in an instant – a lifetime phobia of flying was simply GONE.
Even more important than losing the phobia of flying was losing the fear of death. More on that topic tomorrow…
Photo credit: Hekatekris
Thank you for posting this. I flew for years with fear; then, while in the first years of a 20-year-long extremely violent, abusive marriage, I developed this awful phobia. I’ve now been divorced for almost 17 years and have not even attempted to fly due to past horrible experiences (shaking uncontrollably on a plane, nearly passing out, etc.). I look forward to your next post on the fear of death.
I do not seek to process past lives rather I do not prevent it. It just happens.
It happens many ways and often in a state when I am laying down. Often when taking a nap when I am not tired. When I practiced meditation it got in my way, One of the ways the instruction got in my way was falling “asleep” was seen as negative which is what I needed to do. I go with if you meditate and go to sleep than that is what you should do. Staying present is not what I needed. This may change. I do not think so.
It can happen when I am walking. Once I was walking on top of the snow crust. i shielded my eyes and it felt like the earth was moving underneath me. Once that happened it started happening when I walked anywhere. The beach is an easy place.
It happens swimming sometimes. I am in the same place and the water is moving.
I do what I call sailing a bridge. I go to the edge of the bridge and shield my eyes looking at the water with a no dominant eye. It feels like the bridge and I are going upstream. I have to have part of the bridge in my vision or I start to feel like I am going up the river and that leads to astral projection which is hard for me if I am standing in that my body is not connected to this world so I may mess up in this world.
I learned to sail a bridge when I was 14. It was my first summer free of extreme trauma as I had moved. I went off the bridge and onto the rocks below and it hurt. Then I came back. This was from a fall from a past life. I then had no fear of heights and actually worked as a steel working hanging steel beams. Red iron worker or connectors are we are known. I was not that good at it and stopped. Actually I came to understand that I might fall.
This is not unlike when a car moves beside you and you feel like you are moving. What is different is I do not slam on the brakes.
Sometimes it is weird like when I knew how to throw a pot on a potters wheel. I picked up a bow and arrow and could shoot with out effort and I do not sight down the arrow I just see the arrow hitting the target. This can get confused with the MKUTRA training. I could shoot a pistol the same way. I was trained to fence and throw knives. Some of these things feel like past lives. I do know my body and not experienced the electric shocks or the drugs in past lives.
I did things in my past life that were very wrong for my soul. Those have to be processed. For me most of what I process is about relationships including my relationship to the world at the time.
I do not need any instruction or guide I just know that. I stay away from enlightened people telling me how to be like them. Ironically this might be as I was an Imam and I remember I was faking it. In this life IMAM means to me “I am a Menace.” I remember that some people saw through me as an Imam and those are the people I seek now.
I am a spiritual being having a human experience not a human who sometimes has spiritual experiences. I do not know if that is true for anyone else and it does not matter to me. I do learn and grow when people share about themselves. When they tell me about me it aggravates me as they are always wrong. Their being wrong exceeded only by their confidence they are correct. It seems to increase with degrees.
That is intense. You are so lucky that you can tap into that part of yourself or of consciousness or whatever it is.
Great post.
peace,
m
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