by Alex Ratcliffe
When I was a young woman I was involved in a serious car accident in which my lung collapsed and I was given the Last Rights by a priest. I was not expected to live. Years later, my mum was seriously hurt in a train accident at which I was present.
And I seem to have been born with some anxiety about water. That doesn’t leave too many modes of travel in which I’m likely to feel safe.
I have travelled around the world and across the globe numerous times. For many years I lived in Australia where travelling vast distances is the norm.
Then, in December 1988, I was booked on a Pan Am flight from London to New York for Christmas. I was taking my newly-born first child home to meet my parents.
For some reason I changed my plan and booked instead onto British Airways. There was little difference between the flights in cost or arrival times and they took off within hours of each other, so I don’t know why I changed my mind. At that time, it wasn’t as if I had a fear of flying.
However, landing in New York on Dec. 21, 1988 just after Pan Am had crashed in Lockerbie, was traumatic. The trauma continued insofar as the many friends and family who thought we were on that Pan Am flight were phoning in their shock and condolences to my home in New York. Oddly enough for them and for me, I was answering the phone.
When something like this happens, I‘m not sure if you fully register it at the time. It’s in the days, months and years following that the true import of what happened starts to play into your deepest consciousness. And further, I simply felt I had no need to board a plane anymore. The occasion just didn’t arise after one more flight with the second child.
However, after 23 years, the desire and the opportunity to fly across the Atlantic arose. And with that desire, and the ensuing plan, arose a whole host of past demons to thwart and rob me of many nights’ peaceful sleep and even of many peaceful days.
“Feel the fear and do it anyway” just doesn’t work when you view something as a possible life or death decision. Oh, really, just jump? Rather, my thoughts were: Do I have to do this? Do I need to do this? I have always maintained that most people do not “need” to fly, so why do they? “Stay on the ground where you’re safe” was my motto. I have tried to study the psyche and the psychology of those who earn their living and have careers in the air. Do they not live in fear every day? Apparently, they don’t. And I know many people, perhaps most people, who have an attitude of “when it’s going to happen it’s going to happen, and there’s nothing you can do about it”. Since 1988, I simply haven’t had that comfort. Didn’t I ultimately make the decision that allowed my family to live? I wrestled with that sense of responsibility for many long years.
Point One about Mindfulness: Often, when you decide to come into the moment, and not live in your mind, thoughts and anxieties, you discover energy and powers become available that are there to support you. I find that is the very first step: the decision.
Eckhart Tolle once said, “Narrow your life down to moments. Do you have a problem in this moment?” To me, that is my practice of mindfulness for dealing with a problem, a situation, a fear, and so I applied it to this. As Scarlett O’Hara said when Tara lay burning behind her: “I won’t think about it today, I’ll think about it tomorrow”. As tomorrow becomes today, you don’t have to think about it then, either. This works and it is a magnificent Mindfulness practice.
Over the years, this is what I found in my practice: Whatever you are doing, there is a point of focus in the Now and if we rest our attention on that point, for whatever period of time we can manage, we are being Mindful. I may be chopping vegetables, or working, or going for a walk, or cleaning the house, but at every moment and activity, there is an opportunity to be mindful, to allow the mind to rest on a point in the present, to literally let go and surrender the past and future and the whole habit of functioning in “absence”. My experience is that Mindfulness “works” because when we are present and mindful we are connected with Life. You can call it the Energy of Life or the Stream of Life. That’s why things feel clearer and lighter.
But to use this practice over a period of days, weeks and months in preparation for an event is rather an extended and extensive period of time for practising mindfulness. And here is how it worked for me, using the principle of “separate your life into moments”:
The booking of the ticket is a moment. The packing of the clothes and the buying of the luggage are moments. Every endless detail in preparation for a journey, every consideration, is a moment. Separate those moments. Eckhart says if you see your life as if written on a scroll being unfurled, opening sideways, you don’t get tempted to unroll the past or the future bit. Focus on the one page, the one bit revealed, right in front of you. I use this mindfulness practice when approaching any situation full of anticipatory angst.
Anticipation, anxiety, worry, fear – they happen; yet they are fed and blown out of proportion by absence. However, I’ve learned they can take their appropriate place via mindfulness.
This takes practice and I am not suggesting it is easy but, in those 23 years, I had a lot of opportunities to learn and practise mindfulness, for it to be tested. This is why I feel mindfulness is so important for young people; it doesn’t happen overnight. Yet “no effort is ever lost”.
Personally, boarding the plane (actually 4 planes) and sitting for hours on board, even waiting for hours when one flight was delayed, all involved breaking up that life experience into chunks of moments of mindfulness. When you lose it and you’re off and worrying, come back. There is always something in front of you to give your full, mindful attention to. Human beings are there to connect with; such happiness can arise in a mindful moment of human interaction. And again for me personally, mindfulness means not letting the fear get in in the first place. I just have to work in that way.
The thing about mindfulness practice is that it grows and feeds off itself. This mindful moment of showing your passport, checking your luggage, walking through the door adds to the next mindful moment. And the thing about fear is that it too grows and is fed by other energies. I can’t let the demon of past experience, conditioning or indeed the whole world’s fears, get its foot in the door of my emotional field. So I choose Mindfulness, the moment in front of me.
I didn’t pray continually; I didn’t practise mind gym or tap my forehand. I just tried to live each moment as if it was my last, without fear. Why don’t we live like that? Cherish every good thing about every moment, as if it was precious. Come out of one’s mind and give attention.
Eventually it happens that there is no room for fear. Coming out of the Mind you enter Fullness, and Let Go of everything else. That’s what I practised. And I had so much fun, such great flights, and no fear at all. I almost don’t know how it happened because I wasn’t thinking about it! A friend asked, “Were you terrified when you got on that plane?” Terror didn’t get its chance, thankfully.
I may never “conquer” the fear of flying which I know people can do, or the fear of sudden death, which I know is behind it. For one reason or another, I have not availed myself of more “permanent” solutions: doing a fear of flying course, EFT training or regression therapy to get at the source of my fears.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be free of fears, large or small. But I know from practice and experience that I can break down any situation as it takes place or as anticipation arises, into smaller chunks of moments, and each moment presents an opportunity to be mindful. And in that moment, I am free.
Find Alexandra on Twitter: @AlexandraBeetle
Alexandra’s other Huffington Post blogs can be found here.
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Increased mindfulness is a great step forward in dealing with fear of flying. Yet, we need to be mindful that fear can be produced outside of mind. When the plane drops in turbulence, processes completely outside of conscious cause the release of stress hormones. If the plane drops only once, fear doesn’t build up. But when there is one drop after another, fear can grow in panic or terror. The amygdala can be trained to not release stress hormones in turbulence. The training is spelled out in “SOAR: The Breakthrough Treatment for Fear of Flying,” named recently “Amazon Editors’ Favorite 2014 Book.”