My Skydiving Adventure Taught Me About Fear.

They say when you repeat a thought pattern often enough, you create neural pathways in the brain that, over time, can develop into deep grooves of habitual thinking.  The deeper those grooves become, the harder it is to change.  Many times a habitual thought pattern is born as a result of a powerful stimulus that overrides the system, and when we become overwhelmed in this way there is just enough confusion created to cause us to keep thinking about the event, over and over again.  As a result of that intense focus, and the strong emotions that usually accompany it, a neural pathway is either born, or becomes much more deeply entrenched into our psyche.  And suddenly those thoughts become part of the filter through which we see the world. 

So if a strong enough stimulus can affect us in such a way, why not use this knowledge to our advantage?  This is what prompted me one day to stop in my tracks and say out loud, “I am going skydiving.”  I could hear the surprise in my own voice when I said the words.  I had a full ten days after booking my jump to allow my head to come up with a creative enough excuse that I could justify changing my mind without losing face.  But my motivation was clear.  My skydiving adventure would serve as a microcosm of my whole life, and I would use it to observe my own mind.  Would I contract when faced with fear, or expand?  Would I allow the fear to be bigger than me, or would I allow myself to become bigger than the fear? 

Over the ten days I observed the stories my mind started to weave, such as “it’s too expensive and I can’t afford it right now,” and “I’m too busy to take the time off for this”, to “what if I end up horribly disfigured or…dead?”  But because I intentionally brought into the experience a conscious awareness of all the ways my mind would chew on this, I simply observed my thoughts instead of feeding them.  I thought, “that’s just fear Erica, you can choose not to feed it.”  Each time I interrupted the fear-based thought midstream and replaced it with a more empowering one.  I kept visualizing myself standing at the doorway of the plane just before the jump, and knew that in that moment I would have to embrace trust, and then let go.  If I could do that in the face of such a powerful stimulus, surely I could parlay that into other areas of my life.  And it only took a couple of times before I witnessed my mind already creating a new neural pathway.  It became easier and easier to recognize the fear and redirect my thoughts. 

Because of that intention, fear never got a chance to get a foothold, and each day I could feel my excitement, not my fear, building.  And although the jump was truly a rush, it was actually everything I experienced within myself leading up to it that was most memorable.   Standing in the doorway of the plane I didn’t feel any fear, only exhilaration, because the fear had already been faced and I was then free to just be in the moment and experience the fullness of it.  Amazing. 

And so it is with life.  If we can become conscious enough of our thoughts to notice when fear has burrowed its way to the surface, we can decide if we want to feed it or not.  Do we want to nurture the fear and allow it to overwhelm us and rob us of our freedom, or do we want to expand and become bigger than the fear and feel the liberation that comes with that?  And what would happen if we started doing that consciously everyday?  In the beginning it might take some focused effort, but then once that thinking takes root and is nurtured a couple of times, this new possibility can blossom into reality. 

Comments

[F. Chino Batista]

Hi Erica,
WOW!!! This article is very inspirational. I wish I could portray everything that you wrote about visually but we all decipher information differently. This has helped me understand that good and bad habits could be altered to change ones life. It also helps me tell a better story with the footage that I have. You inspire Erica!

Namaste, Blue Skies and all that good stuff LOL

Chino