Why I Jump Out of Airplanes… I Mean, Meditate

Sadly, it’s not to feel better.

Photo by Scott Schell

When I was 19 I was pushed out of an airplane.

Seriously.

It was absolutely terrifying.

When it happened, I was perched in the open door of a perfectly good airplane. The instruction was “Stand, in the door!”

Even typing that I feel a little dizzy.

I was a cadet at the Air Force Academy. This was my first summer of college. We were wearing our green flight suits. Fully harnessed. Helmets. Jump boots. The inside of the plane was bare metal, except for two benches facing each other.

Sitting there, waiting my turn, while the plane slowly completed it’s rotational pattern, no one talked. I literally couldn’t use my mouth. I just sat there watching as my friends, one by one, got sucked out of the open door.

And then it was my turn. My instructor looked at me. And just like we had rehearsed, he pointed at me and shouted, “You!”

And then pointing to the very edge of the door, the ledge of the last thing to hold on to before four thousand feet of wide, open space. “Stand, in the door!”

I crawled. Slowly. Keeping my face as low as I could to the metal floor. I put my right knee right up on the edge of the world as I knew it. My right knee, my right hand, my left foot—were glued to the cold metal. My chest, my belly, my face and my left hand were fully exposed.

I think I passed out.

The training is to count to eleven before you pull your parachute. “Jump one-thousand, two-one-thousand…”

And I pulled. Before I got to three. I only know this because we watched a video after each jump.

The next thing I knew, I was under canopy. I was floating over the Earth, watching it with wonder. It was timeless, and I was right there, present, alive, awake.

And it can feel like this, on our meditation cushion, when we come in contact with our pain and we choose to stay with it.

It’s really something. That moment of standing in the door, of staying on our cushion, of staying with the reality of what is arising — rather than doing anything to get away, it’s really hard.

That feeling at the edge of the airplane, facing that open door—facing that thing, that big nebulous, scary edge. It’s ineffable, but we all know it. It’s just that feeling of bad, right at the center, deep in the core. It’s what drives us to check Facebook, to drink, to smoke, to binge, to purge, to run, to say that nasty thing, to whatever.

And who can blame us. No one wants to feel that. It’s horrible. It’s normal to want to get away from it. Who in their right mind would crawl up to that door, and jump out? Who would acknowledge the fear and the pain, and go into it?

What I’ve learned the hard way, from getting myself to my cushion more often than not, for the better part of going on 20 years now—is that meditating doesn’t always feel good, and that isn’t the point.

Even after all this time. I feel that same blip of fear and resistance. It’s not always this strong, but it’s always there. It doesn’t go away, not completely.

I sit to strengthen my ability to live more and more of my life with the awareness, and the aliveness, I felt in that moment under the canopy — with all of what is so in life.

We sit to build our courage to be with reality, just as it is —rather than spending our precious energy trying to flee from it.

I sit because I know, that on the other side of that door, if I can just make that crawl to the door, is freedom.

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