The vaster perspectives provoked by flying

Flying frequently takes me into an alternate reality. When I feel the weather will provide a view to the ground, I will often select a window seat and then gaze out taking in the landscape until I get swept into a perspective that encompasses so much more than ordinary feet-on-the-earth reality. When I sense the muse surfacing, responding to my willingness, spaciousness, and availability, I’ll smile and soften some more, closing off my sensory awareness of the people packed in around me and submitting to the drone engines and the vibrations of the plane. It’s not just window seats that activate me; the middle seat and aisle seats have had their dance with my muse as well.

Once as I flew across the country my seat was right behind the wing and the vapor from the cloud we were skimming was flowing off the wing and being transformed into a circular rainbow. I gazed into the image transfixed for hours.

Many of you might have read my LCUPCD poem written quite some time ago now from a middle seat squished between to robust passengers.  Practicing without practicing, sitting with only the ability to move my fingers on the keyboard, writing this poem provided a window of opportunity to honor the images and sensations that had been appearing in my home practice for quite some time. When standing and practicing the normal way, I had felt that it would be disrespectful to the practice, to the flow happening within me, and the grace of the arising and descending images, if I stopped and sought out words of labeling or describing that would freeze frame sensations that were so alive, embracing and fluid. As I closed my eyes to begin my visualization practice of the form I realized it was the perfect time to practice with my fingers seeking the words.

Between Heaven and Earth LINK to the poem

Another powerful poem fragment with deep meaning for me came as the plane carrying me away from my grieving daughter took off through the storm clouds over Pittsburgh. We had all been shaken to the core by my son-in-law’s sudden death, and finally, the time had come for me to leave her to carry on with her new life path as a young widow with a 5-year-old boy and a 3-year-old girl to journey with.  The lift off of a plane naturally is a strong shift in energetic, as is the process of dying and leaving others behind. Passing both through a storm of weather out the plane window and the storm breaking my own heart open with full throttle sobbing, the plane and my spirit eventually pierced the turbulence and found refuge in the bright blue of the sky.

            Lift Off  Link to poem fragment from Journal

Five years have now passed since the incomplete draft of Lift Off, and 10 since the more finishes poem Between Heaven and Earth. Many times the muse has its way with me and I enter into a deep time of prayer, communion or reflection that never finds its way into a poem.  Now and then I even procrastinate on a piece of writing I feel stirring that I know will benefit from an upcoming flight. That was the case recently as I was moving through the various phases of letting go of a job that was so much more than a job with Master Mingtong Gu.

In Qigong terms, I was struggling to release the informational structure and shift the energetic patterns created during a 10-year journey with Wisdom Healing Qigong.  Letting go does not need to mean leaving. I knew that spiritually I had the answers I sought within me. There were clues from my post-death experiences with Andy (my son-in-law) that were waiting to be applied to this current challenge.  What I needed was quiet time and the big picture perspective.  The first leg of my flight to Mexico in January provided me that opportunity. 

            Cords Dissolving Link to the unfinished poem. 

On my recent flight to China, I spent most of the journey grateful for three seats in a row at the back of the plane where I could stretch out into a “sleep”. I had the series of Mingjue meditations (by Zhineng Qigong Teacher Wei) on activating deep awareness within the body cued up and surrendered to the vibrations gently jostling me. My strong purpose was to sleep as much as possible, yet the muse played with the meditations and entered. Noticing, I welcomed it to penetrate deep into my psyche and imprint the perspective it was showing me. Let's see if I can find any words now, several days later … 

I was traveling through time zones, suspended over oceans of living waters, high above the clouds, circling the earth. Opening to a perspective that has a whole different orbit, a different spin. I found myself in a dimension that was not oriented to the earth, yet included it.

Of course, the Earth guides our purpose, we are held to it; claimed by it, dedicated to it with our embodiment, with the gravity that would call the plane (and my body) to it if the other forces and flows in play ceased. We are of the earth, no doubt. AND, here in this particular moment while flying I was opening to a boundless state of awareness inside myself, I was finding the “gravitational pull” on my spirit was emanating from my own center.

This was not a physically based gravitational source calling me home or grounding me. It was more of a black hole of deep surrender. Surrender out of which would germinate a new reference system, a shifting to a new dimension of myself.

I felt unconditionally open to any outcome and totally unbounded by our linear sense of time and purpose in the sense of getting anything done. I was relaxed and both new and ancient simultaneously. Only one aspect of me was the entity (Judy or Guma) that was living out this story by doing her best.

My sense of place or purpose had but did not need, any earth related grounding. I was noticing that it seemed instead to draw from a more primal or originating source, which was also the very source of this state of awareness I found myself within. It was my awareness, my consciousness itself that I had merged with. I was not observing it, or being moved by it, or laughing with it. I was it. I suspect this is what some call the “I AM” state.

I was surrounded by an awareness of “self” stretching abundantly into the beyond. A sense of orientation in spacious awareness, which in only one direction included the earth and my life there. There were so many other directions of the beyond that included me in their embrace.

I was between here and there. Between my past and my future. Between the known of home and the unknown of this pilgrimage to Qigong heartland of China. I was completely without my past and without my future. I was drifting in and out of sleep, nudged by the words of the meditation to continuously chanting of “ShenJi, ShenJi, ShenJi.” I was finding that ultimate awareness within the center of my head, within the spaciousness of every cell of my being, within the embrace of infinite spaciousness, infinite awareness, cosmic consciousness. I gratefully relaxed even deeper into the vibrations of the plane and the gap between dimensions opening so profoundly. And on we flew ...

May these reflections lift you off into possiblities that relate to your own life journey. We are all on this trip together.