I’ve always had a bit of unease with heights. I’m OK in airplanes or tall buildings with solid glass in front of me, but high ladders, scaffoldings, or the edges of cliffs tend to make my body nervous. The natural assumption is that the fear is of falling, but I’ve noticed that when I move beyond the anxiety, and check in with my body, what I often find is not a sense of falling, but of flying, of rising into an open sky. Sitting on a ridge looking over a valley I almost have to willfully hold myself down to keep from flying away.
It’s possible this is an experience of incipient dissociation, the spirit wanting to leave a body that feels it is in danger. It feels to me, however, more like the flying in a dream, and perhaps the fear is not in the spirit, which wants to fly, but in the body which might be left behind. At other times, half in trance in nature, I have had the sense that I could teleport myself across an open space to a pinnacle some distance away. This was an exhilarating sense of heart connection, as one moves in a lucid dream. In fact I had to remind myself that the place I was looking at would be hard to get down from if I succeeded.
In spite of an innate bodily fear of falling, the soul remembers how to fly, which makes the body nervous also. I wonder how often we let our body experience and awareness obscure our soul memories. As mammals we have an instinctual reflex fear of falling. On the other hand, up is a happy place. Flying in dreams is usually happy, either as an escape or as play. Heaven is up. Culturally Spirit is thought to be up or out there somewhere (in spite of various underworld traditions).
Spirit is certainly out there, in nature and the universe, but it is also in here. T’ai chi teaches how to let go, without falling, how to relax like a stone surrendering to gravity. Releasing the tension that comes from a fear of falling down. you create space for your chi to support you. Releasing effort, drops you into effortlessness.
In dissociation we fly up, as we escape in our dreams; in meditation or death the angels carry us up to Spirit, and yet if we relax and fall inward we also come to Spirit, the living Spirit in our own being, through which we are connected to source, inwards/downwards. Sometimes going inward we move through some shadowy places, experiences and feelings that can separate you from your center, your deep Soul. If you allow yourself to relax through them, at the core, or under the lowest surface, you come into the Light.
If you step into the inner Void, you may fear to fall, but do you? perhaps you float in spacelessness, or soar like a hawk? Your body may fear falling, but your Soul knows how to fly.
I invite you to play with replacing up and out, with down and in. Either way will lead you home, but it seems that the former is more associated with effort and struggling, while the later is the default as soon as we relax. Spirit is always calling to us, just as Earth’s gravity is always calling to us. Recognizing the tension of effort or fear, let it go, relax and Spirit will effortlessly pull you home.
(© 2/2014)
