by Stuart Schmitt
Imagine a dark, stormy night in the ocean, hundreds of miles from the nearest land. You are flying a Navy F-14 jet fighter above the storm where the stars and moon shine brightly. In a few seconds you will be descending into the storm to land on the aircraft carrier below. There is no place else to go.
You know the flight deck is pitching in heavy seas. You won’t be able to see the ship until you descend below 200 feet, one-half mile astern. At that point you have only seconds to make final corrections, establish glide path, correct for lineup, and set airspeed and attitude in order to touch down in a 50’ by 100’ box on the flight deck.
The emotion you feel is fear. The fear is a feeling of profound reverence for the task ahead. The unknown is what will happen between now and then. The intention is to land safely.
It’s time to descend. You surrender and push forward into the darkness and unknown. Your struggle with fear is over because you are committed to the experience of what lies ahead. Your full attention is on the task of flying the airplane to the best of your ability. You are present in the moment and time does not exist.
Your concentration on the flight instruments is suddenly broken by a voice over the radio, “201, half mile, call the ball!” Looking through the rain-splattered wind screen, you see the dim glow of a green ball of light between orange lighted bars. “201 ball,” you reply, with a slight sense of relief that you are on glide path and close to centerline. “Now just don’t screw it up!”
You touch down on the flight deck, having passed through the unknown, and feel the familiar tug as the tail-hook grabs an arresting wire and slams you to a stop. Your knees are shaking and you sit quietly for a moment. With total appreciation for being alive, you experience a moment of Grace.
The way to a state of Grace is to surrender to what you fear, with intention to arrive safely on the other side of the unknowns that lie between here and there.
In his book Living Deliberately, Harry Palmer describes fear as, “a belief in our inadequacy to deal with something.” To eliminate the fear, “You need only to gather your courage and look for a belief you have about your own inadequacy.” While words alone may tell us what to do to eliminate fear, they are of little help if we don’t know how to, or are unwilling to, take the action required to discover the belief. Before the Avatar techniques were available it seemed that a person had to be exceptionally brave or extremely desperate to be willing to experience their fear and discover the belief on their own.
Good pilots are neither exceptionally brave nor extremely desperate. It takes years of formal education and many hours of practical experience to prepare a pilot to be proficient in flying on and off aircraft carriers and to handle the fear of night carrier landings.
Like pilot training, the Avatar course contains both formal education and practical experience for those of us who would like to become proficient at handling our fears in a safe and loving space. The student is guided to explore his or her life and, more importantly, how it is created. By knowing how to change things, the student willingly takes responsibility for doing so.
CONTEMPLATE: Are you ready to explore the unknowns that lie between here and there?
Stuart Schmitt, Hot Springs, Arkansas
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