Last weekend I surprised myself by getting scared on a routine flight with my husband in our Cessna 182. He had purchased a new gadget to increase our safety and he needed to test it. That meant I would be the co-pilot and observer, looking for traffic while he did some maneuvers.
Truthfully, I didn’t want to go in the first place. I knew when I asked him what maneuvers he’d be doing.
“Just some stalls,” he answered.
Stalls. The S-word. Especially accelerated stalls, my nemesis.
To practice a stall, you fly along and raise the nose higher and higher, ignoring the stall horn, which sounds when you’re about to force the airplane to stop flying. You keep raising the nose and then you can feel it fall, feel the airplane stop having lift. It’s not very comfortable.
Accelerated stalls are more uncomfortable than power-off stalls, because you’re going faster and the plane’s reaction is faster and more intense. My terror in flight training was not recovering fast enough and entering a spin.
Now, I trust my husband Jon as a pilot with every fiber of my being. An ex-Marine F-4 pilot who flew over 230 missions, he is fully capable of all these maneuvers, probably with his eyes closed.
But. It’s been 11 years since I had to do these stalls myself, and never have I had to sit in the right seat and be the passenger while he does them. So I didn’t like it. My stomach was rising to my throat and I felt light-headed and sensed a big lump forming in my throat.
“I’m not doing well,” I said. An understatement.
“It’s just a stall. Just breathe and get into it. You’ve done these a hundred times.”
“Not as a passenger,” I retorted, probably a little too sharply. He must have looked at my face, which had no blood in it, because he stopped.
There was no talking me out of it, because the fear reaction had already cascaded through my body. Adrenalin. Tension. No resuming a confident air at this point.
I tried my litany of techniques. “I’m just feeling fear,” I told myself silently. “I am not fear; I just have fear right now. I am the witness, the one observing myself having fear.” I shooed the fear energy away, asked it to return to earth.
My body didn’t buy this at all. It wanted to go home and take a nap. It wanted relaxation. It wanted oxytocin.
Oxytocin is the chemical we love to feel when we orgasm, or when we feel any other kind of intense pleasure. We can invite oxytocin instead of adrenaline by doing what Ellie Drake of Braveheart Women calls an “oxytocin breath.”
Right now, take in a big breath and feel it all the way down into your abdomen, which should rise. Now as you let it out, sigh your exhale out loud. Feel your body “let down,” releasing tension.
This is an important notion for me as a two-time cancer survivor. I believe the story Anita Moorjani tells in her book, Dying to Be Me. Her wondrous healing from a near-death experience taught her that fear not only stops us from performing; it can cause cancer. Or at least create the environment that allows cancer.
My advanced flying lesson was probably related to what I wrote about in Lesson #7, “Give Way to the Winds.” To recover from a stall in an airplane, you do what is counter-intuitive: you release pressure on the controls, even though your impulse is to keep pulling back, since you want badly to go UP.
To recover from a stall in life, you do the same. You release pressure.
I had to risk disappointing my husband, appearing to be wimp, or suggesting to my critical self that I no longer had any piloting skills. I chose oxytocin.
“If we’ve done enough maneuvers,” I said to Jon, I’d like to go back now.” As I breathed my oxytocin breaths and took care of the “little Pam within,” the one who had regressed to the pressure of flight training a dozen years ago, Jon suggested I cure my ills by flying us home.
Dear Jon. Getting back on the horse is a man’s method. That would produce more adrenalin. I choose to give way to the winds. I choose oxytocin. I need the feminine way. And so, I believe, does the world.
It doesn’t mean I won’t go flying again, or that I won’t ever be the observer when he does a stall. It just means I choose to allow my body to recover now, instead of pushing.
By the way, he’s forgiven me. It took me almost an hour to return to a relaxed happy state, and I think I was a lot nicer after that.
(Want more “flying lessons?” Order the book at FlyingLessonsForLife.com)
