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In the beginning, it never seems like that big of a deal. Nerves. Gripping the seat a little too hard. Please let it be over. Please let it be over.
But anxiety works by hemming life into a narrower and narrower circle until there is almost no space left, until everything suffocates.
Most of the time, we don’t realize it’s happening until it’s quite advanced. We can barely get on the plane. The whole flight is one long panic attack. We actually Google driving directions to Guatemala.
Many years ago, I took a flight from Paris to Saint-Denis, Reunion Island, which dipped closer and closer and closer to the ocean until, at the last second, ten feet from the black water, the runway appeared. I was delighted! How fun!
I took flights from Mexico to Tokyo; from Hong Kong to Kota Kinabalu; from Houston to Hays, Kansas, in a ten-seater plane the size of a small SUV, and I don’t remember freaking out once. But at some point after returning from China to Oaxaca in 2009, I started to get a little nervous.
Then, on a flight from London to Philadelphia, we experienced turbulence that lasted for hours: the kind in which the captain asks the flight attendants to stay in their seats, and it’s impossible to put a cup on the tray table without it falling off. It was profoundly unsettling; even the sturdy man next to me who claimed to be a frequent flier said he never wanted to go through that again.
I started white-knuckling whole flights, then depending on a mid-flight beer or wine to ease me through. Now, I spend most of the flight staring out the window in an intense state of stress, just waiting for the seatbelt sign to bing! in a sure indication of impending doom. It ain’t healthy, folks.
Since the MBSR course I took in 2021, I’ve started downloading and listening to meditations from the 10% Happier app during flights. I’ve noticed that when I’m really super-anxious, like at a level 10, the meditations can’t touch the fear. It’s like trying to tame a tiger with a cheese cube.
But when I’m closer to a 5, or even, say, a 7, the meditations can begin to make a little bit of inroads. Most of them, the ones centered around panic, begin by grounding me in bodily awareness. Feeling my feet on the floor. My butt in the seat.
Sometimes I freak out at this point and argue, my feet are on a thin piece of plastic 36,000 feet in the air! but if I can get past this, I keep going.
Then the meditations ask me to pay attention to thoughts: what stories I’m telling myself. How I’m projecting into the past and the future. Finally, they simply ask me to accept. Okay, this is happening. No use in fighting it. What is happening is just happening.
This trip to Oaxaca, I came to repeat the last mantra over and over to myself. I have come to intensely dread the Houston-Oaxaca flight because frequent mountain storms can make it very turbulent.
The last time we came down, I sobbed for almost the whole flight. The turbulence was so intense the flight attendants had to stay seated and the plane was lurching and jerking like a wind-up toy.
But this time I kept coming back to what is happening is just happening.
Anxiety is all about control. It’s about the inability to accept uncertainty. The anxious person wants reassurances and guarantees but then discovers, once she gets them, that they’re painfully ephemeral: they only lead to a more voracious desire for more reassurances and guarantees. Any gray area becomes unbearable.
But what is happening is just happening acknowledges that okay, here I am, in a plane, and I am terrified, and the fear is gonna be here, and the plane is gonna do what it’s gonna do, and I can see all that and accept it or I can spend every single last ounce of my energy fighting that truth.
I measured the flight in panic meditations. Five panic meditations to go. Three panic meditations to go. Two panic meditations to go. For hours.
And what I discovered was similar to what I discovered – I’m sorry, folks, I’m so sorry, but I just have to loop this in – on magic mushrooms late last year: once you capitulate, give in, accept the fear, you can feel, if only for a few minutes, like you’re flying.
I mean really flying – not in an airplane, but solo, above the graspingness of your fear. A path becomes visible. A weightlessness. A freedom. It’s possible to feel in the body what it’s like not to be scared. It may not last long, only a minute or two.
But it reveals a choice. A choice to lean into what feels frightening rather than what feels safe, especially when what feels safe is freaking out. That’s anxiety’s top trick: making you feel like the worry protects you. Like the act of panic is a shield, when really, panic or no panic, what is happening is just happening.
It really sucks to think of it as a choice, to be honest. Because then this makes me the pathetic creature who is choosing to whimper and cry and chug the strongest IPA versus, say, putting on The Fast and the Furious 3 like everyone else.
But thinking of it as a choice also opens up the possibility that, with the right training, I might someday choose differently. And it ironically lightens up the choice of fear: okay, this time, I’m choosing fear. That’s what I’m choosing.
Acknowledging that lifts some of the weight of resistance: the unconscious not wanting to be scared and being scared anyway and the interplay between those that causes so much stress. At least acknowledging the choice puts it front and center, deflates some of its power.
In meditation, the invitation is always to come back. To return to the breath. To return to awareness. To acknowledge, okay, my mind went off somewhere on an adventure, it crafted a whole story about how so-and-so is out to get me or how I have to buy new rain boots or I really should stop eating so many chips, and now, it’s back.
Now I get to breathe again. What a gift, to come back.
This is what meditation teaches: you fall off, you get scared, you fail, you make a choice that feels wrong, you lean into the worst emotion and then, you come back.
Come on back, honey. Your breath is here for you. You can start over. Begin again.
A thousand new beginnings, my meditation teacher says. Here’s one, right now.
I’m opening up the normally paid section this week to comments from everyone!
I’d love to hear how you deal with flying. Have you experienced turbulence? What do you do during long flights? Share below!
I am just old enough to be able to see my fear of death as my ultimate fear. Fear of getting it wrong comes a close second.
And you have come so far from your early fears. Now you can live them on the outside, so to speak, where at least you can see them for what they are. Nice post!
I love to travel but seem to have been born with a fear of flying. For a while I flew a lot for work and the frequent exposure didn't help. What did help, shockingly, was becoming a mom. The first time I traveled with my child, I found that my anxiety had a limit, and parenthood gobbled up the whole quota. My brain just didn't seem to have room to fear flying amidst all the new fears of what could go wrong with my child. I haven't flown since before the pandemic, and I am curious to see how the next time goes. Right now, I feel like that particular anxiety has lost its teeth, and good riddance. Glad you are back on solid ground.