Flying Lessons: How to Be the Pilot of Your Own Life

By Pamela Hale

Flying Lessons is an inspirational manual for leading, living, and loving with passion and joy. It is a seven-step journey that helps anyone break free of the "gravity" if old limits and recognize one's power to soar-without even leaving the ground. Pamela uses seven stories from her own private pilot lessons to draw the metaphor between flying and life. A multilayered creative work, Flying Lessons is augmented by Pam's stunning aerial photos, which enhance the ancient and classic metaphor of flight. Each lesson corresponds with a chakra, a yoga pose, and an archetype, so the manual works as a course for readers on all levels of body, mind, and spirit. From the "dipstick" that helps flyers manage their energy, to the story of how the flying lessons helped Pam in her cancer journey, Flying Lessons is a practical and entertaining journey into authentic power, freedom, and fulfillment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9780982869628

Book preview

Table of Contents

Foreword: The Magic of Flight by Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D.

PART 1

Pre-Flight: Preparing for the Journey

Chapter 1: Why Fly?

Chapter 2: The Most Important Journey of Your Life

PART 2

Seven Flight Lessons for Soaring Beyond Your Limits

Flying Lesson #1: Know Where You’re Going to Land

Flying Lesson #2: Bring Enough Fuel for the Journey

Flying Lesson #3: Take the Pilot’s Seat

Flying Lesson #4: Remember Why You Long to Fly

Flying Lesson #5: Communicate with the Controllers

Flying Lesson #6: Broaden Your Scan

Flying Lesson #7: Give Way to the Winds

PART 3

Your Check Ride:

A Seven-Step Process to Becoming the Pilot of Your Own Life

Acknowledgments

Foreword

The Magic of Flight

by Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D.

"What will our children do in the morning

If they do not see us fly?"

— Rumi

Huichol beaded eagle figure with feathers and Peruvian mesa cloth

What could be more magical than flight? For millennia, humans have fantasized about soaring above the earth, looking down on the ordinary trials of material life with the vision of the gods.

Pamela Hale’s Flying Lessons offers an exciting and delightful opportunity to explore the ways in which we can break free of the patterns that hold us earthbound. Her flying lessons provide a map for experiencing the freedom that is ours when we rise to a new level of being.

Pam’s seven flying lessons are an accessible, practical process for working on living, leading, and loving with higher awareness. And her process will enable you to soar not only with your thoughts and emotions, but with your energy body, and doesn’t require you to even step into an airplane.

The Metaphor of Flight in History

The flying metaphor works so well because it resonates with us on so many levels. One of those is our ancestral memory, where we have longed to fly for millennia. Myths remind us that flight has been on our minds since the dawn of history. The myth of Apollo with his chariot of fire rising in the East, flying across the sky during day and descending into the Western ocean at night to float on a great river back to the East is an ancient one. We resound to the image of the phoenix rising from the ashes; something in us knows that it is our destiny to rise above the harsh ways in which we have lived on the planet.

Flight has represented rebirth and resurrection, ascension and the evolution of consciousness, often depicted by falcon and eagle-headed gods and goddesses. White doves, hawks, the ibis, the hummingbird, and the mythical thunderbird abound in mythology. Winged beings are depicted in ancient texts, hieroglyphs, and cave paintings. Myths of creation often feature winged gods and goddesses, indicating that they came from a heavenly realm. Images of winged ones still exist in our psyche. The Sphinx appeared in Asia, Egypt, and Mesopotamia in various forms, one of them being a winged female lion. The winged god Mercury represents the messenger. Pegasus, the horse, was a symbol of wisdom and also poetry, and is still regarded by many Jungians as a powerful symbol of our ability to access the realm of the gods. And Icarus reminds us to remain humble as we rise to our calling, as Pam reminds us in the first section of this book.

In the ancient traditions of alchemy, various birds represented different stages of transformation. The bird represents the soul, which can fly to the spiritual world and bring wisdom back to earth. Like shamans, birds mediate between the physical and spiritual realms.

Folk tales from all over the world feature protagonists who are granted the gift of understanding the language of the birds, who then become allies of the hero or heroine. In Sufism, the language of birds is a mystical language of angels. Francis of Assisi is said to have preached to the birds. In the Talmud, Solomon’s proverbial wisdom was due to his being granted understanding of the language of birds by God. In Kabbalah, Renaissance magic, and alchemy, the language of the birds was considered a secret and perfect language and the key to perfect knowledge, sometimes also called la langue verte, or green language. In medieval France, the language of the birds (la langue des oiseaux) was a secret language of the Troubadours. And in Egyptian Arabic, hieroglyphic writing is called the alphabet of the birds.

The archetype of Eagle has morphed during the centuries into a symbol of power that has taken military forms. But in the ancient tradition, eagle is the one who can fly us wing to wing with the Great Spirit, opening our hearts to our true destiny. In Christianity, the eagle became the symbol of Saint John the Evangelist and is always depicted on the ground by his side.

Spiritual Flight

Clearly, flight has been an attribute of the holy ones for millennia. In ancient Egypt, one of the most important deities was Thoth, who was often depicted with the head of an ibis. The Egyptians credited him as the author of all works of science, religion, philosophy, and magic. The Greeks further declared him the inventor of astronomy, astrology, the science of numbers, mathematics, geometry, land surveying, medicine, botany, theology, civilized government, the alphabet, reading, writing, and oratory. They claimed he was the true author of every work of every branch of knowledge, human and divine.

I have spent my adult life studying and teaching the traditions of the indigenous peoples, many who revered Quetzacoatl, whom you will meet along with the archetype of Eagle, in this book. The feathered serpent, who can fly the skies and also navigate the earth, is sometimes associated with the morning star that signals a new dawn. These archetypes are not only god-like forces; they are reflections of our own powers, which we often project onto divine figures.

In ancient times, a person who dreamed of flying was considered to have entered the realm of the immortal gods. The Native Americans, the Babylonians, the Hindus, the Tibetan Buddhists, and many other traditions claim that we all have a light body that can leave the physical body during sleep. The light body can travel great distances and even into other dimensions that mystics call the astral planes. Here we can talk to our friends who also travel the dimensions, communicate with the people of the spirit world, or learn from the advanced souls the men once called gods and angels.

Pam is a graduate of our Light Body school, where we train students to work with the energetic essence of our being, the template for everything we will create in our physical body.

The shamans of the Americas understand that we have a luminous energy field that surrounds the physical body. It informs the physical body in a way similar to the energy fields of a magnet that organize iron filings on a piece of paper. In the paradigms of the West, we are intent on shuffling and moving the iron filings about, trying to change at the level of the physical. Shamans possess a body of ancient energy healing practices that move and shift at the level of the energetic— moving the magnet— and the physical body follows. The shaman works at the core, at the essential level, and healing happens.

A shaman is someone who can travel to the spirit word and bring information, wisdom, and healing back to the individuals and communities they serve. Contemporary healers who help people with all levels of life challenges use the ancient wisdom of shamans to fly or travel between worlds. Flight, an essential metaphor for this kind of spiritual travel, is available to all of us. The world view of shamans all over the world is that we have direct access to the spiritual realm.

The Importance of Flight Today

In this great planetary shift, we are being asked to take a quantum leap and to leave our role as homo sapiens to become homo luminous, a new human. The problematic mythology of our culture is collapsing all around us as you read this. It is a mythology that is predatory, that is abusive, that reaps the cream of the earth— and passes the costs onto future generations.

The medicine way of the shamans is as contemporary today as it was 50,000 years ago. My mentor believed that the new shamans, the new caretakers of the earth would come from the West. We are the ones who can bring healing and transformation to our families, to our communities, and to the earth. This is a critical time in history, a time for a reawakening of the earth and of the feminine aspect within each of us. It is a time of tremendous transformation. All our old models are being reinvented, in every facet of society. And we are the change agents. The shaman is a map-maker. We need new map-makers. Essential maps do not simply lay out the territory, but are a guide to the territory.

The core healing practice of the medicine way— the illumination process— happens outside time, in infinity. It happens when we access a self that never entered the stream of time, that cannot be affected by disease, that cannot be touched by ill health. Once having made contact with the infinite, we can re-inform who we are today. We can grow bodies that age differently, that heal differently, that die differently. You will see how some of this approach works as you read some of the examples Pam has provided in this book.

In my new book, Power Up Your Brain, I outline the ways in which we now have the opportunity to access the infinite and break free of time by using our brain. The pre-frontal cortex allows us to be witness to ourselves, individually and corporately, bringing new intelligence to the table. We can lift ourselves much higher in the way we function, by consciously shifting which part of the brain we use. We can avoid the gravity of the world of emotions and dream a new world into being, flying into a new role as co-creators of a better world.

Pam has used the archetypes of the indigenous American culture to serve as allies as we go through her flying lessons. These archetypes can also represent various levels of perception. When we shift from perceiving ourselves as only physical bodies (the perception of the serpent) or as only minds and emotions (the perception of jaguar), we can rise to the level of the hummingbird, where we perceive ourselves and the world through the lens of the soul and the sacred. And at the level of eagle, we use our frontal cortex to fly even higher, to the level of spiritual perception. The fourth flying lesson connected to the heart chakra is indeed pivotal. Once you’ve experienced eagle, you’ll never see things the same way again.

What this Means for Your Life

Being able to shift how we perceive is the basis of the shamanic tradition. When we shift lenses, as Pam would put it, we find new solutions— based not on changing the outer, but on changing how we see.

In my work, I talk about how we can develop our ability to be the sage, the solver of problems, the source of wisdom, the one who flies close to God. Our ability to develop our inner pilot comes from our contact with and trust in Spirit, who works through us, giving us the ability for flight. To those who observe the ease and naturalness of operating this way, magic is at work.

This kind of holy magic is an ancient idea. The lore of India describes saints who were able to fly through the air, and yogis who could travel across great distances at an instant and appear and disappear at will. The Hindu legends speak of rishis who possessed the power of flight.

Instead of assuming this kind of flight is beyond us, we must have the courage to believe in ourselves as homo luminous. Operating at the level of the heart and soul, we can focus our intent on taking the great flight to our destiny.

The kind of courage we need to fly is what I call hummingbird courage. The hummingbird isn’t even supposed to be able to fly, given the shape and weight of his body. Likewise, some of us feel that we weren’t made to soar through the air; we’re certain that we were made to trudge through the mud or wade through the swamp. But despite thinking we don’t have enough time, enough money, or enough wings, we each have a great journey available to us should we choose to accept the invitation from life and respond to the call. Hummingbird courage can empower us to rewrite our stories to be mythical ones of heroism.

The lesson, Give Way to the Winds, is a fitting last lesson, for once we let go of the notion that we’re in control of our lives, we begin to understand that the hand of Spirit has always been guiding us, but we’ve simply been unaware of this fact. Then we can turn the controls over to the One who has always been in charge. This doesn’t mean that we no longer need to prepare for our flights and navigate well, but rather that we no longer have to fight the winds.

I wish you a rich journey as you make your way through Flying Lessons. It is true that you can be the pilot of your own life. Remember, you are the storyteller, and in the moment you tell a new story with power and conviction, you make it begin to come true. What are your acquired powers? Can you now fly above your everyday woes?

All you need is to believe it’s possible.

More about Alberto Villoldo

PART 1

Pre-Flight :

Preparing for the Journey

Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.

— From My Surgeons by Stanley Kunitz

Aviation sectional map with elementary flight planning tools

At the Rocking X Ranch, AZ

Chapter 1

Why Fly?

Do you believe you can fly? Do you have a feeling of power and possibility inside that you’d love to set free? Do you long to lift yourself above some of the old stories and patterns of your life and soar? Do you have gifts to share with the world that you long to manifest? In other words, do you believe you can fly?

Please fasten your seat belt. Flying Lessons is a seven-step process— a journey— that can help you break free of the gravity of your old limitations and remember that you have the power to fly now, without ever having to leave the ground.

Even if you hate flying, dread boarding a commercial airliner, and can never imagine jumping into a little homebuilt plane, I’ll bet you can summon the dream of flying in some area of your life. After all, it’s a fundamental image, a mythical metaphor that’s been with us for millennia. It runs deep, that dream of being a winged one, of being free to soar like a bird to great heights. This book is not about a literal flying experience; it is about the metaphor.

Some say birds are messengers from God. In many myths, the gods have wings. And then there are angels— intermediaries, guides, or allies who remind us that we, too, are heavenly beings dressed in flesh. The magic of flight is a central theme in shamanism, an ancient and worldwide tradition that is all about journeying or flying to different dimensions in the invisible realm in order to reclaim the parts of our souls that make us whole.

Even if you aren’t familiar with shamans or don’t believe in angels, the feeling of flight is something you’ve surely experienced. We remember somewhere within how to be free, how to be lifted, how to work with the wind, how to soar, glide, dip, and play. To spread our wings and fly under our own power…what could be more natural? Many people experience this in dreams. And, in moments where we are truly ourselves, a magic seems to take over and we feel we are flying. We are lifted by joy, by delight, by wonder, by magic, and we hardly know who we are…and yet this part of ourselves is familiar. My granddaughter, Mariah, described flying this way when she was only nine years old:

I’m running down the soccer field dribbling and I feel like I’m flying. My body is not tense, but is very flowing. I feel calm and excited at the same time, and I feel connected to the spiritual world and all the spirits. The spiritual world has this warm feeling with a lot of kindness. It feels soft and loving and like I’m connected to everyone and everyone is there for me and I’m there for everyone. For some reason I feel high— like I’m rising— and I’m fast, very fast. I feel like I’m soaring, not flapping like a bird but soaring like an eagle.

When have you felt as if you were soaring? And what would it look like for you to take off now in your life? Maybe it would mean writing that book or taking that trip or starting that business. Or maybe it would mean finding a safe place inside to which you could always journey, no matter what was going on. It might mean finding a way to refuel, to put yourself first in the best sense, thus liberating you from struggling with your burdens. It could be that flying would mean freedom from having to worry about money and responsibility. Maybe it would mean knowing, remembering your own magnificence, so that you could pilot your way through life with grace and ease. Perhaps having peace inside at last, quieting the voices, would feel like soaring. Or really relying on your own heart and intuition to guide you through troubled times with a minimum number of sleepless nights. Or surrendering finally to the power of the winds, to the spiritual powers of the universe that can lift and carry us, no matter what is happening in our own story.

Maybe you are even moving past personal work to a place beyond ego where your primary care is for all creation. That is the shift our culture needs to make now: to a level higher than the woundedness and oppression and violence of the past, to a world where we feel connected to all of life, and where it is our joy and privilege to care for that life and for each other. For all the people of the planet, this would surely be flight.

Whatever flying means to you, it requires a shift from what is true now to another possibility that you need to see clearly. And one way to see a new path of possibilities is to learn from stories. For millennia, humans have used stories as teaching tools. In this book, I’m going to share stories of the flying lessons I began in my mid-fifties. Learning how to fly a small plane brought up every fear I’d ever had and revealed a galaxy of fears that I hadn’t suspected were lurking within. The lessons I learned from my flight instructor, Clio, became lessons for my life. Although learning to fly required hundreds of lessons, I’ve chosen seven key stories that have become teaching points for me and for those who have participated in my workshops and retreats. As you read each story and then debrief it, you’ll see how it pertains to your life. You’ll recognize how the metaphor can teach us a new way to find the kind of balance and power that can set us free.

The Four Forces of Flight

If you think about the way flight works, you’ll see right away how the flight metaphor can help you in life. Everyone talks about balance; it means a lot of things to different people. In my very first flight lesson with Clio, I found out how balance relates to the four forces of flight.

In order to fly, a bird or a paper airplane or a huge airliner needs to have four forces acting together in certain proportions. First there is thrust, the force that propels us forward, whether born of jet fuel, the flapping of wings, or the motion of the hand that throws the paper airplane. The second force is drag, the countervailing force that slows us down so that we don’t keep traveling forever without any braking action. These two forces act in a horizontal direction, one propelling us forward and the other holding us back.

The first of the two vertical forces is lift, which allows us to rise, and is caused by the action of wind on the surface and edges of a wing. The countervailing force is gravity, which brings us back to earth.

We need all four forces to fly successfully. And in life, this is true also. If all we had was thrust, we could end up like the little girl in the legend of the red shoes who began dancing and couldn’t stop. We’ve all been in places in our journey where it’s all about thrust, where we get carried away by speed and power and need a bit of drag to bring us back under control. And we’ve all sometimes been the victim of drag, feeling sluggish and unable to get going, to get any momentum. We’ve been brought down by gravity, suddenly falling to the ground in a thud or a crash that makes us feel graceless and defeated. We’ve also been lifted, as if by grace, and floated high above the usual problems of daily life, in love with a person or a cause or an experience— and we’ve all been tempted to never come down from being so high. But we don’t really want just lift, for we are creatures of the earth and need a safe place to land.

To fly, we need to be in control of how we co-create with these forces, so that we can pilot ourselves while enjoying the powers of nature. We’ve all been in that place of mastery— not the kind that requires effort and struggle, but the kind of control that feels natural. We are moving ahead, but at a speed that is comfortable, and we can stop whenever we need to. We are lifted by the winds and can