No-one can have you feeling substandard without your approval Are you affected by minimal self-worth or inferiority complex? I will talk about some self-help advice on how you can get over that will create your assurance. A person may have inferiority sophisticated mainly because he / she perceives that you’ve got a must win over…
Carl Eisen was at the height of his career in the fall of 2007. An Airbus A300 captain in his mid-forties, he was confident and assured, with more than 10,000 hours of experience in the cockpit. His profession required calm, unflappable, singular focus, and Eisen was proud of his ability to perform complicated maneuvers under extreme stress.
Then he bought his wife a new horse trailer.
“I was towing it with my truck to have electric brakes installed,” he remembers, “and as I was driving down the road, I thought, it has no brakes, maybe I’m going a little fast—” and as if on cue another vehicle pulled out in front of him, cutting him off. Eisen managed to get his truck and trailer under control and safely off the road, but as he sat there in the immediate aftermath of a near wreck, adrenaline pumping, he had a terrible realization. “I didn’t really feel any different than I did any of my other waking hours.” Eisen had been living in a constant state of heightened alert, unable to turn it off.
“Pilots are expected to be superhuman, to suppress feelings of anxiety.”
He made an appointment with his doctor, hoping he had “a heart condition or brain tumor,” he says, knowing that a prescription of antidepressants and therapy would jeopardize the job he loved. “Pilots are expected to be superhuman, to suppress feelings of anxiety.”
A pilot who is diagnosed with depression or anxiety and doesn’t disclose it to their airline is at risk of prosecution from the Federal Aviation Administration. A pilot who’s diagnosed and does disclose it faces immediate grounding.
Eisen was grounded for a year. He took antidepressants and explored cognitive therapy, and when he still felt anxious after nine months, he found his way to insight meditation. “I understood immediately that that’s what had been missing.” He meditated for twenty minutes a day and after a month his “anxiety level was almost to zero.”
Eisen soon had ample opportunities to practice his new mindfulness techniques on the job, and one of the most dramatic came on a hot summer afternoon in 2014, when he piloted his Airbus A330 through a line of thunderstorms as he departed Dallas for Newark. “Almost immediately, the needles on two of my airspeed indicators started fluctuating, then slowly dropped to zero.” Eisen, like all Airbus pilots, is well-trained for this. There’s a procedure pilots are required to commit to memory. “The first item on that checklist is Disregard All Airspeed Indications, because you don’t know which ones are correct.”
Eisen followed the procedure and took the engine power to 84 percent. “Then, to my surprise, the other two remaining airspeed indicators showed that we were slowing down. But were we actually slowing down or are they icing up too?” Mindful of the checklist that says Disregard All Airspeed Indications, Eisen waited and watched, but the situation didn’t stabilize as the procedure indicated it would, and his intuition told him the plane was indeed slowing down. He bucked the procedure and bumped the engine power up to 87 percent. “At that point I became a test pilot, abandoning a mandatory recovery procedure. I had no way of knowing exactly HOW fast we were going. If I put in too much power I risk overspeeding, losing control and/or breaking the plane apart in mid-air. But If the two remaining airspeed indicators are correct, I really AM slowing down to the point of a stall, which means the plane stops flying and starts falling out of the sky.” With autopilot off and turbulence tossing the plane in all directions, Eisen tuned in to the feeling of the plane. “I could feel the air flow burbling over the wing. That’s a sure sign—we’re on the verge of stalling!”
So Eisen free-styled—and called on his mindfulness training. “Rather than get wrapped up in figuring out the details, I remembered one simple fact about the 160 tons of aluminum I was piloting: If you cut the power to zero and pitch the nose down 2 degrees, you can hand-fly without any airspeed indicators at all and stay in the normal speed range making the jet one very expensive glider.”
Eisen knew from experience that would allow him to get control of the plane. Sure enough, the iced-up systems started working again in the warmer air, and Eisen and his co-pilot were able to emergency-land without further problems.
A subsequent investigation revealed that it would have taken 90 percent engine power to stabilize the aircraft. “If I had fixated and followed the procedure to the letter, we would have stalled and lost control.” When the unexpected happens, and the prescribed procedure fails, Eisen says, “you need to be present for what IS and not stuck in stories about how things SHOULD be. Non-reactivity and non-fixation (open and inclusive awareness) really help me exercise discernment. Meanwhile, improved concentration and focus free up working memory so I can think more clearly, in a less distracted way.”
Despite the transformational effect of his meditation practice in his own life, personal and professional, Eisen kept it to himself. And he might have continued as a “closet meditator” if Andreas Lubitz had not crashed a Germanwings airplane into the Alps in March 2015.
“I thought if I can’t talk about this openly, we are not going to make any progress for pilots’ mental health. If I have to become the poster child, I will.”
But Eisen discovered no one wanted to talk about it. “The letters I wrote about my own experience” —letters he sent to his airline and union— “they wouldn’t even respond to me.”
So he continued his own studies with Diana Winston, Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA Semel Institute’s Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC), and became certified as a mindfulness teacher. He started mindfulaviator.com, an online resource that demystifies meditation and makes it accessible to airline pilots. He connected with Matt McNeil, a commercial pilot and mental health professional who started an organization called Lift Affect to offer mental health services to pilots. And he noted that although pilots and other crew were using mindfulness apps on their phones, and were receptive to his message, the real resistance came from airlines, the unions, and the Federal Aviation Administration. “My experience with trying to introduce mindfulness to the airline industry is the sound of doors slamming all the way down the hallway.”
The skills and abilities that make pilots able to fly a 300,000-pound aircraft through inclement weather with ease can also be their downfall.
Eisen says those doors need to open. A recent study indicates that 13.5 percent of the 130,000 pilots surveyed meet the threshold for depression. “That study should have been a wake-up call, the Germanwings flight should have been a wake-up call. The approach the airlines are taking is very old fashioned.”
Meanwhile, Eisen says, the grassroots effort made by him and a few others is taking off, and not a moment too soon.
“When we deal with pilots, when they finally do come forward, they wait until their ass is on fire. They wait until they’re on the roadside bleeding out before they come for help. I was one of those guys, too.”
Eisen says the effects of mindfulness meditation are particularly acute for pilots, who tend to be goal-oriented. “Attachment to outcome is one thing pilots are into, we create certainty in our minds. It’s essential if you’re going to become a pilot, but you don’t know how to disentangle yourself from that in the rest of your life.” The skills and abilities that make pilots able to fly a 300,000-pound aircraft through inclement weather with ease can also be their downfall.
“The first time you check out an airplane it’s massive and intimidating, but like anything else, you become accustomed to it. But there’s a level at which we’re fooling ourselves. We should be in awe all the time. After all, one mistake and it can kill you and everyone on board,” Eisen points out. “But with mindfulness practice, I find that the experience of fear regarding a future task is optional. Some people use fear to motivate themselves, to give themselves an edge or to remain hypervigilant. I used to do this myself. Now I choose curiosity and wonder. I’m in awe of the machine and grateful for the people who make it all work so reliably and safely. Gratitude and awe, without fear, give me lots of motivation and comes with a more open and inclusive awareness.”
Eisen hopes talking openly about mental health will someday be as common among pilots as any other topic. “With the drug and alcohol program, they introduce it at training. But we do not have conversations about mental health in training. We just need to have the conversation for real, out in the open.”
The post How A Grounded Pilot Used Meditation to Fly Again appeared first on Mindful.
A lot of people are afflicted by stalling. It maintains them from located achieved lifestyles and reaching their full prospective. There are various ideas guiding why is individuals waste time and ways to stop, but couple of hit the claw on the brain and uncover the purpose, which is: Discover Your Interest When you’re excited,…
Question:
My question today is about kleshas which I believe are sometimes described as defilements and I understand them as character traits rooted in the unconscious mind which give rise to unwholesome behaviour, such as fear, greed, envy etc.
Following my shift in consciousness I spent about 5 years in a blissful state. Emotions arose but seemed to pass through and I didn’t have the sense of being driven by them. It was as though life was living itself through me and there was a lack of a personal self.
About 2 years ago I began to experience very strong emotions. It was as though the emotions were suddenly back and the gloves were off. Things that had not bothered me at all, suddenly seemed very important and after a while I had to admit that they were definitely driving me. I found this very confusing. About a year ago, I met an Indian gentleman who is a Hindu and has studied extensively in that tradition but also in the Buddhist tradition. He was able to help me with an explanation. He makes a distinction between levels of Samadhi and levels of enlightenment. He said that there are 4 levels of Samadhi which can be experienced in a human body and that the shift I experienced in 2002 took me to the third level. I had described it as feeling as though nobody was driving the bus and he said that I could think of it as moving from a relatively small bus, to a huge bus, so huge that I could no longer find the driving seat. The driver was still there but at a subtler level. There are also 4 levels of enlightenment which can be experienced in a human body and the first level is attained when the kleshas of wrong view, envy, avarice and doubt are gone. He said that through the mantra meditation I had done I had dealt with the branches and trunk of the kleshas but that the roots were still there, hence the strong emotions. I’ve since read up on some of this in Theravada Buddhist books and have also read Joe Dispenza’s “Evolve Your Brain”. After a big shift, the mantra didn’t seem to do anything anymore, so I hadn’t had a daily practice since then. About six months ago I learnt vipassana meditation from my Indian friend during a 10-day silent retreat that he held for a small group. My program now is about 2-3 hours in the morning comprising physical yoga, yogic breathing and vipassana meditation. I also do about an hour of vipassana meditation in the evening. I am enjoying this and feel it is right for me at the moment, however, I’m finding these very strong emotions quite hard to deal with even though I now have a greater understanding of what is going on. I have another 10-day silent retreat coming up soon so I’m sure that will help.
I would be very grateful for your insight.
Few people are totally good or evil. Most are a blend of the two and it is in this that we can find wholeness. The Spectrum of the Mind – Good vs. Evil vs. Wholeness by Andrea Mathews What is the playground of the mind? Where does it dally? What is the range of possibilities available to you within the scope of your mind? No, I’m not going to talk to you, yet again, about the Law of Attraction. I’m going to talk to you about the range of possibilities inherent within the Good/Evil spectrum. You see, most of us grew up believing that there was a standardized definition of “good” and a standardized definition of “evil.” The spectrum actually ranges from “Holy” to “Evil” with “good” at close proximity along the spectrum to “Holy,” and “bad” at close proximity to “Evil.” That’s the range of possibilities available, then, to most of us in our minds. We believe in “good,” “bad,” “Holy,” and “Evil” more than we believe in almost anything else. We came to this belief because our families of origin taught us that certain things were good, and others were bad or downright evil. It was possible for us to be good, bad or evil, but it was not possible, within this belief system, for us to be Holy—that was reserved for the divine. So most of us were taught to strive after being good so that we wouldn’t be bad or evil. And most of us have spent our lives trying to do that. Of course, this also means that some of us will identify with the bad or evil side of the spectrum since it is one of the possibilities available to us. So, for example, a child who is chastised with severity or…
Lawmakers in the state of Georgia have introduced a new bill that takes pro-life logic one step further and aims to ensure that any time men who are 55 or older ejaculate, they would be bound by law to immediately report themselves to law enforcement.
The new bill, House Bill 604, is succinct and cuts straight to the point: “Any male 55 years of age or older shall immediately report to the county sheriff or local law enforcement agency when such male releases sperm from his testicles.”
HB 604 co-sponsor Rep. Park Cannon told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the “bill helps men who are well past reproductive age to self report when they willfully engage in conception.”
But the bill, which was sponsored by a group of black female Democratic state representatives, isn’t simply a case of “big government” run amok.
The intention isn’t so much a bid to restrict a man’s right to choose or to interfere in his reproductive health, but to make a broader point against the state’s recently-passed “heartbeat bill,” which aims to ban abortion at any point once a heartbeat is detected in the womb–which often occurs six weeks into a pregnancy, before many women are even aware that they are carrying an embryo.
Another proposal, House Bill 481, would also see fetuses “at any stage of development” included in the state population count and would allow parents to list the unborn as dependents in their tax filings.
State Representative Dar’shun Kendrick has lambasted the move as yet another sign of a predominantly male, conservative legislature seeking to control women’s bodies and their reproductive rights.
In a Monday tweet, Kendrick contributed to the debate with her own “testicular bill of rights,” saying: “You want some regulation of bodies and choice? Done!”
Ggggooooodddd morning! Introducing my "testicular bill of rights" legislative package. You want some regulation of bodies and choice? Done! pic.twitter.com/5E8HBRSc9l
— Dar'shun Kendrick (@DarshunKendrick) March 11, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The tweet, which had already been retweeted 4.5 thousand times as of Wednesday evening, was accompanied by a screenshot of an email listing how her proposal would protect the “rights” of testicles. Those rights include banning and punishing vasectomies, demanding that men obtain written permission from sexual partners before they obtain prescriptions for erectile dysfunction medications, and criminalizing sex without a condom as “aggravated assault.” Men would also require a 24-hour waiting period before they purchase any pornographic or erotic materials such as sex toys.
But Kendrick isn’t seeking to push some agenda against males—in an interview with Rolling Stone she admitted that her “testicular bill of rights” has little chance of advancing through the Georgia Assembly.
But as a lawyer, she also understands that bills seeking to ban abortion are simply unconstitutional and are largely a test balloon, part of a broader incremental assault on women’s reproductive choices.
And she is “dead serious” about the introduction of her proposed legislation, noting that she wants to see a draft on her desk by the weeks’ end. Kendrick added: “[This bill will] bring awareness to the fact that if you’re going to legislate our bodies, then we have every right to propose legislation to regulate yours.”
The post Lawmakers Push ‘Sperm Bill’ Requiring Older Men to Call the Cops When They Ejaculate appeared first on The Mind Unleashed.
Question:
I hung up the phone last night after talking to my best friend of 30 years. I haven’t been able to think of anything else, since then. So, I decided I needed to ask someone I admire to help me understand. She and I have spent so much time learning about different paths to spirituality, reading The Power of Now, Conversations with God together, and traveling to Las Vegas to see all of you wonderful teachers at the “I Can Do It” Events. So my question is this: She told me on the phone that the Mexican immigrants are ruining everything in CA. They take jobs away from us and don’t want to work just drain the government, etc. How can I reconcile this behavior with who I thought she was and accept or help her see exactly what she is saying? I tried to ask her where she got those facts and she said, “I do my research”. Am I crazy? It just seems that the “right wing extreme positions” (I don’t know how to describe that) cannot coincide with A Course in Miracle’s teaching of love and acceptance and abundance for all. Help me, I don’t want to lose my dear friend, but I don’t know how to talk about things with her anymore. Thank you for any insight you may have for me.
