Surviving and Thriving in Emergency Travel Situations

Packing to Maintain a Healthy Internal State

I just recently took a trip to Connecticut for my grandmother’s funeral. I booked the flight the day before I flew out which left me very little time to pack and got me flagged for more vigorous security screening My day of travel was approximately 11 hours long each leg of the flight and I only had one day in between.

The way in would prove the most challenging as I would lose three hours across the time zones and would have to get up at 5am (2am my time) to drive from East Haddam to Westport in time for the funeral. Of course I was aware of all of this when I booked the flight so I packed in a manner that would allow me to make the most of my time on the plane. I brought along the following:

Two Books: The Complete Works of Lao Tzu & Life of Pi

I had a purse and one carry on bag. Making good use of my time traveling revolved heavily around my iPod. I filled it with several audio books including: Power of Now & A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, Developing Your Own Psychic Powers by John Edward and Ask and It Is Given by Esther and Jerry Hicks.

Because I intended to do a lot of meditation during my flights, I also needed some meditation music. I found Titania by Mike Rowland to be invaluable for my self guided meditations. So with my iPod stuffed full of inspirational content…I was ready for my trip.

Choosing the Experience

My plan on the flight was to spend most of it absorbing spiritually empowering ideas, meditate and record my observations. I had a full schedule of activities on the plane and it was wonderful because I rarely get to spend so much solid time pursuing these interests so I was actually looking forward to being in a situation in which I had nothing else to do. I boarded the plane to the tired complaints of weary passengers…and thought to myself how fortunate I was to have this opportunity. This inspired me to get started by performing a process from Ask and It Is Given called a rampage of gratitude. Using this process I recorded everything I could think of that I was grateful for in my notebook. It was the perfect exercise to access my natural state of well being. It got my energy flowing and made it easier to enter a deeply meditative state.

Midway through the trip as we were flying over one of the great lakes on the way to Detroit and a change of planes I ended an intense meditation session thinking of a friend who lives nearby in Plymouth. While connecting with her energy I felt a strong pain in my right arm, so I decided to phone her during my layover. Over the course of our conversation I asked her if she was experiencing pain in her right forearm and she indicated somewhat bewildered that she had been working on a research paper for school and had been taking an unaccustomed amount of notes trying to finish it. She was in fact very sore from all the writing. When I connected with my friend during meditation I had experienced an instance of clairsentience; this amplified ability to feel energy remained sharper than usual throughout the entire trip.

Getting the Inside Right

Eckhart Tolle often says the only thing that matters is your state of consciousness. If you get the inside right, the rest has to follow.

By using my flight as an opportunity to raise my level of consciousness I was able to achieve a state of such clarity that I not only survived but thrived in one of the most difficult situations that we face in life…the realization that we will share the same fate as the person lying in the coffin. Yet, there is far more to us than this physical body we have mistaken for our true selves…and far more to our physical world than we often allow ourselves to see. I had raised my vibration to such a degree that I could feel the aliveness in everyone and everything I encountered making it impossible to get lost in form because in heightened states of awareness…energy reigns supreme.

Consequently, the funeral was not a bad, sad or unpleasant experience for me. My grandmother’s passing with the coming of spring was a profoundly spiritual experience that affected me deeply…as everywhere in the natural world I saw the process of renewal that speaks to your heart and whispers, there is no separation between life and death. They are two aspects of the one creative force operating in the universe…of the divine in its natural state of beauty, balance and wholeness.