Video and Audio

Finding the Thrill of Joy Within


September 8, 2013

Bob talks about how he got started with meditation, and the connection he feels between meditation and skydiving.

 

Transcript

Bob:

An Intense Approach to Overcoming a Fear of Heights

I grew up with an intense fear of heights, and the way I decided to deal with that is to jump out of an airplane. One thing I started to notice was that as the fear started to dissipate, there was just this intense joy underneath it.

I knew there was something behind it, so I kept going back. I made skydive after skydive. We only have a minute up there, but it's a minute of intense focus. There's nothing else going on in the world other than what's in front of you. It's just you there. It’s just you being present.

Commonalities of Skydiving and Meditating

What drew me to the meditation itself was some of my experiences from skydiving. That feeling was inside of me. There wasn't anything given to me. It was just me jumping out of a plane and having this experience, but the feeling came from within me. I was always curious if I could manifest that feeling by doing something else. It wasn't until I started to meditate that I started to see a lot of correlations between meditation and skydiving. The one thing I noticed about skydivers, in particular, was this is a very happy group of people. They might not know what they're doing, but they're meditating out there all the time.

Hi, I'm Bob Ash, and I am a skydiver and a meditator.