Finding the Thrill of Joy Within

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

"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 of it. I knew there was something behind it. And 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", that's just being present.

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's just me jumping out of a plane and having this experience, but the feeling came from within me and I was always curious if I could manifest that feeling, 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 was a very happy group of people and 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."

Learn more at www.ananda.org/meditation