I always felt present, aware and in control, and always remembered everything afterwards. I didn’t feel changed, per se, but I still felt supernatural calm, a sign, said Grace, that hypnosis was working. The sessions were the highlight of my week, creating a state of intense calm that exponentially surpassed even my beloved morning meditation sessions. But I wasn’t sure they were working – as my flight got closer, I had more restless nights. My storytelling-focused mind, so focused in my daily work as a writer, shifted into high gear, sketching out detailed scenarios of extreme turbulence and engine failure.
And then the day of my flight arrived. On the way to the airport, I listened to a special recording Grace had created for me, designed to distract and take my brain away from its catastrophic thoughts. I boarded the plane and settled into my seat, awaiting the feelings of dread that had defined the weeks of anticipation and every flight in the past 20 years of my life. I checked the seatback pocket to make sure a plastic-lined bag was available and watched my seatmate’s long legs as he settled down next to me, trying to determine how fast I could run to the bathroom, if necessary. But the nausea never came. My heart continued to beat slowly, steadily. My palms remained dry and my breath was long, even when inhaling and exhaling.
As we rolled down the runway to take off, I waited. I waited as the plane hit turbulence that caused it to wobble and creep through the air, a moment that caused my sharpest waves of panic. Instead, I was able to bring up a fact shared with me by a pilot years ago: that the air around the plane, once at full speed, looks more like the consistency of Jell- O that looks fragile, invisible, easy to fall into the space that I felt around me every day. I had mentioned it to Grace in one session, telling her that I had never been able to get it to stay on my mind. Now, however, in the bumpy, bumpy cabin, I imagined a little toy airplane hanging in a tray of cherry red gelatin. When the plateau shook, the plane moved with it, still secure in its position.
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