This post celebrates of one of my longest partners and supporters reaching a truly outstanding milestone in their effort to always put out exceptional content for our skydiving community…
Blue Skies Magazine, Issue 100!!!
CONGRATULATIONS!!!
It has been, and still is, my honor to be a part of your exceptional team of contributors.
THANK YOU for having me all these years.
I’m sharing this particular column below building on the sentiment I shared yesterday that we all always keep dancing in life (both literally and metaphorically).
To flying, dancing, and 100 more.
LOVE!
Blue Skies Magazine, April 2018
Life Coaching Column #91
“My Golden Sunshine”
By Melanie Curtis
I just had my own dance party with myself in the airplane lavatory.
No joke.
The song Sunshine by Matisyahu in my earbuds, firing me up, feeling the freedom in the message and the music. I couldn’t not go for it, say f*ck it to convention and spend an extra couple minutes in there dancing like I was on a boogie dance floor.
Don’t know the song? Go listen to it right now. I wonder if it gets into your body as instantly and actively as it does mine.
Yes.
When I exited the bathroom, I actually deliberately brought my smile down a notch… thinking, I better not walk out of here looking TOO happy. Like, what is up with that chick leaving the bathroom, laughing in delight? Brow furrowed, hmm… what’s happening there? Then as I sat back down, I was like, why would I do that?
Why would I want to NOT share every bit of that life blasting out of me?
Preconceived ideas and unconscious agreements exist ALL around us. In theory, we all “agree” on certain things as normal… as the way we do things… as what’s “right”… as what’s “normal.” On one piece of land on this earth people get naked in saunas in co-ed groups without a second thought, on another piece of land on this earth suggest that same thing and you’ve got red faces and no-f*cking-way all the way around. Without intentionally checking those more widely dictated societal boundaries in our own minds, we will always end up living our lives inside them.
“You don’t jump out of a perfectly good airplane.” That’s a perfect example of a widely held belief in this world that as skydivers we know is bupkiss. We challenged that idea and as such have earned aliveness and an even more open mind from flying our open parachutes.
“You don’t get naked in front of people you don’t know.” Overall this is the American approach. Go to Finland like I did to coach at the Pimp My Fly boogie back in the day and you learn that saunas are a common and culturally completely normal thing. What other life experiences might we be missing living only in our born borders?
“You don’t leave the bathroom laughing and dancing.” Not as giant shared belief, but for the most part if any of us saw a person coming out of a bathroom laughing and dancing, we’d notice. It’s not “normal.” F*ck yeah, I now challenge this one too.
“I can’t do that.”
Why?
“Because X.”
Why?
“Because Y.”
Why?
“Because Z.”
Why?
“Because A.”
Why?
………. Hmm………
Ask as deep as the resistance goes to get to the core thing holding you back.
