Out of Body in Belize

1000-Foot Waterfall hugged by a pine forest.

This is a journal entry for an older blog, the experience happened in 1998. It was a pre being initiated as a shaman event. What I call a breadcrumb…

Many years ago I took a trip to Belize.
While on the flight, I was a bit nervous.

To alleviate this nervousness, I imagined an eagle surrounding the plane (so that the plane was actually inside the bird) to keep it aloft and safe.

With this image, I felt somewhat more at ease and drifted off to enjoy the rest of the flight with my companion.

It took us most of the day and into the night in order to complete our journey. We taxied through jeep and jungle to a small bungalow village deep in the heart of Mayan territory.

When my head finally hit the pillow that night, I was very tired – I expected to fall asleep immediately. Instead, an interesting thing happened.

I thought to myself, just for a moment, about the bird and the airplane. It occurred to me that perhaps I should say “thanks” to the bird and intent-let it know that I had arrived safely and that it would be ok if he went “off-duty.” In said, “I was done. Good job. You can go off and do something else now – this is how the dialogue went in my mind.”

And with this thought completed, an amazing pulsing in my chest started to occur. It first began as a feeling of a flutter, like my heart was bumping with great velocity and also with a feeling of waves. The movement went up and then down energetically through my chest and then all of a sudden, a burst of sensation came out of my heart/my chest and I felt and heard a pop or sucking sound. The eagle, or I guess the spirit of the eagle, had remained inside me and with my “thanks” it decided to leave. I had never experienced anything like this before. But it was 3-D, in my minds-eye.

In my imagination, and also felt energetically, throughout my physical body, the bird flapped its wings inside myself and then burst out to seek out the night. I decided in my heightened state of mediation or consciousness that resulted – to follow the bird with my intention to see where it went.

My body was on the bed, but my consciousness was above myself on the roof of the bungalow. I sped through the roof and out towards the stars and found myself flying with the eagle over peaks and tall pine trees. I found myself thinking that although I felt like this was all real that I must really just be asleep. I could feel my body still asleep on the bed. I could feel the bluster of wind blow by my face as I flew and then ran on the tips of trees. I tried to convince myself that I must be dreaming, even though it felt real because this was so weird. But how could I even be dreaming that I was dreaming?

I looked down and noticed that the tall trees had turned from palm and lush to thin and pine. That’s when I knew I must be making this up because I was in Belize – a place of dense jungle and the landscape now looked like Lake Tahoe.

This is the lost thought I had before I lost contact with the experience and felt myself return to my body. Soon, I did really fall asleep.

I didn’t mention this experience to my companion until the next day, when, on a tour up the rain forest we came into a clearing. Here, the jungle began to recede and tall pine trees began to emerge. It looked just like the vision from the night before. We were visiting the 1000 Foot Falls in Belize. How could I see this waterfall and surrounding trees while I was in my bed? But I had. I did. I really went flying with an eagle who “popped” outside of my chest after I said thanks for helping me.

Flying with the wind through a forest in believe was not my first experience with spirit in the unexplainable. And it hasn’t been my last. But it did leave an impact on me that is most wonderful. Because whenever I think of this experience, I can still feel the way it feels to fly with the wind. Some aspect of me was there, and that aspect of me is always happy to remind the rest of me just what it means to have wings.

Wings appear when we need to reach some place higher than where we currently. I am a woman with wings of her own, who dares to leap from an open heart. Sometimes this means I hit my head on a trapeze, literally. Sometimes it means I flail about looking silly. Sometimes though, it means I catch the bar of my ambition.