Float Away the Blues

I have the great good fortune of living in Albuquerque, NM where the largest balloon festival in the world takes place every year. There are a lot of factors that led to this, but the high desert weather is very well suited to balloon launches in the early morning hours at the beginning of fall. During the festival, which spans eight days, the skies are often filled with balloons and going out to the field where they launch is magical (see the photo from last October). As I experience the balloons floating up so effortlessly, I often contemplate why I feel so stuck on earth and stuck in old patterns.

Luckily, gravity is holding us down onto the earth, so we don’t float away but I got so tired of that heaviness that I embarked on my own balloon adventure. My brother, niece, and I decided to go for a ride (with a group) and ended up floating to 9,200 feet above the Rio Grande valley. The ride itself feels as if you are barely moving and the experience of lightness, and being in the sky, is astounding. And then the pilot held us up there and rotated the balloon so we could experience all the angles of the landscape spreading out below us. Right now, I can bring myself back to that feeling of floating and conjure it when I need to release the heaviness that sometimes sits on my heart.

You don’t have to take a balloon ride to experience lightness – but you do need to embrace the part of you that is free, and connected to the spiritual energy within you, which can power a balloon ride for you at any time. This part of you can also provide inspiration and guidance for whatever you are creating in your life. The certificate I got from World Balloon, the company that operates the balloon we went up in, gave me a certificate that states in part: “Jane Midgley has proven to be a brave and daring soul by ascending towards the heavens in a Montgolfier balloon.” (The Montgolfier brothers invented the hot air balloon in the 1700s.)

The key is here that I was ascending towards the heavens, which is another way of saying ascending to a higher state of being, awareness, and flow with the entire creation. We have the capability to tune into this feeling and experience at any time because we are one with all living things and all energy, including the skies and the cosmos. We can access the energy of this oneness by slowing down, getting quiet, breathing deeply, and imagining spaciousness within our body, and our heart filled with light. And sometimes just seeing a balloon, a starry sky, or an expansive view can take us there too.

So. feeling weighed down by something at work or in a relationship? Tune in, feel the light within fill your body, mind, and spirit, and fly.