Jillian’s August Post: Stepping Into Our Courage

I just finished re-reading Paul Coelho’s The Alchemist (excellent book). He talks of courage as one of the most essential qualities to realizing our dreams. He writes, “Don’t give in to your fears… If you do, you won’t be able to talk to your heart.”

I am about to go off on a weekend to help people walk across fire. Yes, fire. I realize how key courage will be -- for all of us: Courage to stay connected to our hearts. As Winston Churchill said, “Courage is rightly considered the foremost of the virtues, for upon it, all others depend.”

I remember Michael’s story from Change Your Life Travel. I would like to share an excerpt of it with you, hoping we all will feel more empowered to Step Into Our Courage everyday after reading it:

“I stripped down to my bathing suit and started to climb out over this area where tourists do not go,” Michael, an entrepreneur, said. “I climbed out on this cliff and looked down into this blowhole, and it was deep! I couldn’t believe that I was up on this precipice looking down at water surging up as little as fifty feet away -- if you can call that little -- and as much as one hundred and fifty feet away. And that water was moving at a good rate! It was welling up and then going back down. And I realized, if I didn’t time my jump right, I could kill myself.”

Michael was in Jamaica having a quiet beer at a bar “located in this oceanographic formation. Some people called the formation a blowhole, others called it ‘the toilet bowl.’ The cliffs in this area are one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet tall. And, over eons, as the water has hit the cliffs, it’s eaten a hole in the bottom of the cliff. The top of the cliff has been eaten away at the center, probably a hundred feet across. So it’s like a tube that goes all the way to the base of the cliffs. And the bar is situated on the edge of that; there is a cement sitting area that goes around the top of the hole.

“Jamaican cliff divers would go to the top of this sitting area and dive down into this formation, into this surging water, for money. The ocean tide would well up so it was within fifty feet of the top of the hole. Then, as the wave would recede, the water would go down as much as one hundred and fifty feet from the top of the hole. So the water was constantly going up and down inside this giant hole. And the cliff divers would dive after coins people had tossed in. Sometimes they would dive only fifty feet, which was a considerable distance anyway. Other times they would dive as much as one hundred and fifty feet because of the timing of the water surging up and down.

“Well, I happened to be a daredevil at the time and I like to take risks. And I was with my girlfriend who was saying, just for fun, ‘You should do it. You’d be the only white boy here doing it.’ Of course all the Jamaicans were doing it, but most of the people at the bar were Americans -- probably two hundred people or so. And my girlfriend started egging me on. And I said, ‘I can do it. I’m sure that I can do it.’ Then other people heard us talking and started egging me on. And, before I knew it, the whole bar was saying, “Go, go, go!” And I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’

“So I asked the Jamaican guys how they did it, and they told me where to go. One guy went out to do it, and then showed me where the ladder was so I could climb all the way back up. And I said, ‘I’m not going to dive, I’m just going to jump.’

“Then my knees started shaking,” Michael said. “And I started to get concerned, because now I’d spent a good minute considering the possibilities. And I looked around and the crowd started saying, “Jump! Jump! Jump! Jump!” And it was just so adrenaline- and panic-producing all at one time that I felt like now there was no alternative. I really just wanted to go back and finish my beer!

“I tried to time it so that I would jump when the water was at its highest point. But, instead, I waited too long, so the water was starting to recede again. That’s when I chose to jump. So I wound up flying down at the same rate that the water was. So I actually hit the water when it was at its lowest point, not at its highest point. And I hit the water really hard on the side of my leg and it hurt like hell. And I went down into the water about twenty or thirty feet. But when I came to the surface, everyone was cheering. And I was thinking, I did it! I did it!

“I climbed up the ladder and somebody was going to give me a towel. But I went to the precipice and did it again, just to show that I could. And this time, I timed the water perfectly, so that it was about a sixty-foot jump. And it certainly hurt a lot less. And my pride was really strong. And I came out of there feeling that I had accomplished something truly important in my life,” he said.

Years later, Michael would say, “That experience taught me that, even in the face of extreme fear and possibilities of danger, I learned the difference between taking just a leap of faith and taking a calculated leap of faith. From that point on, I have tried to focus on what I can control in any given situation, so as to make the risk a little more in my favor.”