Alright then, I will always be harping on awareness in Freefall. The cool thing about our sport is that it is an extremely tactile sport. Remember when you made your first jump? There was some time right at the beginning when you let go of the plane and you don’t have a clue what was going on? That is what we call “Sensory overload”. That’s because we just put our body in a situation that is absolutely, positively was not designed to do. All your neural pathways get overloaded with so much new information that they had never experienced before that they just went into “What the F…” mode or as is commonly known as fight or flight (a different kind of flight). But the human body is so adaptable that it only took a few seconds for your body to start to create new or modify old pathways to deal with this insane new situation you were putting it through. Now, lots of jumps later, your body understands that this wasn’t a onetime deal and it has created independent pathways for just this purpose. The human body is cool because on every square inch of the human body there is a hair and this hair acts like a sensor. In freefall, because of the air we are falling through, these sensors send a ton of information to body to evaluate and react too. And I don’t just mean your brain. It sends information to your muscles, the fascia around the muscles, your ears, your eyes, and the whole body. Unfortunately we tend to shut a lot of that information out and react mostly to what our eyes are telling us and that is limiting your awareness by a whole lot. Here’s something to try next time you go skydive and are doing a no-contact exit. Looking at the door from the inside of the plane. The angle from the top front corner of the door and the rear lower corner of the door is more or less the angle of the relative wind (I will be referring to it as the Relative plane from now on. There is no hill except for Ron but I will get into that a bunch more later). This doesn’t work if you are jumping a tailgate. You are going to use that reference on how you push your shoulders through the door. So if the door is on the left hand side of the plane, your right shoulder is up and your left shoulder is down. Now as your head goes out the door (very important it is outside the door) close your eyes and count to 5. What will happen is you will fly the air you feel on the relative plane. The ground won’t influence how you position your body, the feel of the air will. Welcome to Organic Skydiving. This is the pure skydiving feeling that we are seeking. This is where you will become aware of the vertical line.
All of a sudden…..Mike