Zenfull Heart | September 26, 2026
For as long as I can remember, I have been afraid of bridges and heights, especially bridges high above a body of water. I never really understood where the fear came from. I just knew my body reacted strongly, sometimes way more strongly than what was happening in front of me.
Last year, when I was driving from Maine down to Washington, D.C. for a Dr. Joe Dispenza retreat, I had to cross a huge bridge along the way. I remember my body going into complete panic. I was hyperventilating, trying to regulate myself, gripping the wheel and basically just trying to get across it. At the time, I did not understand why my body reacted with so much fear. I knew I did not like heights, and I knew I did not like being high above water, but the intensity of the reaction never completely made sense to me.
Back then, I also did not understand trauma in the way I do now. I did not understand how much our bodies can hold onto, whether it comes from something we remember in this lifetime, something we do not consciously remember, generational patterns, or even, depending on what you believe, something that may go beyond this lifetime. Sometimes the mind has no explanation, but the body still reacts as if something is happening right now.
Over the last year, I have been doing a type of emotional integration work called Bridge, and I am currently training to become a Bridge practitioner myself. The way I understand Bridge is that it works with the body's own innate intelligence to help bring mental, emotional, and physical symptoms back toward neutrality. I have experienced enough of it personally that I know what it has done for me, and one of the most obvious examples has been my fear of bridges.
When I came to the Pensacola area in August, I did not even realize there was a three-and-a-half-mile bridge that I would need to cross regularly. That is very much how I live now. I go into the unknown and figure things out when I get there. I did not study the route ahead of time or prepare myself for the fact that this giant bridge was waiting for me.
Interestingly enough, my SUV broke down in Alabama on the way here, so I did not actually drive myself across it that first day. My SUV was being towed, and then the tow truck itself had an issue on the bridge and had to pull over after we crossed. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if there was a little protection in the timing of all of that, because at that point I had not yet worked through this fear.
Later, during one of my Bridge sessions, we muscle tested what needed attention, and the bridge fear came up. I remember thinking, really? I have an entire list of things I want to work on. Financial fear, lack, abundance, relationships, all of the deeper things I thought should obviously come first.
Why are we working on a bridge? But I trusted the process.
During that work, imagery started coming up for me that felt very real in my body. I want to be clear that I cannot prove what it was. I do not know whether it was a past-life memory, something symbolic from my subconscious, stored trauma being translated into imagery, or something else completely. I only know what I experienced.
What came to me was the sense that I had fallen from some kind of bridge or structure into water. I had flashes of large concrete pillars, something wrapped or crushed around my leg, and this overwhelming feeling that I had died with regret and fear because I had a family depending on me. I had the sense that I may have been a man in that life, with a wife and family I was leaving behind. Again, I do not know exactly what that experience was, but my body responded to it.
And then came the part that mattered most to me. I drove across the Pensacola bridge again.
The first few times after doing the Bridge work, I was almost waiting for the fear to come back. I knew exactly what that feeling normally felt like in my body. It would start lower and rise through me, eventually tightening in my chest, my higher heart and my throat. So when I crossed the bridge again, I kept checking for it.
Where is it? I expected something to happen.
It reminded me of walking into a room when you are used to not knowing what reaction you are going to receive. You are bracing for either warmth or conflict before anything has even happened. My body had learned to expect fear on bridges, so even when the fear was no longer showing up, part of me was still waiting for it.
For the first few crossings, I could almost create a little bit of the sensation simply because I was looking so hard for it. My body had been conditioned to believe that crossing a bridge meant danger. I had spent years gripping the steering wheel, focusing intensely, trying not to change lanes, and wanting to get across as quickly as possible because somewhere inside me there was this belief that the faster I got off the bridge, the safer I would be. But something had changed. I have now crossed that bridge probably eight or ten times, and the feeling is not there anymore.
Last night I drove across the bridge on my way into Pensacola for the seafood festival without that old reaction. Then on the way back, I had picked up some food to bring home and realized I was literally eating while I was driving across the bridge. Two weeks ago, I would have had both hands gripping the wheel while my entire body focused on getting safely to the other side. I would not have casually eaten food while crossing it. I probably would not have even considered it. Last night, I barely thought about the bridge at all.
That is what is so fascinating to me about healing. Sometimes we think healing is supposed to be dramatic. We think there should be some huge emotional moment where we suddenly know everything has changed. But sometimes healing looks like doing something ordinary and then realizing afterward that the fear you expected to find simply never showed up.
I do not need to convince anyone what caused my fear or exactly what happened during that Bridge session. Maybe someone else would interpret the experience completely differently than I do, and that is okay. I know what my body felt like before, and I know what my body feels like now. Something that once felt dangerous no longer does.
There are still plenty of things I am working through. I still have fears, old patterns, emotional wounds and things in my life that I want to bring into greater neutrality. I am not pretending one Bridge session cleared everything inside me. But this one thing changed. There is something surreal about realizing that I can drive across the same bridge that would have once activated my entire nervous system and simply look around, keep driving, eat my food and continue with my day.
The bridge did not change.
I did.
