In order for some of us to wake up
we need a wake-up call.
And in 1986.
I was in the triathlon in Palm Springs, California. And I was on the
biking portion of the race. And I was coming up to a corner and I was
passing to cyclists on the corner, and there was a police officer that
was waving me on to make the turn. But he had his back to the oncoming
traffic behind him.
So as I passed these 2 bikers,
a four-wheel drive vehicle going about 55 miles an hour
hit me from behind on my bike and catapulted me out of my bike.
And I landed squarely on my back.
And when you land with that kind of force, the compression
compresses the vertebrae and the spine.
And so, I wound up
breaking 6 vertebrae in my spine. T-8, T-9, T-10, T-11, T-12 and L-1.
And when I was laying there, I realized that it was pretty serious.
Because I had an immediate physical change in my body and I could
feel the blood kind of pooling in my lungs.
And so, the neural arch of the eighth thoracic
vertebra was broken like a pretzel. And the volume of each vertebrae
when it compresses go somewhere, and it went back onto my spinal cord.
So I had multiple compression fractures of my thoracic spine and upper
lumbar spine.
I had bone fragments on my cord and I had the neural arch of T8 broken
like a pretzel.
And the typical treatment for this after 4 opinions from 4
leading surgeons of Southern California
was a surgery called "Harrington-Rod surgery". And they basically cut off
the back parts of your vertebrae,
and in my case, it would be from the base of my neck to the base of my spine.
And they drill in these stainless steel rods in an attempt to
cantilever the spinal column off the spinal cord.
And then they take bone fragments from your hip and they paste it over
the top and you know, they hope for the best.
And so, the prognosis was, if I didn't get the surgery, I'd
probably never walk again.
And, you know, I think if it was anybody else, I saw those films and
saw the radiographs and cat-scans,
I probably would have made that
recommendation. But this was me, and I wasn't so quick to make that decision.
And in 1986, it wasn't a good
idea at the time to challenge your doctor.
Well, there's a little bit more of an awareness around it.
But in 1986. they thought I had hit my head.
They thought I had post-traumatic stress disorder.
They just couldn't understand that I wasn't so quick to sign on
the dotted line.
Anyway, I decided not to have the surgery and I just had this thought,
you know, the power that made the body heals the body.
And that's just how it happened.
I think it was, you know, part of my training and my
understanding that there's an intelligence that gives us life, that
keeps our heart beating and digesting our food. And when done properly,
not only does it reduce pain and increase mobility,
but a lot of times certain nerves that go to certain organs and
tissues are released and you have a pretty big change.
So I was taking this to another level. And I had been, I studied yoga
for years.
I had my own yoga studio at the time, and I just believe that there's
something within us that, that I could make
contact with.
I wasn't going anywhere, I wasn't doing anything.
I was basically laying face down.
And so I just said: Look, I'm going to make contact with this
intelligence and I'm gonna give it a plan.
I'm going to give it a template.
I'm going to design something.
When I'm really complete with the design,
I'm going to surrender my design to this greater mind and let it do
the healing for me.
Certainly I can't do it, but it probably knows how.
And the other thing I thought was - I'm not going to let any thought
slip by my awareness that I don't want to experience. And that
sounds really easy from a philosophical standpoint.
But when you're in crisis or trauma, or you're in a tough
situation, I think we always focus on what we don't want to have happen.
Instead of what we do want to have happen.
So this was my challenge.
It was 6 weeks of the dark night of the soul. Because I realized I
couldn't get my mind to do what I wanted it to do.
Well, I wanted to reconstruct every single vertebrae.
Like, I wanted to be present and show this intelligence exactly what I wanted!
So, I'd start off reconstructing the vertebrae, and then the next thing
I start thinking about if I'm going to be in a wheelchair in a few
months, should I sell my home?
Should I sell my practice? My mind was all over the place. And the
hormones of stress actually do this to us.
Because when we're under the gun of the fight or flight nervous
system or the hormones of stress, out of the infinite potentials
that we could put our attention on,
we always select the worst-case scenario. Because living in stress is
living in survival.
So in survival, you prepare for the worst. Because if you
prepare for the worst and something less happens, you have a better
chance of surviving.
So, 6 weeks, 6 or 7 weeks,
it would take me hours.
When I say hours, because every time I would lose my attention,
I'd start all over again.
I'd say: That's not a complete picture.
And what I didn't know that I was doing at the time was that
I was increasing my ability to be present and increasing my ability to
stay focused. And I was firing and wiring a whole new set of neurons in
the brain and creating a whole new level of mind.
Anyway at 6 weeks,
somewhere between 6 and 7 weeks
it was like I hit a tennis ball right in the sweet spot, like I hit the golf ball
just right, something clicked in that moment.
And from that point on, 2 things happened.
It got a lot easier to do it.
What took me 2 or 3 hours to do, I was able to do in 45 minutes.
Because I had installed the hardware,
that's where my attention
and my mind was. And secondly you know, you get to this point where
it gets easy, and I started noticing my body,
I started getting feeling back.
My pain levels went down.
I started to correlate what I was doing inside of me and the effects
it was producing outside of me. And the moment that happened,
I didn't dread doing it any longer.
I was looking forward to it. And in 10 and a half weeks
I was back on my feet. And they wanted to cast me for this full body
cast, and they casted me for it.
I wore it like maybe
10 minutes and just wasn't... I knew I was healed. The main
surgeon from Scripps Hospital in San Diego,
he was the Marcus Welby, you know, he was the medical director of
the hospital.
He was elderly man, salt-and-pepper hair,
very credible, published.
He was the one that gave me the most trouble,
challenge me the most because he kept saying: If you were my
son, you would be on the operating table right now.
And yeah, I had a great conversation with him.
He said: This is not normal, congratulations.
I don't know that I would still advise my patients to do this because
it's a great risk. But it really opened his mind.
And I remember we had a pretty good relationship after that because he
respected that there was a strong element that mind was
involved.
And I just made a deal with myself - if I was ever able to
walk again, I'd spend the rest of my life
studying the mind-body connection and mind over matter, and I'm doing that
since 1986.
I wanted to get beyond my body.
I wanted to get me on my pain. And I don't know,
I just trusted my intuition I guess more than anything else.
And I never have back pain.
I mean, I don't have any back pain in my body.
I don't have any pain in my body. And I'm actually grateful that it
happened because I wouldn't be sitting here right now talking to you
if it didn't.
There was a moment after the fourth surgeon
said to me: Look, we don't have to put 12-inch stainless steel
rods in your spine.
We can put 8-inch stainless steel rods in your spine.
We can leave them in for a year and then take them out, and put
4-inch stainless steel rods in your spine.
And I said to him:
Hey doc, don't you think that would limit motion in my thoracic spine?
And he said: What? You don't have any motion in your thoracic spine.
I was teaching martial arts and yoga at the time, I mean, I understand
spinal biomechanics very well because of my training as a chiropractic.
I just looked at him and he was about 6′ 3″
and probably 75 to 100 pounds overweight. And I just looked
at him and I thought: My God, maybe you don't have any motion in your
thoracic spine, but I have a hell of a lot more motion than you do.
And that was the moment
I realized that I had, my view was more vitalistic than mechanistic.
It wasn't parts and broken things and pasting them and
putting them back together, that there was an element of life
force that I thought could assist in that healing.
And to this day
I still believe that. I believe that it's not matter
that is emitting a field.
I think it's the field that creates matter!
So, when you change the field you change matter! And the science behind
that is very supportive.
So, my ability to articulate it,
my research that I've done since then and the studies that I've done
in additional education has helped me to be able to put together a
formula. And that formula
in this present time is producing very dramatic changes in people's
lives and health!