Aaron Baker: Spinal Cord Injury Lifestyle Specialist – Ep. 45

2:29 – “There was a malfunction with the motorcycle. I went over the handlebars and crashed headfirst into the ground. And that effectively paralyzed me. It broke my neck. It broke my neck in three places, and I had a very grim prognosis that I was going to have a one in a million chance of ever recovering.”

4:20 – “…what I ended up doing was visualizing those colors of light. My toes looked like Skittles. My left big toe was blue, my right big toe was red. And combining the the sounds with the visualization was how I was able to direct my mind into my body and connect to my left foot.”

8:25 – “I was desperate. A year after my injury, I was in the darkest place of my life. I wanted to end it all. I was very suicidal. There weren’t any places for me to go. I knew that in my heart I had the will to work hard. But since there weren’t any spaces to facilitate that, I was basically just falling apart.”

10:44 – “The way the old school prognosis method is—its probability outcome rather than possibility. So I kind of wanted to flip that script and plant seeds of possibility in people’s minds.”

12:13 – “…we were presenting to an audience one one day and I blurted out on stage, I said: ‘If we’re doing these these marathons, why don’t we do it like Forrest Gump and ride across the country?’ So I made this declaration publicly and my mom’s jaw dropped and everybody else thought I was nuts. But in 2007, we did it. We pedaled from San Diego, 3,182 miles to Florida.”

18:30 – “It was a little waiting waiting list. And I always felt like I needed to keep my foot on the brake so that we didn’t lose control. We could maintain quality as we were basically building the plane during flight.”

23:30 – “I was a bit of an anomaly in the early 2000s, with my level of injury and my level of

27:07 – “I tell the story of my Paralympic pursuit. I think it’s relevant to today, because it’s happening right now. I spent nearly four years pursuing the London Games. After all my cycling tours. Like I said, I started that process. I dedicated my entire life to that goal—everything was invested. And three days before I was to get on the plane and go. I got sick. Bladder infection was rushed to the emergency room.”

32:14 – “I willingly went out to Death Valley, and I walked across Death Valley for a week, carrying all my own supplies. And in that space, it’s just survival. But it was purposeful. I wanted to go there and strip away all my, you know, all this insulation and get down to just the raw life force. Connect back to the Earth.”

37:17 – “Just the variety of people that I got exposed to and that I befriended, was really inspiring. We would just reflect to each other the human spirit. All of a sudden, our differences and our difficulties disappeared, when we’re in this space with the intention and the desire to just be better—be better tomorrow than we are today.”

40:00 – “[My mom] brought in a CD player and just started playing like I said, Carlos Nakai, Native American flutes, chants, you know? That resonated with my… with every cell. Just the frequencies of those sounds transported me out of my body and on top of the Himalayas.”

51:04 – “You’ve got to be willing to go through that. Let go of the resistance. Allow the suffering to be felt, because it’s real and it’s okay. Nothing wrong with feeling like that. This is the spectrum of the human experience. And after that, then come back to gratitude, take a breath with an awareness of ‘we are here, we are now’. If there’s people around you that love you, embrace them.”

54:42 – “…it truly is what all religion and philosophy points to, which is a oneness, an interconnectedness of everything. It was my own disillusionment merging into the vast expanse of connectivity. And that’s why music and sound frequencies and waves (of which we all are) make so much sense to me.”