Mark Divine [00:01:36]:
We have a community app and they’ve seen pictures and everything and it’s pretty interesting, pretty gnarly. So anyways, recently I was on a snowmobile trip now backing up a little bit. I finished my PhD in global leadership and change in December. That was close to a five year slog. Every single weekend was pounding the keyboard and doing research. I didn’t really have a lot of time to do anything for me personally. Now I don’t have a lot of needs. I was in the seals for 20 years.

Mark Divine [00:02:07]:
I don’t need adventure really a little bit, but I miss it a little bit. Of course I don’t have a need for speed or extreme sports or to prove myself to anybody. But after getting done with this, I got contacted by someone who I’ve. I use the friend word with a small F. Good guy. Really good guy. Just, you know, I’ve only known him for a few years. He’s not like a college fraternity and brother type friend.

Mark Divine [00:02:37]:
But I really respect this guy and he’s really into snowmobiling and, and for several years he’s been inviting me to go to Canada on this snowmobile trip with him. And so this year in January, when I thought about that or whenever I was like, well, I’m done with my PhD and I don’t really have a good excuse not to. And it does sound kind of interesting. So I said yes. So two days of travel, right, to get from San Diego to Montreal, then from Montreal up to northern Quebec in the first week of February and it’s 20 below zero and wow. And then we get all of our gear once it gets situated, get over gear. And I rent this snowmobile and I’m like, holy cow. This is like crazy.

Mark Divine [00:03:20]:
I had no idea. The advanced state, I mean, my ignorance is my own issue. But these snowmobiles, for those of you who know what I’m talking about, they’re crazy freaking 100 mile an hour sleds. The state of the technology is a little bit different than the 1974 ski do my old, my dad had, which went like 20 miles an hour and was always breaking down. And then the other, the other thing which I noticed pretty quickly is the, the location was well known for snowmobiling. Has like thousands miles of groomed trails or I don’t know if 1000, but probably thousands of miles groomed trails, all owned and operated or operated, I should say probably not owned by these clubs. And the way it was described to me was that, you know, think about hut skiing, you know, where you ski like in the Alps and you go to these different places and you can stay there and then you go to another place and you stay there. That’s what I thought we were gonna do.

Mark Divine [00:04:14]:
I thought we’re gonna have like a really cool nature experience with snowmobiles and we’re go to these different clubs and, and it’s gonna be like a fireplace with kind of really rich setting and we’re gonna have a drinks and eat some dinner and get a good night’s sleep and then get up the next day and ride a couple hundred miles to the next club. Well, it wasn’t that, right? So four hours into the first day and I’m just barely able to hold onto the sled. Going 80 miles an hour, ripping across the tundras, and there’s four of us. And the host was in the lead and I was jockey. I ended up getting put in the second position and I could barely see the guy in front of me. I could barely see the host. Like he’s flying. And so I’m flying to try to keep up because I don’t know these trails.

Mark Divine [00:04:59]:
You can see what disaster is awaiting me, right? I don’t know these trails at all and I don’t want to get lost in the Canadian wilderness. That wouldn’t be good Even though that was probably irrational fear because I did have my phone and whatever. What’s the worst that gonna happen? So anyways, four hours into this four day trip, we kind of get funneled into this wooded area and it’s really turny and twisty and, and it’s really quite. This part is kind of fun, you know, this is like more performance driving. And obviously we’re not going 80 now, but still going like 40 miles an hour. And I still am barely. Like every other turn I catch a wisp of snow from the guy and so I’m trying to keep up, which means I’m going too fast for my skill level, admittedly, since I hadn’t been on a snowmobile since like 19, whatever, 75 maybe. And suddenly I go around this corner and I was really in my head, right? So this is kind of lesson number one.

Mark Divine [00:06:02]:
Like I wasn’t present because I was worried about getting lost. And I was kind of ticked that the guy was going so fast. And so I was, you know, I had some mental processing that kept me out of being like super present. I come around this corner and another snowmobile is coming right at me in my lane. And now we’re like narrow. So this is like a two lane highway for snowmobiles. And he’s in my lane because he’s taking the turn wide and he probably didn’t think he’d see another snowmobile. And this guy just literally did nothing.

Mark Divine [00:06:35]:
He must have been in shock just like I was. And I was barreling and looking at a head on collision. And my thought at that moment was like, that’s not a good idea. So my instincts were to get out of the way. And so I veered to the right and my snowmobile kind of hit a little bit of a ditch and came to a complete stop. Well, guess what? You know, the law of energy, right? So what’s in motion is going to stay in motion until it gets, you know, stopped by a more firm energy that’s pushing back against it. Well, the snowmobile stopped, but my body didn’t. My body goes flying off the snowmobile and heading toward a tree, right? Which is about 10ft away.

Mark Divine [00:07:17]:
And I see all this happening. And so this is where my training kicks in because I’m seeing this in real time, slow time. And the thought that goes through my head, which is really not very spiritual. I didn’t see my life flash before my eyes. I just said to myself, oh shit, this is happening, right? Oh, fuck. Like, no, no. And I mean, I do remember thinking this is not my day to die. Just, oh, shit, this isn’t going to go well.

Mark Divine [00:07:48]:
And in the time that between the time that I left the snowmobile traveling 40 miles an hour and hit the tree, my instincts kicked in. Actually, there’s two theories here, and one of them is kind of metaphysical. Obviously. The first theory is my lifetime of martial arts and somatic training and Navy SEAL training kicked in. And I did essentially what would be like a parachute landing or PLF or like a karate or a keto roll where I rolled forward and to the right to avoid hitting my head. And I took the blow on my upper back, shoulder blade, scapula, ribs, saved my life. Now, the other scenario which is plausible is that, you know, because this is the non dualistic, non linear thinking that my guardian angels press, pause, reoriented my body, press, start again, and I hit the tree. That’s kind of a fun thing to think about, but I’m open to that possibility.

Mark Divine [00:08:46]:
So I hit the tree, my smack into my back. And I’m laying in the snow and it’s quiet and peaceful. I remember looking up, being like, this is absolutely beautiful. It’s quiet. And right away I knew two things. One is I was alive. I could tell if I wasn’t dead, and two, that my brain was fine. I could tell right away that there was no confusion, there was no muddiness.

Mark Divine [00:09:14]:
I was totally clear. And that was amazing. And so because I had those faculties, I immediately checked my extremities, so I was able to move my fingers and my toes and my legs and my arms. And I’m like. And I just had this wave of gratitude, like, holy shit. Like, thank God. Thank you, right? Like I’m alive. And I didn’t, you know, concuss myself and I didn’t paralyze myself.

Mark Divine [00:09:39]:
Now, I knew I probably had an issue with my shoulder. I initially thought maybe I just separated or dislocated it, which has never happened before to me. So I really don’t understand the pain level. But when I tried to stand up then it became pretty clear that, oh, maybe I did some serious damage. So at any rate, I’ll try to speed the story up because I don’t want to go forever here. But the third snowmobile came up and saw my sled and knew something was wrong. And he found me, right? And he helped me get up. That’s when I was like, oh, wow, there’s some serious damage being done that was done here.

Mark Divine [00:10:13]:
Still didn’t know what it was, how bad, but I tried to get on the snowbill. I couldn’t lift my arm. And you can’t drive a snowmobile with one arm. Left arm, right. So we left the snowmobile there and I rode painfully on the back of one of the guys sleds for 45 minutes out till we came to a location where we could convince a Quebecian, none of whom speak English pridefully, by the way. So we’re like pantomiming and finally got someone to order call an ambulance, who came and took me to a Canadian local hospital. So nine hours later, I finally get an mri. I’m pacing back and forth.

Mark Divine [00:10:53]:
I’m box breathing. I’m really good at pain management and I’m really good at projecting. No suffering. That’s part of our training, right? As a SEAL. Navy SEALs and what we teach a SEAL fit suffer in silence. I didn’t show any pain. I asked for some pain meds. They gave me a couple Tylenol.

Mark Divine [00:11:10]:
It’s like, well, it’s better than nothing, but it didn’t do a whole lot. Now finally, they get me in for an MRI and an X ray nine hours later. And, you know, simply like within minutes of viewing those, the doctor came running out. He’s like, holy shit. He’s like, you’re not going anywhere. We need to get you into bed and get some pain meds in you and we’ll figure out what to do. And we can’t do the surgery here, but you have 18. Your scapula or shoulder blade is broken in 18 places, and you have eight broken ribs and you punctured your lungs.

Mark Divine [00:11:42]:
And I’m like, okay, that’s a doozy. Now can I have some pain meds? So I was only in the hospital there for 24 hours because they couldn’t do any surgery. They said, we want to get me to another Canadian hospital. I said, no, I’m going to go back to the United States. Well, because of my pneumothorax, the punctured lung, I couldn’t fly. It’s too dangerous. And there was a major snowstorm. And my wife at this time now had flown out to Quebec City where a friend was that was able to meet her.

Mark Divine [00:12:10]:
And they decided, and I agreed with them, that it was too risky to drive. You don’t take a Southern California girl and put her in the middle of a snowstorm in Canada. Right. Driving a very injured individual. So that didn’t make sense. So we were left with the train option. So we booked a train from Quebec City all the way to San Diego. And it took us two days, right, to get to Chicago, where we were going to change to a sleeper car.

Mark Divine [00:12:37]:
And then from. As I got off the platform in Chicago, all of a sudden, I think I repunctured my lung and I just stopped. My whole body stopped. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t walk. I was in extreme pain. And the immediate thought entered my head, this is where I’m staying. This is where the work needs to be done. We found some first responders, said, can you take us to the best orthopedic hospital in town? And they said, yes, it’s Rush Hospital.

Mark Divine [00:13:05]:
So I ended up at Rush Hospital in Chicago. Friday afternoon, emergency room. The doctors looked at me like, holy shit. Yeah, this needs surgery asap. Earliest we can do it is Monday. The doctor named Xavier Simcock agreed to do it. I met the doctor, he said, listen, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. This is a doozy.

Mark Divine [00:13:26]:
But I love challenges and I’m a fixer. I love fixing things. And Xavier was a Columbia undergrad, Harvard Med, New Zealander, and he had a great attitude. And I was like, you’re my guy. So Monday, surgery. This is the 10th of February, and doctor calls me the next day and tells me that he’s proud of his work, that it was difficult, I lost a lot of blood. But he thinks it’s going to heal, potential for full recovery, and that I was okay to leave when I felt fit. And so that was Monday.

Mark Divine [00:13:59]:
We were able to fly home on Thursday because my lungs had healed. So I find myself back in San Diego now, almost a week and a half after this accident. So that’s really the worst of it now. Recovery and lessons. I’m still. The doctor said six weeks. Don’t do anything for six weeks. It’s really hard for an active person like me to do that.

Mark Divine [00:14:24]:
So I look at that and I say, okay, how do you define anything? And what they really mean is, don’t do anything with the arm or anything that’s going to create instability. And so I can, because of my training and intuition, I can really sense, like, oh, yeah, that movement, or that even walking was challenging at first. I could walk a few hundred yards, but I had to really stabilize my arm and be very careful. But the walking has gotten better every day. And then I could sense, maybe, let’s see, a week and a half after surgery or two weeks after surgery that I could start doing something, but not with my arm. So I would pin my arm really close to my chest, and I started doing squats, started with 100 squats, I added 20 a day. And then I stopped at 300. So ever since, maybe last three weeks, I’ve been doing 300 squats a day.

Mark Divine [00:15:15]:
And then I’m like, okay, what about the bike? Stationary bike. I can do a peloton. So I added the peloton and squats. And then what about yoga? Well, yoga is kind of tricky because you need both arms, typically in yoga. But what about, you know, can I do yoga with just one arm? And I found I can actually do it quite a bit with one arm. And so I added yoga back in. What else can I do for healing? What about peptides? Like, research is really not solid on peptides because they’re so new. But anecdotally, I tell you what, I’ve got a lot of friends who swear by them.

Mark Divine [00:15:53]:
So I got some peptides. And I’ve been using peptides locally and also systemically where you inject it into your belly for about two weeks now. And I just have faith that they’re helping out stem cells. I haven’t done stem cell therapy yet, but I’m looking into that and I think that’s coming probably when I’m a little bit further along Therapy itself. I’m doing some self therapy, really, just like hanging my arm and doing, you know, drawing circles on the floor and, you know, working on moving it up, down. Like what you see right now if you’re watching this is of dramatic improvement. I’m able to lift my elbow away from my hips and lift my arm forward, but I mean, it’s about as high as I can get it. It’s terrifying for me to think that I wouldn’t be able to gain full mobility, but I quickly surrender to that as fear.

Mark Divine [00:16:45]:
And I know it’s just not true because the human body has this incredible, incredible capacity to heal when you believe in it and you actually actively work on healing. So aside from those other things I talked about, which are going to be like general therapy keeping your body healthy. Right? So this is now translating here to like general principles for you. I’ve always said if you have an injury, work around it. Don’t do anything to aggravate the injury. It’s the difference between integrating pain and disintegrating pain. Just be very careful and work with an expert. What can you do and what shouldn’t you do? And experts are, mind you, they’re always going to veer on the sides of extreme caution, rightfully so, and also to protect their own asses liability wise.

Mark Divine [00:17:31]:
So take it with A grain of salt. You know, when I broke my wrist, I was rowing the next day, but I was rowing with one arm and I was doing all sorts of things because I could just immobilize my wrist. Same thing with my shoulder, right? So unless you have a spinal injury or something that’s really, you know, covers all, all motor functions, you can always do something. And that is good for your motivation, it’s good for your mindset and your attitude. It’s good for your blood flow and prana life force. And it’s going to accelerate your healing. But you just make sure that you can do those things without injuring yourself further. And secondly is as, as you progress, and as I’ll speak this, as I progress, I’ve got to be careful not to overdo it because even though I can do those things, I’m going to want to go faster than I should.

Mark Divine [00:18:20]:
And I’ve had people tell me this several times over, like, don’t rush it, because if you re injure it, that can set you back dramatically. So go slow, be patient. So patience is one of the best healing advices. Like the human body will heal itself with time and with your support, right. It’ll heal itself faster. If you believe in the healing power of your body, if you visualize the healing. And I’ll talk more about that in a second. If you do things like peptides and stem cells and exercise in a way that is prudent, right.

Mark Divine [00:18:57]:
As I’m discussing, like, I can do tons of stuff with my core and my body, my lower body, but I just can’t do anything really with my upper body or my right side of my body. Let me talk about visualization. I think the power of visualization is extraordinary. Our entire world is a mental projection. So the power of the mind to project and to live a creation that is our creation. That’s what the human experience is. So if we create an internal world where we can visualize a healing team, like the team being your immune system, your bones and your connective tissues coming back together. And I like to do this, like visualizing them as a construction crew, even down to wearing orange vests and hard hats.

Mark Divine [00:19:49]:
And so I visualize this construction crew fast at work rebuilding my scapula. And now after the surgery, there’s a bunch of metal in there. Fine. We’re going to take that metal and we’re going to turn this scapula into like a titanium plate. And also the ribs are going to be like titanium. They’re going to be stronger, you know, just Like a lot of times, if you put a broken piece of porcelain back together, it’s actually stronger and more beautiful because it’s got some imperfections in it. So I’m looking at my ribs that way, like they’re going to show some imperfections, but actually it’s going to be stronger that way. And of course, healing my lungs and all that, you know, all the soft tissue, the team is going to town to heal all that.

Mark Divine [00:20:33]:
And so I visualize that several times a day, right, for five minutes or more. And from my past experiences, this can greatly accelerate your healing timeline. I’ve made the claim that it’ll speed up, double the healing speed, or instead, another way, it’ll take you half the time to heal that it would ordinarily if you didn’t do this. So anytime you have an injury or a major crisis like this, don’t waste it, right? Use it to develop your skills. Use it to develop your visualization skills. Use it to reflect upon how you can turn the situation into an advantage. So for me, that was like, how am I? Like, why did this happen? Well, sometimes you can ascribe a reason, and usually it’s kind of bullshit, but it might make you feel better to say, oh, it happened because of this or because of that. For me, I said earlier, well, I was kind of distracted, and I’ve had a lot going on in my life, and I was actually talking to my wife about a need for a sabbatical or taking a break.

Mark Divine [00:21:40]:
And I was laughing with my producer, John. I needed a break. I just didn’t need 18 of them. So I could ascribe some reason, but, you know, it’s. I don’t know if that’s really true or not. Don’t worry so much about finding a reason, but don’t miss the opportunity to learn and grow from it. That’s really the important thing. Reasons are really about the past.

Mark Divine [00:22:02]:
It doesn’t matter. But learning and growing, that’s the important thing. So anything that happens to you, no matter how screwed up the crisis, and actually, the bigger the crisis, the bigger the opportunity. So for me, the opportunity that I don’t want to squander is this opportunity to, like, really, really slow down, make sure that I don’t get caught in my head like I did on a snowmobile trip, and remain really present. So my spiritual practice, my mindfulness, like, very important. It already was important, but now I’m like, oh, yeah, it’s like the center post, right? There’s nothing more important than that, than finding your center and maintaining present moment awareness and witnessing mindset where you can operate spontaneously and with effortless perfection. Shibumi so that’s the opportunity here to really, really slow down and pay attention to what’s extremely important. Also my family and my wife, right, the loving healing energy that she brought me and brings me was extraordinary.

Mark Divine [00:23:05]:
And you know, I think I sometimes take that stuff for granted. So that was an opportunity not to be wasted. All in all I will have 100% recovery. I will be stronger. I’ll have a titanium strong scapula and ribs and I’ll be able to continue doing 20 dead hang pull ups and thousands of burpees. It’ll probably take me nine months to get there. Between six and nine months and I’ll use the time wisely in between. I hope this was interesting and helpful.

Mark Divine [00:23:39]:
There’s so much to learn and like I’ve said, a lot of people with unbeatable mind, we also use it for veterans who are healing. So the training of integration, you know, physically, mentally, emotionally, intuitionally and spiritually using all these skills and tools that I talk about here on this show. They are awesome for going from good to great or great to enlightened. But they’re equally valuable when you get kicked in the nuts or when you really have a problem like post traumatic stress or you run into a tree at 40 miles an hour. And that’s when these tools become even more precious. Pause, breathe, think, slow down, visualize. Maintain a positive mindset. Feed the courage wolf right and learn how to bring energy into the body and expel negativity and things that you don’t want that don’t serve you and to accept your life as it is while also striving for something better.

Mark Divine [00:24:38]:
So on that note, thanks for listening. This is Mark Devine. The Mark Devine Show Show Notes will be [email protected] video will be on our YouTube channel. Just search for it there. You can find me on social media. Markdivinephd Mark Divine Leadership. I don’t know, we just recently changed it. Our ratings and reviews are incredibly helpful so please rate and review wherever you listen.

Mark Divine [00:25:00]:
Apple, Spotify, it’s very helpful. Helps us stay relevant and keeps me motivated. So thanks for doing that. Thanks to my incredible team, John Dahlgren, JET Studios and Catherine Devine, my stepdaughter who help us who helped produce the show in my newsletter which comes out every week called Divine Inspiration. Go to markdivine.com to subscribe if you’re not. So thanks to them. Couldn’t do it without them. And thanks to you for listening and for sharing this with your friends and for being part of the change that you want to see in the world.

Mark Divine [00:25:32]:
We can do that at scale with technology like this. So thanks for being part of the solution and not the problem in the world. Till next time, this is your host, Marc Devine. Hoo ya. People are going to love that.