The Hidden Gift Inside Pain: How My Back and Knee Broke Me Open

0:03Darin Olien:Welcome to Super Life with me, Darin Olien, a podcast where we explore, discover, and share solutions that promote a healthier life and a better world. Together, we'll ignite possibilities, inspire change, and build sovereignty, creating a roadmap towards a super life for you and for all. Get ready to start living your super life.

0:32Darin Olien:Before we dive into today's episode, I want to thank my sponsor, Therasage. Pulsed electromagnetic frequencies done in the right way with the right frequencies are incredibly beneficial for your mitochondria. Pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. That's what PEMF is. I've been using it at alternative doctors' offices for a very long time. Well, now you can own a mat that has one of these technologies on it among six other technologies. It's got PEMF, which I use every day. It's got red light, photon technology, gemstone technology, full spectrum, infrared, heat, a TENS unit, EMF remediation, earthing, grounding technology, and negative ions.

1:21Darin Olien:That's right. It's in one pad. You've got it at your fingertips. You can turn this on. You can lay on it. You can meditate on it like I do every day, and this technology is a natural way for healing process to be created, to help reduce pain, reduce inflammation, to improve your overall immune function. TheraPro is safe, low EMF, and no weird flicker of the lights. It's in many sizes, small size as well as a big size, and I lay on this thing, my full body. It's fantastic. It's got a great travel case with a long power cord, super convenient. You can go to therisage.com and get 15 % off your order.

2:03Darin Olien:Just type in Darren, D-A-R-I-N, and magically, you get 15 % off. I'm super stoked for Therisage. I love their company. I love what they're doing, and you will too. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show. This is Darren O 'Lean. This is the Super Life Podcast. And I am stoked you're here. This episode is a bit personal, but there's takeaways, and I want to share those with you. I recently made a vow, and this may sound strange to some of you, but that vow about four months ago was to love myself completely and totally, whatever that looked like, so that I could take my life, my legacy, my intention, my focus to that next level.

2:50Darin Olien:So whatever is holding me back, I'm ready. That was in a ceremony, in a meditation retreat. It came full on. And I, of course, said, it's time. But I didn't know what that looked like. And with all of that came by way of that extension of what I want to put in that world is to create the ability for others to have an extraordinary life, a super life. That is why I'm here on every freaking level. These last four months have been some of the toughest in my life. But I'm going to break that down and I'm going to lay out the exact blueprint physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually that I went through and that I'm continuing to go through to be the best version of myself first.

3:44Darin Olien:so that I can expand it and contribute to the world at large. That is my DNA. That is why I'm here. So welcome to Super Life. I am excited to share this episode with you and give you practical things that you can take in when you're hitting obstacles because this life is full of them. And that's what we signed up for. This is what this matrix is. This is what having a soul in a body and trying to live, that's what this is. Understanding it, learning from it, expanding on it. So what I started with was a very, very big intention. Was to love myself totally and completely and to be the best version of myself.

4:35to stand into the utopia that is beyond even the nutrition and the water and the fatal conveniences, but there is stuff that I will continue to share with you in this next several years even that is so extraordinary. It will break your reality in such a good way and to give you hope and possibility. So when I'm telling you this, I am so full of hope.

5:04Darin Olien:But it came by way of an examination of everything that I know. So let me tell you what happened. There was physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual things that came at me that I wasn't prepared for. So what happened really, I set this intention. And maybe some of you have heard that I had a career-ending back injury, which catapulted me into health and nutrition and education on that front and understanding the body and set forth my life in such a powerful way. However, that back injury led me to some of the deepest trauma in my life, all the way back to when I was born. Yep. And I'm not going to get into all of that stuff.

5:53But maybe if all of you want me to tell the really deep trauma exploration that I've been doing and liberating within my body, my spirit, my sense of who I am, it is wildly powerful. So with all of that, I had this back injury that none of my bells and whistles were working that I've been using for 30 years and I had excruciating pain like a hot poker knife shoved in my back. I was on my back for virtually two months using everything I could possibly come up with which I'll get into a bunch today but I was wiped out. I couldn't focus. I couldn't think. I was in severe pain and I'm used to the body responding and coming out of things because I have a pretty good relationship with my body but this time that back injury was pointing me to a trauma

6:52Darin Olien:that I needed to face and I'll get into it and then next I was trying to get out of gravity and I went into my pool and I kicked just a frog kick no nothing wasn't working out and my knee dislocated in the pool. This was a surgery I had in 1998, an ACL reconstruction. It had never dislocated after I got that surgery relatively okay. And it dislocated and it popped back in and my knee blew up. So now my back, my knee, I'm in so much pain. I go, what the hell is going on? And then what happened is I got through a bunch of that stuff and I'm going to tell you what I did to recover. I'm just setting the context here.

7:36Darin Olien:And after I recovered from that, I got slammed with some sort of respiratory cold for two weeks. And believe me, I don't get colds that much. And I wasn't recovering. This was so strange to me that, again, I was on my freaking knees. This was the constant next thing after the next thing after the next thing was just pummeling me. At the same time, trying to show up for podcasts, trying to keep my life going, trying to pay bills, all of that stuff that you know all too well of life. So let me get into some of the layers. And I'm going to get into the deepest layer towards the end here. And the deepest layer is inside.

8:21Darin Olien:It's an inside game. And at the same time, I had to do everything on every level. So not in order, but I eventually got to plasma rich protein through a great doctor friend of mine. So an orthopedic doctor in San Diego, I'm going to save his name because we're going to come on and he's going to do a podcast with me and we're going to do a lot of stuff. And I went in, I was under the FDA's right to try because I was kind of debilitated. So the FDA opened up this ability for alternative therapies, if done properly through protocols that you can you can do. But I still had to pay for it. Right. Pay out of pocket.

9:04Darin Olien:And so the first protocol was plasma rich protein. So they take your blood, they spin it and then they inject it into my back, in this case, my back and my knee. And within a couple of hours, I was out of at least 40 to 50 percent of the pain, which I could then think again. This was incredible. And at the same time of the procedure, we did lipoaspiration of fat tissue. Like you've heard of liposuction, but they're taking huge amounts of fat off of people. This is lipoaspiration. So this is water mixed with a little bit of fat tissue, and then you aspirate it out of the body. And then the stem cell proliferation of my cells starts to happen.

9:50mescomal stem cells which by definition can turn themselves almost into any tissue or any organ

9:58Darin Olien:and i could go on and on about stem cells i know a lot about them and i have a really cool story of how i learned from one of the godfathers of stem cells and i really understand how and why stem cells mostly don't work because people don't know what they're doing or they're not following protocols. But I'm going to kind of button it here because I'm going to have an amazing conversation with some incredible doctors about this later. But they got my stem cells and then for three months they're going to be proliferating, growing more of my stem cells. So I will be going back. I haven't had the stem cells yet.

10:37Darin Olien:I will be going back in the next couple months to then have stem cell injection to regenerate the tissue that is clearly messed up. So that is what I was doing to get out of the certain huge amount of pain that I was in for two months on a physical level. And the other things that I was doing was doubling down on all nutrition, doubling down on doing fasting protocols so that I could endogenously make more stem cells. So even before we've expired more of my stem cells, I did a three-day water fast. And that's proven through the science that our stem cell proliferation does go up endogenously inside the body.

11:23Darin Olien:So I did that before the protocol. There's also a bunch of protocol you can do right today, eliminating toxins, increasing plants, working out, and then through some fasting, you can increase stem cells. So I was really doubling down on the basics. And that's what most people don't do, is I was dialing in my food even more. I was dialing in my sleep when I wasn't in as much pain, sleeping on my side. And I was making sure that all of the dark room masks, making sure that I was sleeping so I could recover. And then, of course, mineralizing, hydration, all of this stuff, monovitality, minerals, fulvic acid, all of that stuff.

12:10Darin Olien:And then again, foods, anti-inflammatory foods, lots of fruits coming into the watermelon season. I was just basically eating watermelon until noon, like a whole watermelon. melon. It was so nourishing. So when you're in these cycles, instead of eating ultra processed food for comfort, for the emotional and physical kind of weird comfort you get, I doubled down on eating the best food ever. Also, I had a lot of body work, conscious body work, and micro mobility. So there's some protocols I learned 30 years ago, Feldenkrais and Alexander technique, fascial release stuff. I was doing a lot of mobility of my hips and joints that wouldn't cause more irritation, but would start to decompress things like this.

12:58Darin Olien:And so there's a lot of things that you can do around that. And then going into stillness, meditation, visualization of feeling and healing, even in the face of pain, screaming at me. This is a very, very important aspect because in the face of level nine pain, sweating, sitting in a chair in my car, I would go against all of that going, I'm broken, I'm broken, I'm broken, I'm broken. This is painful. This is painful. I'd go in and visualize like light in there and healing happening and space opening up for that pain. And this is a mental training. And so that kind of brings me into some of the greatest greatest skills that we can create and muscle we can build.

13:47And that is our emotional, mental, spiritual side of this whole thing. For me, when I went into the pain, literally closing my eyes, meditation, going into the pain and letting it show me where I have felt this pain before. I'm letting it explore the reason it's there. It's not easy because it's so intense.

14:11Darin Olien:But if I could get a little relief by laying down and going into a meditation, this was the impetus and the precedent that set some of the greatest healing I've had in my life. And that feeling that I was having was I feel weak. I feel broken. I feel angry. I feel upset. I feel my body doesn't work. I feel terrified that it's never going to be the same. I won't be able to work out again. All of that stuff. And you know where it traveled to. It traveled to when I was born. And I was, I'll keep this brief. I was four pounds when I was born, two months premature. A 50-50 chance of surviving. I came out.

15:00Darin Olien:I didn't get contact from my mom. There was a lot of trauma around the birth process in the room. I was so small. They were so scared. This was in 1970. Then I was tested, shoved into a box, and sat there, fed formula, which I did a bunch of research on, and the formula back then was horrible. And they kept me in there for three weeks, feeding me this crap, not giving me contact with my parents, especially my mother. And I gained weight. but there was a moment where I lost weight and they thought I was going to die. But my father describes, because they kept coming to the hospital, my father describes the moment he saw me choose life.

15:41Darin Olien:Like life came back in me. And then when I gained five pounds, my mom was able to come and hold me and bring me home. Not to mention my dad at the time, you know, talking with my mom about a bunch of this stuff recently. My dad was a full-on alcoholic at that time. So it was utter chaos in the hospital and at home. So all of those things that I was feeling with my back, the terrified, I'm broken, this body doesn't work, I'm scared, I'm angry. All of that was the origin story and emotion, real, real emotion and experience of my birth. So I have spent the last four months revisiting, recapitulating the energy lost in that experience.

16:33What I mean by that is I experienced all of those things, but I am going back there with my spirit, my soul, and going into that somatic release. And things have been releasing. I could feel releasing happening in my body, in my core, in my spine, in my awareness every day, going back there every day. And with all of that would lead me to the PRP with the other physical side of things. And then the visualization on the mental side of things, stillness was key. Visualization was key of healing, making audits, and I would fall back. Because this was Groundhog Day. This was pain, then the sickness.

17:21Darin Olien:By 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. Over 500 toothpaste tubes have been thrown away since I've started this ad. You don't think of these small little things, but they add up a lot over time. And we can do something about it. That ends up to be over a billion plastic toothpaste tubes a year alone. that ultimately end up in our environment and in our waterways and ultimately ends up in the ocean. Do you want to add to this or do you want to do something different? Plus, maybe that exposure to that plastic, getting the plasticizers and the endocrine disruptors and then putting that toothpaste in your mouth also is not a good idea.

18:10Darin Olien:There's some great solutions. You can DIY stuff. I've got many of these in my fatal conveniences, but the easy ones that I use every day, and I'm about to travel a lot more, and the traveling makes them really easy, I go to bite. I bite down on a little tablet, which is not interacting with any plastics because it's in a glass bottle. And it's refillable and reusable and sustainable. And there's no unwanted toxic fluorides, flow agents, and solvents in my mouth. So my favorite is this Bite Toothpaste. 100 % home, compostable pouches, subscription models. You don't even have to think about it again.

18:55Darin Olien:You're helping you by putting clean products in your mouth, and you're helping the environment because Bite Toothpaste is one of the best companies I've seen looking at all aspects of their supply chain and their refillable, reusable, sustainable, regenerative practices. So Bite is offering you, all my listeners, 20 % off your first order. Go to trybite.com, T-R-Y-B-I-T-E forward slash Darren20 or just use the promo code Darren20, D-A-R-I-N, and you can get 20 % off your first order with a great new toothpaste without using the tube. All of the roads were leading me, no matter what the situation out here was, was leading me to all the origin emotions of being birthed and being scared out of my mind and not wanting to be here and then choosing life.

19:52but then my body was messed up and broken and fragile. That emotional release, that spiritual knowing that all things are working for us. That in the face of the pain, I discovered some of the greatest truths about myself. I am strong. I am so loved by my parents. They were doing the best they could. I did choose to live. And all of the things before I released all that stuff, I learned resiliency and power and strength and understanding getting hurt in college football was also supporting that line of energy of this place is dangerous and sucks and I'm going to get hurt. But I was building a strength around that.

20:41But today, now I can release all of the energy that was stored in my body and continue to do that. I hope you're following this. Because the courage of going into pain, and that could be emotional pain, that could be a relationship, that could be that's not working. What are the feelings? What is the feeling that you have? Feel it. Let it guide you, knowing that you're not a victim, that there's information there for you, and there's potential release. This is one of the greatest things. if you grok what I'm saying, one of the greatest skills that you can have, we will not be out of pain, but our perspective, our resiliency, our ability to self-reflect on these things that don't seem, quote unquote, to be working.

21:36Life is always working for us. If we're willing to be Indiana Jones and discover the adventure of it. Imagine if you allowed yourself to really hear what I'm saying. All of life is happening for you. Nothing is against you. So for me, I came out of it. The PRP was incredible. The awareness, the release of that pain, the talking with my mom, feeling my dad has passed, but feeling my dad's love, even in the face of his struggles when I was born, my brother, being able to integrate that the soul has always got me, that God, whatever you want to call it, God, the universe, your connection with this incredible and infinite love, it's always there.

22:27So I want you to practice. I want you to practice going into pain, if you have it, going into upset, and let it guide you into an awareness of letting go. And that is literally just start with stillness. Five minutes of stillness. Watch your brain. Scan your body.

22:47Darin Olien:Start with your toes. Go up to your knees, your thighs, your hips, your abdomen, your chest, your neck, your arms, your fingers, your head, and out your head. If you feel discomfort, Go into it. What is it? What is it there for you? What is it communicating? Just take that stillness for five minutes. Then I want you to also then, this is an incredible body. Hydrate. Mineralize. Listen to what your body needs out of that stillness. What am I not getting that you're trying to communicate to me, body? In this case, my back. Back? What are you trying to communicate to me that I am absolutely not understanding?

23:27Humble. Humility. Breathing exercises. Breathing life into your body. And as you breathe in, breathe in light. And let it go to those places uncomfortable. If it's your mind racing, if it's your pain in your body, if it's whatever it is, bring that light in. These are easy things that you can do. The bottom line creates stillness and space in these places where we believe certain things. If I'm a victim or this is the way I am or this is how my body is or whatever,

24:01Darin Olien:allow yourself the opportunity to explore what these things are and double down on your health and your nutrition and create that space physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Break the matrix. You are not the victim of circumstance. You have visualization. You have stillness. You have intention. You have concentration. There is always something you can do. If you are fighting against your body and yourself, you will lose that fight. Don't fight the entire universe that is working through you. Work with it. Stillness makes you hear, makes you more accurate, gives you protocols. Stillness will create your super life if you're willing to go into it.

24:47So keep in mind, nothing I'm saying here, like, listen, I got into the other things that I wasn't going to talk about, but I got into snake venom.

24:57Darin Olien:There's incredible research on pain with snake venom. So I had a snake venom practitioner come over huge amounts of CBD, but I didn't know what I was doing with the endocannabinoid system, which I'm going to I'm learning a lot about right now. and I have an expert coming on named Dani Fontaine that she's going to come and we're going to do a deep podcast in the endocannabinoid system. And it's not about THC and it's not necessarily just about CBDs. It's about a network that has been scrubbed in the medical literature that is potentially one of the most powerful networks that we have. So a lot has come out of this.

25:36Darin Olien:But through this, I was cross-eyed. I was in so much pain. I was disconnected and I got reconnected. Reconnected to being bold to what I want to create in my life. And I will tell you more about what Super Life is and the advocacy of creating a better life for all of us, if that's something you're interested in. So I hope you got something. I know this particular podcast was a little all over the place, but maybe you noticed I wasn't really, I haven't been engaged on social media that much. I had some resentment towards it because it's so negative, which is why I'm creating a new platform with some cool tools so that I could really show up for those of you that want to come on that ride.

26:25I love you all. Stay open. Stay curious. Be still sometimes in your life. And if you have major decisions that can withstand some time, sit with decisions. Know where your motivations are coming from because mine was coming out of I'm broken, I'm terrified, I'm in fear. And when those dissolve, I have more space to come from pure creation with just great intention and being a steward for what God, the universe has in store for me.

27:00Darin Olien:I love you all and I'm here for you.