Not many people know the story of when I flatlined at a contest back in 2011.
It was summer 2011 in Ocean City for the Dew Action Sports Tour just shy over a year after brain surgery and we were competing on a set up built over the beach.
I was so excited, confident, and ready to compete with a fresh start to the season after a wild ride of events the year before recovery from an unexpected brain surgery.
It was just practice and I was going over a line for the third or fourth time figuring out how I wanted to connect tricks to specific parts of the course for my contest run.
I was focused but relaxed at the same time as I came around a corner wall ride at about 10+ feet, putting my head at about 15 feet off the flat bottom of the ramps.
I came up a bit short into the landing resulting in my back tire clipping the top of the landing and catapulting next over the handlebars straight to my face.
I tired my head to the right, as I always did, leaving the left side of my face/eye socket taking the majority of the impact.
I didn’t even have time to register what was happening and my hands never got out in front of me to brace for the fall. All I remember is seeing the ground coming up quickly and saying to myself “oh, shit! This is going to suck!” The medics and athletes on the sidelines said I was out snoring right away.
As the medics got to me and rolled me over, that’s when they found my heart had stopped beating for almost a minute.
I woke up confused and in so much pain I didn’t realize my right hand was broken as I threw up almost immediately upon awakening.
I remember the first words out of my mouth being “I’m done riding. This ain’t worth it. I can’t keep doing this”.
2 weeks later when I was cleared to ride, I found myself back on my bike on top of the ramps back home.
This was a crucial perspective teaching moment and how majority of ya respond to stress, fear and pain, typically suppressing our dreams and aspirations for a vision we dream about.
What BMX has taught me over and over again is that if you fall down once, you get up twice and try again. This concept of perspective can be applied anywhere in life.
The more clarity I’ve gained in regards to perspective, the more and more I don’t add stories and meanings to an experience or situation the same way as I used to.
Rather than thinking “why is this happening to me” or feeling as if I want to quit and move on, I try to focus on “why is this happening for me” and how can I learn from this in order to move forward more efficiently and closer to my desired outcome.
Life is all about perspectives and choices and the moments of pain and challenge is what I believe highlights our personality and how we respond to life.
Once we gain clarity of our personality/state of being and decide how we want to move forward, we’re able to learn and grow with a choice to transcend our current realities.
I’ve been learning how our true personality is made up of our thoughts, feelings and actions, all of which are influenced by our experiences in this time and space.
What I’ve been learning and experiencing is being defined by a future vision in terms of what I choose my state of being / personality to be helps me overcome obstacles along the way and bring me closer to that desired outcome in my life.
We can choose to put our focus in a specific manner, which is where our energy goes. When we say “I don’t want….” rather than consciously choosing to focus on “I want….” the subconscious mind doesn’t know the difference and focuses on the end of that phrase, ultimately influencing a chain of events influencing our personality and ultimately creating our personal reality.
I believe it starts with clarity of our personality and our personal reality, and the next steps are to focus on our desired outcomes / future, make a plan by reverse engineering that future to our current state, and acting accordingly with inspired purpose along the way.
Josh P.💚🧠✌️