One moment, I was as high as a kite, feeling complete and uninhibited joy as I sailed through the air on my skis… sky blue, air cool and crisp, a student on my tail… We departed the summit tram hoping to get one more run after a day of many.
The next moment, I was sliding down a hill not sure where I was or even who I was. I recognized a chairlift nearby. I recognized that I was trying to stop the slide.
The next thing I remember was as I skied up to a ski patrol standing at the bottom of the mountain, and said, “I think I need some help.”
I do not remember how I got into the base first aid office in the tram plaza after that… but I do remember my wife and a couple of the mountain school supervisors coming into the office afterwards, with fear in their eyes, and asking, “Are you okay?”
Things can change in an instant. It took me years to understand the magnitude of that day. I didn’t want to acknowledge the symptoms of TBI and the changes to my cognitive abilities.
My career as a structural engineer ended soon afterwards as I questioned my own abilities to make engineering decisions clearly.
I blamed my lack of focus, my memory lapses, and my failing eyesight on my age. I had just passed the 50-year-old threshold.
But in ways I didn’t understand at the time, my patience and my zest for life had faded. I was more anxious, more stressed, and had lost my sense of who I was and where I was going.
I resigned from a couple different leadership roles in the ski industry when I felt like I was going to explode. Unfortunately, the timing wasn’t good, and I made these decisions knowing that I would be leaving a ski teaching career born when I was sophomore in high school.
Of course, I kept most of this to myself. Yes, there were the public displays of sudden job resignations, but what was going on inside me was private. It wasn’t clear to me what was going on, I just knew something wasn’t right. I wasn’t me. And because I wasn’t me, the confident and clear me, it was easy to just place blame elsewhere.
Fortunately, I had a yoga practice. Fortunately, I was working at the time in an adaptive sports organization, often times leading programs for veterans with PTSD and TBI. The growth of my work at Heart of the Village Yoga was probably due to my perspective that everybody could have something going on in their lives that they keep private, hidden, protected, and it was my role to offer them a space to feel safe… a space where they could be themselves, however they were or whatever they had going on… and a space where they could heal, whether they knew it or not.
It has been many years since that fateful day, but looking back now, and understanding now the nature of my injuries, it is clear to me that my work has been my therapy. Helping people find ways to be centered, balanced, inspired, powerful, and patient with themselves… through the persistent and insightful practices of yoga, meditation, and intentional relationship-building workshops and retreats, has allowed me to finally feel like myself again. And it has allowed me to know what it is like to walk the walk of a person needing help, but not realizing it. Helping others has ultimately been helping me. My empathic nature has been re-wired and re-invigorated.
Maybe this whole path has been the result of that one day. Maybe not. Maybe it is has just been a result of the yogic practices of realizing our higher potential or our true nature as humans.
Anyway, soon I will be landing at Snowbird again… 15 years later. My memory intact.
That day, my student said I skied from the top of Snowbird to the base on my own. I do not remember a thing. He said that I just kept asking, “Where am I?” Ten years later, we shared a good laugh about it all when we met up in Escalante, Utah. He actually shared how he felt satisfied after taking care of me that day, and was inspired to pursue work as an outdoor educator himself.
Now, all these years later, as a yoga teacher and a personal coach, I try to make sure that I never take life-experiences and personal relationships for granted. So, I ask similar questions of myself every day: Who am I? Why am I here? It can all change in an instant, but there is some aspects of being me that do not change. I try to remember those aspects, and bring those aspects to life as best that I can. And I work towards helping my students do the same. It’s an adventurous ride.
Maybe my life nowadays is more about continuing to heal than I realize. Maybe it’s an ongoing, lifelong process. Maybe it’s just about accepting that this is the life that I chose… and my path is just to live it fully, to experience as much as I can, all the bumps and bruises, all the joys and celebrations, as a means to keep considering expanded possibilities of who I am.
The helmet that probably saved my life.
