Lessons from the Sky: Finding Peace in Freefall

 This episode of the Stance for Health podcast features Karen, who recounts her exhilarating experience of skydiving with her son. 

With over 20 years of health coaching experience, she emphasizes how her commitment to a healthy lifestyle—including a paleo diet and regular exercise—prepared her physically and mentally for this daring adventure. 

Karen shares key life lessons, such as the importance of being in the moment and the power of repetition in learning. Her journey highlights the significance of experiences in building connections and encourages listeners to pursue their passions and face fears head-on. 

Transcript

Dr. Rodney: Hello and welcome to Stance for Health podcast. I'm Dr. Rodney, and today I'll be asking the questions of a rather brave young lady here by the name of Karen Sebastian, Hope Lady Wirth. She won't go by the daredevil moniker, I don't think, but as far as daring and fearless, we could definitely say that. So what she's done, since you maybe haven't heard is that she went skydiving.

Karen: Oh, I feel like I'm maybe a little crazy. It's something I wanted to do for a long time, but not enough to do it, if you understand. Do you have any of those that are just like, you know, this someday.

Dr. Rodney: Something on your list?

Karen: Yeah.

Dr. Rodney: So you haven't always wanted to skydive?

Karen: I haven't really thought about it that much. How it came about is one of our grandsons and our son went to skydive and the weather wasn't good. They didn't ask me to go.

They didn't know I wanted to. So then I said, well, when you go again, I'll go with you. Because they had a voucher to go within a year, getting close to expiring. And so I just went ahead and went with our son and we had.

Dr. Rodney: Such a good time with the desire to hang out with people, to hang out with the ones you love, and to do something daring like a form of connection.

Karen: Oh, that was the great experiences. I think that's one of my biggest takeaways, is invest in experiences, because the memories from that will never fade.

Dr. Rodney: Yeah, I would certainly think something like that would be unforgettable. How do you mentally prepare or physically prepare for anything like this?

Karen: Well, physically, I think the way that we've been living since we met paid off big time because starting in 2020, we've eaten a paleo, no gluten, no sugar, been on it for starting our sixth year. And so we also rest well. We work out with high intensity interval training. I get adjusted. That is huge in that whole thing. Everything that we say around longevity and rejuvenation, lifestyle, all of that.

And then most recently, kettlebell.

Dr. Rodney: What's one of the funniest things that you could actually hear on the audio was, I'm so glad I used the kettlebell as you're falling from 14,000ft. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. You're not the.

You're not the average.

Karen: Well, thank you. I would agree with that. Because the best part that I would say kudos to stands for health and our lifestyle is that as I did this event, I wasn't sore the next day. To me, that was astounding because it is a little bit of a physical.

Dr. Rodney: Oh, yeah, yeah. You're getting jerked around by quite a bit. 120 miles an hour, right?

Karen: Yeah.

Dr. Rodney: The freefall. That's the descent. Yeah. At terminal velocity, Right, Right. So you're one of these people that loves to mine events like this or these. What did you call them? These experiences. Experiences. What are some of the biggest takeaways as far as, like, life lessons or things that you can apply to life?

Karen: Well, for me, besides the learning through the experiences, when you face a crisis, just keep moving. Now, let me describe my crisis. I've done very well. You said. How did I prepare? Well,

I did not let fear come in at all. We're on the ground and you're signing away your life.

I mean, you basically. In other words, you can't go sue anybody. But basically, they're saying if you die, there's no recourse, even if the equipment goes bad. And so basically what you're saying is you trust that the people that are taking you up there are going to take care of you. And so I didn't let fear even enter until the very last second. And I was about to go out the door.

Dr. Rodney: I was gonna say open door of the plane. That's where people lose it. Right? That's where they lose their nerve, probably.

Karen: I mean, if I hadn't had him pushing me and he rocked me and then he said, “Here we go.”

And at that point, but it was just the second before that that I just had that sense of, “What am I doing?” And then I just closed my eyes and I just said, well, “Lord, if I've made the terrible mistake, to be absent here is to be present with you, and I'm in your hands.” But then I opened my eyes and you just start falling. And they had told us the other lesson is when you can't catch your breath, just scream. Because what happens is it's just so cold. And it's the shock of you're falling so fast. And so I just started screaming and laughing and giggling and going, ‘I can't believe this.” And so the whole experience was just in the moment. That's probably one of my biggest takeaways, be in the moment.  I didn't look down at my cell phone one second. I didn't have it with me.

Dr. Rodney: You mean while you were skydiving?

Karen: But you know what I'm saying?

Dr. Rodney: Sure, sure. There wasn't a distraction.

Karen: Be in the moment.

Dr. Rodney: That's a great takeaway. That applies to a lot of things, right?

That applies to our relationships, that applies to our work, that applies to when we're eating, when we're having coffee with a friend. That's pretty far reaching, isn't it?

Karen: Exactly. Because when you are in the moment, you're not thinking about other things.

And in this case, it was just enjoying it so much because it was exhilarating. One of the other big takeaways was the instructions that we were given.

And I think for us here at Stance, I think that is our biggest takeaway. When you work in a profession, in our office, we are telling people, for example, I do neurorehabilitation and I tell people about posture. And I remember telling them something once and then I go twice, maybe three times, but by the fourth time I'm thinking, oh, they're going to say, you already told me that. And that does not bother this crew. When they're training you to go up there, they repeat what you need to do over, over, over, over, over. They say it probably six or seven times in the video.

And then you go out and you practice it. And then when you get on the plane, of course, at that point he's yelling at you because the plane is so loud. It's a small plane, and he's yelling now, don't, don't forget to do da da, da, da da da da. And I think that helped me a lot because we want those who come to Stance to really get those posture principles because that's going to contribute to.

Dr. Rodney: Longevity more than anything that you should mention neurorehab or coming to stance in general. The fact of repeating sometimes when people are on the table or when they're on total body vibration, they're so distracted by the motion or they're so distracted by the moment.

And I tell them, go ahead and lie face down. They lie face up and they just lie on their back.

It's kind of human nature. There's so much internal noise. And you're saying you didn't experience Any of that.

Karen: I did, actually. And I was glad they were repeating it because there were so many different things that we were supposed to do that as they said it,

I made note, I got to remember that. And then I was thinking, oh, I don't know if I remember everything. So it made me feel like. I wonder some.Some of our health partners feel.Because here's the other part. Can you imagine being that trainer? And I don't know how many people they work with each day to jump out of the plane, but they get to say it over and over. And you've got to remember, even though you've said it over that many times, that person hasn't heard it. But that was exactly what I needed.

And funny story is with all of that, I had an altimeter which at 6,000ft I had chosen that I was going to be the one to pull the parachute. And he's tapping me on the arm and I'm like, why is he tapping me and he pulls it. I would have preferred to pull it because then I would have been prepared because then that just is a startling move that happens.

Dr. Rodney: Whiplash, huh?

Karen: I didn't experience any, but that's because I'm so well adjusted. The reality of when you're learning something or teaching someone some principles, don't be afraid to repeat over and over and over.

Dr. Rodney: So you're saying that your life preparation to this point really helped you get the most out of that experience?

Karen: Oh, absolutely. When Doc refers to me as the Hope Lady, basically when you have faced really difficult times in life when which I've had my share, then this particular difficulty is just nothing by comparison and I think a principle of living at peace with no fear, because fear has torment. So I never projected the what ifs, even when I was signing all those papers away. I was just, okay, I'm going to do this. And I had them printed out for me so that I could speed read through it. And basically they're saying, even if it's our fault, you can't sue us. Your family can't sue us. You're signing all of that away. But at the same time there was a confidence they knew what they were doing. This is a well oiled machine and that staff is just absolutely incredible.

Now, one of my motivations that came up stronger to follow through with this was because my brother was a paratrooper, a Green Beret, and I wanted to experience a fraction of what he did when he was in Vietnam and He passed away December 19th. It was heartrending to me. We're going up,

and I'm thinking, I wonder how he felt. Like in a night jump, maybe couldn't even see where he was landing and fearing for his life and all the things that shaped him. And then I'm going up because I want to got the video because I had to have the pictures to provide.

Dr. Rodney: A portable USB that has an inscription.

Karen: On it, and it says, I jumped out of a perfectly good airplane.

Dr. Rodney: That's the funniest thing. Most of the people that were in the military when I was on the ground, not air assault, not airborne, were what we call legs, you know, which basically just means a foot soldier. They would say, I don't want to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.

Karen: Is that why they say that?

Dr. Rodney: Okay, yeah. If you're not airborne, that's your mantra. That's what you say.

Karen: Yeah. And you take. Case in point, you didn't need to go.

Dr. Rodney: I think that brings up a great question. We talk to a lot of different people, and a lot of the couples that we talked to, one of them did it and the other one didn't, too.

Karen: That's the good Lord giving couples balance so they're not both crazy. You've got a sane one and a crazy one, more adventurous one.

But I think that I would highly recommend it if it's something you've wanted to do, because it's going to bring to surface all of those things. And I've heard a lot of people that I've told about it, oh, I'm afraid of heights. I'm grateful that I'm not. And so being up in the plane, there was no fear whatsoever. It was just that open hole. And I was the first one. My son said that he wished that he had gone first because that was the thing that brought fear to him, was was he saw me one minute and boom, Mom’s gone.

So it was just a beautiful experience and one that I will continue to mind because we don't realize where our body is as far as longevity. And so for me, this was like a good set point of the results of everything that we've been doing up till now. Because sometimes when you're doing these small changes like we recommend here at Stance for Health, you get used to it. And it doesn't seem that heroic because we're not doing anything out of bounds. We're not running marathons, for example.

I'm going to the garden every day that I can. I'm getting sun. All those other things that I mentioned earlier, they're just the things that have become our life.

And my goal is that this has become a blue zone. We're creating our own blue zone. I will say I love to go back and look at the video because of how quickly I got into that incredible position where you have your arms raised and your feet are all the way back. And that's part of that's because you're going against the pool. Yeah. So that's even better. You're going against the drop, but you have to raise your legs up. And then the best part I watch over and over and show people here in the office is the land. Because a smooth landing required me to have my feet completely out straight as we came down. And I didn't even hit the ground. My bottom never even hit.

Dr. Rodney: That's right.

Karen: Because it was done well enough.

Dr. Rodney: You said in so many ways that you endorsed this by what you said. In other words, you would recommend it. Say, you know anybody that wants to overcome or do something, say sort of a day trip to do it. And so that's an extreme in a matter of a day. Some people do they stretch that out to in some cases, weeks. That aside, would you do it again?

Karen: Oh, absolutely. My goal is to set their record. Their oldest person was 104. So I plan to go at 105. I have a few years before then, but I plan to go at 105.

Dr. Rodney: Yeah, yeah.

Karen: I want to go at 105 and break the record. Oh, I forgot. I want to check the Guinness Book of Records to see who the oldest.

Dr. Rodney: Guy'S ever done this.

Karen: Yeah. But I just think that most of all, the biggest takeaway for me is all the things that we're doing and they're not sacrifices anymore, by the way. We're doing the detox a 21 day purification.

That all of those things that you're doing are so paying off and you don't realize it many times because we're not trying to lose weight. We're just wanting to gain and improve health. And my goal in function health when I go back to get my blood work done is to have brought the few markers that were a little bit out of range back down. And I, I will let you know if that works because my function health, blood work and, and all those lab tests showed that I'm 12.6 years younger than my stated age.

Dr. Rodney: Well, we are hopeful, yes.

Karen: And basically hope is about believing that there's going to be a good outcome. So may this challenge you, you don't even have to jump out of a plane. Do the detox with us, or come and get adjusted every week, or cut back on the things that you know you should be eating and you don't feel that good once you eat them. I could go on with our list of longevity pillars. Pick one and together we can help you take your stance for health.

Dr. Rodney: Thanks for listening.

Dr. Rodney: Thank you for joining us at Stance for Health podcast, where getting healthy and staying that way are not as complicated as you might think. Subscribe now and discover steps and small changes that can increase your energy and open the door to vibrant health and longevity.

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