Branden Collinsworth's Comeback Story

00:00:10 Speaker 1: All right, welcome back, everybody. We're here for another episode of Comeback Stories, and today's guest is Brandon Collinsworth. Brandon is a Nike Master trainer, yoga teacher, human performance coach, and a compassionate humanitarian. He describes his life as a journey from the streets to the skies. We're so excited to hear about your journey, brother. Welcome. It is such an honor to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to dive deep and inspire some others to forge forward towards their purpose. Let's dive deep. Then let's go right into the childhood. Like, tell us what growing up for you was like. So when I think back to my childhood, I think of the colors black and white. It's not a lot of it was not a lot of color, but that was what was needed to Alcolm Oars, my potent Chell and growing up in Las Vegas. A lot of people think it's glitz, glamour. They think it's the neon lights, they think it's the fame. But a lot of people don't realize that the East side of Vegas especially has one of the poorest ranking school districts in the nation has some of the deepest addiction problems like in the United States, and if you are growing up in the projects there, the chances of you getting out are next to none. So growing up at a very young age with a single mother and being in the projects, I really had to double down on who I was and I had to learn quick and I had to grow up fast. And until sixteen years old, I was, you know, in and out of a lot of trouble. I would, you know, fall into street life. I would fall into just toxic vices. But by the time I was sixteen, the streets were got the best of me, and I dropped out of high school. And once I dropped out of high school, I really fell into this deep downward spiral And for two years I found myself just in being blacked out, drunk, in and out of a lot of fights, in and out of juvenile hall. And it wasn't until I was eighteen years old that I would say that I had my first real spiritual experience. I was sitting at a bus stop on the east side of Las Vegas. For those that know Las Vegas, there's a hotel called Samstown. I was sitting in front of Samstown, and I looked to my left and there was a guy that looked just like me, but he was like twenty five years older, and he had like no life in his eyes. And something inside me told me that if I didn't change everything, that I was going to be that guy. Now. At that time, I never left Vegas, and the mountains that surrounded Las Vegas were like a prison to me. But one gift my mother gave me when I was four years older, she taught me to read. And for some reason, I always had this love for books. So sitting at that bus stop, all of a sudden, I had this inclination that I needed to become a voracious reader, and so I started reading books. One of the first books I read was Who Moved My Chiefs? And that book led to another book, which led to another book, and all of a sudden, my worldview began to expand. And it took about ten years of really focusing all my education, focusing on my truth, focusing on reinventing myself to even get to like baseline, That's how behind I was. Ten years of hustling to finally get to that point where I was like off of the streets and not caught up in street life, not caught up in poverty, and it's still a journey that I'm going through to this day. They say it takes three generations to break the cycle of poverty, and that's if everything goes right. So a lot of times when people speak about poverty, they're like, well, why doesn't that person just do better? It's actually a psychological and institutional disease that really is hard to break free from, especially living in systems that are not designed to help us elevate or expand out of that. So it took me ten years to psychologically recondition myself to actually be able to be not only a functioning member of society, but a highly contributing member of society. We'll get back to some more of your childhood. That's a lot, but I was wondering, in those ten years, what has the work looked like, What modalities, what routes have you taken to break and maybe jump some of those timelines and break some of that ancestral or generational dysfunction. Absolutely So, when I was in third grade, I had a pe teacher named Miss Bennett, and she created this program called the Jog and Walk Stars and instead of playing on the playground, she gave us the opportunity to run laps and if you ran one hundred miles in a semester, you got a pizza party. As a kid, pizza parties or everything. And she told me when I enrolled in this program that I was going to come up against this thing called the wall. She said, if you run long enough, you're going to meet this wall. And it might come in the form of a cramp in your stomach, it might come in the form of you wanting to give up mentally. But if you can focus on pushing through the wall, there's gifts on the other side of that. So, although I was in poverty, one thing that I always had was his love for movement, and one of my ways of escaping my situations was to go running or to go work out. And so I would be dealing with depression, dealing with anxiety, and I would go and meet that wall, I would meet that burning. I started learning that if I could focus and push through that burn long enough, there were always gifts on the other side of it. So once I made that decision to really go after my highest self, to really walk my dharmic path, all types of walls were presented to me, and there was that knowing this from third grade that if I pushed through long enough, there was always another gift on the other side of the wall. Maybe it was going to the community college and spending two years not getting any credits because I was so remedial in math and English that they didn't even count. That was a wall. Maybe it was some of my friends clowning on me because all of a sudden, I'm like, they would call me college knowledge, but not in like a good way, like in a condescending way. Maybe that was the resistance, or you know, diving deep into the books or going after certain goals. These are these resistance points that continuously came forth as I started to forge forward towards, you know, breaking free of that generational poverty that I was talking about. And that ten year span that was just to get to baseline, it's actually been twenty years. Two two was when I was sitting at that bus stop to twenty twenty two, it's been a twenty year journey. So the first ten years was really to get to baseline, to get the rocket ship ready to fly. The last ten years has been actually where we've gone into hyperdrive. I'm curious what's coming up with you with the analogy of the wall and against the Wall and everything, and you can share a little bit about that for maybe Brandon doesn't know where our listeners. Oh yeah, So, um, my last name is Waller. So um, there's a lot of I mean, I got rap projects called Wall Street, I got you know what I'm saying, but better call wall But uh, there's a program through my foundation, the Darren Waller Foundation, Against the Wall Program, and uh, it gives people scholarships to go to treatment from socialist abuse. Um, mainly with mental health issues stemming from that. But it gives them a thirty day stay and it also gives them access to sober living on the way out, just a transition into aftercare and um, you know, just ways to set them up so that the recovery, the treatment experiences and just like a spin cycle, you know. So um it's something that you know, it has some meaning to it, you know, like they're like their backs against the wall, you talk about running up against up to walls. There are people that are being backed up against walls in East Las Vegas, in East Atlanta, in Wilmington, Delaware, like people are getting having their backs pressed against the wall by situations that sure they may have played a part in, but some people would buy situations that they didn't even ask for. And I feel like for me, my back was against the wall as well, and a free gift was given to me to be able to go to treatment. So now I'm all about giving that gift to somebody else because I know what it's like to have my backup against that wall. That's incredible salute for doing the work and giving back, that's a massive Yeah. I want to ask you a question. You talk about going up and running through walls. I feel like in life for me, like I've experienced that too, and and I love the feeling of overcoming that, But I feel like there's a sense of balance that I need to achieve to where it's like I don't have to always be breaking through a wall to be good enough or to be enough. Liked getting into yoga play a role in creating more of a balance of you being okay in stillness and just being okay in your body and who you are, not just what you're doing. Like what kind of role or how did you come across that balance? Yeah? Yeah, So twenty twelve, we get to that ten year mark. Two twelve is when I finally got into the IVY leagues in the University of Pennsylvania got a degree in positive psychology. That was also the time where my training career started to blow up. So during those ten years, I wanted to start share my love for fitness with my friends, I love for fitness with the people that I came in contact with. So it started with me just training people out of my apartment gym for five dollars a session, which inevitably led me to opening up a gym in Vegas, which at that time two twelve is one of the hottest gyms in Vegas. We ended up opening four gyms, and then all of a sudden, the success started to flow in. I went from literally having no money and being broke and nobody acknowledging me to training a lot of the top high profile not only not only athletes, but like executives, like different different people in all types of different fields, And all of a sudden, I was like on this newfound level of success that I once thought was the goal, like to get to that level and to like be successful. And twenty sixteen came around signed a Nike, one of the only trainers in the game signed a Nike. Twenty sixteen comes around and I'm sitting in my high rise condo looking out towards the streets that once enslaved me, and I still felt empty inside. I still felt the same that I felt the same feelings that I felt when I was on the streets. And that was a really pivotal moment for me because all those years I thought that if I got the success, that I got the status, and I got the accolades, that I was gonna feel something different. But I didn't feel anything different. I actually probably felt worse than I felt when I was on the streets. And at that time, I had started dabbling into yoga, but I knew I needed to like experience something that was outside of the West, and so at that time, I've heard, I was hearing from a lot of my friends that Bali was an incredible place to go. So I went out to Bali, Indonesia. I stepped into a yoga class, yoga teacher by the name of Denise Pain, incredible yoga teacher. After the class came up to me and she said, you got it all figured out On the outside, you have no clue what is going on on the inside. And until your worth and your self love and your significance come from within, you're always going to be empty. And that was my yoga journey. So I came back to Vegas at that time, and all of a sudden, this pretend in color that I thought I was living through my success everything became really dull, and I was called to go on a journey. I was called to go deeper. So twenty sixteen, I put everything in storage and I moved to Bali, Indonesia and started to study yoga, and I became a yoga teacher, and that opened up the doors to the journey into self love. And that's when I realized that the most important thing that we can have is self love. I realized that all those years I had gone so hard trying to prove that I was worth something, All those years I had gone so hard to try to have the perfect body, to have to go to the perfect school. All those years I'd spent really trying to prove to the world that I was somebody after being told so many years that I wasn't nobody. All of a sudden, I realized that everything I was looking for was already inside me, like young Santiago and the Alchemist when he goes on that entire journey and the treasures under the tree that he was dreaming it under in the beginning of the book. And so that's really been my work is self love and self worth. And what I realized it is once self worth clicked into place and self love clicked into place, it changed the texture of how I do everything. You can go to a workout and you can be there in self hate, or you can go into a workout and you could be there in self love. We can step into relationships from a space of I'm not worthy enough or I don't love myself, or we can step into spaces where I love myself and I'm worthy to be here. It's a subtle change that changes everything. And then what I realized there's a lot of the psycho somatic issues that I had, like abandonment wounds, codependency, savior complexes, love addictions, was all emanating for me not loving myself. And so once that clicked, that's where the work that it was like a portal opened up that was and that's been the work for the last six years. Is just loving myself, reminding myself that I'm enough. And three questions that I started to ask myself is can I love the parts of me that I deem most unlovable? Can I celebrate the parts of me that nobody celebrates? And then the final one is can I love myself like there's nothing to fix? And when I get really deep with those, it shows me exactly where my work is, exactly where my work lies, and exactly the work that I need to continue to do. I'm letting that breathe for a minute. That's like bringing the Thanksgiving dinner out of the oven. Then you gotta let it cool off, like you just don't. Man, spend all our time trying to earn love through what we do, and and we come to realize that we were worth loving and we were lovable they the entire time. You know, Yeah, I'm still trying to grow in myself love. Like we talked to Mark Groves and talked about self love being the routines and the practices and the habits. And I spent so much of my life the negative voice was, I mean, on a megaphone in my head, like just so loud to where it's like now it's like I'm much more proactive in the practice of self love. But it's like I feel like sometimes it's like, man, if I go thirty minutes without affirming myself or celebrating myself, it's just like the negative. It's just it's got twenty six years of experience as opposed to you know, five years of you know, of loving myself and seeing the best of myself and trying to achieve that best version of myself. So it's like I'm starting to see the light a little bit. I'm starting to not just see the light of feel it and experience it for myself. But it's like sometimes I feel like, man, it's still such a such a long journey for me to get there. It's a long journey from white belt to black belt, no level skips, And that's the that's the beauty of it because as we go on that journey, like you could fake the skip, but that won't last. But like true sustainable worthiness, true sustainable self love, true sustainable compassion, it takes time to integrate that into our nervous systems. And another thing I've learned is I've gone on the pursuit of really understanding love is the only way to truly understand what love is is you got to understand everything that love is not, and that often requires us to go what they call into what they call an alchemy, the negreat, which is the first stage of alchemy, also called in blackenments deep beneath the soil where there's no light in the mud, but essentially where the seed is potentialized. A lot of times we skip out on the shadow work or the hero's journey and going into the cave, but that's also part of the journey into love, so that the trials and tribulations, when we can start to see them as also lessons of love, it allows it for us to lean into them instead of push them away, at least in my journey at thirty eight years old, because I only started understanding it about six years ago and it's just now starting to really land. I'm learning that when we talk about a holistic approach, that means the shadow work as well. Otherwise it's just ethereal and fluffy. What is the shadow for people that are listening that may not know. Hell, I don't even feel like I really know. Yeah, that's a great question. That's a great question. I feel like, the shadow is anything that holds us back from love. And sometimes it's addictions. Sometimes it's relationships. Sometimes it's faulty psycho somatic thought patterns. Sometimes it's location. One of my friends told me one time, if a flowers not blossoming, you don't change is the flower, you change the soil. Sometimes it's environment. Sometimes it's a system that we live in. You know, if we look at the one of the reasons why I love living in Asia is because, like the default is healthy. When I'm in the States, I gotta go above and beyond to be healthy. The food is different, the energy is different, the pace is different. So I feel like deep inquiry and deep introspection is a part of every ancient school of thought, whether it's martial arts, meditations and Buddhism prayer. It asks us to go inside and start to ask the questions what is holding me back? What does love mean? What do I need to shift? And I feel like in that inquiry, we start to have a deeper understanding of our shadows, whatever those may be each person. I feel like, how's it different shadow? But it's not about you know, hating the shadow, because because I always say, like self love and self hate can't live at the same time. A lot of times, especially people who are on the journey of self improvement, they love parts of ourselves that are considered good or considered like, you know, something that is of the light or whatnot, and then they hate the parts of themselves that are considered like negative. What I've learned is the more I hate that part of me that can consider negative, the more it grabs hold of my expression. There's a story that I was told by one of my master's teachers, and it was about this like Buddhist monk who was sitting there and all these demons were showing up because he was like getting closer and closer to enlightenment. And then all of a sudden, this one demon came that was like super powerful and he wouldn't leave, and so the Buddhist monk just said eat me, like take me. And in that space, it was more like surrendering to this idea that all emotions are teachers, all feelings or teachers, and both dark and light are teachers. But when we're rooted in love, when we're rooted in that pursuit, I feel like then we're given the torches to be able to navigate the dark knights of the soul, the shadows in the caves so much there. Yeah, so bringing it to the light, right, It's the what I heard you saying is a lot of awareness, not resistance, also acceptance, acceptance that the shadow is going to be there, and actually building a relationship with it instead of hating it, which is like another form of resistance. And acceptance doesn't mean we need to like it. It just means we need to know that it's air. And in recovery, a lot, a lot of times we talked about acceptance is the answer to all of our problems. But and then I don't know the paraphrasing the roomy quote of it's like, our job is not to seek love, but to seek for all the barriers getting in the way of it. So it's really about bringing to the light, and the work each day is to chip away at all the shit that's getting in the way, because what's in the way is the way and at the center of our hearts and at the center, like it's it's all love. I just love that we're talking about this. I mean, if I don't know, you don't know a lot about my background in story, but I mean, I host a retreat every year called love Yourself. If you go on my shirt, which I ever shirt for you, by the way, that that says love yourself. And I say this all the time, and I'm like have to chuckle and laugh, like this is kind of like my thing. Now it's your thing too, And we're men that this is not the way. I'm quite sure you weren't raised on the East side of Las Vegas taught teaching people are teaching you how to love yourself. So the fact that we've been able to bring this to the light and have this as part of our kind of our deal, especially men in a world where most aren't talking about this, this is exactly why we did this podcast. It's amazing. Yeah, So you're just you're flowing with us. If you go back, like go back, going back into your childhood, is there like an early memory of pain that like really sticks with you. Yeah, there there's a lot. There's a lot. Two in particular that I talked about A lot. One was when I was five, and this was back when like seven to eleven had arcade games. You go play street Fighter, So I would go like take out people's trash and wash people's windows for like quarters so I could get enough money to go play street fighter. And we were there with a whole bunch of other kids, my best friend Chris and his big brother Brandon. Chris was five, Brandon with seven come out of the seven to eleven and we hear a shot. Look over a Brandon, Blood's pouring down his face. Come to find out, some kids in the neighborhood put a gun through the wall shot at the seven to eleven hit him in the eye. And at five years old, we were basically introduced to what the world could be like. All of a sudden, all of our parents wouldn't let us go out anymore, so five years old, there was already a fear of like the world is dangerous. Another moment that was super impressionable on me was when I was seven years old. My mother woke me up at about five am in the morning and she bundled up my little sister, put her on the back of her bike seat because we didn't have a car, so she had like one of those bikes with the child seats on it, and we rode to the local albert Sins And a lot of people don't think Vegas gets cold, but it was like really cold in the morning, and I remember my fingers just freezing and just wondering what was going on. I got to Albert since waited about ten minutes. The back door opened up and some guys started throwing trash cans into the garbage or trash bags into the garbage can, and my mom told me that there was food in those trash bags, and so she had me go over to the dumpster and grab a couple of those trash bags, and that ended up being the food that sustained us and kept us alive pretty much over the next couple of weeks. There was something in me when that happened where I realized like this wasn't normal, Like this wasn't what all the other kids that I knew were doing. And those both became impressionable moments and precursors for really really challenging childhood. And although my mom, rust in peace, did her best, it wasn't easy. It was super challenging, And at the same time, I'm so grateful for it all because it gave it molded me into who I am. Even in those spaces, my mother taught me the power of the thank you, so it didn't matter that we didn't have food, thank you that we were able to find food. And it didn't matter that like the lights were going off and there was no electricity, Like thank you that we had some candles, or thank you that we had each other. So one of the things that I took, one of the many gems that I took from the streets, was the power of the thank you. And I think in a world where so many people are so like focused on what's going wrong or I don't have enough or I need to have more, the power of the thank you, power of gratitude is an absolute game changer. And one of my professors, Martin c led me over at the University of Pennsylvania. They did the research and they found that by just writing down three things you're grateful for a day, there's empirical evidence that it exponentially improves overall well being in life satisfaction. So I'm definitely grateful to be here, to be able to have you share and just you know, I mean, the energy you're radiating right now is incredible. Man. Talk about the power of the thank you. You talk about the things that you took from yoga, from just your entire life experience. How has it made the training the Nike stuff like, how has it made that much more fulfilling? And how have you been able to essentially like cultivate purpose through that great question. So Nike was a manifestation from a vision board exercise I did in two thousand and seven. I put Nike on there. I said, I want to work with Nike. At that time, there was some Nike trainers. I reached out to them. They showed me no love. So I just focused on my goals, focused on my mission, and focused on being the best I could be. Twenty fourteen, somebody was in Las Vegas from Nike. They asked who was doing the most innovative stuff in mindset and sports performance. My name came up and the doors for Nike opened. In twenty fourteen, signed a Nike. At that time, sports performance was pretty linear and it was very masculine in a lot of ways, especially like in the athletic realms. Twenty sixteen, when I started to get deeper into yoga, I started to see that there was a deep connection that actually the tenets of yoga could be used as a means to elicit a huge gain an athletic performance. To help people go deeper, to help people be more present, to help people be more focused. And so when I moved to Bali to study yoga, I at that time didn't know that like I was going to be able to bring yoga into the world of sport, but my heart told me that I needed to at least try, and so after about two years of studying yoga, did a proposal to Nike to bring yoga full force into their arsenal of classes through their NTC app and to allow me to represent what that looked like for them until twenty eighteen. I sent him a proposal and a couple of people at Nike were super innovative and open to like going down that road, and next thing you know, Nike Yoga was launched, and it's been an incredible opportunity to infuse wellness through one of the most potent brands in the world. It's like a lifelong dream. And what I realized quickly was like, although people weren't speaking about wanting more compassion, wanting more softness, wanting more gratitude, wanting these ancient teachings, it was like in our by these we all know we want that. And as I began to go deeper in the East, which at one point I thought that I would just end up in the East and like those teachings wouldn't translate to the West. All of a sudden, there started being more demand for me in the West. And that's really been the journey of bringing these teachings, from martial arts to sacred plant medicines, to the yoga to meditation into my respective communities as a mechanism not only to help people become more grounded, compassionate, mindful humans, but also perform at the highest levels possible. What I'm excited about is if people were breaking records and you know, achieving feats of strength and they didn't have these tools. Now that there's this bridge happening between the ancient wisdoms and the indigenous wisdoms and these ancient teaching and modern innovation and modern sports performance, I feel like we are on a renaissance about and we're about to see just miraculousness come to life across all breadths of the human dynamic. I love the passion you have about yoga, and I feel like yoga saved my life. I have seven surgeries on my left knee x baseball player. Just my body was destroyed. My mom kept telling me, you need to go to yoga at my rock bottom, and I would always say to her, yogas for girls and hippies. I'm not doing that shit. That's the story. I've told it multiple times on here. But I wasn't ready. But then I finally went once for her because I just wanted to make her happy when I went to practice, and I went once, and I knew I would do it the rest of my life from that one. Just from a physical standpoint, from favoring my left leg for twenty years, probably the reprieve I got on my right hip and my low back, and so I got very excited about it. Went to teacher training, and I'd say I started to fix my body, but little I know what to do for the mind and the soul. And for anybody listening out there that maybe hasn't practiced or says I'm not flexible, I can't practice, I can't do yoga, I would say that your yoga will get better when your relationships get better, because it really is about taking your yoga practice off the mat. And I've had some great teachers that have stressed the importance of that. It's like, yes, the practice is, and I set that intention all the time around self love, Like, let self love be your intention in your practice today and make every decision on what to do in your practice and when not to do based on self love. Practice today so you can practice tomorrow. Don't do what the person next to you is doing. Do what you need to do, because ultimately you'll be your own best teachers. So it's like a whole other modality of just deep, deep personal development. For me, it's like the physical stuff whatever. It's like so much deeper than that. And I think when you can understand that and surrender to the breath and build the relationship with the bread, the yoga really starts to make sense. You know. The breath is is an ancient teacher. There was a story that one of my master teachers told me, and he said that there was this this old monk that spent spent his whole life looking for the secrets to the universe, and he never found them. He passed away, and upon arriving to heaven, this angel said, you were a good man. I'll answer one question for you, any question you want. And he's like, you know what I spent the my whole life looking for the secrets of the universe, and I never found him. Can you tell me where they were? And the angels laughs, He's like, funny, man, don't you realize that we place life's most precious gems right in front of you in presence, love and breath. And it's a reminder to me always that something like breath, it's such a gift, it's such a teacher, and it's accessible always on all days, and so many people go their entire lives with no relationship to their breath. Right. I always like to say, if you can learn how to breathe the right way, you can learn how to think the right way. And if you can learn to think the right way, you can start to live the right way. It's powerful, it's like true freedom. And ultimately it's because the breath brings us back home, brings us back home to the heart, to the body, to love at the center of the heart, Like that's what's there, right, Yeah, And I think we get pulled off our center. And we talk a lot about this with Dar and especially with just being an athlete and all of the distractions and all of the noise and media social media constantly trying to pull him in a thing. It's really the whole world. His has just heightened a little bit more in a thousand different directions. So if we don't have these practices like breath, like yoga to find our center, it's gonna be a mess. Truth, it's it's the practice that keeps on giving. And that's the thing that is important to highlight is that it's a practice, not a perfect. A lot of people think that they need to get on that mat and be perfect, and yoga doesn't work that way. Yoga asks us to, as you know, show up as we are and celebrate. It's a celebration. It's an ode two self through breath. A lot of people that I know who do yoga don't realize that like the asana, the physical practice is just one part of the yoga, the whole entire yoga system. My first master teacher three Dharma Metra, he would always say, without a Himsa, there is no yoga. So the first two limbs of yoga are the yamas and ni yamas, and these are like observances and codes of conduct to live by. Then you have asana and then you have breath. So the physical part and the breath part is in the middle, but it sits on the yamas. In the first two yamas are ahimsa, which is compassion and non violence in Satia. Truthfulness and when your truthfulness is rooted in compassion, that's when you really activate the yoga, and it's when you when you really think of truth. It could be just you know, truth to self. Truth and how we show up truth in how we go about our days day to days, and rooting that in compassion, that's when it really becomes alive. So I feel like yoga is an opportunity to step on the mat in our most authentic self, as our most authentic self in truth, and through compassion and breath, celebrate all that we are. And inevitably, when we're celebrating all that we are, ourselves become alive. With that celebration, they wake up and that's the that's the beauty of it. A lot of people think enlightenment is one day, the very fact that we're breathing, that we're alive, that we're here, that we're vibrating, that ourselves are working on our behalf, that that we're able to, you know, live and learn and expand and grow and fail. That to me is actually enlightenment. That is this idea that we're just we're alive, and to be alive is a miracle in itself. I love the shifting perspective towards towards practice um because other things that I practice I don't have the perspective of it's a celebration, you know, it's a it's an obligation to get me there, to get me to where I want to go, to what I want to feel. But like the story said, it's it's being here along the way, being here along the journey because there is ultimately a here once we get to it. And it's like, man, just the power of perspective. But it has to start with us seeing ourselves as as worth celebrating, which is a lot of work. It's a lot of discomforts, a lot of things that as in our human nature, we don't want to go towards. I definitely didn't want to go towards them. I feel like there's a power bigger than me that brought me into that work. And talk about busting through the wall, it's like, you know, all these things, we continue to break through, little small walls with our practice every single day. That reminds us it's like I don't have to get somewhere. I don't have to you know, I got somewhere myself getting into the league, being drafted into the NFL, and I was never more miserable, never more empty, never more feeling more hopeless or worthless. But when I was working at a Sprouse farmers market and going to meetings and I was present there, present to you know, having compassion and truthfulness and having that combined towards myself, beginning on that journey, I respected myself. I felt more alive working out a farmer's market. But that's not what the world told me working out a farmer's market. But being true to yourself is will feel a lot better than making it big and you know, achieving your dream. It's like, it's such a practice to not believe what is sold to us on the day to day. That's everything, because a lot of money is made off of us feeling inferior. Billions and billions and billions of dollars, And there would be a lot of money lost if they convinced everybody that they were great as they are, Like you're already good. You don't need these products. You don't need to become more clothing, you don't need any more of these clothings. Like you're good. But the truth is, we are good. And I love what you said. It's so important to celebrate all aspects of the journey. A lot of times, and I say this a lot. One of my mentors he really brought this in perspective for me. Is there a difference between the seed of an orange tree and the final product of an orange? A lot of people would say, well, the orange is the goal, but the truth is is like, there's really no difference. The seed is just as important as the final product that is the orange. All the stages of blossoming and of becoming are worth celebrating. When people get caught up on just celebrating becoming the orange, then anything that is not of the orange is considered not good enough. And that's where self hate and lack of self worth begins to flow in. When we begin to celebrate the entire journey, that's when all of it becomes magical. That's when all of it becomes worth celebrating because what happens, like for example, as a Nike trainer for ten years, ten years ago, I was back flip burpies. Now it just doesn't work. You know, ten years ago it was really easy for me to be super super shredded below ten percent body fat. Now I have to like really really dial in everything. But what I'm now noticing is like when I'm sixty, when I'm seventy, am I going to be one of those guys that looks back at once upon a time and be like, oh that was my pinnacle? Or Am I going to sit back and celebrate each and every stage as its own opportunity and its own gift in itself. And so I think that perspective really allows for us to truly enjoy the journey. And the truth is, if I could go back to my younger self, I would tell him, like, Yo, it's all gonna work out. Stop stressing so much on getting to a future that you don't even know what is going to exist, and like celebrate the moment, like love yourself now because you can. Yeah, I feel like a huge Probably the most important part of goal setting we've talked about this also is detaching from the outcome. So even more important than the orange, I think is the seed, because the seed and then it's the process right. I think if we get so attached to the actual end goal we don't get it, we're a failure. Were so identified with it and attached to it that we do get it, and then we get it and then it's like now what. So when we can detach from the outcome, it allows us to be in the process, where really the miracle is the journey anyways, And I think so many people just get hooked on that and if they don't get it, but it's like, honor the process, be in it. That's what it's all about. I wanted to ask you. You brought up sacred plant medicine, and Darren and I have talked about this. We've been sober for many years, but both have had an introduction into that into the last year. So I'm just curious what that's looked like for you and how it's transformed your life and your worldview and perspective and when I guess it's opened up your heart a little, but also a lot of it. I started smoking weed at about eleven years old every day, and then about fourteen was drinking five to six days a week. And when I chose to go on the journey, I cut out everything so essentially went sober and it's powerful. I needed that for the clarity and for the direction. About twenty eighteen, I so a little backtrack, you guys, a little story. When I was twenty seven years old, I was finishing up my senior year at the University of the Battle, Las Vegas. I was taking African American film class. I was the TA and the professor said that he was going to do a documentary at a local high school called Valley High School. That's time I never met my dad. My mother told me that my dad also went to Valley High School. So randomly I said, I think my parents went to Valley High School. He looks at me and he goes, is your dad named Lane Rolink? I said, yeah, that's my dad. He said, oh my god, you looked just like him. He said, that's my big brother's best friend. So he calls his big brother up. That night, his big brother calls my father. My father calls me for the first time. We dive deep in the conversation. At that time, I was doing the work. So forgiveness was in my arsenal, gratitude was in my arsenal. Reframing was in my arsenal. Come to find out he had spent the last twenty years living in the Amazon jungle. And so a couple of years after that, I went down to Peru and I visited my father for the first time in the Amazon jungle, and he took me into the hospitals and started to show me what it was like in Peru. Come to find out a wild story. He was an infectious disease researcher and a trauma surgeon. So growing up in the streets, having nothing, then all of a sudden, I meet my father and he's a doctor, which is crazy because there was no child support or anything, and that's a whole different level of work. But I saw it as Wow, this is an incredible opportunity to expand who I am as a man. So for six years I worked in the Amazon jungle two to three months a year, twenty twelve to twenty seventeen, twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen. More and more of my friends are starting to talk about like indigenous sacred plant medicine. Well, it just so happens that the tribes that I'm working with in the jungles of Peru are like the origin master wisdom keepers of that and so in trusting these men and how they move and how they walk, and how they hold so much reverence for these plants, and realizing that the system that I grew up in probably indoctrinated me in ways that are not healthy, I had the opportunity to sit in a ceremony, and in sitting in a ceremony in the jungles of Peru, I was gifted a remembrance of who I am and where I come from and what I hold and the ancestors that are not only have not only laid it down for me, but are still fighting for me to this day. And in that space, it really showed me that Mother Earth is actually there to help us, to help us find deeper levels of ourselves, to help us tap into deeper levels of our hearts, and to reconnect with her in a way that is sustainable and that is it is expansive. So two seventeen eighteen is also when I started my retreat company and I started taking leaders down to the jungles of Peru to not only give back and serve and work in the hospitals, something that my father taught me, but also for those that felt called to work with indigenous plant medicine to go to the source. Now you can go to most major cities and on a weekend you'll have some people playing music and serving ayahuasca or some other plant medicines. It's different when you go to the jungles, and you go into the jungles and you harvest the medicine and you prey on the medicine. And these medicine men have not only been working with it their whole lifetimes, but they come from generations of healers, and so to be able to do that and to be able to share that has been a big part of my journey, and it's something that I have not, you know, talked a lot about, but as of like the last couple of years, has become less taboo and more and more people are realizing that there's a deep, deep wisdom that lies within you know, Pacha Mama Mother Earth. When we look back to almost every indigenous tribe, they use plants in some form or another to help us heal. And so plant medicine has been a really, really big part of my healing on many many levels. Recently, in December, I went down to Peru and I dieted on three trees for ten days. So basically you go to each tree it was Wacomo, Cospy, Chunta, Kiro, and bobenzana, and you make a tea and outside of really really bland food, you're just drinking these teas. And this came after my mother passed. So my mother passed in June eleventh last year, so I was going through a lot of grief and being able to go down there and do a diet on these sacred plants and sit with myself and cut out all the toxic and cut out all the vices, cut out all the sensory overload, cut of all the social media, and sit with myself. I was able to really reconnect with my heart and heal the piece of me that could have easily been lodged and may have never been able to be moved through. And so for me, I'm passionate about sharing Plat medicine to the world and with my respective individuals. I don't think it's for everybody, because I've seen the transformation and healing that it is brought through and helped with so many people that I know. What I would say is that the biggest, greatest lesson I've learned from working with plant medicine is that we already got everything we need. It's all right here, but sometimes we forget that. I call it life Ahuaska. A lot of people say, I ahuasca like life Ahuaska. This is the most powerful medicine there is. But because of so many because of wounds, because of traumas, because of addictions, we lose sight of the medicine that's already here. And I feel like Mother Nature is there to recalibrate us, bring us back to ourselves, bring it back to our truth, bring us back to source. And there's many ways to do that. And just cherry on top of that. Many years later, I did a ganja ceremony with the RASTA completely different experience than just smoking weed on the streets to numb myself. When I sat with it and I really focused on like my intention and my reason, and I treated it as sacred. Completely different experience, and I think that that's the most important thing when it comes to working with plant medicine is one you got to treat it as sacred because there are teachings within these teachers that should be honored. They're ancient and people have been using them for years as a means to reconnect with with love. I really appreciate the way that you shared that and articulated that, especially for two guys that have had an identity of sobriety. And we had one of our teachers on here who leads Sacred Toad and Combo and very similar conversations, and I'm thinking about that that conversation and you cut chiming in and saying like it's all about intention, right, That's really what it's all about, and especially for us, it's like so much more about feeling, where before it was to numb out and to not feel, but to treat it sacred. But you articulated that all so well, and I'm really glad I asked that question, so thank you. I'm sure, Yeah, what does one of the viable things I learned? It's like I've had a spiritual experience in my life and a lot of spiritual growth, but it's about constantly expanding that awareness, expanding that consciousness, expanding you know, just the impact and the connection I have with that. What does that look like for you on a day to day basis now? To not only like maintain what you've learned and digested, but to continue to expand that great question and something I think about a lot. I was told one time that our brain integrates and I almost instantly, but it takes our nervous system three years to integrate it into a new behavior. For some that might not be true, but for me, a lot of the teachings that I've been gifted or that I've acquired, it's taken a few years to integrate into my being. To embody gratitude, to embody my rituals, to body self love. It's one thing that I know I need to love myself, but it takes practice. And the one thing that I've noticed in our instant gratification society is people want to skip from white belt to black belt. They don't realize that there's a journey that one has to go on to not only like integrate, but to like fine tune and equip our nervous systems to hold a new level of frequency, a new level of behavior. And I think that that's when people really like to start to understand it, then they can begin to really enjoy the process. You know, I've been practicing morey tie in jiu jitsu for a long time, and there's this huge difference between a white belt and a black belt, but even when you get to black belt, you're still opening the doors to like higher level belts. There's a red belt I just heard about in jiu jitsu that takes twenty five years to get after your black belt, and like only like five people have it. So it's it's this notion that like we are always growing, we're always evolving, and to enjoy the journey, but also remembering that the work works. You just got to do the work. And a lot of people when they hear the term work sometimes they like people want to shy away from it. But when you feel deeper levels of peace, when you feel deeper levels of connection, when you have healthier relationships, when you're you know, bringing your goals of life, you're bringing your dreams of life as a result of that work, then at least in my experience, then the people in my life who truly do the work then really start to value the working and treat the work as sacred. And I think the one thing that we got to like destroying and create in our society is this idea of the finish line. Finish. There's no finish line until we leave this space. One of the things that like really became apparent after my mother passed. One of the last gifts she gave me was our family history on her side, back to the fourteen hundreds. And although it was really cool to see all these names and these professions of people, the one thing I kept noticing was just the dash between birth and death. I was like, that's the one thing they all have in common. They all have different numbers, but there's this dash, and what is the dash dash his life? We are all given a dash. Some of us are going to make this dash really colorful. For others it's going to be very black and white, but it's inevitably our choice. And I feel like through the work we end up taking that dash and starting to paint it with our own colors. We start to infuse that dash with like our own meaning, and we start to like really begin to celebrate being in that dash, because inevitably it's all going to be over, and so the sooner than we can do the work and start doing the work, the better. And for a lot of people, they get into paralysis analysis. They might be in their thirties, they might be in their forties, they might have failed so many times, so like, why even start but there's that quote that says, like, the best time to plan a tree was like ten years ago, and the next best time is to start right now. And that's the beautiful thing. So as long as we're alive, as long as we have breath, as long as we have opportunity, there's an opportunity to change. And the only reason we wouldn't change is if we choose not to change. Yeah, you keep saying the work, and yes, it's work, but it's still the easier, softer way, you know, then banging our head against the wall of reality waiting for everybody else to change, or getting to the end of our lives and being on our deathbed and being scared shitless to die because we haven't lived and done that work. So it still is the easier, softer way, and it is our path to freedom, and ultimately it's it's part of our purpose is just to everyday chip away at all of those things that are getting in the way of love. That's what it's about, all right, we're running out of time. I want you to just maybe close real quick. One thing I love about what I've heard about your story is that you say, how until I own my story only then could I help others own theirs? And I feel like that's Darren's story, that's my story. My life changed when I shared my past, my past addiction. So maybe you can just wrap it up with a little bit on that. Yeah, that's I think why we're here in the land of artificial, in the land of fake, in a land of fast, cheap and easy. Authenticity and owning who we are is truly the biggest flex and it's about remembering that there never has been and never will be another me, another you, another U. And when we start to get caught up in that, this idea that we truly are a miracle, then we start to honor our unique gifts. We start to honor the thoughts and the desires that flow through us. Emerson says that there's nothing capricious in nature. That the implanting of a desire means that it's in the constitution of the creature that feels it. So what we're gifted, our visions, our dreams, they're not there to tease us. Those are roadmaps for us to bring our gifts and our magic to life in the most powerful way possible, and that happens through authenticity. When we're trying to be like other people, we cut ourselves off from our own unique gifts. When we start to own who it is we are, that's when we not only bring our gifts to life, but as Marian Williamson said, as we shine our own life, we unconsciously give other people the permission to do the same. And that's really I believe what we're here for is to shine, and a lot of people think it's just about highlighting the winds. What a lot of people don't realize is like my Instagram, you know, it blew up in a lot of ways over the last couple of years because it's my personal journal and I'm sharing my shadows, I'm sharing my struggles, I'm sharing my humanity. When we can give ourselves permission to be human, then we pull down the barriers of race and religion and status and all that other stuff that keeps us divided. When we can give ourselves permission to be human, then we can look at another and say, I honor the human and you and truly embody. You know, the Yogic mantra of Na must day like the dark, and the light in me respects and reflects the dark and lightening you, and for that reason, we are one. And a lot of times people just get caught up in the light. The lightning ME respects the lighten you. But when we can say the light and the dark and ME honors the light and dark and new, that's when we humanize ourselves. That's when we remember that we are just all one human family, and that's what we're here for. And so my life's work is to help people be themselves because that's what we need. We do not need any more clones. We need people to just be themselves. And I feel like in that space we get a taste of everything that this beautiful world has to offer, rather than a whole bunch of regurgitated clones. Where can people find you? So my instagram is my living journal at Brandon Collinsworth. You can also do yoga with me on the Nike Training Club app, and as a few weeks ago, my yoga classes are also on Netflix. I also host an annual rite of passage for leaders that starts in the Amazon Jungle and ends in the Andies Mountains called Warrior Retreats. And finally, I teach two lectures a week on an app called Mind and I also have about one hundred and eighty lectures that live on there, everything from self love to discipline to how to create powerful morning rituals. And so super excited to continue to share, so honored to be on to come back and thank you for having me guys. Thank you, yeah, thank you for just responding to the adversity in your life the way that you have in just creating your own path, like you said, you've You've given so many people the inspiration and permission to come back from whatever they need to come back from, and to come back to exactly where they need to come back too as well. So thank you for being here today. Man, I'm better for having this conversation with you. Yeah, it's an honor your light, your energy, your truth. I mean it's I've been following you for a while and repost your Instagram your quotes all the time. So it's a gift to be able to share this platform and get some more followers and listeners to the wisdom that you're putting out there, because it's a beautiful thing. So thank you, thank you, guys. It's an honor. All Right, we're out. What's up? Comeback stories, family, It's Donnie dropping in here. So did you know that Darren and e I's relationships started by me being his personal development, mindfulness and mindset coach. I want to let you know about both my one on one coaching program, The Shift, and my group Mastermind Elevate your Purpose. These coaching programs are specifically designed for people who are ready to take the next step in their purpose and level up their career, personal finances, and have more connected, deep and meaningful relationships. My gift and part of my purpose is to help others take that next step and leveling up their lives so that they can have a greater in pact on the lives of others, creates success that sustainable yet evolves and grows, and help build a legacy that will outlive your life. If this is calling you, just go to Donnie Starkins dot com and apply for either one of my programs.