96. Breaking Down Pain: Omid Vojdani's Holistic Health Approach

Michelle Walters: Hi, we're Cinthia Varkevisser and Michelle Walters, co-hosts of Mind Power Meets Mystic. Our weekly show is here to expand your mind to what's possible, uplift your spirits to move forward with confidence and joy, and to create a space for your collaboration with the invisible. Welcome to Mind Power Meets Mystic.

Michelle Walters: It is just me this week, Michelle Walters. I am our show Mind Power. I am the hypnotherapist. Our mystic, Cinthia Varkevisser, has the day off. I am very happy to be sharing a special guest I met a few months ago whose name is Omid Vojdani. Omid is a certified holistic health coach with a background in functional medicine and fitness. After graduating from California State University, Chico with a degree in psychology, he discovered his love for fitness in the gym. He moved to Los Angeles to become a personal trainer and started working at 24 Hour Fitness, where he gained experience working with clients with specific medical conditions ranging from back pain and knee replacements to MS and Parkinson's. Today, Omid helps create custom health solutions based on his client's unique personalities and lifestyles so that they can create sustainable change in their health and happiness. He is passionate about helping individuals achieve optimal health, and his unique background, training, and experiences have shaped his approach to coaching. Welcome.

Omid Vojdani: Thank you for having me, Michelle.

Michelle Walters: We are very happy to have you today. One of the things I wanted to get out there right away is that when I met you, I was like, "Oh, this guy is different. He does not have a very standard Western approach to health." I know a lot of our listeners are very interested in alternative approaches and finding other ways because either Western medicine has disappointed them or doesn't seem to be addressing their needs, or maybe it's suboptimal, or they have a lot of health concerns, and the combination is tough. But I wanted to hear from you a little bit about what it is you do. Your bio has a nice description, but I know there's a lot more. So why don't you share that with our listeners?

Omid Vojdani: Yeah, the elevator pitch, as I give it, is I get people out of pain. That's really the bread and butter of how people find me. They have something going on that is causing them some, mostly physical, but sometimes health or psychological pain. And what a lot of people end up doing before they come to me is they start trying to apply themselves to a model. And it actually has to, in my experience, be the other way around. You know, if I'm a car, I go to the mechanic. It's really easy, but the human body and psyche is not a car. It's not a machine that you can just apply one model to. So as the individual comes to me, I assess everything that's going on to figure out what the actual root cause of the pain is. And then once I find what that is, that might take a session or two, it might take four or five. But then once I have that information, I create the customized plan for them to address all of the things that are going on. And there's a stack ranking order to that, right? I want to go after the biggest thing that's going to move the needle the most, not the smallest first, to get them the best results I can.

Michelle Walters: So why don't you walk me through maybe an example client?

Omid Vojdani: Yeah, actually, I'll do the one that was most recent. So a massage therapist, best massage therapist I've ever worked with in my life. She was having a little bit of this interesting neuropathy going on in her right foot, and she just could not figure this out. So I have a lot of skill with assessing the physical body, so I'm like, "Okay, well, neuropathy could be coming from the foot itself, could be coming from any of the muscles in the leg, could be coming from a lower back disc, could be coming from the neck." I did all the physical assessment, I found a couple things, but it wasn't anything big. So I said, "Well, let's stretch this, let's strengthen that," that sort of stuff, just with basic exercise, and she felt way better for about five weeks. Then all of a sudden, something happened and her back just seized; she could not get out of bed, couldn't even go to work. So I'm just like, "Huh, okay, it's not like the exercises did that. That's strange." So I started digging into it a little bit more, asking her a lot more information about her lifestyle, her diet, her sleep, and all these types of things. Turns out she had a massive kidney stone, and the exercises that we were doing had dislodged it, pushing it further down the path, and now it was stuck and causing this big problem. So I was able to identify that, sent her to a urologist, they started figuring this out, and now she's scheduled to get that sucker shrunk down a little bit to get rid of this pain. But along the way, I was able to actually use some of my skills and modalities to help mitigate the pain while she's going through this healing process.

Michelle Walters: Interesting, very, very interesting. That's great. And I think that's an excellent example that people will understand. I mean, nobody thinks a massage therapist is going to hurt, but as you're pointing out, like, we all need help, right? We all need to ask for help when we need it. What attracted you to this line of work? What spoke to you about helping people in this way?

Omid Vojdani: You know, it's funny, I actually think a lot about how I actually got here. My original path was actually to become a musician. Way back in the day, I've been playing clarinet since like four years old, went through drums, went through tuba, went through a lot of different things. And when I finally graduated college with a random degree in psychology, that's a whole other story. It was a long time in college, let's just say that. So I basically said, "You know what, I'm going to take a break. I'm not going to go to grad school quite yet." And what ended up happening is I just kind of fell in love with the gym. Chico had just built this two-and-a-half million dollar rec center there, and I was going all the time. I don't know if this is a video podcast, but I'm about 120 pounds soaking wet. I mean, I'm not a big guy. So I started working out, I started feeling a lot more confident in myself, and that was actually the first kind of inkling where I'm like, "Hey, this degree in psychology is actually really helpful." Exercise can help change people's psychology very, very quickly. So I just kind of took two years off trying to figure out what I wanted to do. One of my buddies randomly calls me and he says, "Hey, me and another friend of ours are going to move down to LA to go join the industry. Do you want to come with us?" I'm like, "Hey, I've got this music background. Let's go there. I want to." And Michelle, it was probably about 30 seconds worth of thinking where I was like, "What do people in LA like to do?" This is so judgmental back in the day. "They like to go to the beach and look good with their shirts off. So let's become a personal trainer." It's just the silliest random logic that led me to going down to LA. I got a degree with the American Council on Exercise, it's a 12-month period, a course that you have to kind of go through to get their certification. I did it in two and a half months. Moved down to LA, I had no idea what I was doing, I showed up to the interview in a three-piece suit because I wanted the job. But they hired me, and they taught me everything that I needed to know about selling fitness to individuals, but they didn't actually teach me anything about fitness. And the American Council on Exercise's work is fantastic, but it also doesn't teach about fitness. So I show up 120 pounds soaking wet. People are next to me as other trainers, like, you know, six-foot-tall Greek gods. And I'm like, "I'm not going to compete with that, but I'm super smart, and I have the psychology piece down pat." So what I ended up doing is I started talking to the membership there, and I said, "Hey, give me the people that are scared. The people that are barely taking two steps into the gym because their doctor told them to, their wife or husband told them to, something happened that they need to do this. And I will hold their hand through the entire process, make them feel comfortable in the gym." So that was basically all of the people either that were little old ladies that were super scared, or the people that had issues that they were worried were going to be worse. So I would teach them techniques. For example, if somebody has knee pain, cool, well, here's the three machines you should not do, and then here's some other exercises that we can do to strengthen a little bit more globally around the body to help that knee stabilize, and people just started seeing great, great, great results with that.

Michelle Walters: That's a beautiful answer, and very illustrative. And I think it depicts a lot about you. It depicts, it says a lot about your passion and love and interest in helping other people. And the fact that you are willing to ask for the help and figure out that you have a gift of making other people feel comfortable and that that's a way that you could help them is a really great combination.

Omid Vojdani: Thank you, I appreciate that.

Michelle Walters: I know that you've also done some really interesting work with NLP and hypnosis, and as a fellow hypnotist, I wanted to hear about some of those clients that you've worked with. And maybe share an example story of someone you've worked with using some of the hypnosis and NLP techniques.

Omid Vojdani: Yeah, that's a great question. And I think the first one that comes to mind was a, it was actually a Zoom client who had very, very, very severe scoliosis. And so I knew that there was some pain going on, but we weren't addressing the scoliosis itself. She was actually working with a chiropractor for that. We were addressing a lot of the fear and the anxiety around the pain and around what that was doing for her body. So we basically were doing just general guided hypnosis, a lot of the hypnotherapy scripts that you learn when you're first going through the coursework. But the thing that really moved the needle for her was actually a very, very basic NLP reframe. She just had this thought process of, "I'm broken. This is how I'm always going to be." And just a very, very simple reframe of saying, "No, you don't have to be that way. This is just a state that you're in right now, and states can change," was enough to actually start moving her out of that feeling of stuck, that feeling of "I'm always going to be this way," to "Okay, I can take more steps forward." And once that little switch flipped, it just opened the doors to what was actually possible for her, and she started seeing way, way better results from the chiropractor, from the other modalities that she was going through.

Michelle Walters: That's a beautiful example. I know that for me and for some of my clients, it's a little bit of the mind moving the body, a little bit of the body moving the mind. Can you talk about some of that?

Omid Vojdani: Yeah, actually, the first thing that pops into my head is there's, I don't remember who said it, but there's a great quote that says, "Strengthen the mind, the body will follow. Strengthen the body, the mind will follow." And it's kind of both are true. When I start seeing somebody come to me, especially for the first time, we do a lot of physical work, even if it's just low-level stuff, that we can get a sense of accomplishment. And as that sense of accomplishment, that physical ability increases, it tends to drop the level of anxiety around certain things. I also will flip that around and go after their mind first if their mind is so stuck in the past or in the future. So bringing them back into the present moment, "Hey, right here right now, you are not dying. Right here right now, you are safe," that starts to calm everything down and the parasympathetic system can kick back in. And now we can start making progress on whatever the physical issues are.

Michelle Walters: Right. Thank you for explaining that and giving a great example. I know you have a course coming out soon, and I wanted to make sure we included that in our show so that our listeners would know that that's happening and can find out about it. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Omid Vojdani: Yeah, absolutely. So the course is actually called Healing Emotions: Trauma Release Exercises for People with Stress. It's a little bit of a long title, but the focus of the course is actually to teach people some very, very simple and actionable physical movements that will help to release stored trauma in the body. And I've got three beta testers going through it right now, and their results have been fantastic, both in terms of physical mobility, but more so actually on the emotional side, just helping them process through emotions that have been stored in their body for years and years.

Michelle Walters: Thank you for sharing that. I know that there are many people in our audience who would probably really benefit from that, so we'll be sure to include a link to that in our show notes. Is there anything else you wanted to share with our audience today?

Omid Vojdani: No, I just appreciate the opportunity to be here and to share some of my story and my work. I hope that it helps some people out there, and if anybody is interested in learning more, they can always reach out to me through my website or through social media.

Michelle Walters: Thank you so much, Omid, for being with us today and for sharing your insights and experiences. It's been a pleasure having you on the show.

Omid Vojdani: Thank you, Michelle.

Michelle Walters: And thank you to our listeners for tuning in to another episode of Mind Power Meets Mystic. We'll be back next week with more inspiring stories and insights to help you expand your mind and uplift your spirit. Until then, take care and stay well.

Outro: Thank you for joining us on Mind Power Meets Mystic. Stay tuned for our next episode, and keep exploring the mystical connections in your life.