There’s Nothing Wrong With You: Finding (And Healing) Yourself In A Chaotic World

Michael Roesslein

Thanks for the introduction and for having me. I’m excited to have this conversation and I’m living vicariously through your tropical background because it’s cold in Italy right now.

Jana Danielson

It’s cold, yeah, I know someone, one of the speakers asked me yesterday is like, is that a virtual background and I was like no, like those are my blinds and those are my palms. So yeah and you know what I can appreciate that because right now back in Canada there’s like a whole bunch of snow back home and I even sometimes forget that it’s you know winter time and

Michael Roesslein

I was a Chicago transplant in California for eight years. So I know the Canada side and I know that not having winter side but here they have winter. So it has been a readjustment and a reintroduction to something that I thought I had escaped forever.

Jana Danielson

Well and I think you know, I feel like Tuscany winter might just feel a little bit different than a Saskatchewan inter I don’t know, maybe not. No. Yeah, no, exactly, exactly.

Michael Roesslein

It is not Chicago winter, it’s somewhere right in between California winter and Chicago winter, but it’s cold enough that it’s you know it gets about zero Celsius is okay. Yeah, so not minus not frozen, not ice and everything not buried under snow but cold enough that you don’t just stand around outside.

Jana Danielson

Yeah. No, exactly. And when we get those minus 40 temperatures we always will say, but it’s a dry cold. So it’s not as bad. Right? Oh man, Okay, so let’s start, you had a shift, you had a shift from what I would say more, you know, in health and wellness, the training, you know the fitness, the nutrition side of things. And then there was this shift over toward you know the emotional, the spiritual, the energetic side of healing walk us through that

Michael Roesslein

It was more kind of like a meandering than like a big shift. There was a time where there was like a pretty big shift, but it was I’ve in retrospect it was more of just a gradual increase in layer of depth. Like I started out and I don’t mean to I don’t want to negate anything that anybody does out there professionally or where anybody’s at or anything, so I don’t want to take it as like deeper is better. But I started out, you know, with the masters and exercise science, I was a very highly educated trainer. I did mostly fitness training. I was working with athletes helping people jump higher, run faster and shoot the ball better, that kind of thing, which I didn’t really find super rewarding. And I didn’t really enjoy it a lot. And then by chance I took on a couple of clients who were recovering from back surgery and they were de conditioned not athletes at all like regular people and helping them be able to like walk up the stairs and do stuff that they couldn’t do a couple weeks prior, that was more fun for me. And so I started working with people who were out of shape trying to be able to enjoy their life better. Which lead to, hey, I have this digestive problem or I have this stubborn weight loss, I have headaches or I can’t sleep at night or I have fill in X. 

Symptom that most people in modern society have and I didn’t know how to help them with that because they didn’t teach that in my grad school program. I only knew how to make them stronger or run faster, have more endurance or whatever. And so I started to learn what I now know as functional medicine or nutrition but I didn’t know what it was called then I started to learn that so I could help the people figure out the things that they were bringing up because when you’re a trainer it’s like a barbershop like people come in and they tell you all the things and it wasn’t just about I want to be able to exercise better, it was you know I want to be able to eat food and not get bloated and whatever. So that led to learning about you know health and nutrition from a more holistic standpoint which led me to F. D. N. Where I learned how to use functional lab testing which allows you to go really deep and work with really complex clients. And I did that kind of work in education for a while until my own mental health and like I’ve always had depression always had anxiety always had really severe A. D. D. 

But I didn’t even know it for most of my life because I think everybody else around me did too. Like I think it was pretty normal and so I didn’t really realize there was anything quote like wrong with me. I used to have a lot of really unhealthy habits and lifestyle things that would allow me to cover up a lot of that or mask it or soothe it or distract myself or feel better or whatever. I figured out a lot of ways to not feel the depression and to not be so anxious and to kind of fix a lot of the problems, which is what most addiction or substance abuse or even like shopping addiction or like anything like that, and most of that is just self medication. And my life reached a point after my wife’s first autoimmune flare about four years ago when everything kind of collapsed and fell apart and I abandoned doing all of those things because I switched to this healthy life and this healthy lifestyle so I quit doing all the things that were my like crutches, my supports, my things that were self soothing or self medicating, but I didn’t realize that you also have to address the things that are underneath that because I didn’t even know there was things underneath that and that’s when you know, I went through this really dark period of like extreme depression and tried a bunch of stuff like I tried the functional medicine route, I took all the supplements, I was eating right, I was doing all the things you’re supposed to do and it would help a little like I could get through the day, but there was like this much deeper, like, doom gloom, despair and I tried a bunch of different kinds of therapy and counseling and I saw these people and half the time I thought like, they should have gave me money after the session, like it was not really helping out and I was pretty desperate and I had an experience that really shifted my perspective on a pretty deep way and I then realized like that there’s a lot more to this whole healing thing that there were layers to what was going on with me that I hadn’t touched or understood or seen or felt and I became kind of obsessed with that, like, then I found people I did benefit from working with, I found practices and things that were helping me and of course I immediately signed up for like two extremely intensive trainings to learn how to do that professionally. I studied with some of the best people in the world to do various things from somatic therapy and trauma therapy, and energetic healing and all of that. 

I haven’t really stopped or slowed down and in between there, my wife went through three autoimmune flares that were really bad and really scary and are the main reason we moved to Italy was to get her out of her career in the er she’s a nurse in the er and she was there for Covid and the stress levels were through the roof and she had flares and was in tons of pain and like  so navigating that and having a real life situation at home where my world was on fire while trying to learn all these new coping and healing strategies and practices was like all my teachers and co students that I had signed up for the advanced level of course in in life. 

And so what I accidentally learned is that much of the chronic health problems that people were coming to my, you know, original work for have roots in the places where I was then studying and learning and practicing and doing my own work through whether it’s suppressed emotions or suppressed trauma or a nervous system, just regulation or whatever that is, is the driving force between but behind a lot of the symptoms and a lot of the conditions and diseases and and as you mentioned, I studied with Dr. Gabor Mate who’s pretty internationally known at this point for connecting the dots between trauma and autoimmune disease and cancer and all these other problems. And I started to stop seeing things as like I used to work on this side of healing, which is nutrition and functional medicine. And now I’m starting to work on this side of healing, which is mental, emotional and spiritual. The lines between the two started to get really blurred and I realized that there isn’t any real separation and we make a huge mistake when we try to separate the two and that they can’t be separated. That’s just an illusion that we created that, like, oh, this is separate than this. And when you point out certain things to people, like it becomes really clear and obvious to them, like, oh, my symptoms get really bad when I’m around this person, I can’t stand, or when I have to go to this place, that makes me really uncomfortable, my back hurts, or I have headaches, or my I. B. S. Flares up, or, you know, I had a dream about this thing and then my symptom was where it’s like, if you really sit down with people and pointed out to them, it’s super clear that there’s no there’s no differentiation. So for me, it just went from like, fitness to nutrition, to more functional medicine, to like kind of touching on the mental side a little bit like stories and beliefs to emotions, to somatic healing, which is all body based too energetic to spiritual. Like to me, that’s kind of a linear progression of depth and that’s how I’ve kind of landed in the middle of all of it, if that made sense. And wasn’t just a scattered.

Jana Danielson

No, no, I mean, I think it makes sense. I don’t think anything is linear when it comes to our health and wellness. I think we try to box is right and that’s where sometimes the frustration is because we’re searching for the diagnosis or we’re searching for the one thing and what you so eloquently have just said is that the lines are blurred and if you’re looking for one thing, yeah. Yeah.

Michael Roesslein

And chasing the biochemistry, which is what I did for a while, like, oh, you feel tired because you have low cortisol so you can take licorice extract and your cortisol will be higher and then you what that’s doing is it leaves symptoms, which there is a benefit there because then people feel better, but also its giving you like a cheat to be able to push through doing things that your physiology and your system at this time are telling you are not, you’re not don’t be doing this. And we found ways around all of that and we don’t really look at What’s driving it in the first place. So if you’re somebody out there and this isn’t intentional, I’m not saying people are like intentionally avoiding things, some people are, but most aren’t, they just don’t understand. And so if you’re one of those people that’s bounced from like practitioner to practitioner to practitioner and protocol to protocol and you take 22 supplements and you’ve been on every single restrictive diet and you’ve done every kind of thing and your symptoms get marginally better or like level off or whatever. I would highly recommend exploring some trauma work or some energetic based things or some somatic therapy or you know, anything to kind of explore what’s going on beyond those things. And you’d be surprised at how quickly the needle can move when somebody kind of finds the right b for their lock, I guess. I would say,

Jana Danielson

I love how you said that. I feel like often people have these unhealthy habits that they can’t just, they just can’t seem to break and what you’ve just alluded to is that, you know, the trauma, the stress, the anxiety can be the underpin or like the the keystone in the roman arch when it comes to our our physical health and so how do we, you know, it’s kind of like this, this cycle, right? It’s that the habits are creating and we’re trying to fix what’s going on here, but we’re not able to change the habits. So, you know, how, tell us about that cycle and you know what, our audience as they listen to you today, what they can take away from understanding that in a maybe in a different way that they can be like, oh, I never saw it that way.

Michael Roesslein

Yeah, I think that a lot of people struggle with that. I know I ran into it a lot as a coach when I was working with clients and fitness and nutrition, I would give them, I would spend so many hours on this like perfect diet plan and this perfect exercise routine and this perfect everything and then I would send them home with it and then I would see them in a week and I’d be so excited to hear about how it was going for them and they’d be like, I didn’t do any of it and I ate Mcdonald’s yesterday, but they’d always look like this and it would be a shame and so they would, you know, apologize, they would belittle themselves, they would say like I can’t do it, I’m sorry I screwed up, I did this bad job etcetera etcetera. And I didn’t understand it then at all and I was like what is wrong with these people? They don’t want to get better, they don’t want to heal, they don’t want to lose weight, they don’t want to get more fit, they don’t want to, they don’t want it. And that was my theory. 

And then when it came my turn to start trying to change a lot of things and I was having a lot of struggle with it. I really did want what was on the other side of those changes, like I really did want to live a different way. I really did want the results that would come from not staying up super late at night and not drinking and not smoking and not doing all these things, I was in the service industry for 10 years, so if there’s anybody out there that’s been in the bartending restaurant server industry, you know what the lifestyle is there and I really did want what was on the other side of that yet I couldn’t do it and I’d screw up or I’d make excuses or you know whatever. 

And what I’ve learned, studying with Gabor and doing the work at luminous and in my own training is my own, like my own work with my own people is the things that we learned, whether it’s zoning out and watching netflix for four hours instead of going to the gym or stopping at home and buying that food that you know isn’t good for you, but you buy every time or eating a pint of ice cream every time you’re upset or like in my family when it was something to celebrate, we ordered a pizza when somebody was upset about something, we ordered a pizza. Like food in modern, a lot of people’s modern lives is tied into emotions, It’s tied into, you know, everything else. So the thing that you can’t stop doing, whether it’s people pleasing or starting unhealthy relationships or drinking or zoning out and watching tv or buying whatever thing or whatever the thing is, everybody has their things, their patterns, their loops, these are things we learned to do at some point that made us feel better and that’s it like and personality traits to like it doesn’t have to be a loop, it can be a personality trait, Like I get really triggered when I see somebody not do something that’s in their own best interest and then I have to like do it for them or help them. Like that’s a trigger for me that can be traced back like every single thing that if there’s a thing that I just said that and it popped in your head that like, oh I get really pissed when somebody does this or it says this or I’m around this thing. There’s a reason for that and you can trace that back and you can find out where that comes from and it’s never about the thing that’s happening right there and the, the soothing and the coping mechanisms we learned those and that’s what kept us safe. And so are the behavior patterns if you have walls up and you don’t let anybody get close to you or ever see you or you’re one of those mysterious people that doesn’t let anybody in, that’s because you had to do that. If you’re never want to express anger and you’re a pushover and you always let everybody walk all over you and you never voice yourself and you never stand up for yourself. 

That’s because you learned, you had to do that. Like at some point you learned that these are the ways that you survive and that you maintain safety and connection in your family and in your house and in your environment regarding the unhealthy habits or being unable to do something. Like I grew up eating lots of fast food and pizza and Taco Bell was like my favorite place to go in junior high still to this day. If I drive past the Taco Bell, which I haven’t eaten at and I don’t know how many years I still get that feeling that feels like comfort. Like warm comfort. That feeling you needed, like it provided something that you needed. So like when people tell me like, oh I fell off and they look down like this, it’s shame and we experience shame, we feel terrible. There’s no worse feeling like shame is worse than any other emotion or feeling as far as like how it makes us feel and to get out of that you do the thing again. 

Like you have another thing that makes you feel better about that thing and then you’re in this loop and you do this thing and it makes you feel good but then you feel shame about doing the thing so you do another thing and then you feel shame and then, and so the thing that stops the wheel from turning is removing the shame and and really having compassion for yourself. Like these things that you’ve learned how to do whether it’s a behavior or personality trade or some kind of pattern or way that you are like what we think is personality is nothing but a whole bunch of learned ways to be survival patterns or thing that you’ve found that helps soothe you or calm you. Like I still the most thing that calms my nervous system the most is if I like watch a movie or a show while I eat because when I was a kid I ate in front of the tv by myself a lot of the time and now if I’m like really stressed out, if I go grab a snack and watch 10 minutes of some netflix show my whole nervous system calms down now. What that snack is I can choose and it can be something that either is you know life sustaining and healthy or something that’s not. But the actual act of sitting down and eating and watching 10 minutes of the show, calm is my nervous system and all those other things that we use calm your nervous system, like it brings you into a state of regulation. Like we’re self regulating and there’s no shame in that like, like Gabor does a lot of work with addicts if people aren’t familiar. Gabor mate is a doctor that works with a lot of addicts. He’s kind of blurred the lines between being a physician and a therapist and he’s connected a lot of dots between trauma and addiction. He has a book called in the realm of hungry ghosts that outlines all the connections between trauma and addiction, trauma wires, our nervous system to be dis regulated. There could be 10 hours of talking on that, but that’s really what it comes down to is trauma rewired our nervous system to be dis regulated and in a state of constant alert or shut down, it can be shut down or alert, but one or the other a dis regulated state that isn’t this like peaceful connected, safe feeling. And so we find ways and people and situations and things. I used to jump off planes for fun and drive real fast and do all kinds of stuff like that. I went the first week I ever did scuba diving. I went in the night time because that’s even more intense than going in the daytime. 

I jumped out of a plane at midnight in the dark. Like I’ve done the things that were all the scary things because I used to think I was a adrenaline junkie because that’s cool. Nobody’s adrenaline junkie, adrenaline feels terrible. What I was chasing was like the things that go in my head to stop and when you’re falling out of a plane, things going on in your head stop. They call it a flow state. Extreme sports are very good at activating a flow state. That’s what I was chasing. But I didn’t know it. So I was putting myself in danger all these times to experience this peaceful state that I didn’t know how to experience on my own. I used to eat kind of ice cream sitting in front of a movie on the couch because it calmed my nervous system down. So when you talk about it in that way, as I’m talking about it now, like if you’re listening to this, you probably aren’t hearing these things that people do and being like, man, that person sucks. 

That’s such a terrible thing to do. It’s like you feel bad, you find things that help you feel good, you learned this a long time ago and it works. So you do it, that’s okay. And so taking the shame out of it removes the loop like, oh I did that thing. Well, why was I so activated? Oh because this happened, Can I find another way to bring myself into a regulated state other than doing that thing? And there are tools and practices and ways that you can learn to like regulate yourself without doing the thing that you used to do and you’ll slip up and whatever. But eventually you’ll transition into like now when I get anxious instead of reaching for some kind of food or beer or whatever other thing I used to reach for, I know that I can go outside and sit on a bench and overlook a valley and take some deep breaths and feel the breeze on my skin and ground into the that experience and before long that wave is gone and I can come back in and I didn’t do any of the things now, it wasn’t this like transition to boom, I have this new skill, I’m going to go do this, you have to learn to trust the new practices and the new skills and the same thing goes for the behavior patterns and the loops and the, the ways we learned to survive and the tendencies that we have is you become more conscious of them more aware of it, like, oh, I did that thing again, I snapped at that person. You know, whatever your thing is, everybody has a thing when I say that they’re like, oh yeah, that thing you become more aware of it, you become what you become aware of, what triggers it. You work on the underneath story behind that while learning new ways to respond. There’s no shame in that. Like everything that we do that we wish we didn’t do, we do it for a reason and we learned how to do it for a reason and it served a purpose and we needed it to survive at the time. So I kinda looped in unhealthy habits and then like behaviors, but they both have the same, they both were ways to keep us safe and to regulate our nervous system. Does that make sense?

Jana Danielson

It makes total sense. And I love what you pulled in around. I think we default to thinking about, you know, use, you know, using food as a crutch or using alcohol as a crutch or using drugs as a crutch but I love that you also brought in like the adrenaline junkie piece as well because I mean I actually, I was like wait I hear that quite often from you know people around me and it’s just as much of a distraction strategy as you’ve made it obvious as all those other maybe seemingly negative vices that we just have become conditioned to know those are

Michael Roesslein

More like acceptable. Like in our society we’ve created our stories that we tell like some of them are cool to do and acceptable to do And some of like in North American culture, I know Canada falls in the us with this drinking is super cool, like it’s glorified. It’s like the, it’s the pillar of society and a lot of different circles but then you know, if they see somebody using some other substance or something grumble, grumble, drug addict, Blah Blah Blah Blah. Well they slam down 12 beers and smoke cigarettes and drink coffee. 

Those are all drugs. Every one of those are drugs. There’s a comedian that has a skit about it that says like the only drugs approved in this society are caffeine that makes you get going in the morning and alcohol to make you forget on the weekends how much you hate your job and and that’s it and everything else is like criticized or outlawed or banished or whatever and yeah some of them are cool. Some of them are not cool. Some of them have stigmas around them and taboos, some of them are celebrated and like the guy who does adventure skiing and go scuba diving and jumps off planes, that’s really cool. And like marathon runners, I used to have a lot of clients who were like marathon runners and every single one of them was type a overachievers had to prove something to somebody never got praise or acceptance unless they were the number one thing at whatever thing. And they learned that when they were a kid and this was their way to do it now. And most of those people had total adrenal burnout and thyroid issues and like all kinds of problems and I would tell them like you’re gonna have to stop running and they couldn’t like they, they couldn’t, and it wasn’t about the running and I didn’t understand then what I understand now to like help them figure out like why do I need to run 13 miles a day. But that’s one that people look at it like, oh, that’s a healthy habit. If you look at statistics and numbers and a lot of research. Ultra marathoners and people who run a lot have way shorter lifespans than people who are couch potatoes and eat Mcdonald’s so no, it’s not super healthy, but they’re things are skewed, you know, and I worked with fitness competition model, recovering fitness competition models who women who would get themselves down to like 2% body fat or 3% body fat and then they wouldn’t have a cycle for three years and they would have hormone tests that I would look at and have to send to the lab and they would be like, I’ve never seen anything like this. We don’t know what to tell you to do. 

And I’m like, oh, okay, well maybe she needs to eat and rest and not work out six hours a day. But why was where’s the drive to do that coming from? Where does that perfection need come from? And what are you without it? And like, so yeah, it’s and then not to shame those people either. Like it’s the thing that they learned how to do that made them feel good either about themselves or in their social circle or whatever. It’s just our physiology doesn’t care why we’re doing the thing. That’s the problem if it was like all like, oh, but eating cheeseburgers everyday makes him feel better. Mcdonald’s is really emotionally soothing to him. Let’s not have it mess up his health. No, it doesn’t work that way. So like, unfortunately a lot of the things that we learned how to do have health consequences to them. So it’s helping you in one way, but it’s not like the way through the way to fix that is to find the thing that’s driving the behavior that’s driving like why, you know, and that’s not always fun. And it’s difficult and it can be painful often it involves feeling things that there’s a reason that you didn’t want to feel before. So you found all these really creative ways to not feel that thing and to feel that thing often you need somebody there with you. So that is where, you know, having somebody in your corner that can help you do this kind of work can be really helpful rather than just going at it alone. But the way out is through,

Jana Danielson

I’m glad that you said that because I feel like so many people, you know, are like this lone wolf where I can figure it out right and often and I’m not saying and probably you’re not saying it needs to be, you know, someone who’s a PhD psychologist. I mean there are amazing life coaches out there that have training you know, like fitness trainer, I mean we’re seeing a shift in how we are approaching health and wellness and the mental side of it. I believe we’re seeing a shift. And so that’s the beautiful thing about having, you know, a coach is someone that can see things that you just, you you literally physically symbolically cannot see them until someone, you know holds the mirror and says here and then you’re like, wait, has that been here all along? And so what advice I mean that in itself is a great piece of advice is you know, look outside of yourself. But for those people that are here or thinking, you know, jeez you know, my friend should be here or my sister should be here listening, you know, to Michael, What other, what other pieces of advice could you plant in someone’s mind to be that? Huh? Moment. Because I think that’s a necessary part of this where you’re like ready to receive, Sometimes we’re not ready to receive or ready to be open. So what else can you whatever kind of

Michael Roesslein

Another thing that we’re taught that’s a whole another programming thing like not being it, not being safe to ask is learned that you won’t receive what you ask for is learned that you don’t deserve to receive is learned that nobody should help you is learned. All of those are beliefs that are learned. Not everybody has that and those are learned at some point. You needed support or help. And I’m not saying you personally, but like that person needed support or help. They asked for it as a child and they didn’t receive it or they were even condemned for asking. Especially men in Western society a lot of the time, that’s why there’s you know, this epidemic of suicide amongst men. Men are taught as boys that crying is not allowed showing emotion is not allowed asking for help is not allowed at all. 

Like if you can’t do something on your own, like you’re worthless. You know, so there’s that whole thing. So you can do all kinds of solo work. I listened and read. I prefer to listen to books around this kind of stuff. Like I am more of an auditory learner, but I will say read for these purposes. I’ve read, I don’t know, dozens of books and gone through really advanced trainings and done all this stuff and I tried to fix it alone. Like I tried to understand myself and psychoanalyze every single pattern I have and reason for this. And you can make really big strides doing that. Like you can understand yourself a lot more, you can become more conscious of things, but you’re always going to have blind spots. 

Those blind spots exist because like you’re in it like you are it like an eyeball can’t see itself? Like it’s, you know, it’s like you’re in it, you can’t see it. So that’s one value of having somebody or a group of people luckily, like both of those trainings I went through were done in cohorts of small groups that like you go through together. So there’s not only the teachers and the and the guides, but there’s the co students and everybody kind of holds each other accountable and works with each other. But the other reason is as we learn more about, you might people out there might have heard of like attachment styles or attachment repair or attachment trauma or the word attachment things that wounding and damage and pain that is caused in relation whether that is with a parent or the absence of a parent or with some other caregiver or peers growing up or in school or a teacher or social situations, whatever, whatever wounding that comes from some aspect of relation with other can only be repaired in relation with other. They’re learning that there’s certain things that you can’t do on your own. So if you never had like a healthy hey, I need to share how I’m feeling and somebody say, okay, great, I’m here have at it and then you can share that and not get any judgment and get support and get what you need if you’ve never had that before, that causes the stories like you just mentioned earlier, but I can’t ask for support, I can’t receive, I don’t blah blah blah. The only way to get rid of that story and realize it’s not even to get rid of it, it’s to teach that part of you that believes that it’s an outdated story that it was true at one point and that it was never okay and that it’s not their fault and that is not true now because look, I have this relationship with ex person and they do this and it’s safe for me to ask for support. It’s safe for me to do this thing and say these things and I’ll get the support, I won’t get judged, I won’t get criticized. 

The only way to unravel that story is to learn a new one and so doing that in connection with someone. Obviously there’s people who are trained to do this really effectively in different ways, but just like anyone in your life can be helpful, you just need to be careful because it can you can get I never use the word re traumatized because that’s overused but you know opening up with somebody who’s like skilled and trained in these things and is there for this reason versus like some random stranger at the store who might snap at you or something like you know use your discernment about what you know about people, but the more that you show the parts of you that believe that asking for support and asking you know for whatever. This is just one story, but that story is I can’t ask for support, showing the parts of you that believe you can’t ask for support or something’s wrong. If you ask for support. 

That’s not true by asking for support and receiving what you needed. That’s the only way to unravel that story on a deep enough level to where it will actually change your behaviors and responses. You can intellectually understand that. Like I just explained this and somebody’s sitting there going, that makes total sense and they have this pattern that doesn’t mean that just because they heard this, they are going to be able to all of a sudden ask everyone for help and receive all this help and what No, no, no, it’s toe in the water like baby steps and when you struggle with it again, like having compassion for yourself, like that is the number one thing. That’s what got me through my depression, that’s what breaks these patterns. That’s what shifts all these stories and these behaviors that we want to switch is dropping the shame. Like you learned how to do that thing because you needed to and it was the best you could do at the time with what you had and you did really good because you’re still here. So dropping the shame and then trying out, you know, new ways to be in connection and kind of you mentioned that individualism that we’re taught like lack of connection is a greater predictor of all cause morbidity, morbidity than smoking and so we are social animals, like we’re social creatures like without that connection, we get sick and so there’s tons of levels on which that is important, like there’s people now pushing group community, functional medicine groups because trying to do stuff in communities more effective. There’s group types of therapy, there’s something called circling which is basically a bunch of people just literally being there and sharing what’s happening for them right now. And it’s like immensely therapeutic because it’s in a circle, it’s in a group, it’s in community and so I hope that sort of answers your question in some sideways kind of way.

Jana Danielson

Well, no, no, and you know what you actually, and maybe the next question I was going to ask you is you know, what do you think is not being talked about enough when it comes to your area of expertise and your experience. And I feel like what you just said could very easily be overlaid on that. Is there anything else that you would add to that or does that just kind of connect those dots?

Michael Roesslein

I think the community aspect of it and like and this isn’t some woo thing like you can look up science on this, like you can look it up. My friend James mask out is right now he created something called hell community I think it’s called and he’s written books about this that has like health outcomes based on personal connection and you know, community connection things radically changed when people are connected to other people and when they’re not and so much of the psychology field forever has been like what’s wrong with this person? And I’m the psychologist and you’re the person and I’m going to psychoanalyze you and find all the things that are wrong with you and there’s this wall between the psychologist and the and the patient because it was the same as the medical model. 

This could go with doctors, this could go with whoever, there’s this wall between them and I’m the power over dynamic where I’m the expert and I’m the person. I’ll tell you what’s wrong with you and what you’re supposed to do and it doesn’t work the other way at all. There’s no connection. It’s totally like this one that actually re triggers a whole bunch of wounding patterns that a lot of people have and that kind of power dynamic. So it automatically puts them in like a distrusting place with those people. I’m one of them. Like I was the one that if the teacher said to us like you can’t do this thing, you have to do it this way. I would immediately do the thing that they said that we couldn’t do and there’s a lot of people that are like that. So what they’re learning now and, and Gabor was one of the first ones to challenge this. And now there’s a whole modalities of therapy and counseling that are based on establishing like real connection with the person that you’re working with and not just sitting in the room with them like really deep level in train mint and connection and that’s great with one person, it’s even better with a bunch of people. And so I think that even within, you know, the most progressive aspects of the functional medicine world and within the therapy counseling, mental health world, the focus is still pretty often on like what the individual can do and then it’s all about the individual and that they have this problem and these problems don’t just come out of nowhere. Like these woundings happen from society, they happen from the way we were brought up, they happen from the way our society is run like like right now you have kids being raised by screens because parents work two jobs and are gone all the time and they’re stressed out of their mind, which nervous systems are just antennas by the way. 

So we pick up nervous systems around us when your child and your parents are stressed out of their mind because they can’t pay their bills and they’re working two jobs and they’re fighting with each other because they’re stressed that and change your nervous system to be like that forever until you change it, which is hard work. But the community aspect of healing, I think I think it’s still overlooked. I think that the level of connection and community, the importance that connection and community has in establishing a felt sense of safety in people that is missing because you know, you get into functional medicine and talk about all these complex chronic diseases that now exist, all this stuff like mold illness and mast cell activation system and histamine intolerance, all of that stuff is a heightened fear response, danger response in the body that gets switched on and stays on and that’s just the way that it manifests itself. It’s why somebody gets sick in an elevator with somebody wearing cologne. 

But I don’t, it’s why somebody goes in a multi building and they’re sick for six months where like, I just, I’m like, oh, this building smells bad. Because the body switched on into this dangerous state. One of the most powerful ways to switch off the danger state is to be in connection with other people and animals. Some people find it much easier with dogs or cats, but that’s also I just think it’s overlooked. I think that so much of it is focused on the individual, which is like, you’re responsible for everything that’s wrong with you. I’ll put in quotes, but you’re responsible for all of that and then you’re responsible for figuring it out and fixing it all and that’s it. And I think that isn’t talked about enough that that’s a super flawed thing that isn’t gonna work. Like it hasn’t worked. It doesn’t work. It’s never going to work because we were wounded by other people and situations and society. Like so that repair needs to happen in in community, it literally shifts our physiology to be in connection with other people.

Jana Danielson

Well, I mean, the old, the old statement that it takes a village, right like that, there’s, there’s so much meaning to that. And I think when you talked about you know, the other piece to that is that we were in this experience and we think no one else is like, we’re the only people that have it as bad, like maybe. Yeah, exactly, Exactly. And so yeah and it plays, I mean, what you’ve taught us and what you’ve educated us on this whole conversation, you know, brings us to this point where, you know, you took us through the piece of, you know, the feeling of, of shame and and how that kind of becomes this little tornado inside of our head and our body and now we’re all the way in this beautiful conversation to the connection. 

Like you’ve offered such seemingly simple yet, like you said five minutes ago, this maybe landing for someone, but they’re just going to dip their toe in the water and they’re going to see what, what would that be like if that started to change or if I tried, you know, something a little bit different or if the mirror maybe, maybe this conversation for some of our audience really gave them that mirror, that they can see the eyeball now that there’s a mirror in front of them, whereas before, or they couldn’t I want to ask to close out our conversation and you’ve offered a few of these kind of in some of your your answers and and to the questions that I’ve been asking, but Michael, what are some of your non negotiables like your go to is that, you know, for you really nurture, protect and honor the mindset, The emotionality, the spirituality that you’ve come to know is really, and you know, like I said, a non negotiable for you.

Michael Roesslein

This has kind of shifted, but nature being outside that is a non negotiable for me. Like that is something I need to do, I have to do it, it needs to be there if I’m locked up in, I have a really nice little office I created here for the first time I’ve ever had, like a really nice little office and it’s great and if I’m in here all the time, it’s not good for me. So being in nature, connecting with nature because that disconnect, that could be a whole other combination conversation. But the disconnect between us and the natural world is one of the main drivers of why we’re so unhealthy on so many levels. So getting in nature, feeling that connection, the breath breathing, there’s no more effective way to shift our felt sense and our physiology than the breath, there’s no supplement. There’s no diet, there’s no anything else you can do and if you start to become really aware and conscious of your breathing. It has a big impact whenever I catch myself like in some sort of loop or pattern or anxious or whatever. If I stop and pay attention to him breathing, it’s always very short and shallow and always 100% of the time. It’s a chicken and egg situation, like breathing short and shallow can make you feel anxious and then feeling anxious shifts the breathing. It also works the other way. So I’ve learned some breath techniques and some more complex styles of breathwork that helped me a lot. But it can be as simple as sitting down, stopping doing whatever you’re doing, breathing through your nose, inhaling for five seconds, exhaling for five seconds. That’s six breaths a minute. That will slow things down and you may have to do it for a few minutes, relax your shoulders, you know, relax your body, breathe into your belly through your nose and just, that’s it. Count to five, count to five on the way in, count to five on the way out. It sounds silly and ridiculous that something that simple could have an impact, but it will immediately shift the way that you feel. And it used to piss me off when people would tell me that because I’d be so like riled up and angry and agitated and they’d be like, just take breaths for a few minutes and whatever and I don’t want to do that and then I would do it and they’d be like, don’t you feel better? And it’s like, yeah, I do, and I didn’t want to it’s and then you can go down the breath rabbit hole, like a long ways. Breathwork is a really powerful thing. But that is really simple and then not keeping everything to myself, I have certain really close friends that I made in those training programs I went through that luminous is a really deep energy trauma neuroscience psychology type program. 

And I made some really close friends there and in God was training, I made a couple of close friends that we know because we all have the same patterns if we don’t hear from each other, even if it’s just like on WhatsApp or a little facebook, messenger check in or something like I have friends who know that if I don’t message them for a couple of weeks that like I’m in like a whirlwind of anxiety or something is going on and so that they check on me and that we have this no bullshit role with each other. So they check on me. So I do the same for them and then we have zooms and we connect and having like at least one person who, because we, we we get so looped into these stories that exist in our head and then we act on the story and then this story and it becomes this little world that we live in, that nobody knows about, that. We’re just living in this tortured little existence of spiraling stories and whatever, as soon as you put those out and somebody else has those stories too, they become a lot less spiraling and a lot less powerful. So, I would say getting outside, getting in nature even when it’s cold, I still go for a walk every morning. I live in the hills, I wear a weighted vest, it’s part of my workout. 

I just go out walk the hills. Sun in the morning is another one, huge, huge, huge, like, first thing you do in the morning, go outside and get sunlight in your eyes for don’t stare at the sun. I had that happen one time, I didn’t know I needed to say, don’t stare at the sun, but don’t stare at the sun. Get sunlight in your eyes first thing in the morning for like 15 minutes in your whole day will be different, but nature, the breath and having people in your corner, at least 11 person that you make a deal with, that you’re always gonna tell them what’s going on. Because it’s carrying all of that stuff alone, it’s a lot heavier and a lot more like feels bigger, more real, more whatever. I have friends, I’ll tell them what’s going on and they’ll be like, you’re being ridiculous. And then because we have that relationship, I don’t mean that like having that story is ridiculous. I’m not trying to call somebody else ridiculous, but they know me, they know my stories, they know my stuff and they’ll be like, you’re doing that thing, you know that that’s not true and then they’ll make me admit it and then we kind of laugh and then it’s all lighter. So those would be my things right now, I think.

Jana Danielson

So good. So, so good. Now, if someone is, if, if our audience is looking to connect with you and learn more about your work, where’s the best place to send them?

Michael Roesslein

I have two platforms, which you mentioned earlier. One is Rebel Health. That one is focused a lot more on the functional medicine side of things, nutrition wellness, got health neuroscience, like all of that type of stuff. We have a lot of great educational things over there, some really good physical health products to, And then, and Nora is my other platform and that’s focused a lot more on the mental emotional spiritual side of things. You can go over there, take an assessment, find guides that do various types of this work that would be recommended to you based on your assessments. I may be starting to do some coaching both in group and individual. Starting in the spring of 2023, so pretty soon after people would be hearing this for the first time. If you want to connect with me directly, I would say that the best way to do that would be email Michael at rebelhealthtribe.com is probably the one I would see, the fastest. 

But I don’t know. If I’m going to be doing that in the spring or not, but I want to like, I really, I want to start applying some of the things I’ve learned to work. I was like the only one in those trainings who wasn’t a therapist or a counselor or actively coaching people and they’re like, you don’t have any clients and like, no, I used to, but now I just do all this. I do like educational things and produce all like events like this one and we did a movie series and I kind of, it’s coming full circle and I feel like going back to going back to sitting across from somebody like this.

Jana Danielson

Well, I think maybe the fact that you just gave everyone your email address is a good underpinning

Michael Roesslein

Publicly or out loud that I even want to do it. So I think naming it might help that kind of go along.

Jana Danielson

I love it. All right, well ladies and gentlemen, if you are here, this is like potentially the world premiere of amazing coaching program

Michael Roesslein

Coaching service accidentally on this interview accidents.

Jana Danielson

There aren’t no, I yesterday one of my speakers said that, do you know the definition of miracle and I was like, oh, do you want, like, the Miriam Webster definition? He’s like, no, the simple definition is just when something unexpected happens and it depends how big of an unexpected thing that is, that kind of determines if we even call it a miracle or coincidence. And so there are no coincidences, Michael. So this is fantastic. I want to thank you for your time and your brilliant and just the, like the steady as she goes way that you show up. I love that. And I know that our audience is, has really connected with that because it’s a very unique way that you bring your expertise and the little nuggets of information that just kind of get planted. I’m excited for our audience and hopefully, we were just saying nothing is a coincidence. So the fact that you’re here listening to Michael is where you were exactly supposed to be in this moment. So thank you so much again for your time and gang it’s time to, we’re gonna wrap this session, go and if you can get your feet on the ground or your hand on a tree and and do some grounding, do something for you over the next couple of minutes and then we’ll come back for our next speaker at the Medicine of Mindset Summit.