You Winning Life Podcast Ep.168- "Eliminating Your Mental Barriers"with Erin Phiel

Alright y'all, welcome back to another really about to be awesome episode of the You Winning Life podcast. But you already know that because I've been blessed with having some really incredible guests from day one, and today's gonna be no different. And a shout out to Todd, who has hooked us up with this amazing introduction. And welcome back to You Winning Life podcast. Today's guest, Erin Pyle, you already heard a lot about what she is accomplishing and Making Bud in the World. And as we had a pregame conversation, just the overlapping of our worlds and everything that you're used to on this podcast, it's just going to take it to another level today. And Erin, thank you for hanging out with us today.

Hey, what's up?

What's going on?

Good to be here.

I feel like we already, like, already did our podcast interview before we even started recording. So I feel bad for everybody else who's not going to get the good stuff. So, but we're going to get into some good stuff. So we're going to get into psychedelics, we're going to get into healing, we're going to get into trauma, we're going to get into a little bit of your journey without really getting into all of your journey because rabbit holes and stuff. All that things. But I think that what I really want to start off the conversation with is the BS of old school therapy. And as a licensed therapist myself, the stuff that like I went to as a kid, that old Freudian sit there for years and, you know, tell me about your feelings and really not getting to the stuff that we need to get to. And even as a licensed therapist, when I started an incredible training, it was systemic. It was postmodern and philosophy, meaning your meaning is what it means. We're not looking particularly for diagnosis. And pathology. We're looking for relational dynamics and beliefs and meanings. But even that I hit walls with. And what you're doing and what you and your team is on the leading edge of really does describe what I believe is the necessity of what healing and medicine could be like. So, so let's get into a little bit of that, right? Let's get into like some of the things of like, we've all been to therapy, you've done therapy, like you were saying. So let's get into like that, just that the genesis of like that story for you and what led you of, you've tried these things. This is why you didn't like it, and this is where you started leaning into what you started leaning into for you that eventually led you into this.

Yeah, I— God, I started therapy at such a young age. I mean, I think middle school or elementary school, and then really I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder in high school and have been in therapy off and on ever since. I would go and sit and I think, as is the case for many intelligent humans, talk circles around the therapist, leave, and they think, they say, you're brilliant and you're doing really great. And it was like a game.

But yet, why do I still feel like crap?

I don't think I ever left a session going, that made a difference. I feel better. I'm on a different track. I learned something today that is going to change my life or the trajectory of my life, or things are really going to be different now. It was just, I went to therapy because That's what you do. And that's the only option there was. And then the '90s rolled around and it was like, oh, there's probably some serotonin issues in your brain. Here's some Prozac. It's all Prozac. And so I would go to psychiatrists as well and they would sit. I remember I had a fellow and he would do 12-minute consults and you'd talk for 2 minutes and he'd go, here's my recommended pill for the next 3 months. Come back and that will be $800 and I will see you again. In 3 months and we'll do it. And it was just, it was ineffective and yet it was all that existed. It was all that I knew. There were no alternatives that I knew of and that I grew up with. And so if you fast forward, I ended up after my getting a psychology degree in undergrad, I ended up going in a different direction and started a web company and built a web consulting agency, ran that for about 16, 17 years. And in the last 5 years, I knew I wanted to do something different. Didn't know what it was gonna be. Ended up in a lot of turmoil, getting chronic mystery pain that no doctor could figure out, more depression, more anxiety because I didn't know what was happening. And then the doctors could, and it just, nothing worked. I'd go to more therapy and I'd sit in more offices and it was like just nothing worked. And so that was when it was one of those, like, there has to be a better way. I have to figure something out. I can't keep talking. And so that's when I started to look into more root cause explorations. How do I shift my thoughts? How do I shift what I'm feeling beyond just talking about it. And I started to look into the world of beliefs, and I started to look into the world of identities and seeing that these pieces underneath the surface played a major role in shifting and creating these elements that I never had any success in changing despite all the therapy. So that's kind of how I got to, uh, started where I am now.

Yeah. So, and I know that with the background that you've done both for yourself and professionally, the trainings and the certifications and stuff like that, that, that there's developmental stages of people. And I want, and this is something that like you and I you know, pre-gamed about. And I think it's such a timely and important topic that there are stuff that we're going to get into at any aspect of our life that we developmentally might grow out of, but that served us at a particular time and particular place. And that's okay, right? So for me, like, I was so excited when I took my hypnosis training. And my— the professor, Dr. Douglas Flemmons, was one of the, you know, one of the people that helped found my family therapy program at Nova in Fort Lauderdale. And he was like the guru of like— and he was— he's such an amazing person. And it was like this of like, oh my God, I'm going to take Douglas's hypnosis certification course for a week and it's 40 hours or whatever hours it was. It was a big deal, right? And that was like the talk of if you're taking that and you're into that, that's like kind of like a special deal in our program. And it wasn't part of the curriculum. And I remember at that stage, I'm like, oh my God, this is amazing. Because like that was the threshold and ceiling of all the Ericksonian stuff and the mindset and NLP came out of that for, yeah, in a different world. But that's what I thought was I'm going to be able to handle everything that comes into my office now. And I was able to do so much for it. But what I was training and hitting the wall with. I'm like, oh my God, this takes a long time. Now, it wasn't like 35 sessions of like just talk therapy, but it was still like— it was still shortening the time, but I still felt impatient with it. And even though it was working, but it still wasn't like, you know, I wasn't getting— now, of course, like, it takes you years to master anything, so yeah, you know, I had to honor that too. But it just wasn't getting me to where I needed to go. And I'm realizing, like, oh well, that might be his thing, right? That's— Douglas is the hypnosis guy. Maybe I'm realizing for my own ego that like I wanted to be like accepted and liked and whatever, so I did the training and it was really cool. And I became like, you know, but maybe that's not what I need to be doing with my clients. And I didn't even realize what else was out there. But it opened the door to a new window of hypnosis is pretty much clinically accepted and universally accepted. It wasn't— I didn't even know all these other things existed. Right. So when you were like kind of at that stage of, okay, I'm kind of done with like, all right, I have the psychiatrist, and it's pretty accurate what you're describing. That's probably 70%, unfortunately, of people who are listening to the show's experience.

Yeah.

Right. What were some of those tools at that time that served you? Because what I'm wondering is, again, people, a lot of our listeners don't know stuff that even exists out there, and it may be right for them at this developmental stage, or it may be completely wrong for them at this developmental stage, but they just don't know it exists. So I think that's a— so what would be some of those things as you got started in that? What were some of the things you're like, oh my God, like, that's insane. Like, I remember watching, just as an example, Dr. Joe Dispenza's TED Talk in TED Tacoma. So if you all are listening, just type on YouTube, TED Tacoma, Joe Dispenza, and it just showed the neuropathways changing and connecting and the different thoughts and the different feelings and how neuropathways ways, connecting wire and fire together. And seeing that on a video, I'm like, oh, that's what we're doing with neuro-emotional technique.

Yeah.

Right. And that just opened up. Okay, so now there's that rabbit hole. So what were some of those things for you at that, like, each of those developmental stages that kind of like showed up for you, helped, and then you moved on, and then this showed up for you and that helped? What were those different things and those different things you got out of it?

Yeah.

And what helped indicate that you were ready to move on to something else?

Yeah. So I'll dive into that. The precursor, the thing that I want to share is that in tandem with everything I'm about to talk about, one of the pieces of my journey has been having to reconcile and acknowledge and address the physical component of mental health. Within the past half decade, when I started deteriorating really bad, had brain fog and panic attacks for the first time. And I was sitting here going like, my work isn't working, what's happening? And it turns out I had been living in a severe black mold infestation for a year and a half, literally in the walls in my office. In my bedroom, in the bathroom. And I happen to have the genetics that make it so that I don't clear mycotoxins. I don't tolerate them. So it impacted my entire body, my brain, inflammation, my ability to process, my nervous system's ability to regulate. And so here I kept thinking, if I find the right modality, surely I'll be able to address what is this stuff coming up? Is this childhood trauma? Is this memories? I went through all the mental stuff and sometimes And I learned this lesson again when I listened to a doctor and I, against my better judgment, and took a thyroid medication, two thyroid medications for 6 months. And again, I'm back in panic attacks being told, this is important to your— we gotta get this right. And within a day of being off of it, I'm like, oh, I'm actually totally fine. So there have been a number of instances, I think, along my journey where I went looking for mental health professionals or the right type of methodology or coaching to address what I felt was just not not optimal mindset or brain states or challenges. And at the end of the day, it was like, okay, I have this severe food sensitivity, I have mold throughout my body and my brain, I have taken a pill that my body does not need. And so I just want to really have people who are listening check in with that element too, because I spent a lot of time insisting it's got to be in my mind, it's got to be in my mind. And physical health is such an important part of a healthy life.

Yeah, well, and that goes back to that old school neck up, body down separation of Descartes and all that stuff that, like, thank God, right? The worlds that we— you and I hang out in. The bookshelf directly behind me, that's the whole top 2 shelves are all integrative and functional medicine. So when you're talking about mold, then, you know, I have my clients— literally have a client going tomorrow to my primary because I know they're open to all this stuff. And I'm like, here's the list of stuff that you're gonna give our primary, and she's gonna be okay because she knows you're working with me and she's my primary too, and I love her for that. And I also want you to get this tested, this tested, and when that comes back, the next thing we're going to be doing is organic acid testing and mycotox from Great Plain Laboratories because we— I want to see what's going on. Oh, and by the way, you need a Lyme test. And by the way, I want to check out H. pylori. And by the way, right, and I'm probably going to start having you put on these protocols anyway, because I have a feeling that that's what's going on, even if it doesn't come back from the normative labs. So I completely, completely are in step with you on this, that any doctor— and I'm going to be bold, I'm going to say an unpopular or just very unconventional thing as a licensed therapist— that this is what you're sharing is my wheelhouse and what I do with my clients. If you are listening to this and you go to your primary care or your therapist and they say to you, "It's just in your head," or, "No, this whole thing about Stachybotrys, black mold," or any other things, or even if you even think about parasites, which is a whole nother conversation we can get into. I'm reading a book.

Oh yeah.

This is Your Brain on Parasites. I'm half nauseous and half my mouth is in awe as I read that book. But changing the biochemistry, changing our neurotransmitters, our brain being hijacked and having our white matter decay from certain parasites that cause people who are studied who got into motorcycle accidents in one particular lab all had the white matter missing from their brain and were all tested for the same parasite and all had it. So what Aaron and I are talking about is that this is not just the neck up, the emotions, the depression, the anxiety, the stress can be as much environmental and toxins that are contributing and affecting your biochemistry as well as just having unhealthy people in your life and bad relationships is about equally as important as that.

Yes. So much. I still remember the day I went in for my yearly physical and they have you fill out the depression index or something. And I was like, God, I'm, I'm really not doing so well. And this is not a good look for for someone who's running the type of company that I do and helping people. And I was— and they're like, you know what, we're gonna have you talk to a therapist so you can talk about things. I'm like, that's not— and then here's some Valium or Atarax or something. And they, they loaded me up with a bunch of highly addictive pills that can worsen the anxiety cycle.

Exactly.

And I walked out that day with a bottle of pills going, what is happening? I knew deep down, and it's like, I thought it was— I just— it was mold. But that's what's happening. So many people are having these physical health issues and then getting handed medication or even missed or had some major anxiety, panic attack stuff.

I went to a therapist, a psychiatrist, someone, and I— within 3 minutes, it's like, oh, well, you're bipolar. I'm like, what are you talking— and then put me on the pills. And I went, I checked with all my professors, and I went to check with everybody. I'm like, they're like, yeah, you're going through stuff, but you're— we've known you longer. Like, that's not— and then I went on Google, or back in the day, whatever it was, and I found him, and they're like, everybody walks out of his office with the diagnosis of bipolar. Like, that's like malpractice, right? And that's happening out there. And if anybody's in South Florida and wants to know that person's name, I'm happy to tell you to not go there. So literally protecting your life. But I'm so— you and I, we're so passionately advocating about this stuff. And it's like, my old office, pre-pandemic, I had a psychiatrist that was wall-to-wall to me. And, um, I remember one day she showed up in the waiting room and she's like, oh, I have like— I bought these sodas for my clients, but I'm not gonna drink this. Do you want it for your clients? And I'm literally out of my mouth, I'm like, fuck no. Really, that's literally what came out of my mouth.

And she's like, what do you mean?

And I'm like, I'm giving those toxic chemicals to my clients. What are you talking about? Like, well, number one, there's aspartame in it. Number— that's a neurotoxin. Number two, there's this, this, and this, and here's what it does to your hydrochloric acid. And she's like, what do you mean? Like, everything is okay in moderation. I'm like, you're right, I'm gonna go find a, find a hooker and do crack with her, but I'm only gonna do it once a year because it's moderation. Yeah, that was pretty extreme of me to say all this thing. So I got a huge smile on my face, but it was just that it just didn't register that, like, well, it's okay in moderation, but I'm putting you on pills, but I'm gonna give you soda that has neurotoxins in But I might put you on pills, that, right? So, so the disconnect is so ridiculous. And again, obviously there's medication that there's a time and a place for, and an issue, right? And I'm, we're, I'm not anti-psychiatric medication. There's amazing clinical professionals out there, but the model has shifted. The model is moving forward. And I know that you and I both have had those experiences and a lot of people listening to this can relate to that. And if you are seeing someone that is not supporting you in the way that you're hearing right now, or they're like dismissing all these other things that could be, get a different practitioner. And if you need help finding one of those, obviously you can reach out to Aaron and I, and we can help you based on where you are. We can help collaborate with you on that. I want to talk a little bit about the shift into something that is touchy. I've had other multiple other podcast episodes, and I'm excited that I'm having more and more, and you're partially, you know, you're experiencing this as well, is moving into the world of psychedelics and plant medicine as it relates both to mental, physical, and really as we, the idea of leading the leading edge of like where medicine should be and the, we call it, I guess, the impossibility of healing longstanding traumas and issues in a very short period of time.

But let's dive into that and then we can also circle back cuz I never actually even answered your first question. Okay. And I started with the precursor of like health and then never, I know, I'm sorry.

Answer that question. That's my ADD.

That's my ADD. Sorry. All right.

Or do you wanna start there and then go into that?

Whatever.

What works better?

It doesn't matter. Okay.

I'll leave it up to you. Whatever keeps a smile on our faces, guys. That's my kicking in.

That's hilarious. Let's talk psychedelics for a few minutes and then we can go back to the shifting and the 10x-ing of modalities and like the the evolution of what's happened, transpired.

All right, go for it.

Oh, go, whatever, you just go, just go.

I'm having— I'm just gonna chill and enjoy the ride on this one. This is way too much. This is double thumbs up, my dear. So whatever you want, go for it.

Whatever. Okay, no pressure. I'm just so grateful for what's been happening in the world of psychedelics, and watching the transformation that's occurred just in the past year has been mind-blowing. It's been so extraordinary. And the conversations being had with people. Say 5 years ago, it was still like, oh, what do you mean? And so much misinformation and assumptions. And now I feel like every third person is like, so when I ran my web agency, when I started, people didn't even have, back in the way, back in the day, people didn't even have emails, right? My clients were like, can you send me the invoice in a letter and we'll talk over rotary phone and shit like that. And yet as time went on, things shifted. I had a really good story. There's a point to this. It just, the transformation within the industry. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I just remember there came a point when we were building websites and doing consulting and we'd laugh because we're like, every client has some nephew that does websites or their best friend from high school does websites. So we need a proposal. And just by the way, we're also considering our nephew. And I feel like psychedelics has rapidly entered that world. World where you talk to someone and you explore what they know, and they're like, oh yeah, no, no, no, my best friend's cousin sells mushroom chocolates, or my doctor does ketamine. And it's like everybody knows somebody now, and it's so commonplace.

It's amazing.

And the world is actually— the work is actually trying to untangle the misperceptions and the misunderstandings and the assumptions that people have that, you know, I I did 200 milligrams of psilocybin once. And so I'm good. You know, I've done, I've done all the psychedelics. It's interesting how the conversations have changed so quickly in the past year.

Yeah. And even myself as a person who was like, so, you know, grew up on D.A.R.E., right? The whole D.A.R.E. campaign, right? In the '80s.

Oh my God. All the coloring contests and first tries.

This is your brain, right? The omelet, the omelet commercial. This is your brain on drugs, right? All that stuff. And thank you. Thank you, Nancy Reagan. That's all your fault. Right. But it's interesting if you watch the documentary, The Map, Change Your Mind documentary, and you had, no, yeah, Michael Pollan, but Nixon's Jason's secretary, chief of staff, pretty much says straight up, there was two ways for us to really control things. We were going against the hippies and we were going against the poor Black community. One community was doing crack cocaine and heroin, and the other community was doing psychedelics. So we can nail two, two in one with making all this illegal and making this criminal and making it, making them the enemy and they're destroying society. And we basically manipulated that. Like, that's verbatim what his chief of staff said in these interviews. So we know the politics, we know the other stuff like that. And I grew up kind of in that world of, you know, family medicine and family members are like published and well-known doctors in the psychiatric world. And, and remember, I was at a friend's bar mitzvah party, they just like went out to the golf course to smoke cigarettes. And like how upset and distraught I was over like my close friends doing that. And then even more so, like, oh my God, like you're a pod— can I get it? Like at a Dave show, or you're going to fish and whatever, someone smokes a joint. But it wasn't until I was like 20, 31 for the first time I smoked. And it was in a spiritual healing thing. It wasn't like I'm just gonna smoke together. It was like, so let me process through some stuff. But just that shift, like you're saying, is so magical, where literally I don't know if I have one client, as well as like the 30 young professionals that spoke for last night at a community organization that literally now knows that I am not only a big supporter of all this, but I also microdose myself. And I'm on my— I just finished my first 3-month protocol. And I think the normative of this is so powerful and profound, like you're saying, that it does make it less threatening, less, less scary. You're hearing people have amazing healing transformations, both emotionally. And then I have 2 good friends that had like AFib. One, their AFib gone in their heart, their chest palpitations are gone. Another one whose night sweats and night terror are gone. And right. And like, that doesn't happen from prescription medication. It goes to the root source. So let's talk a little bit about that and what you're experiencing, what you've learned, what you're, you know, tie that into the organization and the programs that you're running and what, but yeah, I know it's kind of going back macro again. I want people to know that this is nothing to be afraid of when you're doing it with the right people, with trusted advisors, trusted people who have gone through their own journey. They're holding that space. And it's not just like, I'm going to go to Coachella and trip balls.

Yeah. And I like the misinformation, I mean, that I carried throughout my life about psychedelics that came from drugs are bad, see red, say no, every, all drugs are heroin, all drugs are cocaine. And even there's still a number of people out there when the word psychedelics is broached, there's the assumption that it means hallucinations. There's the assumption that it means loss of control. There's the assumption that it means vomiting and discomfort and nightmares, leading to schizophrenia, jumping off a bridge.

Without knowing it. Yeah.

Or yeah, loss of control and visuals. And it's almost like assuming, hey, we're going to go out to eat. And it's like, you think of like one restaurant and that's all, you know, there's so many different types of psychedelics. There are psychedelics that allow you to be in complete and total control of your faculties. There are psychedelics that have, there are no visuals, there's no hallucinations, there's no loss of control. And you have psychedelics that oftentimes I've found the model that's useful is there psychedelics that connect you more deeply to your heart, to your mind, to your body, or spirit, and you can actually choose and go to different spaces depending on not just which psychedelics you use, but the amount. The 0.1 grams of psilocybin is wildly different than 7 grams of psilocybin. It's a very different experience, right? And so there's titration, there's options, there's baby stepping into the world. There's not just this, oh my God, it's LSD. I'm going to be hallucinating and loss of control. I think as people, as more information is released and there are like Michael Pollan's documentary and on Netflix, the misinformation is starting to—

Yeah. And maybe it'll be like, I wanna just, just describe my day one of the microdose that I did was I remember at the end of the day, I have a, a client that I, I mean, my, all my clients know I love them, but at the end of that I told him and he's like, yeah, you're, you know, you look, your eyes are a little bit more, what's the word looking for? Dilated. And I'm like, it's funny. Like I feel like I'm more energized. Energized. I feel like I'm more focused. And then I remember the end of the first day, I called my uncle who's a family medicine doctor, and I was telling him, and I'm like, nothing bothered me today. Like, it just felt like, oh, that was a good— it was just like, even though I know there's stuff that's like out there that bothers me, and it was just like, okay. So it helped me basically discern over time what I should stop really giving attention to that I thought was problematic and I need to work on that will— if I just stop paying attention to it, it will dissolve and solve itself. And it allowed me to put the things categories that I really do need to work on and find the right people to do that with, but also to allow me to have a little bit more timeliness in it, to not keep pushing it off and procrastinating around it. And I think it dropped some resistance around making some really cool decisions on different aspects of my life, like going back and learning to play— picking up my violin and taking violin lessons for the first time since I was 12 years old. I think the efficiency and the streamlining of things have become a lot easier for me in the last 3 months because of that and less like doubting decisions. Now again, I still have some anxiety. I still have like my malaise that comes and goes and I still have my other stuff that I'm working on. But like, I think it allowed me to just streamline what to just stop paying attention to and just like, it'll handle itself. And like, okay, let's now put these into a bucket that like, okay, you can more proactively and directly handle that. So that was been my, and that's with like low, low, low, low, low, low, low dose psilocybin for 4 days on, 3 days off. The Paul Stamets, I think it's the Stamets protocol. But yeah, so going back to what you were saying, like, I think that the fear— and I wasn't high, I wasn't blitzed out, I wasn't in— I just felt the way I normally feel, just something felt better. So taking it back to your experiencing, and when you were moving from, you know, was there anything where there's ever a time where you're like, okay, I'm ready to try this, this is something that I want to do for me?

And yeah, I think there was a moment, and this is also coming from— to paint the picture, I was the straightest edge of the straightest edge, like X on the hands, you know, San Francisco. To this day, I've never had a glass of wine. I've never drank a beer. I've never smoked a cigarette. I've never smoked a joint. Like, I just, I was told, I think the anti-drug— it worked. It worked on me. I was that kid in the background going like, I don't want my brain to look like that, like that egg. And I was a rule follower. And then when they threw me on Prozac when I was in high school and college, they were very adamant that you don't mix this with alcohol. Alcohol, big, big trouble. And I wanted to be like the good kid so bad that I was like, if I get the straight A's and I don't do the drugs and I— that was part of my identity, was like the good kid. And I took that into adulthood. And so there came a day though, when I was like, I'm doing all the things, I'm going to the therapy and I'm eating this crazy anti-inflammation diet and I'm exercising and I'm reading the self-help books. And this isn't working. And I had been introduced and invited to an opportunity to explore psychedelics by some people, I think maybe 6, 8 months earlier. And it was such a hard no. I was fully in the identity of, I don't do that. I'm not that type of person. And there was a day when I was laying in bed going, something needs to change. Perhaps this could be a step in that direction. And it was after exhausting a lot of the clinical traditional routes and going, it's not working for me, that I I was able to open my mind and go, you know what, if this is a tool and it's impacting lives the way that I've been hearing and researching, then I owe it to myself to give it a shot. And with my first psychedelic experience, I remember I was not even an hour or 2 hours in and I had the felt experience of gratitude for the first time. My entire life I had been raised to be like, you need to be grateful. You don't know how good you have it. You, how grateful are you? I'm so grateful. Thank you. Thank you for everything. I'm great.

You know, it was cerebral.

Like, yeah, forced is fully cerebral. And then, you know, the whole positive psychology movement came out and Shawn Achor, and it was like, you need to focus and have your gratitude journal. And I remember like, if I keep a gratitude journal for a year, it'll literally change my brain. It'll change my brain, just like all the meditation I need to be doing. And I think I kept it for— I was like at month 6 and I remember opening it one day and it was the most homeworky cerebral experience of— I was literally writing down, I'm grateful for the roof over my head. I'm grateful for the clean water that I drink. I'm grateful for my good friends. And it did nothing. It was writing words. And, and so fast forward, and here I was having my first psychedelic experience, not knowing what to expect. And it, it allowed me to start rebuilding the bridge between my mind and my body, my mind and my emotions, and actually having the felt experiences that I had been so numb to from antidepressants for 25 years that had completely numbed my ability to feel and know what I actually experiencing. And so I remember sitting there in tears crying, go, oh my God, this is gratitude. I'm in my mid-30s and this is the first time I feel like I've really felt it and been able to experience it. And so that's when I said, I think there's something here for me. I couldn't pay for this. There's no book I could have read. There's no therapy session I could have gone to that would have just had me have this felt experience.

Yeah. And it sounds like, and the way I'm experiencing and the way I'm seeing it, especially with those who have gone way further down the rabbit hole than I've gone yet, is is these are in the span of a couple days that one, not only the insight, but two, the actual physiological shifting is happening, right? Like I said, like the AFib is gone in one of my friends and night sweats and right amongst other things, right? But I'm just seeing so much between like where I know like I have this really amazing tool, neuro-emotional technique, and I'm a pretty decent therapist, but like, thank God I have these really amazing tools and I love coupling it with, okay, so I have a client who went to an ayahuasca retreat and I want you to come back and now let's process everything that came up for the retreat and let's do NET with that, right?

Yeah.

So that's really where I'm playing at that level. And I think so walking from what you realized you had this, right, that business and now you have this, you went from the websites and all those other things and now you have this really awesome thing called Mindfix.

Yeah. So Mindfix, we're a small group of experts who specialize in rapid transformation and we have invented and honed combined various different modalities and tested and retested and tested on ourselves and on, in our laboratories for the past half decade and have evolved our work to the point where we, we were talking before the show started, we're doing things that 5 years ago I would've thought was impossible. And still to this day, it's hard sometimes for people to believe the amount of change that can happen or the challenges and problems that can be resolved. Resolved in a relatively short period of time. And I hesitate saying that because I know sometimes people will fixate on that and go, okay, so you can fix my anxiety, you know, my debilitating generalized anxiety in one session. It's like possible, not likely. But what we see is, what I'm trying to contrast that to is the assumption that A, something's, it's who I am, it can't shift, or B, you're going to be working on this in therapy for the rest of your life. Right. And in contrast, we see people shifting lifelong patterns, things that they thought were personality characteristics or traits that they were gonna have to deal with in, in a matter of months, sometimes weeks, sometimes hours. And when I say weeks, it's not requiring practice and hard work and repetition. It's an hour or two a week. If I can share anything, I think that's the work that we do and what I'm passionate about is shifting the focus. And a lot of traditional coaching and therapy is what we call additive. You need to do your red light therapy, you need to do your gratitude journaling, and now you need to track the number of times today that you made an exaggeration. You need to do— and you have this to-do list before it's 9 AM of how to be happy, right? So it's additive. And what we have found is that transformation and healing work, we think of it primarily as subtraction. So that they're almost like you have— you've accumulated splinters and shrapnel over the and when you can pull them out in these pieces strategically, you don't need to keep putting the Band-Aids on. You don't need to keep putting the numbing agent on over and over and over and over and over. You don't need to like meditate through the pain because the pain goes away. And we see that subtracting the root causes or the causes of people's suffering and frustrations and challenges is where so much of these breakthroughs healing technologies are happening these days.

Yeah, they're going to just on the level of belief of like, what's the presuppositions of the things that got you there in the first place? And I like always love having this thing of like, well, I have this expectation that this person is going to be doing this for me, or that they should have been this way. I'm like, well, did you get their consent about that? Like, did you even discuss that with them? Or that was just like the thing that you put on them, and now you're like, right? Four Noble Truths Buddhism, right, is, you know, the beliefs, assumptions, and expectations that you carry and put on a thing. And when that doesn't happen, that causes you to suffer. So you are the cause of your suffering because you held that to be true for you. And then using NET, then using integrative nutrition, and then using environmental talk, right? All that— I mean, I would put that under the functional and integrative medicine world, right? When you're looking at, like, in NET world, we call that the home run formula. We put the issue on the pitcher's mound, and then we run the 4 bases. First base is emotions. So it's NET, it's talk therapy, it's hypnosis, any of those type of things. Second base will be what are the toxins that we need to get out of your body, chelating any of that, right? Environmental toxins, whatever. Stop eating certain things, right? Those type of things. Third base would be nutritional deficiencies, right? Your biochemical chemistry stuff could be off, your probiotic, right? All those things that we need to put back into you. Yeah, enough magnesium, enough zinc, all those vitamin D, especially if you're a dude listening. Vitamin D is not just for your immune system and autoimmune stuff and asthma, it's also for your D. There's many, many really connections between vitamin D deficiencies and erection health. People don't know that, right? So you have like, oh, it's in my head, or this isn't working, or it's a medical thing. No, you just might be missing vitamin— yeah, might be doing this. And then home plate structural. But if you don't hit all the bases, you can't get the home run. So the world that you and I are now playing in are bringing all those things together. But then it's kind of like going to a podiatrist and they can only work up to your ankle, but your issue in your ankle might be coming from your right— the opposite side knee, or your low back, or your neck, or it could truly be an emotional physiological response that is just being somatically stored there through the neuropeptides of your DNA.

Yeah, yeah. When you say structural, what are you referring to?

So chiropractic, physical therapy, I'm sure. Yeah, body doc, right? The body doc.

Got it.

But again, you can go to a body doc, and I love this, is why NET, it came out of chiropractic, and you would have the subluxation person going over and over and over again for the same thing, and it's not getting better. And that's where like Dr. Walker kind of is like, oh, there's an emotional component to this. Let's, right, figure out what the emotional thing is. That's where the muscle testing and the meridians come in, and we can get to the somatic experience of it. And then all of a sudden the subluxation holds. Or I have a client with a long-term shoulder issue, surgery, PT, rehab, 3 years later still wearing a sling. Literally a 13-minute session, full range of motion again, and the sling's gone in the garbage, right?

So I have an interesting side note to share.

Yeah, please.

So we do quarterly retreats, and we have a whole buffet of amazing healers and practitioners at these retreats. And we brought on a new specialist this year, and he is one of less than, I don't know, maybe 5 or 10 people in the US that does a really extraordinary special type type of Atlas adjustment. So the C1 vertebrae. I have spent probably 6 figures be having my back worked on, my left SI joint, PRP injections, scar tissue therapy, 10 surgeries on my ankle, and have just structurally worked on my body for as long as I can remember, late teens. And at our last retreat in July, after everybody had left, I got to have finally a session and I'd never had this special treatment apparently is trained by—

it's specific. It's called Specific Atlas, right? I think that's the actual modality.

The Atlas.

It's the Atlas.

It's Specific Atlas. Atlas, right?

It's Specific Atlas. I think there's like, they always have all their really cool abbreviations in the chiropractic world, but I think it's like either Atlas Specific or Specific Atlas. Yeah.

Oh no, no, no, no, no. It's like, I don't remember exactly what it's called. It's not that. He was trained by, it's a Swiss company and there's not a lot of people in the US that are certified in it, but it was 15 minutes. And after the inflammation died down, after maybe the first half hour, hour, I was doing back bends. Like I was 8. I had no tension. I couldn't pop my neck if I tried. The snapping in my ankle was gone. I could take— the dorsal flexion in my right ankle was increased by maybe like 10 degrees. It was ridiculous. My hip pain— I was walking around and I felt 20 years younger. And that again, as we're talking about like root causes versus people who have said, I've tried everything and it's like, no, but you haven't, right? And so I just wanted to tie that in because I myself just last month had that experience of an overwhelming rapid transformation throughout my entire body, feeling like a different person like that because I was able to get to this root issue. My, my atlas was so out of place. And so it also goes back to how the structural component is required for the home run too.

And I just wanted to give that back. It's all systemic. And that's right. I think that's like where where, you know, you and I and other people on our, our lens are hanging out is really connecting that it's not just that, like, laser focus, like blinders on whatever's right in front of you. You have to take that 10,000-foot view. And like you said, like, you know, you were living with mold, and like, I'm in South Florida, and like, I mean, like, I have my freaking 3-gallon dehumidifier running in my bedroom every day. I have to dump the thing, and that's just my bedroom. I don't even have it in, like, you know, it's— and I sleep way better when I have it versus when I don't have it. Like, it just— and those are just the specific things that— and of course there's gonna be mold in my walls. Of course I'm in a, you know, 50 old condo and, you know, there's always water leaks in someone's apartment.

Yeah.

So it may not be obvious and it may not be directly in front of me, but I'm sure there's black mold somewhere existing in there. So we all have to look at these things. But I like, I realize that these are necessity, right? The functional and integrative medicine, doing these type of labs for neurotransmitters and mold testing and being willing to get uncomfortable doing things that for so many years were banned as evil. And then because we can get, you know, the whole religious context and all the other things that were put on on us for all these different cultures that, but this has been stuff that's been happening for thousands and thousands of years in any predetermined organic religious culture anyway. They were doing all this stuff as all the shamanics, if we want to call it shamanic from one tradition is still, I can't, I'm sure there's out there tracing every religious background that has used these as tools at one point before someone decided to ban it.

Yeah.

And it's really, really so cool. So you have the, that, and then you have the retreat and you're saying that you have different practitioners working on different things. While they're with the ratio of those clients.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Super cool. Super cool. So I know that we have, we have time limited and yeah, I know that there's so much more. So I wanna first invite you back to, to get more into some stuff cuz you know, again, I obviously, you know, our time is limited and we wanna keep the episodes, uh, short. But I also know that these are the conversations that I know that people who are listening want more of. And I know we didn't get into all the different modalities that I know we were gonna go back to with both of our ADD. I wanna I want everybody to just go to Erin's website where you have the mindfixgroup.com. And you can see there a lot of the different modalities that she has worked through. And, you know, at certain, like I said, certain developmental levels you moved on from, that they were great for you at that particular time. But some of them might connect to someone right now, right? I mean, a lot of people are into the IFS stuff. And there's a lot of— there's two great books on IFS, Internal Family Systems. I mean, there's all the somatic healing and the psychedelic-assisted stuff. You can talk to either one of us or listen to some other episodes of my podcast, the Netflix documentary, uh, Change Your Mind. There's so many great tools and so many great things out there. So if you have any questions or you want to check out more about the retreats and the programs and the consulting that, that Erin's— Erin and her team do, then please, please, please go directly to mindfixgroup.com. So I know you gotta bounce, but thank you.

Thank you, this was super fun.

Cool, looking forward to our next hangout. And everybody else, we'll talk to you soon.