Reprogram Your Mind, Heal Trauma and Free Yourself From Limiting Beliefs with Mike Zeller

50% of your operating system energy is being used to manage this other thing that you've been burying, suppressing, whatever, like major PTSD. I got fired, I had a broken heart, whatever. Those things are still in your operating system and it's still soaking up energy.

You're listening to the High Performance Health Podcast, helping you optimize your health, performance, and longevity. My name is Angela Foster and I'm a former corporate lawyer and high performance health coach. Each week I bring you cutting-edge biohacks, inspiring insights, and high-performance habits to unlock optimal health, performance, and longevity. So excited that you've chosen to join me today. Now let's dive in. Hi friends, in this week's episode I am sitting down with Mike Zeller to talk about how we can rewire our brains for success and overcome limiting beliefs that may be holding us back. Mike has founded or partnered in over 16 ventures in 7 different industries, and his businesses have collectively done over $100 million in revenue. He's also faced tremendous adversity, losing over $1 million in about 18 months, and also helping his wife with her 2.5-year deep battle with mental health, including 3 attempted suicides. And he now guides leaders, entrepreneurs, and investors through his powerful Rewired program, helping high achievers shed sabotaging beliefs, habits, and patterns to step into their genius and live in flow. In this interview, we discuss many of these strategies, including the power of NLP to help you do this, and we also touch on the different types of psychedelics that can with transformation. And while psychedelics can have powerful effects in overcoming trauma, what's also really important is the reintegration process, and Mike goes over that in this episode. We also talk about the power of NMN that he found that helped really increase his wife's brain energy, and that can also help to enhance NAD+ in the body. You've probably heard me talk about NAD+ on multiple podcasts, particularly those, um, my interviews with Dr. Paul Vinn and Dr. Nicola Conlon, and I'll put links to those episodes in the show notes below this. But what's interesting in this episode is how it was a really helpful adjunct in terms of healing his wife and helping her have the energy to do the work to improve her mental health. Please remember that while we talk about a lot of modern therapies in this episode, including psychedelics, which are being increasingly studied for their benefits for mental health, they are still not legal in many countries, and none of what we talk about should be taken as medical advice. If you're struggling with mental health, please reach out to your medical doctor or primary care provider, or if you'd like some resources for us to share, just email us at info@angelafosterperformance.com. But now let me introduce you to Mike Zeller. Mike, it's absolutely awesome to have you here today. I'm like, I'm so thrilled that we connected on Instagram. I think the podcast and Instagram have been the way that I've just made so many friends in this world and just I'm super excited. You know, when I was looking at your content and everything that you do and how you combine biohacking with neurohacking and peak performance coaching I just think it's such an incredible kind of trilogy in a way. So firstly, a warm welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Angela. And I love all that you're up to and can't wait to dive in more on heart rate variability and so much more with you in our episode on my show too. But can't wait.

Amazing. I'm really looking forward to that. How did you get into this? I know that you have a pretty powerful story. Can you share? How did you come into this?

Yeah, I originally got exposed to Tony Robbins in my mid-20s, but I was obsessed with personal development starting about age 19 and just started recognizing— I played college sports and I was like, what's the difference between someone that has the talent but doesn't make it and someone that has the talent and does make it in the sports world? And it was always the mental edge. And I was like, all right, how do I get the mental edge? How do I study the mental edge? And so I became obsessed really with peak performance psychology, with leadership, with how to wire your nervous system or how to wire your mind for peak performance in my 20s. And Tony Robbins was my first kind of guru to follow and read all his stuff, went to 14 Tony Robbins events in 2 years and spent 1,447 hours with Tony and got Master NLP certified and started coaching and training other people with using NLP, which is the core basis of what he did. And to date, I've read hundreds of books on peak performance psychology, leadership, so much more on trauma now because of the next major season. A big shift for me was in my wife's a 3-time suicide survivor. But when we got married, that was kind of like good. And she was— we didn't have any issues. Like, she was in a good mental state. Well, when we got pregnant in October 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, Guess what? All this buried stuff, trauma, complex PTSD, panic attacks just floods back and she becomes suicidal for 2.5 years. And she would have massive panic attacks for like 3 or 4 times a week. Like I'd be on a coaching call, she hand me our crying baby and bolt out the house for like hours. And I'd have like 10 coaching clients on the call. I'm coaching with an infant in my lap because she was just overwhelmed. Life was— and she couldn't handle it. And I was like, what is going on? How did she shift from being happy and pleasant to overwhelmed, not wanting to be here on Earth, can't see hope, can't see— I was like, it was like her nervous system was stuck. And I didn't— in my peak performance psychology side, wasn't helping pattern interrupts and reframing and all that. I was like, there's something else going on that's much deeper. And that's when I would literally read trauma books in the middle of the night while my wife was sleeping, while my daughter was sleeping. I'd be on the Kindle, holding the Kindle right in bed just flipping through, learning about trauma. I was like, oh, she had this massive— her body is just overwhelmed and it's an unconscious reaction that she cannot control. I was like, oh, okay, so this is a lot deeper than, than what I had done. And so I had to learn in— I was, I was in line of fire and I had to learn about trauma real fast if I was going to save my family. Keep my wife alive. And because she did not want to be on Earth, she did not want to be a mom, she did not want to be a wife for most of that time period. And she was just— just because life was too scary and overwhelming. Their nervous system was just crushing her.

Wow. She was lucky. I mean, super lucky, right, to have you dive into that. I mean, I guess, like, when you look at that, so you were aware as a couple, right, that she had experienced trauma, but it hadn't sort of bubbled up to the surface at this point.

Yeah, I mean, we were aware, and, and, but I hadn't really ever studied trauma. I didn't really understand it. I didn't understand the, uh, you know, how her autonomic nervous system was kicking in, how her fight or flight and her amygdala was shutting everything else off, and she was just stuck in the fight or flight mode, um, which the amygdala is designed to keep you safe, right? And it's, it's the number one— it will overrule every other part of your brain if it thinks there's a threat. Well, couple COVID, you couple having a baby, couple, you know, we had just gone through a season where I lost $1 million and she had stayed with me through that season. So like, I, you know, she had a lot of courage and a lot of guts to stay with me through my valley of despair. And, and so that's, you know, I was like, I'm not abandoning you. You didn't abandon me in my darkest hour. That I'd be a schmuck if I abandoned you. Right. And also like I wanted our family to be together because I knew she'd be a great mom once we got to the other side. But her nervous system was just overriding everything. And I had to— and until you really— it's kind of like, you know, someone suffering from autoimmune disease or whatever. Until you've really experienced it or been right beside someone suffering a major crisis in their life, if you've never handled that crisis before or never really studied it, you just kind of I didn't even recognize the signs. Took me about a year and a half to really recognize, and her too, to recognize she had very severe complex PTSD kicking in.

It's so interesting. I mean, I know from my own experience with depression, you know, that your partner is such an important part. Like, I'm so grateful to, to my, to my husband through that process. For your wife, was that triggered during pregnancy or did it sort of come on postnatally?

It was triggered during pregnancy.

It was pregnancy.

Yeah, she literally had started having flashbacks and started thinking about— because she was one of the old— one of 11 kids, narcissistic, abusive mom and dad, um, and she was the protector standing guard between her— between the abusive parents and the younger children. And she'd be like 8 years old cooking dinner with a baby in her arm while her parents are abusing each other, yelling, screaming at each other, beating each other. And, um, and so her nervous system was just boom. And then having the thought of having a baby started sending her back to memories of her past that she had just thought she had dealt with and buried or cleared out, but they weren't cleared out.

Yeah, of course, of course. Such a trigger point. And you had like quite a unique way of, uh, of helping her, right, come through this. It's quite interesting, a combination of psychedelics with NAD kind of brought that sort of relatively new science in mental health together with biohacking. Tell us more about that.

Yeah, so I looked at it as like, hey, I'm going to try one thing after another until I figure out the right recipe. And I looked at it as like, if you go to a beautiful 5-star restaurant, they created this immaculate dish. Well, it has a bunch of different ingredients and put in the right order in the right sequence. Well, it wasn't a silver bullet. It wasn't one ingredient, just one ingredient alone. So we, the first thing we started with, I mean, obviously meditation and those sorts of things, that wasn't making a hill of beans of difference in their overwhelm. Then we did somatic psychotherapy and she'd feel great for like 3 hours after a therapy session. And then our daughter would cry and it would start sending her back into her because it would trigger her unconsciously, her childhood trauma. I didn't know that at the time, but that's basically what was happening. I was like, hey, why, why is our daughter crying? A baby is going to cry. Why is this creating your overwhelm? And, and why are you getting frustrated? And all that. But it was triggering her nervous system. And so somatic psychotherapy from Peter Levine's model, that really helped. But it helped for a day, in essence. And then, um, and then the next piece, Emotion Code, was another thing that we did, which was helpful processing ancestral trauma. And then I started learning about NAD. We did an NAD IV session. Initially, I had learned about it for treatment for addiction and the hope that it brought. But then I heard some research about maybe it shows promise for depression. And we didn't want to do antidepressants because we know once she's on there, she's getting off of them is next to impossible. And it just numbs you. It doesn't really cure the problem. Well, we started doing NAD. We did an NAD IV session. I noticed the next 3 weeks, her energy and her mood was much higher. And mine too. My energy and my mood was much higher. I felt like 5 years younger for the next month. And then so I was like, all right, then I started creating an NAD IV clinic partly to treat her and treat myself too. I wanted this fountain of youth. And once we learned the protocol, I found a clinic that basically the protocol was 4,000 milligrams of NAD spread out over 2 weeks. And my wife went from sleeping 10 hours a day 2 naps a day, 400 milligrams of caffeine a day, and barely functioning, like just dragging, to end of that 2 weeks, she's bursting out of bed, 7.5 hours of sleep, no naps, 40 milligrams of caffeine, happy, back in hot yoga, feeling great, and her mood had just lifted in a dramatic way. Like, oh, and I thought, I thought we were done at that point. I was like, we— she's cured, we're good, we found the secret. But then about 2 months later, she breaks her foot. We lose our nanny the same week. And then being stuck with our daughter at home who's crying and doing the normal baby stuff started triggering her overwhelm and she went back into a depression spiral. And I was like, crap, I just got you out of this depression spiral. And I realized then that's when it really hit. The other layer was the complex PTSD. NAD raised her mental energy and her ability to handle overwhelm and all that, but it didn't really cure her PTSD. And then I started like, hey, what's the— is there hope? If you look at conventional medical diagnosis, there's really— most of the sites like Cleveland Clinic just says, hey, in many cases, symptoms can be managed with medication and therapy. I was like, I don't want to just manage this. I want my wife back. My wife wants to be back. She doesn't want to be suffering. And so I was like, all right, what else is out there? And I started Tim Ferriss and Huberman Labs and other major shows talking about psychedelics and just the hope and promise. John Hopkins University doing all this research. I'm like, okay, I got to try this out. And I literally listened to about 150 podcasts, read more than a dozen books, started Eventually found friends that are psychedelic neuroscientists in the space, and now they actually come to my retreats and stuff too. But I started diving in and I did a journey myself on psilocybin, and I was flooded with gratitude and just the most beautiful— I remember that day for the rest of my life. It was one of the most beautiful days of my life, and it gave me a lot of hope. And I came back and told my wife, we got to try this. I think this might work. And I bought some psilocybin and we did a journey with her and her sister and her brother-in-law who were in a tough space then too. And she laughed for the first time in a pretty heavy way for 2 years. And we had this magical fun evening and I could tell her nervous system was kind of starting to reset. And then we continued on the journey and I eventually learned more on the research was it's doing a full dosage. She did a half dose. She was afraid to do a full dose with the guided therapeutic side, which is what really ultimately creates "the cure." Sure enough, February 2023, she does a 5-hour therapy session, full dose, which is about 2.5 grams or 25— I don't remember the exact specifications, but Night and day difference. That day is when she said she got cured of depression, and then about 90% of her complex PTSD was cured.

That's amazing. Amazing.

And basically gone since then. Yeah.

And you haven't had to do any more of that therapy since? That's incredible, isn't it?

Yeah. I mean, we, we're still— I would say we're kind of working on the last 10% of the, the, uh, complex PTSD, which is just basically some little triggers. And, and she's only done one little mini session on that, and that's taken a lot of it out. And I'm like, we'll just do one more and she'll probably be good.

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Yeah. And it's like her nervous system, like when you were battling your depression, it's kind of like your, your nervous system is stuck in a loop. And you're on a train track and you don't know how to get off that freaking train track. And you kind of need— for her, the gradual approach wasn't enough because the gradual approach just didn't feel like progress most days. And, and that's where we're like, all right, we, we figured out the brain energy side with the NAD because that gave her the energy. But then the PTSD— and if she's living, she's not going to abandon her daughter, So if she's living with the actual trigger, that means we got to heal the trigger. We don't— can't heal the trigger over 2 years. We gotta heal the trigger right now because she's going to be re-triggered tomorrow. And, and because our daughter would cry and it would literally send my wife into a 2-hour depression spell that would like last as a depression hangover if she cried for like longer than 30 seconds. Like, I would literally say If my daughter started crying, like screaming in a big way, I'd say, babe, get out of the house, get out of the house, get in the basement, go to the other part of the house. Because it was just activating her nervous system. Or I'd carry my daughter out. I'd literally carry her out to the backyard. And our neighbors would hear our daughter screaming. I was like, I was like, like, what is happening? But I was like, I don't want my wife to be— I had to avoid, minimize my wife's triggers during that season. Because I could see that. And she loves my daughter. My daughter is amazing. She was just a normal baby. Um, so anyway, yeah, we had to— we had a lot of deep work to do.

And what did the psilocybin itself do? Like, how did that help? Was she able to see kind of parts of herself? Was she able to go back? Was it regression therapy? Like, how did that, um, help?

So I'll explain in two parts. The first part is what the medicine actually does, and this is both for psilocybin and MDMA, which we've done as well. The psilocybin and MDMA, they do similar effects in the sense of basically flooding your body in two major phases of neuroplasticity. The first phase is acute. The second phase is a critical period reopening. The acute window is that 3 to 6 hours, and it's There's no other substance, no other experience that we know of in the neuroscience side where your nervous system is basically way beyond what you were at 2 years old in terms of neuroplasticity. So, you think of how absorbent a 4-year-old is or a 2-year-old of— they're in a hypnotic state according to Bruce Lipton up to about the age of 7 where they can just absorb and receive. Their brain is in alpha state. Well, her— that acute window is the greatest healing window we know of in modern neuroscience. And so you can do— like one of my mentors, he's led 600 MDMA therapy sessions and he's like, "I do— my average is I do about 2 years worth of therapy in that single 4 to 5 hour window." And same for peak performance. I'll take clients through— if they got trauma, PTSD, we'll knock it out in that 4 to 5 hour— we'll knock out 80% of let's say. There's still a little bit that we might have to clean up in another session, but usually we get vast majority, if not all of it, taken care of. But then if it's a peak performance side, I have that window where I can just go in and help your body reprogram limiting beliefs, fears, traumas, doubts, and anchor into that higher self. So that's the acute window. The second window is the critical period reopening. This is from a research report in, uh, Nardo, uh, August 2023, by the way. So, if anyone wants to look that up, I can send you the link, Angela. That second window, well, for psilocybin and MDMA, it's a little over 14 days. And, it's like your nervous system is back to being a 4-year-old. So, it's like that neuroplasticity. So, you have this massive surge that's way beyond the 4-year-old and then you're back to the 4-year-old for about 2 weeks. So, that's where the integration where we'll say I'll take my clients and like, hey, You need to do breathwork. You need to do meditation, do sound baths. You need to avoid the triggering people as much as possible for those 2 weeks. Recalibrate your nervous system back to where you want to be. Anchor in those beliefs, anchor in those visualizations. Do the exercise, do the things that make you feel great. So you recalibrate your nervous system. Okay. So in that 3 to— back to that 3 to 6 hour window, the therapist that we brought in, she's psycho trained, but also trauma informed. And then she helps her integrate all those overwhelming moments and as many as her body wants to process and is able to process. But the other massive benefit of the medicines is because when your body is on those substances, now your body feels safe. The protector parts of your psyche, like if you look at an internal family systems model, you have like these different parts of yourself. Well, those protector parts are now, instead of having this massive like, uh, like moat and steel wall around your internal operating system. They're relaxed because they feel good. And then you can go right in if someone knows, is trauma-informed, understands the subconscious, has your best intent in hand, and guides your body to integrate and release and even do inner child work. Like, I took a client, she almost died giving childbirth 15 years ago. Put my hand on her shoulder when I met her back in February. I was like, Lisa, what are you— feel like a linebacker? Your shoulders are so tight. Are you powerlifter? What happened? No, she's like, I just had a lot of crazy shit happen in my life. Ah, okay, tell me more. I almost died giving childbirth, and my brother died the same year. Childhood abuse, all this stuff. And her nervous system was holding on to it. And, and then what is trauma? Trauma is like this In that moment, your body is too overwhelmed to be able to handle something. So if it's too overwhelmed, that means it gets emotionally frozen in your body, and it stays there until you can safely release it and process it out. So with Lisa, we did this session. She had 5 traumas that she had been dealing with since— for 15+ years, some of them almost 40 years, because she's 50 years old, right? Childhood We released all 5 of those major traumas in about an hour and a half during the session while I was focused on— because her husband was there and we did a little work with him too. But, and she's like, I feel— and then she started bouncing around the room. She's like, I feel like a boiled carrot. I'm just so light and flexible. And she was tense. She was rigid for years. And she's still like— I'm flying down to do another session with her best friend in about a month and a half, and she's She feels amazing. She's unlocked. And now her nervous system is basically recalibrating to a new state, a new baseline.

And in those phases, in either the acute phase or the second phase, are there any side effects? Is there any pain or hurt? Like, what do they go through in that process?

Yeah, if they got some trauma, great question. If they have some trauma, which most people will, it's just like most of us, we bury it, especially as men, right? We bury, suppress, repress, whatever. Um, you know, there'll be emotions that come through and tears and all that, but then you let it process through you. And so like, I had another client when she was 3 years old, she had some PTSD. When she was 3 years old, her little bunny rabbit, uh, I think his name was Thumper, um, she found him frozen the next morning because her dad had accidentally let her out of the cage and, you know, was It's Canada, and so it's winter, and she freezes. So she gets her little throat— she's like, why is Thumper stiff? Why is Thumper stiff? And her— and so that was a trauma that she'd totally forgotten about, but it was affecting her today, 37 years later. And so as we worked through it, and it wasn't her major trauma, the one that she brought me to deal with, but that was one that came up that had been lodged in her nervous system and she had forgotten about. And because often, you know, we know when we're interrelating with our partner, they're not just reacting to what we said. They're reacting to the beliefs, the memories, the emotions, the pain that their parents, previous partners, previous lovers, whatever beliefs, ancestral, etc. So we released that, and then her nerve— and we had her hold, doing inner child work in a way. We had her hold little 3-year-old version of her And as she's holding that 3-year-old version of her, and I invite her to help that version of her feel safe and loved and protected, and that she's— and invite that 3-year-old version also to cry on her shoulders and to release and share whatever feelings, whatever overwhelm, whatever scary feelings are coming up. Let her know what she needs to know. Then it feels complete. And then literally you can see in her physiology In this client's case, you could see in her physiology that she just, her nervous system relaxed. And then at the end of the session, she starts moving her legs. She's like, my legs feel so flexible. I haven't felt this flexible for years. And she started just waving her legs in the air while she was on the couch. And we released two other traumas for her that had been buried. And then her PTSD is gone. And she's more connected to her heart and her emotions. And doesn't mean she doesn't have some sadness that comes up. Now she's actually connected to it and she's able to move it through. We've unlocked that dam of emotion that she had.

Pretty incredible. For people, and thank you for sharing those examples because I think it just helps people see, you know, just I think so. I think the thing about trauma and I guess and this sort of programming is people are held back in ways that they almost don't know, right? It's almost like if you don't know know how far you can go, right, until you set a new standard, right? It's almost like unless— if I said to you, hey, let's, let's open a bottle of wine every night, uh, we might be able to get up and function just fine and go to the gym if we just shared one bottle. But then— sorry, go to work. But then if I said, hey, you know what, let's also train for a marathon and get up at 5 AM and go running, all of a sudden we realize that that bottle of wine is an absolute inhibitor of peak performance. But it wasn't apparent until we did that. And I think what you're describing here is it's helping people really unlock parts of themselves so that they can transcend, right?

Yeah. And great example too. Like, let's say for some of the work you do and clients or whatever, let's say you want to go run a marathon. Well, if 50% of your operating system energy is being used to manage this other thing that you've been burying, suppressing, whatever, like, uh, major PTSD, I got fired, I had a broken heart, whatever, those things are still in your operating system and it's still soaking up energy. What I find with my clients is they release the stuff, then maybe they only have 5% of their energy being sucked with these background operations. It's like a computer, right? If you have 9 programs open and you can only see 2 of them, well, those other 7 are still taking up energy. And they're slowing down your performance. And we all have— some people, like, it's really obvious, right, that we have some things to work on. And you may be aware, you may not be aware, maybe obvious to other people, not yourself. But if you, if you clear out— all of us have stuff, little t or big T. If we clear it out, the more free, the more light. Like, I feel light as a feather now. My wife is the happiest she's ever been in her whole life. And she's free of that background operation. You're like, as you move through your trauma and your depression, like, you're freer and it feels great.

Yeah, I'm definitely freer. There's still work I'm doing. It's quite interesting because you mentioned like pregnancy being a trigger point. And then I think also like just as you, as you progress in life, right, any area you're trying to— when you're elevating yourself in different areas, it brings up, right, new things that you need to discover. I'm sort of doing some Jungian therapy with someone at the moment and looking at shadow side. And it's quite interesting. But yeah, it's a journey, right, that we're all on. I'm curious. I want to talk a little bit about the reprogramming of beliefs. I know that's an area of your expertise. But before we do that, when you talk about brain energy, you mentioned NAD and enhancing that. Did you also look at other things like omega-3 fatty acids, for example, B vitamins? Were there other things alongside the NAD?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, some of the research on omega-3s, if you get 1,000 milligrams of EPA and 1,000— I think I can't remember all the data. We had my wife taking 3 big omega-3 pills with EPA and DHA, like super high in those 2. I think it was over 1,000 for both of those because it was the equivalent of an SSRI for like up to 60% of population. And I'd heard that from Andrew Huberman's podcast. And so we were doing that vitamin Bs, doing magnesium because it's a big deficiency for most people and mineral. We were doing other, other like maca root, maca root, not really for depression, but GABA and 5-HTP. And they were helping, but it wasn't the most massive difference was the NAD optimization. And yeah. Yeah.

Interesting.

And most noticeable.

Sorry.

And most noticeable. Very much. We could see it and we feel it energetically. Like, I'll take a scoop this afternoon at like 2 o'clock when I would normally have my 2 o'clock lull, and I'll just bypass that 2 o'clock lull.

Do you do that twice a day? Morning and then early afternoon?

Yeah.

Interesting. Yeah. I know that protocol. It works super well. Just don't take it too close to bedtime.

Yeah, exactly.

If we switch gears a little bit, because, you know, I love it when he said, you know, Tony Robbins, right? My goodness, it is very hard to feel depressed if you put Tony Robbins between your ears. And you went to so many events, right, which sort of sparked your interest into NLP. I mean, he gets these transformations without psychedelics and things. I don't know how long they hold beyond those events, but I know he's just impacted millions of people. How can someone listening to this, whether it is a belief around money, a belief around worthiness or deserving things, whether they, you know, it could be in any area of their life, not just money, relationships, anything really. What is the way that, what method can we use to reprogram any limiting beliefs? I'm guessing the first part is actually understanding where those beliefs might be and psychedelics is one route, but not everyone has access to those. How can we understand what those are?

Yeah, great question. So you're spot on. Like, the first thing I want to do is I want to go clean out the negative energy, negative beliefs, the limiting stories. And it's almost like if you got two glasses of water and one glass water is totally clean, totally pure, another glass has a little bit of dirt in it. Well, if I take that glass of water with a little bit of dirt in it, it's kind of brown, I pour it into the clean glass, well, that clean glass is now dirty. So that's why if you do some of the mindset work and limiting belief work and you don't clean out whatever's dirty first, you're just going to stack new beliefs on dirty beliefs, we'll call it. And so I want to go in the root. And the thing I didn't understand for a number of years was how trauma is an energetic emotional block for us. And it's a very low— are you familiar with Maps of Consciousness and David Hawkins' work?

Yeah.

Power versus Force?

Yeah.

So if you look at the scale, you know, top is enlightenment, bottom is shame and guilt and, you know, fear and all that moves right up. Well, what I find is, is there's almost in money beliefs, money trauma. I helped a client, she flew in from Toronto last week, And we worked on some money trauma. We worked on it by actually accessing the trauma less than trying to go directly at the money trauma and money beliefs because the trauma was lodged there and it was like she had some shame and guilt and just unworthiness that came from a scenario with her dad. So that scenario, that emotion was there. If we just stacked a bunch of reprogramming her beliefs, without dealing with the trauma, this— she might have gotten incrementally 10% better. But literally, she sent me a voice text this morning. She's like, Mike, I get it. And we created a powerful alter ego. So I do alter ego work because it creates, uh, this capacity to imagine and visualize and see a different part of yourself that you can't imagine when you're like, oh, I'm just normal me. Well, when we did the alter ego work, her powerful alter ego. Her name was Cynthia. And she's like, she sends me this voice text and she's like, I love Cynthia. Cynthia's got great boundaries. Because she had a lot of self-worth issues, which meant she overcompensates and allows people to take advantage of her. But she sends me a voice text, like, Cynthia just owns it. She's got great boundaries. And people are like, whoa, what's— who's this woman? And like, people are recognizing that she has more self-respect for herself. Because she's healed. We cleared out the junk. Now we can build a new foundation. It's like, it's like, you know, if I want to do some— if I want to build a skyscraper, I gotta go down deep in the ground. So first step, clear out the junk, which is also finding out what is the good intent. We find out, oh, when I was 8 years old and my dad told me money doesn't grow on trees and maybe, you know, taught me about hard work or whatever, and that became Both a positive belief and a limiting belief that I had to work hard and just, you know, bust my ass all the time to make money, and I never learned to work smart. So then we go in, what's the good intent? Appreciate it, and that allows it to no longer control your life. When that feeling, that limiting belief, that fear, that memory no longer controls your life, now I can release it from driving my life. So I literally do deep psychological work, especially when we're on the journeys, but I can do it virtually without medicine as well. And then, then I'm going to find that more powerful version of yourself. Like in Lana's case, it was Cynthia, and Cynthia is leading and guiding her life now. And then I'll help anchor that version in. So what we did, we went off into the future And we found that desired destination, that desired experience, that desired way she's shown up. And then we reverse engineered step by step all the way back to the present moment. It's like we blaze a neural pathway in the neuroforest of her mind so that she unconsciously can go home like she's doing this week, handle her ex-husband, handle this difficult business partner, handle the scenarios and work and have self-respect, self-love, and show up in her most powerful radiant self. And she's doing it and not with not trying to do it. She's unconsciously, it's already wired into her nervous system because we visualize and we emotionally anchored it in. And then we had already cleared out the junk. Clear out the junk in the trunk before you put new stuff in the trunk. It's kind of a metaphor.

Very powerful. And after that process, is there integration for her? Like when you say we've kind of reprogrammed it into her subconscious, Is she then utilizing affirmations or specific routines to reinforce that, or is it now so like, can it be that automatic that quickly? What's, what's the follow-up from it?

Yeah, to some extent it's going to be fairly automatic, but I, I am a believer that now because we've got this beautiful space and also she's still in that 2-week window of the critical period reopening because she also did a medicine experience. Because we're— so we have this 2-week window where her nervous system is very open to being reprogrammed. And so it's, it's almost like not exactly a blank slate, but it's, it's a very open space. And so I'm— I want her— so we're doing our integration call on Friday, uh, so, you know, basically a week since her journey. We're doing that, and then we're doing another one next week. And then I had already given her action items books, meditations, habits to do to anchor that in and anchor that higher state in. And then of course, yeah, doing affirmations, speaking of herself. But the main thing is, if I can get it lodged into her subconscious mind, then it makes all the conscious mind work of like affirmations and etc. much easier because it's already there. But because of medicine and because of meditation, meditative aspects that utilize while we're on the medicine, then I've already seared it in. It's like I've already built a highway in her subconscious mind that she just has to choose to go on that highway every day. And it's like she's already kind of almost programmed to choose to go down that highway.

And now it's just being reinforced. And with affirmations, when you're looking at those, I'm curious, people approach these in different ways. You know, some people talk about what they want in the present tense, but then if that's too far away from their belief system, correct. You can sort of reject that on a subconscious level. Some people talk about more process-driven affirmations. What's your approach?

Yeah, great question. It has to feel really congruent and true to your higher self. So like, I remember I had a goal and an affirmation in my early 20s that I was going to own like 1,000 apartment units because I was in real estate and all that, and I didn't really care about building wealth. Through apartments. I really cared about the psychology side of things and the peak performance side, but I didn't understand that then. So I had that big goal. Guess how many apartment units I've owned in my lifetime? Zero. But I spent like $50,000 to learn about it. I did all these things. I had a big goal for like 2 years. I was affirming it. It wasn't aligned with my highest self. So that body keeps the score. Now, so you got to test for congruency. And you can feel it in your body if you're connected to your heart and your body and your mind and your spirit. If you're really connected, not blockages, you can tell pretty quickly, yes, my body wants this. Yes, this is aligned with my heart. And I can guide people to usually figure that stuff out pretty quick. But then the second part is if it feels a little too far, like I am a multimillionaire or I am a New York Times bestselling author, I give $25,000 keynotes and you haven't given a $500 keynote yet. Well, that feels like that's far away. Then you might write out, I am becoming the type of person that builds a multimillion-dollar empire, or I am becoming a great dynamic paid speaker, or I am becoming a great writer who writes bestselling books. And so that becoming, I am, I am is really powerful, but to make your nervous system feel like it's more true, because you don't want to be proclaiming everything, something every day that feels very untrue. That's not helpful in manifesting and all that. I am becoming, or I am growing, whatever, something along those lines is going to give you that special caveat word.

Now, yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that. I use that, uh, I'm becoming. And I also find as well, like you were talking about meditation and visualization, I think the visualization aspect, right, of connecting as Neville Goddard water us with the feeling of the wish fulfilled. So just visualizing, like, what will you be doing if that was true? Like, if you, you mentioned like a New York Times bestselling author, what would you be doing? Whose podcast would you be going on? What would you be doing? And entering in and imagining yourself, or a keynote speaker, imagining yourself walking on stage in front of all these people. That feeling is so powerful when we look at manifestation, right? Because the feeling and the vibration is everything. I'd like to kind of go there. I think for many people listening to this podcast, they're familiar with it. Most times they love it. There's some people who feel it harder to connect. I think when we look at manifesting, you're actually making something happen. There is an element of action with that alongside a big element of action, in my view, as well as connecting. How do you help people manifest what they want into their lives?

Yeah, so spot on. I would agree with you, like, you know, the feeling and the action, because the action creates that internal momentum that you're like, oh, I'm making progress, I'm committed to this. I'm— and you see little— you're looking for evidence, you're training your nervous system to look for evidence that I am making progress, right? One caveat, like, I love Neville Goddard. I've read like 10 of his books, Feeling Is the Secret, all those, right? Something that I struggled with, I personally deeply struggled with for years on the manifesting side, is I struggled feeling things. I was a dude. I was like, I was walking brain. My wife was a walking heart. I was a walking brain. And, and so until I learned how to connect with my heart, which most men— and the number one, most men struggle with connecting with their heart or their feelings. And it's also the number one complaint wives have about their husbands, that they're disconnected from their heart, at least in their personal life. So it wasn't until I did the medicine, in particular MDMA and sassafras, and those medicines create the heart connection so that I now can feel those things. So I struggled. I would visualize and see them, but I would see the things without the feeling, which slows down the manifestation, right? But now, because I can— I'm much more connected to my feelings, I can see and feel, which means I can draw those things in because The heart is 65 times more electromagnetically powerful than your mind according to HeartMath Institute. So it's really important to get those feelings, but I could not get the feelings. I did all the stuff. I was trying to figure it out. Even Tony Robbins could not help me with the feelings most of the time. And it's just because in my home that I grew up in, men, the only feelings that were safe for men to express were anger. Right? That was what was permissible in my culture where I grew up, all that jazz. Now, literally, I remember taking, uh, those medicines the first time and I was flooded with so much love and empathy for my wife. And I had entered the room feeling resentment and frustration. This is back in October 2022. I had so much frustration and resentment. Now I can take the— without the medicines, like, and my daughter at the time, up until like about a year old, or something like that.

It's— yeah, it's different. It's almost embodiment at the same time, right?

Yeah, yeah. And I think it would almost— is a little bit of the masculine and feminine, the ways of manifesting. Like Tony Robbins is going to be like direct, go kill the dragon, right? And, and there's that little bit of masculine direct energy. Feminine is about receiving, feeling the receiving, opening up. And I couldn't get there. And a lot of men— and also, you're right, women do have a better advantage of that. Like the, the average 7-year-old daughter has a more emotionally rich vocabulary than her dad. 7 years old. She's just more naturally emotionally connected and tapped in. And now the work I do, I get to help men really connect in a deep way as well as women. But like, you ideally want both. But I would argue that even in this particular case, a much more pleasurable and enjoyable side is actually the feminine. And the more, maybe even the more powerful you become, more magnetic. Instead of the, the male side is like grind and grit it out and just, and that's hard. It's hard to manifest from a grinding, gritting out energetic state.

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, it can lead to burnout, right? Because you're holding on too tight. You haven't got the art of allowing, which you say is the feminine aspect.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

We need both. Amazing. Amazing. So powerful. I love what you're sharing. Where can people find out more about reprogramming their brains, working with you, your work, your podcast? Please share.

Yeah, all the social media handles is @themikezeller, Z-E-L-L-E-R. And then mike@mikezeller.com is my email, or mikezeller.com is my website. I also have a download that is the 14 most powerful tools for rewiring your nervous system. Just go to neurorewiring.com. I also have my book, Genius Within. You can grab that for free at geniuswithinbook.com or Amazon, et cetera. But, you know, the work I love to do, I work with a lot of high performers. I have virtual programs. I have a lot on my YouTube channel that I'm really focusing on right now. We go through a lot of this manifestation using some of these tools. And my favorite tool is obviously the use of MDMA and psilocybin, but there's a lot of other great tools, neurofeedback, holotropic breathwork. There's a lot of other things that can help you get there in a different way. It might take a little bit longer, but the main thing is way beyond your mindset is your nervous system. And that's why my process, I focus on neuro-optimization. Neuro means nervous system because your nervous system is going to override your mindset. And I didn't understand that for years, really, until we dealt with my wife's trauma. That's when I really came to understand that. So thanks for having me and thanks for letting me share our journey and how I can help people. Appreciate you.

Thank you. Thanks for coming on the show and just, yeah, inspiring so many people. People. Uh, thank you so much, Mike. I hope today's episode inspired you on your journey to vibrant health and high performance. Make sure you check out the show notes for a summary of all the important links to everything we talked about. And if you enjoyed this episode, hit the follow button and share it with a friend on social media, or leave a review over on Apple Podcasts. Remember, achieving high performance health is about getting 1% better each day. So think about one thing you learned from today's episode and start implementing it today. Share with me what you've learned on social media over @angelasfoster. I love hearing from you and connecting with you. Have a beautiful day, and always remember, you are worthy of your dreams.