Rebel Health Tribe Spotlight – Episode 1: Michael Roesslein

Michael Roesslein:

Hey everyone, and welcome to the first episode of Rebel Health Spotlight. I’m your host and first guest, Michael, co-founder of Rebel Health Tribe with Joe Rignola, who will be the featured guest in episode two. We founded RHT almost 10 years ago, back in 2014, and I’m creating this little show or series of videos because I want to give everybody something that they can listen to on the go, like walking the dog or driving to work. Something short and simple and easy that will give you practical takeaways and steps and things you can do right away to improve your health, both physical, mental, emotional. We’ve done a ton of podcasts over the years that are usually very in depth about somebody’s story and their process and everything they’ve been through and everything they can teach. And these can run 60 minutes, 90 minutes in length.

And we’ve done a ton of deep dive webinars with a lot of industry experts, we’ve done masterclasses and all of these things are like long and in depth and really comprehensive, which is great because that’s what our audience often wants. But we’ve never done anything short and fast and simple and easy. And I know that I have a hard time finding an hour, hour and a half to sit down and listen to something and watch something. I have a whole bunch of things like that bookmarked that have been sitting there for two, three years. So I wanted to create something that is fun and fast and easy and simple and can leverage my incredible amount of connections in the health world, which is expanding into different areas of health from the functional medicine space to more mental, emotional, spiritual, and trauma and nervous system type health.

And I want to mix all that in to have short, simple, easy conversations with people that are really just going to go, who are you? What do you do? Why do you do it? Feature them and what they do really quickly. And then ask them to give you a handful, three, four, takeaways or action steps or things you can do right away or implement right away in your life, that could be really simple to just give you things to think about and to try, and things that have been used and practiced and work. These are going to be doctors, practitioners, researchers, therapists, coaches. It’s a really, really good lineup of people and I think you’re going to like it.

So I’m doing the first episode on me to demonstrate the, what’s it called, the format a little bit. And because while there’s a lot of people here at RHT that have been around for almost 10 years and you’re like family, and I know your kids’ names and you’ve attended all our webinars. We also have a ton of new people from our recent Toxicity and Detox Masterclass who aren’t as familiar with the work that we do do. We hosted a webinar with Kiran last week from when I’m recording this, and there were a lot of people who’d never been on one of our webinars before. So I do like to reintroduce myself a little bit here and there so that everybody knows who I am, and what we’re doing here, and why we’re doing it.

So my who I am, what I do and why I do it briefly. My name’s Michael Roesslein, I grew up in suburban Chicago. Straight out of school I was a teacher and worked in the restaurant industry. I had a very unhealthy lifestyle in my teens and 20s. I’ve had lifelong anxiety, depression, mostly social anxiety, and also just general anxiety, insomnia. And I had found a lot of ways to numb those things and kind of self-medicate or treat those things. And there’s a lot of different ways we can do that, whether it’s drugs and alcohol or food or shopping or sex or some other way to either distract or cope or soothe or numb, which is how a lot of people end up needing to improve their health because they’ve used food or some other unhealthy coping mechanism to help them navigate life when they’re unable to do so. So I went down that road.

In my late 20s, I decided I really wanted to make a change. I went back to school. I got a master’s degree in exercise physiology. After I left school, I found the CHEK Institute where I learned holistic lifestyle coaching and some more natural ways to do things, and what we would now consider holistic nutrition or functional medicine started to fall onto my radar. And I started working with more and more complex clients and teaching a lot of workshops and classes. And that’s when I found out about Reed Davis and Functional Diagnostic Nutrition, which is a training course that I completed many years ago that enabled me to run labs and work with functional doctors, with clients and patients. And that’s actually how I met Joe. And we co-founded Rebel Health about nine years ago after a chance encounter, which we’ll talk about in the next episode probably. And from there, we started hosting webinars with Kiran, which blew up and took then Physicians Exclusive, Now Microbiome Labs from a small little company that nobody had ever heard of to MegaSpore being the number one probiotic in functional medicine.

A lot of practitioners and people first saw it on our webinars and trainings with Kiran. And now Kiran is one of the biggest speakers and educators in the industry. We’ve also worked with dozens of other now top the industry doctors and researchers and practitioners. We’ve created and produced four masterclasses, a virtual masterclass training series. And we were producers on the Human Longevity Project film series back in 2018.

So that’s a little bit about RHT, which we created because we really wanted there to be a source of no bullshit, high quality health education without an agenda on the web. And even within the functional medicine, natural health, holistic nutrition space, we found there was a lot of not great stuff going around and not high integrity. And that was really what caused us to want to start this. And for me personally, the last five years, I have shifted my entire focus towards mental, emotional, spiritual healing and wellbeing. I’ve completed three rather in-depth training programs over the last five years on meditation, trauma, breath work, nervous system regulation, psychology, survival patterns, which would be what I talked about earlier, how we develop ways to cope and soothe with things that we can’t handle. So really working towards deeper levels of healing and trauma.

And that’s the work I’m going to be doing mostly going forward. I’m still going to be operating Rebel Health, I’ll be hosting these videos, we’ll still be doing some webinars, but most of my focus and attention personally is now on that side of the healing world. And I’ll be opening up for the first time in eight years, coaching and teaching and speaking with clients and groups, facilitating in-person retreats. I live in Northern Italy. I’ve been here for almost two years, and we will be hosting retreats here focused around breath work and trauma and meditation and nervous system practices and some deeper healing work. So not your typical yoga, massage, sip wine type of retreat. These are going to be transformational, powerful experiences we’ll be facilitating here.

I hope to be doing some wellness type retreats in the US soon too. But most of my work will be done online with clients and groups facilitating self-exploration and trauma processing and breath work, and really helping people unwind their nervous system and find peace and stillness and presence in life that can help a lot with chronic health issues, which is now being proven. And so that’s my who I am, what I do, and why I do it.

And then we’re going to end every interview that we do for this series with takeaways, things people can start right now. So I’ll be asking guests for theirs. I may or may not prep them on this. I might put them on the spot. We’ll see. We’ll see how that goes. But here’s my three and one is to become acquainted with your breath. I’ve recently completed a very intensive breath work and trauma release training called Biodynamic Breath Work and Trauma Release.

And that is one way to use the breath is to reach deeper subconscious layers of yourself, but that doesn’t have to be the way that the breath is used, just becoming conscious of our breathing. The way we breathe influences our physiology more than anything else that we do. And so my challenge would be to five times a day, set an alarm on your phone. This only takes like one minute. Set an alarm on your phone five times a day and check in with your breath. Just breathe consciously in through your nose, out through your nose, breathe into the belly, let the belly fill. But it’s important to breathe through the nose into the belly, slowly and fully. Take five breaths. That should take you about a minute. So that’s one minute, five times a day. And while you’re doing this, just become observant about what you feel in your body.

You may notice that your mind slows down, you may notice that the chaos of life slows down a little bit, you may feel more calm, you may feel more connected to the ground. You may be agitated with me, but whatever you do, whatever happens, I challenge you to try that for a week every day, five times. And if you like it, keep going. And if you’d like some resources on ways to breathe and the ways that breath influences health, I’d recommend the podcast we did with Patrick McKeown. We will put that links down below in the show notes for this on the post. So look for that podcast with Patrick. He is the lead over at the Buteyko Clinic. He does Buteyko breathing trainings. He’s also the author of the book, The Breathing Cure, which is fantastic and really breaks down a lot of different ways that dysfunctional breathing can impact health.

And then another amazing resource on that is a book called Breath by James Nestor. He is a journalist who became fascinated with breathing and the way that it influences our life, basically, and wrote an incredible book on the topic. So Patrick is more of a practitioner writing from a functional standpoint of like, what does a breath do and how do I use it? And Breath, the book by James Nestor is more written by a professional writer. It’s very entertaining and interesting and fascinating. So I would recommend all of that, checking all of that out. This is often a huge missing link for people.

Two, get natural sunlight for at least 20 minutes upon waking every morning for a week. So wake up, don’t turn on your phone, don’t look at your notifications, don’t turn on your TV, don’t just head into the kitchen for the coffee. Go outside, get natural sunlight in your eyes for at least 20 minutes. 30 would be ideal, but let’s aim for 20 and do that before you do anything else. If you want to incorporate some movement like walking or some light yoga or Qigong or stretching or something. Great, fantastic. But the only challenge here is to go outside and get natural sunlight in your eyes for 20 minutes at the start of each day. There’s a ton of reasons why this is important that I’m not going to get into, but I just want you to try this with the breathing, the sunlight.

And number three, this is the harder one for everybody. Those two things that I already listed are pretty easy. The third one is a little tougher for people. So it’s summertime right now when I’m recording this. In the winter, it doesn’t have to be sunset. You can go a little later in the day, but at least 60 to 90 minutes before bed. But right now with summer and late sunsets, no TV, phone, screens or bright artificial lights after sunset or within 60 to 90 minutes of bed for one week. Just one week. You can do it. Get candles, have a dim lamp. Salt lamps work great. Get a book. Read a book. Have conversations with your loved ones. Play games. Just relax, breathe, do the breathing, take up meditation. Whatever it is that you want to try to do, do it in not so bright light, no screens, no stress, no TV, no news, no scrolling, no social media for at least 60 to 90 minutes before bed.

So that one’s pretty simple, it sounds like when I say it, but that’s the one that people tend to have the hardest time with. If you combine the 20 minutes of sunlight in the morning with the no screens and bright lights and phones in the evening and the breathing for one week, report back to me and let me know how you feel. Let me know how your sleep is. Let me know how your stress levels are, how your mood is, what your energy levels are like. I have a feeling if you can stick to all three of those things for a week, you’re going to feel a lot different than you do right now. And none of those things cost any money. So try them out. Let me know what you think. And I will be recording more episodes this week. They’ll be coming out probably like every week or two. We’re not going to put them out every week. We’re probably going to do every week or every two weeks, something like that but they’ll come out consistently.

I’ve already invited about 70 different guests to be on here. I have fun having these short, fast, simple conversations with people. I enjoy doing it. So I’m looking forward to you guys experiencing it and getting to hear from all these excellent, excellent people, a lot of whom I found via the survey we sent out a couple of months ago that you guys requested. So we invited a lot of the people that you asked for, and we’re going to be having lots of really, really good conversations. So thanks for checking it out. Thanks for being part of our community. If you like these videos, please share them. We’re going to have them on YouTube and we’re going to have them on the website. So if you like them, please share them. You can subscribe to the YouTube channel, and we appreciate you being here. Thanks a lot.