The Somatic Path to Self-Love and Healthy Partnerships with Lauren E. Zoeller

In this Episode

• [04:58] Lauren E. Zoeller describes the turning point in her life when she recognized the recurring pattern of attracting men with substance abuse issues and decided to explore the root cause.
• [10:53] Lauren shares how her work with somatic practitioners helped her understand and renegotiate these patterns in her nervous system.
• [12:49] Lauren details the process of tracking a client’s nervous system and introducing counter vortexes to renegotiate trauma in real-time. She describes the four survival responses and how they manifest in the body.
• [18:17] Lauren explains the process of renegotiating these responses through somatic work, using visualization and safety-seeking techniques.
• [22:09] Lauren emphasizes the need to develop a relationship with the body to understand what safety feels like and how to orient to it.
• [26:42] Orion shares a personal story about surrendering to attract a healthy relationship, highlighting the importance of surrender in manifestation.
• [46:28] Lauren offers three tips for living a stellar life.
• [47:16] Lauren provides information on how to find her and her resources, including her website and social media handles.

Jump to Links and Resources

About Today’s Show

Hey, Lauren, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here. 

Yeah, Orion, thank you for having me. 

Before we begin, maybe you can share one very fun memory from your childhood. 

We’re heading into Easter this weekend, and Easter has always been such a big celebration in my family. What comes to mind, because I just have it on my brain, is that we have two little girls—my partner and I have not been together for that long—this will be their first Easter with my family. 

I think the fun memory is seeing all the kiddos run around the yard looking for eggs and just seeing the joy in their faces. And this year, we’ve decided to add something for the adults. The adults will have their own Easter egg hunt this year. 

Oh, wow, that’s fun. 

Yeah, that memory comes to mind, just because it’s fresh. We’ve been preparing to leave tomorrow to get ready for Easter. 

Amazing. So you said this is a new relationship with a girl? 

Yeah, fairly new. It feels like we’ve been in it for years, but it did a lot of work to call it a really healthy partnership. We’ve been in it for about a year. 

That’s beautiful. Congratulations. 

Thank you. 

Talking about relationships, why is this your mastery, your fascination, the thing you share with the world?

I think it’s because I always believe that the universe, in multiple lifetimes, gives us certain areas of our life that we are meant to step into, deepen our healing, and deepen our relationship to ourselves. For me, the area that was always very difficult was romantic relationships. As young as I can remember, the first time I started liking boys was in kindergarten and first grade. 

I also have somebody who’s trying to say hi here. 

Oh my goodness. Who’s that?

This is Jack. He has a lot of anxious attachment, 

I like him so much.

Relationships have been where I’ve done the most healing, and they have catapulted me into finding out the most about myself and giving me the tools to love myself deeper.

He’s a sweetheart. We love Jack. He is a puppy. He is only six months old, a hundred pounds.

If you’re just listening, a huge dog, a Great Dane, showed up and hugged her.

He’s here to say hello. Usually he’s outside, but he hurt his leg, so he’s been inside. Anyways, coming back. Relationships have been where I’ve done the most healing, and they have catapulted me into finding out the most about myself and giving me the tools to love myself deeper. That’s why I’ve made my way into this field.

What was the problem with your relationships in the past? What was the thing that made you search?

There were multiple scenarios, but I would say the story that I talk about the most is that I had a history of dating men who had some sort of substance abuse problem, like they were alcoholics. They weren’t really deeply in love with themselves, and so when I started to get into nervous system work, and just to give everyone background, I did not grow up in a family where alcoholism was present. I did not have an issue with alcoholism. Nobody in my family did. 

The first time that I attracted an adult relationship with a man who had a serious problem with alcohol, I was like, “Okay, bad luck. Maybe.” Then, the second intimate relationship that I got into that was serious as an adult, he was also an alcoholic, and then there was a third, and then there was a fourth, and after the fourth, I realized, “This is a pattern. What’s going on here? There has to be a reason that I continue to attract these types of men in my life.” 

That was really the turning point for me. That’s when I decided to start getting curious around. It starts with me, and something is happening that’s calling these men in. At that time, I was starting to do some somatic work with one of the practitioners I was working with. I recognized that I grew up in a long line of Polish women. All the women in my family taught me at a very young age that you don’t get to sit down, you don’t get to eat your dinner until everybody has eaten first. 

This pattern of selflessness, of “if you’re okay, then I can be okay, if you’re happy first, then I can be happy,” was deeply ingrained in how I was raised. What I recognized through this whole process and really diving into my nervous system was that my nervous system was familiar with this dynamic of, “if I could save you, if I could be the one that’s there when you get out of rehab, if I could be the one that gets you to rehab, if I could be the one that is there for you when you’re struggling and it’s hard, then I was worthy of love because I had earned my place in your life.”

Yes, you have to earn love.

It was one thing to recognize that cognitively, the big shift for me was being able to work in the somatic realm, to be able to understand that understanding the pattern cognitively is one thing, but what’s happening inside of my nervous system that continues to pull me towards that familiar dynamic, healing that, and regulating that in my system shifted the trajectory for me and really changed the way that I attracted men. 

I didn’t really find my first healthy relationship until I was 32 because it took time to renegotiate that pattern in my body. That was a pattern that was really prevalent in my life when I was dating.

Do you think it was just epigenetic from the women that came before you, or was there any event or something in your childhood that happened that made you form a certain belief about yourself or somebody you watched physically, like, maybe your mom, that you kind of took on her beliefs?

I think it’s deeper. I’ll just give you context. My great-grandmother came over here from Poland, and when she came over here, her husband, at the time, told her, “Listen, we just need to be accepted. Do whatever you need to do to be liked and loved.” This is deeply ingrained. We call it the ‘fawn response.’ It’s a ‘survival response.’ When we’re looking at the nervous system, it’s people-pleasing. 

This people-pleasing response became a means of survival for my great-grandmother. It’s like, “In order for us to survive, we have to be liked.” It was a survival mechanism, but the issue was that it was never resolved. It’s one thing to do it because you need to survive. It’s another thing to then never look at that survival pattern. And then it got passed down to my grandmother, and then my grandmother passed it down to my mother and aunts, and then it got passed down to me. 

It just became this ‘dysregulated fawn response.’ This nervous system pattern became so familiar that it was the only thing I had witnessed as a child. So to answer your question, yes, I witnessed it. And then what happens is, because that pattern was so familiar, it was also repeating itself in all of my relationships, so it felt like this is the only way I know how to relate.

Do you feel it now that you solved it, you actually solved it for other people in your family, energetically?

Just because you “step” into a deeper relationship with that pattern doesn’t mean it goes away forever. You’ll still have moments where you must face it head-on, and that’s healing.

Yes and no. I always say that with the women that work with me, when you heal these patterns, you are not just healing yourself; you’re healing that pattern for previous and future generations. But you know, I still see that response alive in my mother when I’m with her. 

Sometimes it takes time for the shift to happen in other people.

Her witnessing my ability to use my voice and claim this sense of self autonomy and not become the martyr for every person I meet has led her into a deeper inquiry around herself. The thing is, I always say, just because you “step” into a deeper relationship with that pattern, it doesn’t mean that it goes away forever. You’re still going to have moments where you are going to have to face it head-on, and that’s healing. I don’t really believe in the notion that we’re ever fully healed. 

I had so many questions, and now I’m like, “Wait a second, which one am I asking first? I want to ask about the somatic experience that you teach. What kind of somatic practice do you do? Is it your own method? How did you come up with that?

I am trained classically under Dr. Peter Levine. I went through the Somatic Experiencing Institute, an almost five-year program by the time you complete it. I am technically a somatic experiencing practitioner. I use his methodology of somatic renegotiation in my practice. After studying under him, I started working with other somatic practitioners like Raja Selvam and different people in my field. 

I started to recognize, “Oh, it’s all based on somatic experience and tracking a client’s nervous system to introduce what we call a counter vortex, to renegotiate trauma in real time.” But a lot of the women that I was working with were sexual assault survivors who really struggled to find healthy partnerships. So, I started to develop my own method within Peter’s method, which I now teach. 

I certify other coaches, therapists, and healers, and it’s my relational somatic method. A lot of the work that I do is very heavily based on Peter Levine’s somatic renegotiation work. But it’s a little different in that we’re looking at how attachment theory, relational ruptures, and relational patterns really affect your ability to relate and connect on a deep level. That’s the work I do with women inside of my practice, and then I also teach other practitioners to do inside of their practices as well.

What does it look like when somebody’s having a session? It sounds like a bunch of big words, but I can’t get the visual or the understanding of how it works. 

Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn are our four survival responses.

What I tend to tell people is that true somatic renegotiation work. It’s difficult to put into words because it’s not a somatic modality. We’re not doing breath work, we’re not doing tapping, we’re not doing all of these fancy modalities that you see on the internet that are kind of touted as something that’s going to renegotiate your trauma. It’s not that we aren’t ever going to use breath work. 

It’s not that we’re not ever going to use tapping, but everybody’s nervous system is different. So if you were in a session with me and we were speaking about something that you are struggling with, when your body goes into a survival response, symptoms are associated with every survival response. We’ve got fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Those are our four survival responses. 

For instance, if you’re in a fight or flight response, I may notice that your fists start to clench, or your eyes are darting towards the door. You’re giving me physical signs that your body is in a sympathetic state. As a practitioner, I’m tracking this. Then, I’m leading you through different modalities to get safety to come on board so we can renegotiate that survival response in real time. 

So if you’ve ever experienced EMDR or brain tapping, it’s similar to those modalities, but the difference is that with EMDR and brain spotting, there’s no counter vortex that is introduced to renegotiate. In somatic experiencing, as a practitioner, I’m saying, “Okay, as I’m feeling into the resonant field, as I’m feeling into what’s happening in your nervous system, what do I need to introduce so that I can see this survival response that’s alive in your system, I can see this start to deactivate and fall into safety, so that we renegotiate that pattern over time.” 

It’s hard to explain somatic experiencing until you fully experience it, because every nervous system is different, and what I do with you is not going to be what I do with the person that comes after you. That’s part of the problem with these blanket somatic modalities, like breathwork and tapping. They’re great resources, but let’s say you have an overdeveloped relationship with a sympathetic charge that’s really familiar to you. 

If you go into a Holotropic breathwork session, you run the risk of actually re-traumatizing your nervous system because you blow past what we call your ‘window of tolerance.’ So when you’re working with an actual somatic practitioner, I’m tracking that to make sure that we’re not re-traumatizing and we’re actually renegotiating, which is a little bit different than other somatic modalities that are out there in the world. 

What does renegotiating mean? 

Let’s kind of break this down in a way that hopefully is tangible for people. Most people think that trauma is an event. They think that I was in a car wreck, which means I have trauma. Trauma is not actually an event. It is the stuck survival response, or the stuck psychosomatic response to any overwhelming event that was too fast, too much, or too soon. When we go into the survival response, if we don’t have the proper container to access safety, then that stuck survival response becomes trauma. 

When we go into the survival response, if we don’t have the proper container to access safety, that stuck survival response becomes trauma.

Let’s say you were in a car wreck and it was at a stop sign. You felt it; your body went into a flight response, and there was a lot of panic after the crash, and there wasn’t any space for you to find safety. Then what happens is, every time you roll up to that stop sign, you may feel that same flight response over and over and over again. Renegotiating that flight response means, when you come into my practice, we’re going to slow down that wreck, and I’m going to look at what happens when your body starts to roll up to the stop sign in your mind. 

We’re going to work with this flight response that’s coming up in your system. I will give your nervous system the space to notice safety. And as you notice safety, we will watch your nervous system deactivate. We will watch your nervous system go into this flight response, and then use your visual to recognize, “Whoa, I’m actually safe. There’s no threat present. I’m going to give my body the space to feel that, and then I’m going to give my body the space to find safety.” 

The next thing you know, let’s say you come into my office or come into my practice a week later, we go through that same visual. You roll up to the stop sign in your mind, and there’s no charge. You don’t feel that flight response anymore because you actually gave your nervous system the container to renegotiate that survival response. 

When women come to you and say they have those patterns in their relationships, they can’t find the right guy. Usually, it’s based on a lack of self-love and safety. How do you know what’s missing for them, and how do you guide them, apart from the somatic experience?

I have a process that I lead all of my clients through when they make their way to me. The first thing I do with them, if they have not done traditional therapy, is to look at what some of these patterns show up relationally. What’s the cognitive link? What I mean by that is, when I explained earlier, I attracted alcoholics. I work with my clients to say, “Okay, let’s talk about your past relationships. Talk to me about the patterns that showed up here. Also, let’s talk about big moments in your life that you remember, that feel like they have charge.” 

I call those ‘big T’ or ‘little T’ trauma moments. Then I will ask, “Okay, now let’s look at your childhood dynamics, and let’s look at your generational dynamics. I want to get a full picture of what your life was like growing up and your relationships.” This first step gives me a lot of context and gives my clients a lot of context of what these patterns are cognitively that keep showing up in partnership. 

Then, once we can identify the patterns, we’ll look at them: “Okay, now that we notice these patterns, I’m curious. What do you notice inside your body when you think about these types of relationships?” Based on that question, the body is going to give us answers. For instance, if you have a lot of anxious attachment inside of your system, chances are you’re going to have an elevated heart rate when you think about those types of relationships. 

Or you may have the pattern that you leave when things get hard, and sometimes, you just pack up your stuff and leave. All of these are based on the flight response. So then we can say, “Okay, now that we recognize these patterns of dysregulation, can we be with them? And can we introduce and become familiar with not just safety, but also that pattern in your nervous system so that it doesn’t feel like it’s flooding you and becoming overwhelming.” 

It’s different with every single woman. We’ve got to look at, what are the cognitive traits behind the patterns that you’re experiencing, and then the level deeper is, how can we look at your nervous system patterns that are in conjunction with those cognitive patterns, so that we can start to shift those and bring different awareness to them. 

What shifts do you see in your practice? How quickly does it happen? 

If you want to heal trauma, you have to slow down.

Well, it depends, because every nervous system is so different, and I always tell people, if you look at the definition of trauma, it’s too fast, too much, too soon. So if somebody in the field tells you they can help you attract a partner in three months or less, or they can heal your relationship quickly, you’re actually exacerbating the trauma. If you want to heal trauma, you have to slow down. 

You have to develop a relationship with safety, slowness, and this sense of softness inside of you; that’s where true, healthy partnerships come from. And it depends, right? Some women can attract a healthy partnership in three months because their nervous system has a lot of capacity for resilience, and they can orient to healthy love. For some women, it takes longer. It takes six months, it takes a year. 

But I always tell my women, if you stay committed to it and you really fall in love with your nervous system and understand that language, it’s going to happen for you, and it always does. It happens with every woman I work with. It’s different in relation to the timeline in which it happens.

I like what you said about finding the safety inside. How do you do that? 

Through this work, through committing to nervous system work. Most women don’t have they don’t understand what safety feels like in their body. They can’t orient to it. They can’t find it. If I were to work with most women who come to me, say, “What does safety feel like?” They might rattle off something cognitively, but when I say, “Okay, now tell me, what are the sensations and the emotions associated with safety?” They’re like, “I don’t know.” 

The first step on this journey is being able to learn the language of your nervous system. Like, I know that when I feel safe, there’s expansion in my chest space, there’s warmth in my low belly, I can orient to my surroundings, and I notice that there’s not a sense of urgency, there’s not a sense of feeling like I have to do something. There’s just this settled feeling. 

So, the first step is to start building a relationship. Just what does safety actually feel like in your body, not what comes out of your mouth, which is, “Oh, I’m safe when I’m with my partner, and we’re holding hands, and we’re walking down the street.” Okay, cool. But what do you notice in your body as you’re doing that? That’s the more important question. That’s where we have to start building a relationship with safety to expand it.

For me, safety feels like a warm pink marshmallow cloud. That just came to mind when I was thinking about safety. 

Yeah, beautiful. 

When you can let go and feel like everything is holding you. Or like when you’re floating on the beach, on the ocean, and it feels so aligned, that’s safety.

That’s the first step—to develop that relationship. And then also develop a relationship with your activation, too. Because activation is not bad. You just have an undercoupled relationship to it.

What do you mean when you say activation? 

Activation is what we were talking about with the survival responses. It’s that sense of your heartbeat rising, or that pattern of you packing up all your things when you get into a simple fight with your partner, with someone you love, because you feel like you need to flee and get away from it. At one point, that activated response, survival response, served you, as if it got you away from danger.

It feels like safety in a masculine or feminine way, where it’s almost like you’re turning on your warrior. You’re like, “I’m invincible, and nothing’s gonna stop me. I feel safe regardless of anything, and I’m just gonna fight.” Or you’re just in your true feminine, and you’re in a marshmallow cloud, “I’m so safe with everything around me. It’s just gonna form around me, and I’m just gonna walk the world.”

That’s the sense of surrender that really does call in a magnetic life, being able to say what’s happening, even if it’s activation. Can I notice that my pattern is to pack up my things and get to the door, and can I stop at the door, and then can I have some grace for myself for this pattern, like, can I hold myself and say, “Ah, I see that you did this because it kept you safe in the past. But now we don’t have to do it, and we don’t have to be in shame around it, but we can notice it, and we can embrace it, and we can be with it, and we can learn from it,” and that is what it feels like to be in relationship to your activation. 

And over time, the more grace and the more love and compassion you can give yourself in those moments without it flooding you and taking you past your window of tolerance, and you packing your things and getting in the car and leaving, the more that those activated responses start to soften, that’s what it means to be in relationship with that. 

Do you believe that every manifestation happens from a place of surrender?

We can manifest from scarcity. Our reality is a reflection of our most predominant frequency.

The answer to that is no. I believe that we can manifest from scarcity. Our reality is a reflection of our most predominant frequency. So if we’re in the space of scarcity, if we’re in the space of really grasping and holding on, we will probably manifest the opposite of what we actually desire.

I had to surrender to attract my men. I was in an abusive relationship, and then I became super masculine, and I couldn’t date anyone. I would pretty much emasculate every guy I saw. Then I went to the seminar, and it was a relationship day. There was a conversation about feminine and masculine energies, and I was very emotional that day. I knew something had to change. 

That night, I went to a little waterfall at about 1 am and wrote my relationship vision. I prayed, and I was crying and laughing and crying and laughing hysterically. It was very cathartic. Forty-eight hours later, I met my man at 1 am. I was introduced, and nine days later, he proposed to me on a hot air balloon in Vegas. And I said no with the diamond ring and everything. Nine months later, I said yes. 

Oh, I love it. Beautiful.

But yeah, it all happened from a place of me telling God, “Hey, listen, I can’t do it on my own anymore.”  I guess there was some somatic release there, with the laughing, crying, shaking, and being like, “Okay, I’m done. I feel like I’m pushing a mountain, and I can’t do it anymore. So please help.” God just showed up. Whatever you call God, divine energy, matrix, everything was aligned. 

It’s amazing, beautiful. 

Yeah, I love it, but I find the process of surrender super hard for me, even though I know it’s good for me in many areas of my life; even within my own relationship, sometimes it’s difficult. 

It definitely is. It’s a practice, and for me, nervous system work has helped me deepen my relationship to surrender, softness, and slowing down. I think that when you can operate from that space, things come in with ease because you are in that space of being able to receive, and you are receptive, versus feeling like you’re constantly working against the grain all the time.

What are some of your practices when you wake up in the morning to hug your nervous system, calm down, or slow down?

We live on quite a bit of land, so it’s shifted over the years. Actually, I’m getting ready to release a series about this. It’s called the ‘soft year.’ This is the first time I’ve talked about it. I’ve always been a high-achieving, successful female entrepreneur. There was a moment a couple of years ago when I realized I keep looking for this softness and this surrender and this space to be in my feminine. 

I know that men are supposed to protect and provide, and if he comes in and he does that, then I will have the space to be soft, surrender, and be in this space of safety. I recognized, “Wait a second. No, I have to find that now. If that’s what I want in my life, then I need to be that identity now, so that I create the space to invite it in.” A year and a half ago, I lived in the city, in this buzzy high-rise. So much happening. I have a podcast and so many friends here. How can I find softness? How can I find that sense of safety and space? 

I started to create it. My mornings became less about getting up at 5 am, going to the sauna, exercising, doing my affirmations, and visualizations. I started to say, “What would it feel like just to wake up and have a soft morning?” And it changed. It totally shifted. And so, long story short, now I wake up, I let the doggie out, I make us French press coffee, because it takes quite a while. You have to boil the water, and you have to let the coffee bean soak.

Is that a Polish thing? I had a Polish girlfriend, and she always did that.

I don’t think it is, but now that you say it, many of my Polish family and friends do French press.

One of the most cherished memories I have with her is that coffee. Okay, cool.

We do that. Maybe it is. I’ll have to look into it. Then, I go out. We have a little barn cat that I manifested. So, I feed our barn cat. Then, I’ll feed the chickens. We have ducks, so I’ll feed the ducks, and then we have baby chicks. I feed the baby chicks, and I come in and I feed the dog, and then I have a cat inside, so I feed the cat, and then I’ll take my coffee upstairs to my partner, and we’ll talk, and then I will slowly get ready for my day. 

I love my mornings because there’s this sense of softness and this sense of slow that I crave. It’s not what the personal development world preaches. It’s what feels good to my nervous system. 

That’s beautiful. 

That’s what my morning looks like. 

I was very surprised when I saw you on video because when I researched you and looked at your website and your interviews, I saw a very different energy than the energy you showed up here today. It works.

You must be able to love yourself wholeheartedly to call in a conscious safety relationship in your life.

Yeah, it does. The work works. I promise. It’s so funny because my team last week was like, “None of our old branding fits anymore.” I’m like, “I know.” That’s the beauty of this work—you continue to deepen and evolve, and that’s where we are.

It’s really, really cool. Let’s talk about helping women find love. What’s the most dangerous myth successful women believe about love? How did it show up in your own life?

The biggest one that I see is that it’s something that needs to be earned. We talked about that earlier. I have a lot of women that come into my practice and they say, “I’m afraid if I slow down, I’m afraid if I soften, I’m afraid if I really lean into this slowness that I’ve created, that I’ll lose my success. I’ll lose momentum in my business. I will lose the ability to climb the ranks inside this empire that I’ve created, or this life I’ve created for myself. I’m also afraid that if I slow down and soften, a man won’t find me successful.” 

If that happens, and this gets ripped away. There’s this belief that their worth is tied to their career. They feel like they need to earn love. Their success has replaced their ability to deeply connect, and that’s a slippery slope with women, because there will never be a man who’s good enough. It’s because they don’t feel in their core that they’re good enough and don’t have a relationship to softness, slowness, and safety. That’s what I see the most in my practice. It’s when women come in and they’re struggling to find love. 

Yeah, it seems like a pattern. A lot of women these days gain all that success, but they can’t find love. It’s hard for them to make a connection or stay connected. I think the excuse is that “I am too successful. They cannot handle me. I’m too big.” What would you say to them? 

Well, it depends. We would have to look at where this pattern originated. But what I would say is that to truly call in the relationship you desire, the right man is not going to care about that. The relationship you want that is rooted in conscious safety and connection, and this sense of true partnership, your success level doesn’t matter. But you must be able to love yourself wholeheartedly to call that into your life. 

I then go a little deeper and call out the pattern. Where were you using your career to fulfill this sense of validation that you were enough? Because if you’re using your career to do that, you’re also subconsciously doing that in your partnerships, in the way that you date, in the way that you attract men into your life. You’re looking for men to validate your existence. That again becomes a really slippery slope, because no man can validate your existence, not one of them. You have to feel worthy of that first.

How do you help women feel worthy of that? Let’s say somebody cannot come to your practice, but they’re listening right now. What are some practices they can do to calm down their own nervous system or to validate themselves?

A really powerful exercise is to flip your negative belief and then make yourself find proof that that belief does exist.

One of my favorite practices is cognitive and somatic. This is the first thing you’re going to do. You’re going to get out a piece of paper and write down all of the beliefs you feel are true about why you don’t have love in your life. It could be, “I am unlovable because everyone leaves.” “There are no good men left in the world. They’re all taken,” whatever those beliefs are. 

After you write them down, I want you to look at each of those beliefs and feel how they land in your body. What sensations do you notice? What emotions do you notice? Chances are, you probably feel constricted. You may feel your heart rate elevate. You may feel sweaty. You may feel like, “Oh my God, I want to run away from this exercise. I don’t want to be here anymore.” You’re starting to notice all of these patterns. 

Most likely, those sensations and emotions are associated with survival. You’re going to feel that in your body. After you write down those beliefs, I want you to write the flip side of that belief. For instance, everyone always leaves the flip of that belief: I am loved, and people stay in my life. This is where most women stop. They stop at the flip belief and say, “Okay, yeah, great. But I can’t really believe that.” 

The next step is to start to find proof that that belief is correct, that that belief is right. So let me give you an example of this. I had a belief that every man always leaves, that I will never find love, because regardless of who he is, even if he’s with me for three years, he’s going to leave. And I remember I actually had a friend who woke me up to this. I remember when I was dating, I was like, “Oh, everybody always leaves, and I’m just so sick of this.” 

My friend looked at me and she said, “Hey, not to be mean, but I’m kind of sick and tired of hearing you say this. Because I have never left. I have never left you. I’ve been here. And you keep saying everybody leaves, but I’ve been here.” I remember feeling that land in my body like, “Oh yeah, she has always been here.” I felt this sense of expansion and this sense of deep connectedness. I said, “Whoa, I am more committed to the proof that goes along with that old belief, but yet I have all this proof that people never leave. I’m just not oriented to it.” 

So, a really powerful exercise is to flip the belief and then make yourself find proof that that belief does exist. I have not had a single woman come through my practice where we have not been able to build a case file for the opposite belief. Then, the work is being able to understand how that land in your nervous system and how I can orient to that all day, every day, so that I can start to attract from that space. That’s a really powerful exercise that I highly suggest everybody do for themselves.

When you change the world around you, you change. 

Exactly. 

It’s like we live in a movie, and we’re just like, “Am I creating a drama? Am I creating a comedy? What am I creating right now, and which storyline am I the most committed to?” Sometimes we tell ourselves one story so many times that we just believe it. We don’t doubt it for a second. This is a great exercise. I love that you stopped to check how it landed in my body because the body doesn’t lie.

Well, that’s the part that most people miss because it’s one thing to think cognitively about these things. This is why I say if you’ve struggled with manifestation in the past, and you’ve done all of the things The Secret tells you to do, and all of the webinars that I attended about manifestation—

I was supposed to interview Marie Diamond, but she couldn’t make it. I love her. 

Ah, bummer. 

She’s amazing. 

She’s wonderful. 

She’s gonna come on the show, maybe in a month or two. I actually had a few teachers from The Secret, Dr. Demartini and John Assaraf.

Oh, I love that. But something that I feel is missing from The Secret is that—I’ve watched it several times. I watched so many things on manifestation—it didn’t teach what to do with your nervous system. It’s one thing to think that cognitively. Where people struggle with manifestation, it’s like, “Oh my gosh. I was visualizing it, and I was seeing it, and I was repeating it every day.” 

But if your nervous system is still operating in survival around that thing, you’re still going to attract from survival, you’re not going to attract from connection and safety, which is what you need when you’re manifesting really big things. I think that’s an important part to look at, and you can do that through that exercise. 

The movie was missing a lot, for sure. When I spoke to Dr. Demartin privately, he told me they shot 12 or 48 hours, I don’t remember, but a lot of footage. From all that, you got the highlight five minutes that will be like the little candy that the audience wants to listen to. Everybody wants a very quick solution. Nobody wants to know that they actually have to do an everyday practice and connect their body and all of that. That’s a lot of work.

Yeah, but that’s the thing. It’s like, if you want a new reality for yourself, we live in such a quick-fix society, go back to trauma—urgency, too fast, too much, too soon. The reality that you desire can come in quickly if you’re committed to the work it takes to actually get it, and most people aren’t.

For sure. So, what role does God or spiritual alignment play in calling in love? 

Everything in my life that I’ve desired has resulted from connecting to spirit and the universe.

I believe, just as you spoke about earlier, that whatever you surrender your life to, and I tell people, it could be God or the universe. It could be your pet turtle, if you have a pet turtle, but at some point in your journey, you have to recognize that true safety comes from presence and the ability to release and let go and know that there’s something bigger at play. And I’ll tell you, the hardest part of my life was growing up Catholic. I really struggled with the Catholic faith. It never really resonated with me. I would go to church, and I just wouldn’t feel anything. 

For a long time, I was searching, like, “Is this real?” It was one of the hardest times of my life. When I became an adult, and things started to get really big, I realized that not believing in something higher than me is not working. I’m pretty broke. I don’t have a healthy relationship. I don’t feel connected to my body, like it’s not working. My life’s okay, but it’s not great. What if I surrendered to something bigger than me? What would I even feel like? What would it look like? What if I just entertain it, and we’ll never forget this moment? 

I was like, “I’m gonna see if this is real.” My best friend growing up was my grandmother, and I had a really deep connection to her. I was crushed when she passed away, and when I was struggling in my spiritual journey, I remember having a conversation with her. I was like, “Grandma, I know you’re not here. I can’t connect to God. I can’t feel him. I can’t feel anything bigger than me. But I can connect to you because I know what it’s like to be in your physical presence. So, if there is something bigger, can you please send me a sign? Can you show me something? I just need something from you. I need a letter. I need something to show me that you’re here.” 

After I had that conversation, I immediately called my mom, and I was like, “Hey, do you have a letter from grandma? Do you have anything from grandma?” I wanted to be in control of the situation, and nobody in my family could find anything from her. It was wild. That day continued. I went to bed, woke up the next morning, and had this pull. I just heard this voice, “Go into your guest room closet.” 

So I was like, “Okay, this is weird.” I went into my guest room closet, opened the door, and there was this box that my mom had given me a couple of months prior, of just a bunch of old stuff. You know how moms give you these boxes, and they’re like, “Here’s all your stuff.” I opened the box, and there was this Michael Jordan shoe box full of old letters from old boyfriends, like kindergarten. I’m like, “What the heck? Why did I get pulled into looking at these?” 

What you put out into the world, you receive back.

I’m going through all the letters, and this butterfly letter was at the bottom of the box. I opened it up, and it was a letter from my grandmother. It was for my sixth birthday. She said, “I’m so proud of the young woman you’re becoming. You’re gonna do big things in the world. I love you, Grandma Ellie.” I have the chills. I knew in that moment, “Okay, there’s something bigger than me.” 

Once I could feel that and surrender to it, it became my North Star, and I have a tattoo of the “I love you” from that letter. Everything in my life that I’ve desired has been a result of connecting to spirit and the universe and to my grandmother, which I know is much higher than me.

I like that so much. Beautiful story.

Thank you. We have to remember, going back to the beliefs I was deeply held and loved by her, and so to know that love helped me orient the love I wanted to call in.

I love that, beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing. We are almost out of time, so before we say goodbye for now, what are your three quick tips for living a stellar life? And where can people find you, take your courses, offers, and all of that?

My three tips would be, first, learn the language of your nervous system, get curious, and understand the body, because it will change your entire life. The second thing I would say to live a stellar life is to develop a relationship with the present moment. Develop a relationship with slowing down, safety, and savoring where you are now, because that will shift where you want to go. My third tip for living a stellar life is telling people you love them. If you feel something in your heart or see somebody who has great hair or is kind, tell them. Use your words because what you put out into the world, you receive back. 

People can find me at laurenzoeller.com and on Instagram @laurenzoeller. I have so many things you can take advantage of. I have a lot of free resources on my Instagram page. I’m getting ready to launch a year-long master class series called ‘The Soft Life’ that is launching next month. I have my collective program, which is a three-month container. I have one-on-one coaching, so just come into my world, and we can have a conversation. DM me on Instagram, and we’ll talk about the best route for you.

Amazing. Thank you so, so much. It was a pleasure. Thank you for your wisdom and for sharing your heart.

Thank you, Orion, for having me. It was so wonderful to talk to you.

And thank you, listeners. Remember to learn the language of your nervous system. Slow down and connect to the present moment. Tell people you love them and have a stellar life. This is Orion till next time.