Michelle Masters: “Rewiring Your Relationship with Money”

Michelle Masters: There’s probably never been a child born in the history of humanity who did not want to heal their family. There’s definitely never been a child born in the history of humanity who has pulled it off. But they all try, and they try in really predictable ways, and the first way a child tries to heal their parents is through love. “I will love them so much that it will all be okay.”

Tami Simon: Hello, friends. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Michelle Masters. Known as a coach’s coach, she helps clients create lasting positive change using tools like neuro-linguistic programming, NLP, and family constellation work in order to transform how we see ourselves and live our lives. With Sounds True, Michelle has a new book that we’re just releasing. It’s based on a popular international workshop that she leads that teaches people how to break the patterns that keep us stuck—and, are you ready for this, around a topic that is controversial and, I think for many of us, is the source of a lot of angst: our relationship with money.

Her new book is called Wired for Money: Change the Patterns That Block You from Thriving. Readers call it small but mighty. And now, meet Michelle.

Hi, Michelle.

Michelle Masters: Tami, nice to meet you.

Tami Simon: All right. How did you come to focus on money as one of the topics in your “change the patterns that keep you stuck” work as a whole?

Michelle Masters: Yeah. It’s really ironic that I came to this work. It’s a little like Vladimir Putin being asked to write a book on nonviolent communication. It’s not an instant “Oh, yeah, that makes sense,” because I had no money. I had no interest in money. I had no knowledge of money back in 2006, when I was asked to create a two-day workshop on money by the executive director where I was teaching NLP. And I was so excited to be asked to create a workshop. I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” like, “Put me in, coach. Put me in, coach.” And then after I said yes, I’m like, “Oh, my God, what have I done?”

I was going to try and learn something about money, and I realized there is not enough time in the world for me to learn enough about money to be useful, and I’d probably just be regurgitating other people’s stuff anyway. So I decided to take the stuff I did know, which was how to create change for people, and apply it all to the context of money and see what happened.

So that was 2006, and I spent a summer creating this workshop, which was later titled Money Magic. And I took myself through everything that I put in the course just to make sure it wouldn’t cause any unwanted side effects, spontaneous combustion. Tested it out. And it seemed okay, so we did it, and we got really good feedback.

Then in 2008, I went to a Matrix Energetics workshop with Richard Bartlett and Melissa Joy, which is a quantum way of working, and I decided to add some of those quantum tools into the field of the class. Not teaching people it, but into the field of consciousness of the class, to see what happened. And what happened was that whereas before, people would take the class and start to get changes, when I added in the quantum tools, people would register for the class and, before it even started, changes would start to show up. Unexpected money, unexpected promotions, opportunities, contracts.

It’s to the point where when I do a workshop now, I usually ask at the beginning, “How many of you got unexpected money since you registered for the class?” And it’s usually at least a third, and by lunchtime it gets up to about half, because people go, “Oh, wait, I just remembered.” So that’s what I was doing for a long time, and then I wrote a book based on that. Talk about tiny. But I was so glad—it was about a year ago when Sounds True expressed an interest in publishing an updated version. And if I’d had my pick of publishers, I would have picked Sounds True.

Tami Simon: Wonderful. Now, I notice when you started talking about how a third of the people that come have these changes even before they get there, a question came up for me. But right here at the beginning, I want to address the grumpy person who’s listening right now and wondering if they should keep listening or if they should just say, “Forget this stuff.”

And the grumpy person says, “You know, God, I’ve heard so many of these change-your-mindset tools, and they don’t work for me. They don’t work for me. They don’t work for me. And I’m tired of hearing this because obviously, quote-unquote, money magic or whatever, it’s kind of baloney.” This is what they’re thinking. So just speak to that person right here at the beginning.

Michelle Masters: And my God, I so understand. The problem is that when most people talk about beliefs and mindset, they are trying to change a subconscious problem with conscious tools. Affirmations or whatever it is, conscious action. And if that worked, we would all be transforming every day, instantly.

So really what’s different about this, aside from the quantum woo-woo, is this is about accessing a place where the beliefs are stored, which is not in the conscious parts of the brain. Completely separate part of the brain, and it’s a part of the brain that’s designed to be really difficult to access and very difficult to update.

Unlike your phone, this part of your brain does not update itself. Most of our beliefs that are in the way are in place by somewhere between three to six years old. And so if you’re trying to change them with conscious decisions at 40, it’s not that those decisions don’t matter, but they do not change the patterns that have been running since you were three, four, five, six years old.

Those run on automatic loops. It’s like CNN—automatic loops, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And they filter our reality. We don’t experience the world as it is. We experience a filtered reality. When you actually change basically the source code of your reality at the subconscious level where it runs, it’s a very different experience than most of the conscious tools people are using.

Tami Simon: Okay, so let’s talk more about changing at the subconscious level. Michelle, I have friends that have different kinds of careers, but I have a lot of friends who are therapists. And over the past decade, I saw a lot of my friends who studied all different kinds of psychotherapeutic approaches starting to engage in their own psychedelic explorations, because they were like, “Look, guess what? Not only are our clients not changing, but we’re not changing. Not as much as we want. We have to get into the subconscious. What we’re doing isn’t working. Maybe psychedelics will work.”

Now, this conversation isn’t really about psychedelics. I’m only bringing that up because I think there is this hunger in people to get change at that level, but not clarity about how to do it.

Now, I know you were teaching in an NLP context. Maybe you can talk some about that, because that, my understanding at least, does address itself to changing subconscious beliefs, but people are suspicious about it. “What’s going on? This is like some kind of programming. I don’t want to reprogram. I want to find the truth of who I am.” I said a lot, but I’m opening up this discussion about what actually changes us at a subconscious level.

Michelle Masters: Yeah. And this is—I think therapy is wonderful. I did four years of it with an absolute saint, and I got so much out of it. I got self-acceptance. I got a sense of self-awareness and emotional vocabulary. But after four years, I stopped because the patterns hadn’t changed. And it’s why I didn’t go into a career as a counselor, which I briefly considered.

I have dear friends who are therapists. There’s no knock against therapy. But to change stuff, you have to access the part of the brain where it’s stored, and therapy can do that sometimes. And then you have to create new neural connections.

I understand why some people are hesitant about NLP, rightly so. In the beginning, the tools are amazing, but when they’re amazing tools, they often get misused for manipulation or sales tactics and all kinds of stuff. So I was lucky enough to be trained by people who had a background in psychology who were using these tools to actually access some of those deepest patterns and then create new neural networks between those younger parts of us that were holding the old patterning and what we know now.

And, full disclosure, I haven’t done psychedelics. I know a lot of people who had amazing experiences.

Tami Simon: Yeah, it’s actually irrelevant to our conversation. I share the hunger.

Michelle Masters: Yes. But what is different about these tools is that when you use them, you get to decide where you’re going to come out on the other end. It’s not just about accessing the old stuff and healing it, which is a big part of it, but what do you want to heal it toward? What do you want your life to be like?

And most of the stuff around money—the things that play out in our money are not even about money. They’re about how safe we feel, how deserving and worthy we feel, how lovable we feel, what we think we have to do to survive, how okay it is for us to enjoy life.

And so whatever it is that’s in the way, be it that kind of patterning or sometimes even ancestral patterning, when you can get access… In a perfect world, when we hit 18 or 21, someone would send us a letter and say, “You seem to have these beliefs that you have to work hard, the world isn’t safe, you’re not safe, you have to do more, be more, or you have to be less. You’re not okay as you are. Would you like to keep these, or would you like to change those?” But none of us ever got that letter. And so this is a way to actually go in and revise those things at the source.

And so the programming part—the name is awful. I don’t know what they were thinking. It’s the second-worst name in the world. The first was National Socialist Party, but that was taken, I think. So they went with this God-awful name of neuro-linguistic programming.

Tami Simon: What would you call it? What could you call it if you wanted?

Michelle Masters: That’s a really good question. That’s a great question. I would sit with that for a while. But it might be something like evolving the brain to catch up with the soul. But that’s not something that’s going to go on letterhead.

Tami Simon: No, but I still appreciate the question coming forward. I like that: evolving the brain to catch up with the soul. Tell me, what are the principles related to money and these stuck patterns—the core principles that help people evolve their brain to match the soul?

Michelle Masters: Yeah. The real true inside. It’s not just one brain that we have. We have three to four different brains that are sort of patched together with spotty infrastructure, spotty interfacing. And the oldest part of the brain is the one that comes online first. That’s what’s in charge of our survival. Because survival is so important—we’re not having this conversation without us being alive in a body—neurologically, it’s got the best seats in the house, and it’s got seniority.

So the other parts of the brain, especially the conscious brain, the cerebral cortex that we’re so proud of, that’s not fully developed until somewhere, for women, between 20 to 25. For men, somewhere between 25 to 30, or as my friend and teacher Carl used to say, somewhere between 30 and death. This is the last part of the brain to develop. And so that’s part of why from up here we rarely touch this, because this brain back here does not think. This one thinks. This one reasons. This one evaluates. This one makes decisions. This one has preferences, imagines, and dreams.

This one is in charge of what—biology joke—is in charge of the four Fs: fight, flight, feeding, and reproduction. And all it cares about is if you’re alive, and its operating system is pretty much done by three years old, if not six. It has just noticed what a person is experiencing, and if they’re not dead yet, then it regards all of that as good.

It could be awful. It could be just horrible. But if they’re not dead—because that’s really its only criteria—this part of the brain regards it as survivable, which is all it cares about. And so later on, as we grow and develop and we reach for better experiences from our heart, from our evolving brain, from our soul, if it’s different from what this grew up experiencing, this will pull the plug.

It will self-sabotage. It will find a way to reset the system back into the emotional state of those first few years, and it runs 24 hours a day. It never takes a personal day or a sick day. It’s always on the job, and it’s very hard to access to update. So most of the work I do is helping to access that part of the brain that’s holding the old beliefs, the old visceral experiences of not safe, not okay, and then give it new neural experiences—because it’s not about logic.

It’s about a visceral experience—and create neurological connections between the two. And that’s what the exercises in the book are designed to do: access where the old patterning is, and, once we’ve already established what somebody wants, we start to create… There are different patterns to it, different ways.

Create neural connections between what your heart and your evolved soul and mind now want and that old wiring, letting this part know, first off, you’re okay. You made it. Because it doesn’t do time. As far as this can tell, your childhood is happening right now, so it’s still trying to survive it.

Updating that, like, “No, it’s okay. You’re okay. You made it. You’re this old. You’re a grown-up now. You’ll never be that small and helpless again.” Most of us have car keys and credit cards—way more choice than we did as kids. So connecting those two and giving this part a visceral experience that you can be happy and have enough and be safe. That can be even safer than the old thing.

Tami Simon: Now, as you’re talking, first of all, I just need to highlight: you’re really funny, Michelle. When you speak, and your book is funny too. I had a few laugh-out-loud moments. Okay. So I think most people can connect to this sense of the survival brain, the four Fs, and how it’s running a huge part of every moment of our life. I think the part that’s mysterious is this evolving process, or quote-unquote reprogramming process. You offer exercises in the book, and many of them have to do with embodying, walking, moving, standing in a different way. And I wonder, could you give us a taste right now of some sense of how we’re going to use our physical self to work with these embedded survival beliefs that we want to upgrade?

Michelle Masters: Right. Well, because the beliefs are all formed on visceral experiences. Like, a kid’s even in the womb, parents are stressed out. There’s no cognitive thought yet, but there’s a visceral experience of, ooh, not okay, not good. Maybe life’s dangerous, I’m dangerous, something’s dangerous, got to protect, not safe, not safe.

So it’s a visceral experience. So the first thing we have to do is access that part of the brain, get back to where it started, which lights up that part of the brain. If you’re doing a brain scan, you can see when the conscious mind is active and when the subconscious is active. So going back to where the pattern started lights up that part of the brain. That part of the brain is now active.

If you’ve already set up triggers, like associations, it could be a spot on the floor. A lot of the change patterns use a spot on the floor, a piece of paper or a spot on the floor. Or you’ve set up a spot that has a reference for somebody who has a different experience, like the Dalai Lama. You imagine a spot, there’s the Dalai Lama. If you step into that spot and imagine you’re in the Dalai Lama, you’re now having—I don’t know what his experience is, but you’re having a different experience in your body that you associate with him. This is different neurology that’s lit up, okay?

This is coming from the conscious mind, and even though it seems to be about the Dalai Lama, it’s happening in your brain. So now that part is lit up. If you do this correctly, if you do it fast, you take that embodied experience of the Dalai Lama and you step back—mentally, physically step back—into the spot that represents the younger you and imagine being in that kid’s body. We’re not talking to him from the outside. Being in that kid’s body.

Now both of those parts of the brain are lit up, and the old saying is, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” So it actually creates a neural connection. Now, if you try and do that consciously, through affirmations, it can take anywhere up to hundreds of repetitions to do that through affirmations.

But you do this correctly once, and those neurons are now wired together. So it’s an incredible time-saver, and it’s affecting the part of the brain that’s holding the old patterning. So now the thing that’s on a 24-hour loop is different, because mixed in with whatever was happening when you were three, or in the womb, is an experience that, oh, but I’ve already made it to adulthood—and part of the Dalai Lama’s experience.

So it depends on the change pattern, but they’re all designed to get as visceral an experience of what you want, or of something more useful, as possible, because that’s what this really responds to: the visceralness, not the concept. As visceral an experience as you can. What does it look like, sound like, feel like, smell like, taste like? And get those neurons to meet these neurons back here and make new friends.

Tami Simon: Okay, the only thing you said that I had a moment of “Hmm, I don’t know if I buy that” was that if you do it even one time in a deep and thorough and complete way, it will start creating a true shift. Maybe I’m just stubborn or something, but it seems like I have to repeat a lot of these things quite often. I mean, now I’m on my almost 1,000th interview and, you know, it’s still kind of settling in. So that part I was like, “Hmm, is that really true?”

Michelle Masters: Well, I’ll tell you. Most of us had more than one rough experience in the beginning. So there can be other experiences you have to rewire. But done correctly, it can be a case of one-trial learning. And we’ve all seen one-trial learning in the opposite way. Like, right here is my cat, Finnegan, my orange kitty, Finnegan.

When he was little, he kept wanting to jump up on the heat stove in the living room, and we dissuaded him. Then one day we weren’t looking and he jumped up, and it was on, and he has never done it since. Now, 95 percent of the time that stove is not on, it’s completely safe. But that one-trial learning—he’s never doing that again, right?

So if the experience is visceral enough, is real enough, one time can make a huge difference. So it depends. The resource needs to be ideally of equal weight to what happened.

Tami Simon: When you say resource, can you say what you mean by that?

Michelle Masters: Yeah. I mean, the conscious awareness or knowing we’re wanting to connect to the trauma. So for instance, I taught for 25 years, and one day there was this group of students, and one of them, their mother had just died.

So the other two, I mean, entrepreneurs that they were, they decided, “Hey, we’re going to do some NLP and help her.” And so they created an anchor for her mother’s death. That’s just a trigger for that feeling of grief, which they didn’t really need. It was loaded anyway. And then they created another trigger for a happy day at the beach, and then they fired these off so they collapsed together, and then they came back to say it didn’t work.

Well, of course it didn’t work. That’s like throwing a marshmallow at a Sherman tank. The grief was so big and so primal, and the resource was a happy day at the beach. So the bigger the trauma is, it may take layers, but you also need a really compelling resource, which is an experience of something different.

You know, a lot of times when people have near-death experiences, they come back and they say, “I don’t have a fear of death anymore.” Because the experience they had in the near-death experience was so visceral and so compelling that that was enough. A lifetime worth of fear of death gone, because it was equal weight or greater. I would say greater. So the deeper the change is, you may need to do it on a couple of different aspects, but you also need the weight of the resources to be at least as close as you can to the same or bigger than what was going on.

Tami Simon: Okay. And in your example of standing in the position of the Dalai Lama as a placeholder of benevolent, tremendous, radiant goodness and feeling that—I think that that’s good. Now, in terms of money and the idea… Let’s just take a very common view of lack, not enough, and I want to stand and feel a different sense. How can you give our listeners right now a sense of that?

Michelle Masters: Right. Again, that’s going to be a very primal experience, where that got wired in, that feeling of lack, and a lot of us learned it ancestrally as well as having our own experience of it. And it’s actually not factually true. There’s more than enough… Well, actually, nobody knows how much money there is in the world.

There’s no fixed amount of money in the world. It’s not based on precious metals anymore. It’s a mass hallucination of value, and there’s no limits on value. Even before that, when they thought there was a limited amount of money, they will tell you there was enough—there’s enough money and resources in the world for every man, woman, and child.

The problem is hoarding, right? There are people who are hoarding a lot of resources out of fear, and people who are not allowing it, who are living in scarcity because of fear. So that fear is really primal and typically unquestioned. So one of the things that I start with, typically, with people is finding out how far… Like, when did that start? Because for a lot of people, it started in the womb. And the first thing that I will often anchor in is to get the adult part of them that knows, “Look, you’re here in the year 2026. We know there was enough. You made it this far, yeah,” and anchor that and take it in to the parts of them in the womb who are still wondering if they’re going to make it even out of the womb, right?

Because we don’t change ages. We just collect them. So updating those younger parts that were afraid there wasn’t going to be enough to know, “No, you’ve already made it this far”—so childhood, 100 percent survivable. That’s a huge relief and a huge update. That in and of itself usually lets people exhale in a way they haven’t before.

Tami Simon: There’s a lot here obviously, and there’s a lot of layers, and there’s a lot of ways people come at it from different directions. I want to underscore one thing, because you were talking about being connected to value, but how it’s now a mass hallucination.

There’s no direct relationship to some finite gold or silver or anything like that. Okay. For me, when I broke through the zero-sum fallacy, which only happened a few years ago, it was really huge. And what happened—I’m just going to share this because I want to help our listeners, if there’s anybody there who still believes in it.

Some part of me, yeah, the conscious part of me, really believed that money was like a pizza pie, and that if I got a bigger slice, I was taking pizza away from other people at the table—my employees, my customers, all kinds of things. I really believed that. I operated from that idea. And it was a huge limitation.

And then I was talking to a very bright consultant—McKinsey, Harvard MBA graduate—and he just looked at me and he started laughing. And he was like, “Tami, you’re a bright woman. You don’t believe that, do you?” And I was like, “Well, some part of me does.” And then he proceeded to give me economics 101. And what I wanted to ask you is: even though now I know factually that the zero-sum fallacy is not true—as I make more money, I’m not taking it away from anyone; factually, I know that’s true in terms of how economics works, they’ll print more of it—some part of me still can get emotionally caught in that story, and I wonder if you can talk about that.

How come we get caught in believing this thing that even the intelligent part of us has seen through?

Michelle Masters: Yeah. I think it’s very primal and I think it goes back a long, long way, when people were fighting for animals and for food. Who knows? But there are a couple of analogies that I use that often help people to understand. One of the common blessings is wishing people health, wealth, and happiness.

So if you think about health—if you get healthier and healthier, are you making other people sick? Are you using up all the health in the world? And people go, “No, that’s crazy.” And I say, “If you get happy, are you bumming out the people in Darfur? Are you making people in Sri Lanka depressed because you’re using up all the happiness?”

Most people can understand it like, oh, health and happiness. Yeah, the more people that are happy, the more happiness there is. The more that are healthy, the more health there is. And money actually operates along the same concept. It’s just breaking that really old model of there’s only so much and we have to fight for it, we have to guard it, we have to protect it, and on and on.

Tami Simon: In Wired for Money, you have a section on this zero-sum fallacy, and you have a very powerful section on what you call our unconscious loyalties. And you also reference the founder of constellation work, Bert Hellinger, as calling these entanglements.

I wonder if you can talk some… Because I think most of us have these entanglements, this unconscious loyalty. There we were in the womb with those parents, and the first three years when all these things got wired, let alone the ancestral loyalties we have, and they’re so hard to shake. And you’re very clear about why, and I wonder if you can address that here for our listeners.

Michelle Masters: Yeah. So Bert Hellinger—I was lucky enough to get to study… I’m that old, I got to study with Bert Hellinger while he was still alive. And he talked about these as being sourced out of a need to belong. And belonging first—for some reason, as human beings, we compute our belonging in terms of conformity.

When we’re like the people we come from, we feel like we belong. When we’re different, our belonging feels threatened, right? One of these things is not like the other kind of thing. It’s very basic. And one of the examples I give in the book, but it’s just so common, is that we feel guilty when we have it better than other people, especially the people of our tribe.

So if you go out to a restaurant with friends now as an adult, it’s a good restaurant, and your appetizer comes first. Now, you know everybody’s appetizer is coming. They all tell you, “Go, eat it while it’s hot.” But it just feels so weird to be eating your delicious coconut shrimp or whatever it is when nobody else has any.

Just on a very primal level it feels wrong. So people can do it. Most feel off about it, and they’ll try to share their three shrimp with everybody, or they’ll just wait. They’ll just wait until everybody’s got food. And so this is one of the ways it plays out, and the other way that it plays out is the desire we have as human beings to help and heal the people we love.

So when an infant is conceived into a family, they don’t have any conscious thought yet, but they feel everything in the family field. And kids in general, they have very little cognitive understanding for quite a while, but they feel everything, including the things that adults are not even noticing they’re feeling, that are running below the surface.

The kids feel it all, and their instinct is to want to help. There’s probably never been a child born in the history of humanity who did not want to heal their family. There’s definitely never been a child born in the history of humanity who has pulled it off. But they all try, and they try in really predictable ways, and the first way a child tries to heal their parents is through love. “I will love them so much that it will all be okay.”

And because their love is so pure and so big, and because they have zero sense of proportion, it feels like it will work. Of course it will work. How could this love not work? It never works. If it worked, people would be instantly healed upon the birth of their first child. It’d be, “Congratulations, it’s a boy, it’s a girl, it’s a them,” and they’d be like, “What was… You know, dear? I thought I was anxious and attachment avoidant. I frankly thought you were a narcissist, borderline, alcoholic. But we had a baby, and it’s all fine.” Like, everybody would be instantly healed, but that doesn’t happen.

So then the kid goes to plan B, which is, “Here, I will take the pain on me. I will be the one with the pain so that you can be okay.” And we glorify this, by the way. We glorify when people sacrifice themselves for others, right? And so every kid wants to be a hero. Who doesn’t want to be a hero? So they try and take the pain on themselves.

If that actually worked, if it was like snake venom that you could suck out of somebody’s leg, maybe it would work. But it doesn’t. All the kid ends up doing is cloning it off, and the parents or ancestors still have all that pain.

Tami Simon: Michelle, let me ask you a question. Here’s someone listening at whatever age they are, and they say, “You know, truth be told, I’m still trying to make XYZ parent happy. I’m still trying… That’s why I’m trying to accomplish this, that. I don’t know how to shake it. I don’t know how to shake it.”

Michelle Masters: And honestly, this is the hardest thing to get people to shake. With the stuff that’s stored in the neurology, that’s a much more straightforward change. With this stuff, because it’s not actually stored in the neurology, it’s sort of like an ancestral cloud, kind of like the iCloud, which apparently you can access. I’ve never been able to, but it’s like a field of consciousness.

Bert Hellinger called it the family conscience or the family soul. It is driven by love, not fear—because fear is so much more straightforward to work with—and it is really hard to get people to stop. And I can never guarantee, if it’s a loyalty, that I can get them to let it go.

It gets easier as people get older. People in their 20s and even in their 30s still have hope they can heal their parents, or families. The older people get, the more they start to realize, “Oh yeah, this is never probably going to work.” If people have children, I will sometimes shamelessly leverage that, because it’s like, “Okay, the longer you keep doing this, the more your kids are going to try and do it for you,” which is, you know, a little manipulative, but it’s for a good cause.

But it is the hardest thing to get people to stop doing. You know, they did studies. I’ve been doing this work since 1996, the constellation work. It was seen as kind of fringe, and then it became more mainstream. But in 2024, the 80th anniversary of D-Day, there was a scientific study that released data showing that patterns of PTSD were showing up on the D-Day survivors, were showing up two to three generations downstream physically in their body, even though they weren’t there.

They were carrying the PTSD. So this is the hardest thing as someone who works in this field, the hardest thing to get people to let go. But if they can, it often makes the biggest difference.

Tami Simon: In Wired for Money, you share many different stories of workshop participants and clients, people you’ve worked with who made changes. But I wanted to talk to you for a moment, Michelle, about you, and what one of the entanglements might have been that you discovered in yourself and how you shifted it.

Michelle Masters: Yeah. Well, I said I tried this stuff all out on me, and I was doing a pattern, a pattern that’s there to find out your subconscious relationship to money. And because, like I said, I had no money, I had no interest in money, I had no knowledge about money. And when I did this exercise—

Tami Simon: Which is what you’re going to teach me about money, Michelle.

Michelle Masters: When I did this exercise, I realized the relationship I had with money was not a good one. It was kind of this, “I am not interested in money. I am a spiritual person. I am interested in more important things,” right? And I started to realize, because when you strip everything—all the family stuff, and all the beliefs, and the societal stuff, and all that—when you strip that out of money… And I’ve seen this in 20 years of workshops all over the world.

When you remove all the stuff we project onto money off of it, the energy always shows up as the energy of blessings. And what person in their right mind would say, “I am more evolved than blessings”? You know? It kind of short-circuits that. And I realized for me, part of that came from an insecurity about who I was, and so I was trying to be more by being spiritual.

For other people, it’s different stuff that’s in the way of them with their money, but that was the one for me. And when I came to understand what a blessing this is, it just feels like a way the universe wants to love us and bless us. One way. Not the only way, but one way the universe wants to love and bless us.

And I realized kind of how obnoxious my relationship with it had been. Like, you know, “I’m better than you,” when it was there trying to bless and love me. And it had a lot to do with my dad, because my dad was all about money. And so, shocker. And so I worked on that, and it got better. This is the one exercise that I still repeat a couple times a year.

And about 10 years in, I noticed that the energy of money felt really clean and beautiful and warm and benevolent, but I still felt disconnected. And I took a moment, I’m like, “Okay, who does this disconnection remind me of?” And instantly I’m like, “Oh, I’m playing out my mom’s pattern.”

My parents are both gone now, so they wouldn’t have an issue with me. They’re much more cheerful now, and my mom has stayed so close to me. But she was fairly disconnected from most things while she was living. Good reason. She had good reason. And I had kind of taken that on without realizing it wasn’t even mine.

So when I moved that out of the way, it was like instantly this space opened up between me and money that was just this beautiful experience of love and care.

Tami Simon: You said this is an exercise that you do, that you check in with it every six months or a year. What is the exercise? Can you share it with us?

Michelle Masters: Yeah. It’s in the book. It’s a Fritz Perls exercise, actually—he was a psychoanalyst—where you use three chairs. Originally, it was for when people have had a difficult experience with another human being. So you have a chair for you and a chair for them, and you sit down in your chair and replay the experience, whatever the bad interaction was, the way you and God and everyone know it actually happened, right?

And then you stand up, you leave yourself in that chair, and you go sit down in the other person’s chair and just feel what it’s like to be in their body, which is a huge eye-opener, typically. And notice what they were experiencing. And then you stand up, and you go sit in the observer chair and watch the interaction between those two people, and then you come back to your chair with the advantage of these different perspectives.

So that’s how it was originally designed. I wanted to take it and apply it to the context of money. So you have a chair for you and a chair for the energy of money, and the first thing you do is notice, how comfortable do you feel across from money? What does money look like? What’s the energy? Does it feel like there’s a connection?

And then I have people go sit in that chair and notice what it’s like. And if it feels all warm and glowy, great. But quite often there’s family stuff in there. There’s, you know, people will say, “Money feels distant, hard to connect to. It feels cold. It feels judgmental,” whatever.

And so I’ll ask them, “Okay, who does that remind you of?” And we’ll start taking that person’s energy out of money, just moving it out of the chair. And it’s like layers that come off. Sometimes when one person’s energy moves, the whole thing changes. And you’ll see people’s face when they sit back down—it’s just the energy of money.

It’s instant. Their face lights up. There’s this glow and this sweet warmth and happiness, and that is their first experience of the kind of essence of the blessing of money, and that’s a beautiful moment.

Tami Simon: I love that exercise. I think it’s very accessible. I think people can try it. You have a chapter in the book where you’re talking about money and, jokingly—because as I said, you’re funny, Michelle—personal ads. And if you were writing a personal ad to money and you were like, “You know, I’m terrified of you. I want to ignore you, but I want you to show up all the time and be there for me when I want you, but otherwise I don’t want to pay any attention to you,” you’d never get a first date. And I thought to myself, “This is a good way to discover how we’re relating.”

But then I also had this voice in me that said, “God, you know, people personify money.” It’s sitting in a chair, and I’m talking to it like someone I—a partnership, a relationship. Is that really accurate, to quote-unquote personify the energy of money?

Michelle Masters: Well, I don’t think it is personified, but I think it has become personified, and so it’s a way of finding out whose personhood is in there that’s mucking up the relationship for me. You know, it’s kind of like the sun. Does the sun have personality quirks? I don’t think so. And I don’t think the energy of money does either.

In its purest form, I think it is the energy of blessings. It’s benevolent. It’s warm. It’s not attached. It’s not like, “Oh, I need to save her.” It’s just this warm, glowy, loving, blessing energy that’s there if we will allow it. So this was a way of—because people would talk to me that way.

They’d come to me and they’d say, I can’t tell you how often I heard this, “I don’t want to have to think about money. I don’t want to have to deal with it. I just want it to be there when I need it.” And I started to feel bad for money. This was even before I did this workshop. It’s like money was some sort of burden, some sort of nuisance that they had to put up with.

I thought, “That is not an attractive relationship.” If you advertised, “Yeah, I don’t want to have to think about you. I don’t want to have to deal with you. I just want you to be there when I need you. Send photo.” It was a way to make it visible to people how they were relating to money.

Tami Simon: Let me ask you a question. The energy of blessing, money energy—how, in your felt experience, do you compare that to the energy of love, the energy of holiness, the energy of joy? Does it have a specific color, texture? Or no, these are all the good feelings and they all kind of feel the same?

Michelle Masters: It definitely is very—not identical—very close to the feeling of love, but without an attachment. A love that’s unconditional, that’s not attached to… And when I step into it, it also has—how would we say this in English?

Tami Simon: You can use whatever language you want.

Michelle Masters: Well, feelings. Feelings don’t always translate that well into English. It has a feeling of… There’s not a big enough word for it, but like a win-win.

Like, when we accept a blessing, it amplifies the energy of blessing throughout the universe. And so it’s like—not that money or that energy needs us, but when we accept it, we become amplifiers of that energy, of that love. That sort of joyous interaction between spirit and creation is the best—well, not a great way of saying it. It’s the best I can do on short notice.

Tami Simon: One thing that I find remarkable about you, Michelle, as someone who’s written a book called Wired for Money, is you’re very humble and grounded, and you’re not flashy.

Michelle Masters: No. No, I’m not flashy. I’m not flashy. I’ve got a great face for radio.

Tami Simon: You’re funny, as I said. In the beginning you said, “I’ll talk about the types of brains we have and how to get into our subconscious beliefs and rewire.” And then there’s the woo-woo work that you also added into the field. And when you teach, even before the workshop starts, people are feeling, quote-unquote, “the field.” Tell us more about that. And without any disparagement of any kind, you know, quote-unquote “woo-woo,” there’s obviously something that in your work and in your workshops—how do you understand it?

Michelle Masters: Well, you know, for a long time, science operated with this sort of 18th-century view that the universe operated like a machine. There were rules and laws, and that’s no longer the prevailing wisdom. For quite a while, the prevailing wisdom has been that the universe operates like—and especially currently, there’s been a lot of stuff published about this—the universe actually operates like consciousness.

And when you come down to the basis of matter, there’s nothing there other than what scientists have begun to call either the field or consciousness. And so there are parts of us that experience ourselves as living in a body with neurology, right? And we experience an outside reality.

And so the NLP stuff is really good for working with those parts of us. And there are parts of us that experience ourselves as part of a family and a lineage and a history, so that ancestral piece is good for working with that. But we’re also these eternal souls that, at least in my experience, existed before the body, will continue to exist after it, and are experiencing other things even while we’re in the body.

The soul is so much vaster than anything that can be encapsulated in one life. And so this is a way of working with that aspect of us that is eternal, is on some level connected to everything—and being able to acknowledge that and work from that place of there is no time. Like, any physicist worth their salt will tell you that linear time, a progression in one direction, is not… And the same is true of space. Like, we have this idea that distance is a real thing, and not so much. That’s probably beyond what we’re talking about today, but we have parts of us that do exist in a nonlinear, nonlocal, no-time, no-space field. And so much of us is there, and so much of our creativity is available unfettered there, that I want to be able to meet that part of people as well.

And change on that level can happen instantaneously. It can happen before the cause, because there is no time. So effects can show up before the cause technically happens. For me, that’s very comfortable, and I know for a lot of people that’s not. And I understand that. I tell people, “You don’t need to believe what I believe for this stuff to work.”

So, good news for everybody.

Tami Simon: For that person who tuned in because they have anguish around money—how does this nonlinearity and non-progression of time apply to their working through their money stuff and finding this blessing amplification power in their life?

Michelle Masters: Well, when they buy the book, you know, or take a class, they enter the field of consciousness of the book or the class. They are now able to access that field of consciousness. And within that field of consciousness—which, I can’t say it was formed by me; I was a big part of forming it, but I never work alone.

I always have help. But that field of consciousness was set and then expanded and became its own field. So when you access the field of the class, whether you know it or not, on a very basic level, my belief that this can change for you is often stronger than people’s disbelief that it won’t, and is operational in the field.

And also my understandings and my experiences, and the experiences of everybody who’s gone through it and had changes, are in the field as well. So even though people aren’t consciously aware of them, they are now swimming in a different sea, and that sea is a lot more buoyant. It can work on someone’s behalf without them needing to believe it, know about it, know it’s there.

The density is lighter and the amplification for change is easier. Does that make any sense?

Tami Simon: You said you never work alone, and I don’t think you were referring to, like, the talented Sounds True publishing team that helped. Who are you referring to, or what?

Michelle Masters: Yeah. Well, how far out do you want to go, Tami?

Tami Simon: I want the truth.

Michelle Masters: Okay. Truth is, I don’t come to Earth very often. There’s often not a lot here for me to do. So when I was in my 20s in New York—and I don’t know that I’ve shared this anywhere public—I was doing experiments in consciousness, and I was trying to astral travel, and I was getting nowhere.

And then one night, in the middle of the night, I got a phone call in the middle of the night, and it woke me up. And I woke up really fast. And I woke up so fast that I actually wasn’t in my body. But that brought me back, and I slammed back into my body. I came in at a weird angle. I had difficulty walking for two weeks, I was so sore from that crash landing.

But because it happened so fast, I remembered where I’d been. And I was at a meeting. It was like a council meeting, kind of like a city council meeting, but incredibly—the most productive, cooperative, elevated, no ego agenda. It was just all of us working on this project. It was so familiar. It’s like, oh, I go there all the time. So the goal is not to get me out of the body. The goal is to keep me in. But I had always felt that connection, and I never had anything to attach it to.

And after that, it’s like, okay, that’s part of it. And when I would teach, things would happen sometimes. I would know things that I never learned, but I knew them, and later on they were verified. You know, factual information about physics, about science. Or I could sometimes do things that I shouldn’t have been able to do. I move time. Time is very malleable. I don’t do it very often, because I get a temporal headache. Like, literally the temporal lobes hurt.

Tami Simon: Can you say what you mean by that? You move time—what does that mean?

Michelle Masters: I can just imagine what some people are going to think hearing this. That’s why I don’t share it that often. But I was doing a Money Magic workshop and—when you do a big deep piece of change around a deep piece of identity or something, people need time after that before you do another big piece of change. So I have it structured better now so I don’t have to do this, where there’ll be a big piece of change and then there’ll be either a break or something lighter, more easy.

But back then, we were toward the end of the day, we had time for one more change piece, and they really needed the piece on worth, self-worth, which is a big piece. And we had just done a big piece, and I knew emotionally they just didn’t have it in the tank. And so I felt into, okay, when will this group actually be ready? We were supposed to end at 6:00. It’s 5:00 p.m., and it was like 7:00 p.m. they’ll be ready for another dose. I’m like, “Well, I am not staying here till 7:00 p.m. They can’t do it now.” So I told them, I said, “Look, this is the situation. I’m just going to move 7:00 p.m. into now.”

And honestly, I couldn’t do it now to show off for you, just for that. But at that moment, because I needed to, I knew I could do it. I didn’t have a doubt in my mind. So I moved it into now. I watched the entire class’ heads—they all snapped back in unison. And this one woman went, “That should not have worked.” But we did the change piece. When it was done, I moved time back, and they all went, “Huh.”

And I’ve had to do things like that other times, in the moment, because it was in service and I needed to, and I knew I could. And I don’t know if it was me, if it was somebody who was, you know, one of the souls that works with me. But I never do it alone.

And one of the most beautiful ways that expressed itself once was: I was working with a new group who didn’t know me from Adam, and I didn’t know them. And I had to ask them questions to start off. And like the second guy, I said, “You know, what do you want to come out of this?” And the second guy, this young man, he just raised his hand and he said, “I just want to be the best version of me.”

And in that instant, I saw him the way the universe sees him, is the only way I can describe it. I saw him, and I was overcome with emotion. It was a while before I could start to talk. I still can feel it. I saw how beautiful he was, how complete he was, how enough he was, and I was both teary from the awe of him and the grief that he didn’t yet get to experience himself that way. And so it took me a while to talk before I could say, “Buddy, box ticked. You’re the best version of you. Will you change and grow? Sure. But you’re all good, you know?” And that expanded experience—that’s the thing that’s most important to me when I teach.

Tami Simon: I do have one other kind of follow-up question. You said, “I don’t come to Earth very often.” Okay, where are you normally, and why are you here now?

Michelle Masters: God, you’re going to get me into so much trouble, Tami. I work across different times—I have memories of the future—and different dimensions. But what’s going on on Earth right now is so important that a bunch of us were like, “Yeah, put us in. We’re happy.” This is such a phenomenal turning point. But yeah, I work across, and I’m never alone. And I sometimes get frustrated with medicine because I remember medicine from the future.

And some of it’s starting to show up now, which is so exciting—about sound and frequency and light. Because for so long, those of us who talked about that were kind of labeled as, you know, not intellectually right in the head, so to speak. But now, even Tesla said the future of medicine is frequency.

And so in those other times and those other places, especially the times we would call future—it’s all happening at once, but we would call them future—it is so much more about vibrational frequency, dimensional aspects. So if there are other people who want to travel to this planet, they are not dragging a ship, a rocket ship, through space the way we’re trying to do.

You can either do it through portals—that’s an easy way. But it’s a little like if I hold up the book, for instance, okay? So say you’re here, and you want to be here. If you have to move your finger, you can do this or you can do this. But with your eyes, if you’re here and you want to be here, you can just switch your eyes from one point to the other. How long does that take?

Tami Simon: A blink.

Michelle Masters: A blink. Yeah. So you can access—random access memory, right? That’s one of the things that sped up computer chips. Time and space can actually be accessed, say, randomly, because nobody ever does it randomly, but they can be accessed without all the processes we think you have to go through.

So the work, no matter where it is, is almost always based in love, no matter what time period it’s in. The expansion of the soul—of a human soul here, or wherever you are, whatever you want to call other life forms—it’s almost always about the expansion of the soul, but from a place of sort of joy and love. It’s not a disciplined… It’s a place where the heart and the creativity come together and go out for a ride and see where we can take this thing, if that makes sense.

Tami Simon: You know, Michelle, I thought you were the neuro-linguistic programming, constellation work, money lady, but you are a mysterious love force that I feel so honored to meet, and we’re going to have to have a second conversation. We’re going to have to, because there’s so much here. For now, I do have to ask you, though, one follow-up, because I don’t want to leave it, which is: yes, this time is so important. Many of us feel it. What is your perspective on this time?

Michelle Masters: Yeah. I get emotional just thinking about it. Tami, we have front row seats for one of the greatest leaps forward in consciousness ever. And, you know, the analogy I use—if you’ve ever remodeled anything in your house, you know from almost the day it starts to almost the day it ends, it’s utter chaos and you wish you’d never been born.

And then at the end, you have this beautiful new kitchen, deck, house, whatever. And we are in the middle of one of the most fundamental remodels of reality and expression there has ever been. And I feel so privileged to be here.

How I see it is that the focus is moving from fear and control—that’s my actual goal, to take down the wattage of fear on the planet and help people to experience the beauty they are. If it comes through money or a health workshop, relationship workshop, wherever, I’ll meet them wherever.

But it’s to reduce the fear, eventually make the fear unnecessary, connect them back to the beauty they are and the incredible power they are. And I see it happening. Even COVID—I saw that as a huge factor in getting a lot of people to stop and reevaluate everything. And so, you know, the technology for free energy already exists.

There’s a lot of stuff that would make our lives already the paradise we want that, through fear of not having enough money or control, have been suppressed. When nobody has to be afraid that they won’t have enough, that they won’t have enough money or control or whatever it is, that there’s enough for everybody, then the whole paradigm shifts into one of, “Okay, then what do we want to do with this gift of experience?”

It switches to a much more heart-forward, also innovative experience of, “Yeah, let’s take our hearts and brains out for a spin and see what wonders we can create.” That’s what I see happening.

Tami Simon: I’ve been talking with Michelle Masters, a surprising, magical person. Reduce the fear, amplify the field of blessings. I’ve so enjoyed this conversation. With Sounds True, she’s the author of a new book. It’s called Wired for Money: Change the Patterns That Block You from Thriving. Michelle, more to come between you and me and Sounds True. Thanks so much.

Michelle Masters: Thank you, Tami.

Tami Simon: Thank you.

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