The Fully Mindful with Melissa Chureau
The Fully Mindful podcast explores what it is to be fully mindful and present in our everyday lives, uncover our worth and discover our purposes. Host of TFM, Melissa Chureau is a neurodivergent lawyer, mindfulness teacher, and embodiment and breathwork coach. On TFM, Melissa interviews inspiring creatives, wellness leaders, and social disruptors about how they have discovered their purpose(s), authentic wellness, and the value of their work on the world at large.
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The Fully Mindful with Melissa Chureau
Outer Chaos, Inner Calm: Anthony Abbagnano on Belonging, Breathwork, and Healing from Within
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What if your breath could heal your deepest wounds and reconnect you with your truest self? In this transformative conversation, host Melissa welcomes Anthony Abagnano, founder of Alchemy of Breath and author of the newly released book "Outer Chaos, Inner Calm," for a profound exploration of how breathwork can reshape our relationship with trauma, presence, and authentic living.
Anthony shares his journey from being an eight-year-old outsider in an English boarding school to discovering the transformative power of breath through an unexpected childhood experience. This early awakening revealed a "still point" of peace amid his isolation—a foundation that would later inform his life's work helping others find their way home to themselves.
The conversation delves deep into our collective misunderstanding of trauma. Rather than merely developing coping mechanisms, Anthony advocates for true resolution through conscious connected breathing—a technique that creates communication between our conscious mind, subconscious patterns, and what many call a higher power. "Most breath workers do make up all kinds of different breath patterns," Anthony explains, "but remembering to breathe is half the job." This simple yet profound insight underscores how reconnection with our breath can transform our entire experience of life.
Perhaps most compelling is Anthony's gentle challenge to those who believe they haven't experienced trauma. With compassion and wisdom, he suggests that claiming to be trauma-free often indicates dissociation rather than absence. From birth experiences to witnessing others' suffering, trauma shapes us in ways we rarely recognize. By becoming "detectives of our own experience" and exploring our lives in seven-year increments, we can uncover how past events influence our present behaviors.
The episode concludes with a beautiful conversation on belonging. Anthony points out that "belonging" contains "be longing"—suggesting that our state of longing, though uncomfortable, is worthy of exploration. When we can witness our longing rather than frantically trying to satisfy it, we gain agency and avoid attaching ourselves to destructive habits out of desperation to fit in.
Ready to transform your relationship with breath and discover what lies beyond the chaos? Join us for this life-changing conversation, and consider attending one of Anthony's free Sunday breathwork sessions through Alchemy of Breath's "Breathe the World" initiative. Your journey back to yourself may begin with just one conscious breath.
More about Anthony and his work:
Free Sunday Breathwork Sessions
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Welcome to the Fully Mindful Podcast. I'm your host, melissa. I designed this podcast for you. I'm so happy you're here. We are talking about what it means to live with more intention, creativity and authenticity, so we can make aligned connections. I'm a neurodivergent lawyer turned coach who found the healing power of breathwork and the powerful impact of mindfulness as we navigate this wild and beautiful ride of life. Here at the Fully Mindful, we dive deep with inspiring guests, share solo mini-sodes that are packed with tools you can apply immediately, and I mix it up a bit with tangents and sidebars where my friend and host of the New World Normal podcast, debbie Harrell, joins us for some down-to-earth, sometimes random but always meaningful conversations. If you're ready to breathe, reflect and grow, you're in the right place. Let's get fully mindful. Well, hello everyone. This is Melissa with the Fully Mindful. I'm honored to welcome someone whose work and deep inner journey resonates with my own.
Speaker 1Anthony Abagnano is the founder of Alchemy of Breath, a global breathwork training school and community rooted in healing, connection and awakening. He's also the author of a powerful book called Outer Chaos, inner Calm, which beautifully traces his own transformation, through illness, loss, life and spiritual reckoning, into a new way of being. Like many of us, I've also walked a winding path, living with trauma, a longing for belonging and challenges of my own, with neurodivergence and addiction. For me, mindfulness and breathwork has become a steady anchor and a spark of awakening, and that's why I'm so excited for this conversation. Anthony's story is about more than just personal healing, although that's powerful in and of itself. It's about how we return to ourselves, to presence, to each other. Through breath, awareness, curiosity, we can learn to meet the chaos around us with calm within and, from this place, create something more whole, more true, more real. So welcome, anthony, it's so great to have you.
Speaker 2Wow, Thank you for such a great intro and I love that return to ourselves that feels grounding to hear actually when I hear you say that yes, yes indeed.
Speaker 1Well, I like to start this conversation with what's most alive for you today.
Speaker 2Today, what's alive for me is that I love what I do so much that I could do it every waking minute. I just feel so fortunate and so grateful to be able to share from my experience and from my being and to hopefully bring hope to people that returning home isn't so scary and that we don't really need to go anywhere else because wherever we go, we'll find ourselves anyway right.
Speaker 1So, yeah, something about that, what you just said, really resonated and it kind of like capped off my day returning home yeah, and so often, so many of us, I mean, we're on this journey, we go about our lives, we're living our lives and there's something, there's a sense of disconnection for many of us along the way and we don't we can't really place our finger on it necessarily Just something's like wow, I'm I mean, I've talked to so many people like this and I've experienced this myself myself where we seem to be doing all the right things in air quotes, there, we're doing all the right things, we're checking all the boxes, and yet something's just feeling off and disconnected.
Speaker 1And you talk about that in your book Outer Chaos, inner Calm. How, I mean the first few pages, I started reading this and I thought did Anthony write this for me? I had that very strange experience, like I've only met you once and you somehow wrote the book before we met. And you talk about that, this feeling of disconnection that we have. How were you able to get so intimate and understand that disconnection that you could describe it so well?
Speaker 2Thank you. I was actually an outsider as a young boy. I was put into boarding school when I was just eight years old and it was a very harrowing experience for me. I didn't really understand why I'd been put away from my family and my mother, who was Italian, was not really very Italian. She was living in England and had to become English because this was just after the war, so I didn't get a lot of nourishment from her, and then I was kind of deposited in this place and, being half Italian, I was not welcomed. In those days.
Speaker 2Back in the early 60s, it was still a time of being marginalized if you weren't pure-blooded english and so, being an outsider, I began to observe in fact I run workshops before on being the outsider and what a powerful experience it can become if we can move away from that sense of damage that we experience from it and transform it into a superpower, because it really is. We're usually the ones who speak the least and see the most and we tend to accumulate this awareness of the human condition and for me that was really important to see people I mean especially boarding school. People don't. They're not. We're not conscious as children, we're not conscious in the way that we would wish to be, perhaps, and so I saw a lot of brutal treatment myself. And there was one other kid who was Jewish. I remember him being quite persecuted as well. I remember him being quite persecuted as well, and this gave us the opportunity to really sit on the edge and watch and not to lose the moment and to also understand that even these people who are kind of mean, they were just children and they didn't mean harm. It was because they were harmed themselves Right. It was because they were harmed themselves Right At other people.
Speaker 2And that's, I think, very early for me that I understood that hurt people hurt people. And I was because of an early breathwork experience when I was that age I was just eight I understood that there's got to be a better world and there's got to be a better way to manage this situation. So I was always kind of the kid who was trying to put things together. I was the youngster in my family and I was the one who'd ask everybody to come around and talk and sit together, and I was the one that kind of I think there's one in every family, right, there's, you know, someone's going to take the thread and try weave it through or carry the candle for the family to gather around. And that was my role in my family as the youngster, and so I've always sought to bring togetherness and community and ease to the human condition, and I've always been fascinated to explore it and to understand why.
Speaker 2Why I mean, it was just recent history for me when I was born the second war but why those behaviors occurred and how can they be forgivable, just like the behaviors that exist today. How can they become forgivable? Because if we don't go there, if we don't go into forgiveness, then we're going to repeat it. We're going to repeat the same issues again. And so I'm really in the book seeking to create an alternative to that that not just for our own being inside, that we can become more whole, but that we can also become an example, that by gaining our own agency we can also help other people.
Speaker 1Yeah, thank you for that. I think that's really powerful and a lot of the work that I try to do and that I do is about creating a sense of belonging, because really that is, I think, the antidote maybe for some of that disconnection. I think the antidote maybe for some of that disconnection is feeling like we truly belong for who we really are, not for the. To talk about your first breathwork experience that you alluded to earlier, when you were eight.
First Breathwork Experience at Age Eight
Speaker 2Can you? Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, it was. I also want to come back to the word belonging, because it is something, if we can touch on it a little bit later. But I was only eight and I I wasn't popular at school, as I said, and this boy who was, I wouldn't say a bully, but he'd never really treated me very well came up to me and and said hey, do you want to do an experiment? Why don't you breathe into this bag? And um, I was kind of craving someone's acceptance, so I said yeah, okay, I thought, okay, I'll go for it. And so he had me breathe into a paper bag, 20 very, very big, deep breaths. And then he came behind me and said okay, now exhale. He squeezed my chest from behind and then let me down to the ground, fortunately very gently.
Speaker 2And my experience, I think it was my first spiritual, it was my first real spiritual awakening to understand the suffering that I'd felt, that I was in, because I used to cry myself to sleep every night but to understand those feelings of loneliness and not belonging were nothing in comparison to the magnificence of that experience. I suppose it could be compared to a near-death experience as we see them reported today, like an instant knowing and an instant sense of grace and peace and the question and the answer becoming the same thing, that they kind of like wash each other and bathe each other, and a real arrival, arrival at a deep, deep inner peace. And I think from that point on I knew that that was possible and it was there sometimes and it wasn't at others. But my coming home, my returning home that you mentioned earlier, has always been about that still point, the still point from which anything can become possible. And I think, paradoxically, that still point also includes the state of confusion or learning in the unknown which we see.
Speaker 2You know, when we say to someone we're confused, it's an admission of some defeat, usually it's.
Speaker 2It indicates oh, I can't figure things out, but that's actually such a powerful place to be to accept that I can't figure this out. I'm just going to sit here and be an outsider to this experience and witness it and be curious and become the detective of it, and then something will become apparent, so that I think that's what it taught me. It taught me where home base was, that it wasn't in a successful relationship with a bully or, you know, or becoming his victim. It was really something much, much broader and I think since then I've understood that and I one of the things I teach. It doesn't matter what one would call their higher power, the god of their understanding, but my own experience says that if we don't believe in a higher power, then that higher power cannot help us. There's something, there's somebody, there's some entity, there's some benign force that's just waiting for us to awaken to it in order for it to be able to play through us I really like that.
Speaker 1I there's so many things than what you just said I was remembering. Well, I was thinking about, very interesting, that a person who was not a child, who was not very nice to you, kind of gave you that gift and how interesting that is that it came from that person. This experience, I mean, of course it was something you experienced internally but unbeknownst to this child who, whatever he thought he was doing, I'm sure he didn't think he was giving you this experience, right, this spiritual experience. So that's interesting, and I too was a bit of an outsider when I was a child and somehow what you were relating was reminding me of my first. I don't know if it was a breath work experience or a mindfulness experience, but we had this enormous tree in our backyard. We were living in Pennsylvania and we had this giant tree or at least that's how I remember it and I remember climbing it and kind of having this sense that I probably shouldn't be climbing this.
Speaker 1I had very pronounced ADHD when I was a child, but I had no impulse control and so I ended up climbing this tree very, very high and I thought I don't know how to get back down, but in that moment it was okay. I was getting a perspective that very few people probably had, from that tree, from that high up, and certainly that I had never had this experience of being truly present and seeing things for what they were, and it was in nature, and so I love that your experience was also unexpected and led to this different way of being and I think my climbing tree experience and I somehow have this recollection, I think, of the fire department having to be called, but it was a beautiful experience for me right To breathe, heavy, work hard, climb a tree, get perspective and in that moment, getting back to this idea of belonging, I can say that I felt like I belonged right there in that moment, even though there were no other people around. I just felt like I belonged, which was a very unusual feeling for me as an awkward young child. Yeah, so, yeah, so this idea oh sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 2That's exactly what my feeling was at that point that I belonged, notwithstanding what any human might tell me that I belonged, and what a powerful experience, right, that I belonged.
Speaker 1And what a powerful experience, right? Because, for whatever reason whether it was your experience because you were living as an Italian child in England and you know, or if it was the boarding school or all those things combined, it probably was not a very common experience for you until that moment to feel like I belong. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so, and it's fascinating, and you talk quite a bit about trauma in your book Outer Chaos, inner Calm. So what do you think the role is of trauma and disconnection and coming back home?
Speaker 2Well, at best trauma is our teacher, but it takes us quite a while to accept that the big T word is enough to make us tremble in our boots a little bit. There's so much more that we know about trauma now than we used to 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 years ago. I remember reading a trilogy by Pat Barker. I think it was called Remembrance or something I can't remember, but it's a book about the First World War, and a beautiful book that talks about what people are going through in the war and how they used to deal with trauma in those days. Thank goodness, we've moved a long, long way from there. We've moved through a period where you had to confront your trauma to get strong, and then we got to a place where we understood that actually confronting your trauma embeds it further, and every time we're triggered and it's reawakened, it actually becomes more normal for us to be reawakened that way into the trauma. And now we're at a stage of understanding that there are ways that we can not just manage our trauma but also find resolution with our trauma that are unfortunately not yet mainstream but but are functional and actually work. And it's now possible to achieve this resolution without having to relive or revisit the trauma as well, and I think the breath is particularly helpful with that.
Speaker 2I think just to quantify a little bit what I mean when I say the breath, because my wife tells me when I put in posts or emails I say the breath, she says people don't know what that means. I want to just rewind a little bit and explain the or I can't possibly explain it. I'm a student of the breath but I can hopefully convey some sense of proportion. My own belief, as someone who's worked with the breath since I was a youngster, is that one breath, the contemplation of one inhale and one exhale, is worthy of more than a lifetime of reflection and study. That's how big it is when you think of the different elements that are involved in one breath. For example, argon is something that never disappears and we all breathe it in and out and we're all breathing the argon that's come from someone else. So this concept that we have, which is relatively new in the western world, of oneness, is actually true in the sense that we're all breathing the same air. We're all actually breathing the same ingredients. So that would mean that we're breathing the same ingredient that the buddha breathed, or jesus christ or muhammad breathed, but also the same air that hitler breathed, or mussolini did, or a mass murderer. There's a connection between all of us, and I think that part of my work is helping people understand that it's okay. That's okay that it's perhaps a doorway to us being able to accept that the things that we need to keep hidden, the things that we feel shame about, don't actually belong to us we don't have a monopoly on this thing, it belongs to all of us and that sometimes we wear other people's shame unconsciously. Indeed.
Speaker 2Ancestral trauma is a perfect example of that, or the pain body that Eckhart Tolle speaks of. That can be a national pain body or a cultural pain body. It's not trauma that we've been subjected to directly, but it still has a very strong effect on us, and so, having somewhat described this history of trauma discovery, I would say that it feels like we haven't even reached the dawn of what we're going to find out about trauma, but what we do know is, more and more we discover how much it informs our lives, and so to to look at how we've tried to cope with it in the past is not where I feel we're going to find the right answers to resolve it, because I see that we settle, we cope with trauma, we keep calm and we carry on, like you see on t-shirts and yeah, you can't. You know, a brittle sense of calmness is not really calm. It's a dissociation from over identification which, if that's conscious, that's a good thing, but if it's automatic and unconscious, we're not actually. We're trying to dodge the bullet, but the bullet will eventually find us.
Speaker 2So my work with trauma is really about not settling for coping mechanisms, but to actually look at the coping mechanisms and when they were born, which would have been the point of trauma and not so much focused on the trauma as focused on that part of who we are that got the problem that occurred to us. This person who's going to resolve the trauma is not the perpetrator. We can't look to the perpetrator, even if they say sorry and we forgive them. That doesn't resolve the trauma. We actually need to move into the role of our own caretaker in order to be able to give the reassurance that that part of us needs to reunite with who we are. And so, in a world that takes pills and finds habits and addictions and ways of coping, I really stand for accepting that as a temporary possibility. It's not that I put it down in any way my goodness it helped us at the time but what seems to historically happen is we keep using the same system. So that's why addiction develops is because one of the reasons is because we keep relying on that system to find the sense of connection we lost or some kind of relief.
Speaker 2And I'm really what we do, what I do with alchemy and in the book is speak more of holding out for the resolution. Just for people who are curious, like what do you mean? Relief and resolution? I think the distinction. I have a sweet little example that I can use to help distinguish, if you know any of your musical or if you understand the sense of an octave. An octave is eight notes and the first note and the eighth note are actually the same note, but one is one octave higher than the other, so there are seven notes and then the first note gets repeated. So an octave might be do re mi fa sol la ti. Do is how the latins sing it. But if I was to go, do re mi fa sol la ti, and now we're all in this state of yeah and what's, going to happen next.
Speaker 2It's like suspense, it's not comfortable and now we can like, now the cells can settle a little bit and that's a really, really important moment to develop the robustness and the strength to explore and I'm using the music as a metaphor, but we know what that's like in life. We also know it exists in every story, even every commercial. There's an arc of interest where things reach a peak and there's a moment of suspense and then there's a moment of resolution. It happens in music all the time, modern music, every kind of music, except perhaps for some abstract jazz, jazz which you're always waiting for that moment of resolution and they keep playing with it and pushing it away, and so that can be quite frustrating for some people to listen to jazz, because it doesn't wrap up with a ribbon at the end of it sometimes.
Speaker 2But it's in that little piece of unknown there. And that where the confusion lies and has been said that where there's the most confusion there's the most possibility. So if it was dan siegel that said that, so if we, if we can learn to make that our point of discovery, then we begin to develop this robustness just by being willing to stay in that unknown. That then the next time it happens it's more welcome. And the next time it happens, then it's not just more welcome, but it becomes a sign like, oh, something very different can happen here.
Speaker 2This is like a fulcrum, like a pivotal moment that not a great deal of effort is required to understand things in a very different way. And the breath, using breathing practices, is to me the most effective way to reach that pinnacle where you can pivot and you can change direction and change your understanding. I've always found breath to be the most vivid and practical and cheap way, and we don't have to buy anything, take anything, pretend anything. It's just a very grounding experience and we often use the term coming home, your breath work. There's a sense of restoration, because this period of discovery does conclude with a sense of resolution.
Speaker 1Yeah, there's so much in what you said. Of course I was thinking about the collective trauma that we have as a culture, as a society, and the intergenerational trauma and how we cope with that, like you said, our coping mechanisms. I appreciate that you have clarified that they make sense in the moment, right? You know Gabor Mate talks about it. Certainly 12-step folks talk about alcohol or other substances or behaviors. Doesn't matter what it is as a solution in the moment, right, it's the solution in the moment until it stops working as a solution, right.
The Power of Conscious Connected Breath
Speaker 1And we need to look to something else, something deeper, to find our way out of that disconnection and that trauma. Whatever that trauma experience is, whether it's our own or the collective intergenerational trauma is whether it's our own or the collective intergenerational trauma. And I love that you're able to tap into the breath in order to, as one of the tools for the deeper tool, to uncover and, like you said, go into the confusion a bit to uncover what's really there. And so can you say a little bit more about how the breath helps us, I guess, access that confusion and come out through the other side?
Speaker 2Yeah, I can say masses. How many years do you have? This is my life, so I still feel like I've discovered a tiny percentage of how much the breath can really do. But there are several ways how much the breath can really do. But there are several ways in which the breath helps.
Speaker 2Perhaps the biggest and easiest takeaway is the ability to remember to breathe. It's actually more important than the breath itself, or at least half as important as what happens when you breathe. So it's half of the work is in a situation that might trouble you to lean into your breath, to learn to use your breath. In fact, I have a one. One of my students said he saw emotional intelligence being the ability to take a breath when you don't want to remember all of those times that you've been upset. You're in the supermarket queue and there's some old fellow in front of you that's digging in his purse for three cents and you're in a hurry and you're late for an appointment. He can't quite see them properly and you're impatient and that's a good time to take a breath good time to use a breath practice.
Speaker 2that's a little tiny, easy example, but we know that there are some horrifying examples too in which we would lose our breath and, of course, losing our breath is what helps us, leads us to panic. So emotional resilience, emotional intelligence let us see if we can accept that is demonstrated by the ability to choose to breathe. Choose is a very important word, because when we're traumatized, we lose our choice. So if there was a ledger of your psyche for all the times that you unconsciously lost your breath because of the impact of an outer event, what about we balance it out with each time that we choose our breath?
Speaker 2as a way of creating some kind of balance in this lopsided equation. And then it becomes okay, well, how? And what does that mean, and how do I begin?
Speaker 2Give me three takeaways. Give me five steps that I can use in order to change things for myself. Well, first of all, the outcome is to be able to change everything. Not just one thing, but everything. Not just what happens in your life, but also the way you perceive what happens in your life can be changed with your breath, and the initial stage is to notice what you're doing now.
Speaker 2Are you breathing now as you hear this? How are you breathing now to sort of make that in a commitment, like, okay, I'm going to become a student and that means that you would, if you're super keen, have some kind of a notebook or way of memorizing. Oh, when I'm, I tend to sort of have short, choppy breaths. Or if someone cuts in front of me when I'm driving, then I lose my breath. Or when I'm making love, I'm noticing. This is how I breathe, at what point in the experience. Or if I'm angry, how am I breathing? Or if I'm really feeling good after a delicious healthy meal, how am I feeling? Or when I'm feeling delicious healthy meal, how am I feeling? Or when I'm feeling love and strong emotion, how am I breathing? All of these are opportunities to begin to create a little catalog of how we breathe. And the reason it's worth doing this is twofold One is because we're developing acquaintance and eventually intimacy with the way we breathe. And the second, which is, I think, amazing, is that if you repeat that breath at another time, you can recreate that condition so as you develop this catalog. Let's say, you find, when you're excited and enthusiastic, that you're breathing a strong, powerful breath, and if you're feeling lackadaisical and tired and exhausted, you're just like half breathing in the bottom register of your breath and you're not really using your lungs at all. Well, guess what breath and you're not really using your lungs at all. Well, guess what? If you want, if you're feeling tired and useless and you want to upgrade a little bit and get some activity going, then you're going to breathe the same kind of breath that you did when you were enthusiastic and you will become enthusiastic.
Speaker 2The body can inform the brain it's not just the other way around, in fact using also the vagus nerve, which is some people call the well-being nerve, the um. The amount of data that travels from the body to the brain is five times the amount of data that goes from the brain to the body. We just haven't learned to listen to it. So this journey now we begin to get some idea of the proportion oh my god, there's like four-fifths of my human experience. I'm not, I'm not paying attention to, I'm thinking. The brain is dominant and the brain is what makes everything work and the brain is what gets all the credit and the blame. But actually there's a whole body that's thinking too, and thanks to bruceton, we know that each cell in our body has intelligence. So what would it take to awaken to that source of intelligence? So that's the kind of scope that we're talking about.
Speaker 2And then the next stage once we begin to play with the breath this way and we can make up all kinds of different breath patterns I mean, most breath workers do, and some people, like wim hof, for example, names it after himself. He calls it the wim hof breath and he's had great success with that. But really anybody could do that. That's actually an ancient tibetan technique that's borrowed and very successfully got out in the world, and I'm super grateful because more and more people are becoming aware of how powerful it can be. So you can make up your own breaths, remembering first of all. Step one is remembering that's half the job and then any breath pattern you use after that will have the effect that you want it to have Now. So those are general daily breath practices we can create.
Speaker 2And then there's what we call the conscious connected breath, which is a breath pattern that is consistent and we never actually pause.
Speaker 2So at the top of my inhale we exhale smoothly, connectedly, and then, just before I get to the bottom of my exhalation, then I bring in my next inhale, and that's a very powerful, dynamic process.
Speaker 2Breath and it's one that historically has been kept secret for millennia, both in the sufi tradition and the indian tradition well, the sufi, not millennia, but several hundred years and the and the indian tradition and many indigenous traditions in indonesia and most of the indigenous races were aware of the power of the breath, and indeed we are in our world too. The bible mentions the breath 43 different times, and it's always in reference to its supernatural power. The quran refers to the breath several times I think it's three or seven, I can't remember. One of them is that muhammad was born by virtue of the breath upon his mother's chest divine breath upon his mother's chest. So we've always understood, in somewhere out there, that this has a power that's beyond the human brain. There's something different, there's something supernatural about this, and when we breathe the conscious, connected breath, we engage in a communication with this greater power.
Speaker 2And if we give it our conscious connected, so if we give it our consciousness and our awareness and our awareness, and we address our subconscious, our traumatized selves, with an openness and not a neediness or an expectation, but an open quality of attention, then it's as if we kind of find ourselves in the ray of the divine or cosmic code, or whatever you would like to call it, that aligns itself with our conscious mind and also with our subconscious mind, and it's as if a bolt of lightning is coming through us and we get our subconscious gets re-informed.
Speaker 2And they're, practically speaking, very few ways for the subconscious to be re-informed. It's it sort of fills by the time we're seven or eight and then it just repeats, rinses and repeats as we go through life, right. So this is one way, including the act of repetition, which is another way that we can re-inform the subconscious, so that repeated choice to breathe in with will, to breathe out and release surrender, breathe in with will, breathe out and release surrender, breathe in with will, breathe out with surrender and then placing ourselves in a state of unconditional attention, allows what people call miracles to happen.
Speaker 1Yeah, I've had many students who have practiced with me conscious connected breath talk about it as a spiritual experience, although others just say, hey, that felt great and I needed to release what I needed to release, and they go on with their lives. I've certainly had more of the spiritual experience and in fact that's why I started doing this work, the conscious connected breath work. I was very skeptical. You know, I'm a lawyer by trade and I think I became I probably have been skeptical from my own trauma and so but also open-minded. You know, skeptical but open-minded. And I think the first time I tried conscious connected breath, I was really blown away by the experience that I had. And I remember the teacher. He was a funny, whimsical guy and he said something like you know, there might be people crying next to you. You know, don't worry about it. And I thought who's going to cry? Just from breathing what? And lo and behold, at the end I hadn't realized I was crying, but I must have touched my face and it was wet and I thought, oh, okay, and something internal shifted in me and I think that's what you're talking about, that sort of reshifting of the subconscious, that rewiring that is so important that we do, because otherwise it is rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, and that's why people are baffled, why they're still where they've been five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 40, 50 years ago. Why am I still here? Because our subconscious is wired a certain way and we haven't done anything, because it is very, otherwise, really hard to shift it. Because we're trying to shift, we're trying to change our minds with our own minds, and it's really, really challenging to do so when we invite the breath, basically, like four fifthfifths of what we're doing is in our body and the other fifth is in our brain, and yet we spend most of our waking hours in our heads.
Speaker 1So I love that you've connected it back to the body and that it's this and I think you talk about it in the book this way as this hero's journey that we're going through, and we can do that even within one conscious, connected breath session. We can go through the entire arc of the hero's journey and feel complete at the end if guided well, and I think that's such a beautiful, beautiful thing, and whether or not. I wanted to go back and talk about this for a moment. We talk about trauma and I think there are some people who are listening to this who are thinking well, I haven't experienced any trauma, I had a really great childhood. I had a privileged life, my parents loved me, you know, all the things went well. And so what would you say to these folks?
Speaker 2and so what would you say to these folks about trauma? Well, I want to be very delicate because I want to respect. First of all, this is for a position of really respecting people's experience. You know, sometimes things for people might be better left untouched. I don't want to pride people open, but my experience is mostly that the people who say they haven't had trauma are sufficiently dissociated from it not to understand really what it is.
Becoming the Author of Your Life
Speaker 2Um, you know, one of the things when I train my facilitators of breath work, one of the things we do is we study our own lives. It starts with studying our own life and that's really what the book is about is the essence of our facilitated training, of studying our own life and picking out the things that have really worked and are functional and also identifying those constriction points, the points in our lives that were traumatic and that have dictated the way that we behave, the way that we meet the world today. This goes through seven-year periods, from seven years before you're born to the age you are now, particularly the one around birth. I think we have like. This is information that's been collated since 1972.
Speaker 2I have eight pages of small print of different conditions during just the birth, not even the pregnancy, not even what the intention was around the conception Was it a loving, conscious conception or was it rape or anywhere in between? But just the birth itself. Eight pages of little lines of cesarean means this. Delayed birth means this. Twins means this. Death of a twin. Inarean means this. Delayed birth means this. Twins means this. Death of a twin in the womb means this. And it goes on and on and on. And it also includes a perfectly normal breath, a perfectly normal birth, and a perfectly normal birth can actually cause significant issues for people later in life like I'm, unexceptional I'm not worried because I'm.
Speaker 2It's all too easy. I've never had to, I've never had to fight in my life. So I don't have ambition or initiative. So it's not just trauma, it's events, and you know. Then it just becomes a question well, what do we call trauma and what do we call normal? For those that are men, you know, circumcision in my day was done without anesthetic because the baby won't feel anything and it'll be over in a minute and a half. You know, these are, these are, they were considered normal, but now they'd be considered to be hopefully abusive.
Speaker 2So I think we need to understand or I hope I would invite people to understand that even if we feel like we're not traumatized, we have been traumatized. I mean, is it not traumatizing to see children damaged by war? Is that not traumatizing? Is it not traumatizing to hear someone talk of their own trauma? Is it not traumatizing to see an accident on the side of the road? Is it not traumatizing to see someone in any degree of suffering? Something is happening inside us, something is resonating with us deeply. So I would and I've had countless other times that I've heard people say that and then take them into a breath session and something quite wonderful happens that they begin to open to an understanding that, okay, yes, it was perfect, my memory was that it was perfect. Okay, yes, it was perfect, my memory was that it was perfect. But maybe there are still influences in my life that have contained me or controlled me, or that I've developed coping systems for that are, frankly, out of date, because I worked it out when I was four years old that that's the way to deal with it. When my dad comes to the table and is grumpy at the dinner table when I'm four, so I start whining. Grumpy at the dinner table when I'm four, so I start whining. And now I find myself whining when men are aggressive, you know, instead of owning my power. So you know, whatever those conditions might be, that we can go back and rewrite them, and I think that's the whole point. I mean, there's an invitation at the end of my book and I keep telling this all to my friends as well, and I keep telling this all to my friends as well Write your own book.
Speaker 2In the act of writing your own book, you take stock in a way that to be invited to write your own autobiography and invariably, when I have my students do this, I kind of have to fool them into it and I say, look, we only need 50 words for every seven years. We'll start with seven years before you were born and then go up to the age you are now. And so they sort of laugh and I think, okay, that'll take 10 minutes, but they begin. And then they begin to remember things that they hadn't remembered. Then they get curious and ask mom and dad or a sibling or a friend from school, how was it? How did I behave when I was around girls, you know, if they were a little boy or the other way around.
Speaker 2They start to become the detective of their own experience and accumulate so much information. Then it's like, oh my gosh, I've got a whole new jigsaw of my life on the table and I can't wait to put it together because I don't need to have that piece. I can actually put another one in there instead and begin to become the author of my life. So I think by becoming the author of your own book, you claim authorship over your own life. That makes you the authority of your own life, and it doesn't matter whether the book is good or bad or has no, nothing, nothing to do with it. The point is to go through the agony or the process of, you know like oh god, will someone read this? What will it look like? What will it? But to, to, to, to persevere, to prevail and and come out the other side of it, give birth to yourself in a whole new way.
Speaker 1Ash, that's so fascinating. You know I've been involved in 12 step for 30 some odd years. One of the tools that they do use in 12 step is called the fourth step, which is an inventory right. So you take stock of your life. It's a little bit different. I kind of like your way of doing things a little bit more. I think it's a bit more the fourth step can feel I don't know that it necessarily was intended to be, but it can feel shame-inducing for some of us, whereas this is truly what you've contemplated, what you've suggested, what you've invited us to do in your book and in your work, is to become a detective of your own life and to discover right, to get curious about how were things seven years before we were even born, and that's fascinating right.
Speaker 1Has anyone, you know? Do people really think about this on a daily basis? Probably not. And then to think about their lives in these seven-year increments, to discover, to come back again to who we really are and make these choices about, to see things. I think in a way I mentioned my tree experience. It's kind of like being up in the tree and seeing everything and below for the first time, and making a decision, a choice. Coming back to your idea of choice and having agency and authorship of our own lives is such a beautiful experience.
Speaker 1I'm looking forward to engaging in that project. Obviously, read a bit about it, read it in your book. And then I thought, okay, I guess this is the invitation to do this work, and I hope the listeners here will do that as well. And is there anything else that you would like people to know about this process of discovery or way to do this? I guess I'm coming back to this idea of belonging and community, because that seems to be very important to your work and your invitation is how do we? How do we do this? Obviously, the work we have to write our, our, our books, our autobiographies on our own. But how do we make this more of a communal process, a connection process? How do we do this together?
Speaker 2Well, I have an answer to that. I'm really glad you asked that question because I think it's fundamental to making it work, to making this take hold and actually be able to create the sense of agency that we want to have, and it's to do with the belonging that you spoke of. We've spoken of all along what I've done. In the introduction of the book there's a little qr code and the idea is you click on that qr code and you join a forum of other people that are reading the book as well, and I've done that because that's what we do in our classes. I think you know shame is such a lonely thing, and admitting that we are less than we hoped other people would think we are is also a notion that we can really only discard if we share and we understand oh, we're all the same, we've all got the same things going on for us. So I think the element of community is really fundamental, and I I've seen that in my classes, I've seen in in. You know, when I teach people, take them through this journey and through the facilitated training that actually I teach less and less. It's they that teach each other, and so it's in this community that you develop a boldness and a braveness because you understand other people are experiencing the same thing and you also have the chance, by virtue of your own journey yourself and sharing it with other people, to actually become an inspiration for someone else. So if there's a hidden agenda in this book, from from my perspective, it's if I can support you gaining agency in your life, then you will end up naturally supporting someone else gaining agency in their life too, because your sense of agency will be an inspiration. Be an inspiration. So then we begin to learn, not by, not like I used to at school, which was like content delivery and if you don't get it right in the exam, you, you know I'd get beaten if I didn't perform well in my exams. So there's no fear base here.
Speaker 2This is meant to be fun and a journey of discovery together, and I really believe that without the acknowledgement and I think this is a strong theme in the book without acknowledgement and without celebration, we really can't get traction. We'll default back to our self-judgment so quickly, and that's why, when you mentioned the fourth step, I think it's so important we're gentle with this work. This is not about. This is about divesting ourselves of that burden that we carry that we're most needing to hide, and understanding that when we do it together and when we see someone else do it, it makes us feel safer to do it ourselves. So that community aspect to me is is really, really, really not just significant but crucial.
Speaker 2And the belonging was just like a little take on the book, a little double click. I. I think you know, when you look at the word belonging, it has be longing in there, right to be in a state of longing. And being in a state of longing is a good thing. It's not a bad thing. It it's also a good thing, like in that seventh to eighth note of the octave, because it's uncomfortable to be in a state of longing at first, but it's really worthy of exploration.
Speaker 2So we begin to learn that our feelings are not our enemy. Actually some things that pass through, they have a shelf life, they're like clouds in the sky. But we begin to see how much we want to stop them flowing and that's usually because of fear or shyness or embarrassment or self-judgment. But once we allow those feelings to flow, there's so much richness in understanding more of who we are and then being able to express to other people who we are more honestly, without having to construct some kind of a smart sentence or a winning statement or you know anything. That's not who we really are.
Speaker 2So the game here is the game of presence, of coming to a point where I can be sitting in front of you naked and be okay, because that's just who I am, that's how I was made and that's who I am. And so what would that mean? Not, I'm not necessarily talking about going to the sweat lodge and stripping off. I'm talking about psychically naked, just honest and frank as to who I am and what are the things I fear and what are the things I love and like you would with your very best friend, so that belonging to me.
Speaker 2It's that moment of suspense, of being in a state of longing and recognizing that I'm in a state of longing is empowering, because it's going to stop me doing things, because my need to belong is beyond my capability to witness it. If my need to belong is beyond my ability to witness it, I'm going to make myself belong to things like cults, belief systems, alcohol, trends, fashions, peer pressure. All of these things are all signs of losing agency, signs of losing my traction. So, when we want to belong, that if we can not just rush to satisfy the need but to stay in the need and become the detective of that experience. That's really a little little sort of view into the work that I do and that's very much. The tone of the book is that these things that we're accustomed to skipping over in life are really worth opening up, as if we can open up that moment, then there's just so much that's passed us by in the past that we can learn from.
Speaker 1I could talk with you forever. I'm mindful of your time, but maybe one or two final questions here. If a listener is kind of at the edge of their own transformation, or they just feel somehow they're at the edge of something, maybe uncertain, what would you want them to hear right now?
Speaker 2What would it be like for all of you to be welcome here? Would you be willing to take a breath? That would be my question.
Speaker 1Yeah, I love that. Well, if people are interested in your book and you're no pun intended, or perhaps intended your breath of work here, how will they find you?
Speaker 2well, the book isn't yet released, but here it is. It is in hard copy and it will be released in June. You'll find it in all the usual channels Amazon, and you can also write to us and get it. You can also find out more about us and the book on Alchemy of Breath at alchemyofbreathcom. We are alchemyofbreath on Instagram as well, and there's lots of other things that are happening too. We do free breath works every Sunday. We call it Breathe the World, so we breathe the southern hemisphere during the morning on Sunday and then the northern hemisphere during the evening.
Speaker 1On the west coast of the United States. I can tell you you can do it at 9 am.
Speaker 2Yeah, thank you. That's much, much clearer, thank you, and you breathe with several hundred people, so we really get an idea of group how we can redo groupthink.
Speaker 1Yeah, we come and breathe together, we can rewrite what groupthink means. Yeah, I love that and I really do want to invite you back because there's so much we didn't get to talk about that I wanted to talk about. And you have a really fascinating life and work that you continue to do. And you have a really fascinating life and work that you continue to do and I love that you talk about yourself as a student of breath. You know, for someone with your vast experience, that's really refreshing to hear, and I want to thank you very much for being open about your own journey and continuing your work and helping us navigate our own chaos, as well as the chaos of the world, and I highly recommend.
Speaker 1I've gotten the opportunity to read your book and I'm grateful for that upfront, and so in June, when it is available everywhere, I really hope people will pick it up. I think it will be a very transformative experience. As well as checking out those Sunday morning, afternoon or evening wherever you are in the world. Breathing experience was really a beautiful offering that you do this for free. Thank you so much for your openness, your kindness, your generosity and the work that you do.
Speaker 2Well, thank you, melissa, it's been a pleasure. You're one of the easiest people to talk to in the world. I'm sure you have a lot of people to speak with in the world. I'm sure you have a lot of people tell you that. But I look forward to a day we can sit in front of a fire and have a longer chat. I'm looking forward to that. Thank you All right Blessings. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Speaker 1Thank you for joining me on the Fully Mindful podcast. If you got value from this episode, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review or share this episode with someone who loved this content too. Remember, small moments of mindfulness can lead to big changes in your day-to-day life. Until next time, take a deep breath, stay present and tap into your own mindfulness. I'll see you next week.