Heallist Podcast

The art of breathwork with Anthony Abbagnano

• Yuli Ziv • Episode 63

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In this enlightening conversation, Anthony Abbagnano, a pioneering breathwork expert and founder of Alchemy of Breath, discusses the profound impact of breathwork on mental health, consciousness expansion, and personal transformation. He emphasizes the importance of conscious breathing, the misconceptions surrounding breathwork, and shares transformative stories from his practice.

The discussion also explores the integration of breathwork into various healing modalities and the significance of presence in facilitating healing. Anthony highlights the need for practitioners to embody the principles of breathwork and encourages a holistic approach to healing that embraces both psychological and spiritual dimensions.

Key Takeaways:

  • Breath is a fundamental relationship in our lives.
  • Conscious breathing changes our quality of consciousness.
  • Breathwork can be a tool for transformation, not just coping.
  • Healing is a continuous state of being, not a finite process.
  • The breath can serve as a pure form of prayer.
  • We share the same air as historical figures, connecting us all.
  • The greatest challenges can lead to the greatest gifts.
  • Breathwork is essential for all healing modalities.
  • Presence is crucial in breathwork practice.
  • Random acts of kindness can create significant change.

Anthony Abbagnano is a pioneering breathwork expert and founder of Alchemy of Breath, the world's top-rated breathwork institute. He has helped thousands transform their lives through free weekly Breathe The World sessions, Facilitator Training, and BreathCamp retreats at ASHA in Tuscany, Italy. Learn more at www.alchemyofbreath.com and buy Anthony's book at https://iam.alchemyofbreath.com/book-podcast

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Yuli:

Welcome to the Heallist Podcast, where we unpack the many layers of holistic health. I'm Yuli, founder of Heallist, your portal to holistic healers worldwide. Now let's go deep. Hello, dear friends, and welcome to the Heallist Podcast. Today we're unpacking breath work as a foundation for mental health, consciousness expansion, and accessing inner wisdom. Anthony Abbagnano is a pioneering breath work expert and founder of Alchemy of Breath, the world-rated breath work institute, and he helped thousands to transform through his sessions, through his trainings and retreats. And his work is noted in applications of fields of addiction, transformation, and personal empowerment, and integration of psychotropics and plant medicine experiences. So he's also an author of Out of Chaos, Inner Calm, an incredible book that I highly recommend. I had a chance to check out. I'm just so, so grateful to have you, Anthony, with us today. I couldn't imagine a better guest to help us dive into breath work and really inspire others to try this modality, or even for practitioners who are listening to us to really explore this world of breath work and how they can incorporate into their modalities because I see it as a trend that's happening now that really breath work is becoming this fundamental modality that that plugs through any healing process. So welcome. So grateful to have you here.

Anthony:

Oh, thank you, Yuli. It's a pleasure. It's a great pleasure to be with you.

Yuli:

So I like to dive in into things. And I would love to talk later on about your journey into breath work because I find it really fascinating and inspiring. But can you just give us some of the fundamentals and maybe talk a little bit about also some misconceptions about breath work? Like what are you seeing that people come to you with and what it actually is?

Anthony:

Well, I think first of all, that the breath, it's a huge word, right? Breath work. Or it's a small word, but it means an enormous amount. It means that we get to work with our breath to create changes and accomplish things. And the breath also works. Breath works on its own. So all we need to do is show up and do it consciously and things shift. So it's a bit of a paradox. It's something we participate in actively. We work with it, and it also works back with us. So it's a relationship. I believe it's the most important relationship in our lives that we could possibly have. More more important than my little puppy at my feet right now, more important than my wife or my children, or anybody, any human is my relationship with my breath because it changes the quality of all of the other relationships.

Yuli:

So people, there's a lot of talk about breath in general, and I agree how important it is. Um once you add that other part of it, breath work, right? It becomes something else. So talk about that shift. When we just move from optimizing improving our breath consciously, right? Which is one practice. And and it's really, I recently read this book called Breath, and it was really eye-opening as well, how important it is. But when you add the work to it, what happens? And like to me, this is kind of where the transformation begins, right?

Anthony:

Yeah, and I I mean, even before the even before we can work with it, we have to choose to work with it. An experiment might be right now to pay attention to your breath. If you pay attention to your breath right now, is it the same as it was before you paid attention to it? And the answer is no, it's not. Just by virtue of paying attention to it, it changes. You become kind of self-conscious. Literally, you become conscious of self. And so you the act of noticing it changes its pattern in itself. And that act is not just changing the quality of your breath, it's changing the quality of your consciousness because you are making a choice. And a lot of us live in a choiceless world. How many times have you been told to just calm down, just relax? And it's the most infuriating thing you could ever hear, right? It's like someone comes up to me and says, you need to meditate. And you know, that's exactly the it's the last thing that you would think of doing because you're feeling stressed or under pressure. But actually, the choice of taking the time to take a breath is a very creative act. So I wish we could get everybody to commit to taking a breath when they don't want to. I have a student that says it's a measure of our emotional intelligence, a measure of our EQ, that we can stop and take a breath when we don't want to. I know in my own relationship with my wife, we have a contract between us that says if we ever get into deep trouble, either of us has the right to ask the other to take 10 breaths together and look at each other in the eyes. And you might start off really reluctant. It's like, yeah, okay, I promised I would, so I'll pretend I'm breathing, but I'm not going to show you I'm breathing, or I'm going to breathe, but I'm not going to look at you in the eye. You know, we find try to find all these reasons to stay in that ugly rut that we're stuck in. But the truth is, when you do lend your consciousness to your breath, it does work. And things change, our perspective changes.

Yuli:

What a beautiful practice. I might have to adopt it with my husband. So those are the kind of the simple things, right, that people can do when they encounter a block or a challenge. Is there anything else that you feel like maybe breath is underutilized in certain situations that you see people kind of falling into? And, you know, I can help them in this moment. What is your kind of go-to tool or a technique?

Anthony:

Well, it depends. There's a whole range of techniques, and it starts with a consciousness of what one breath is. I don't think we carry an awareness of how significant one breath is. If you consider the first breath of your life is how you entered consciousness on this planet, and if you consider that the last breath of your life will be how you exit consciousness on this planet, these are quite significant things. There are significances, there are physiological significances that are happening to the body to prepare for life. We're having to clean out the liquid from our lungs. We're no longer using the umbilical cord as our life source, as our life force. We're now transitioning to the air. So we have to clear the remaining half or so of the liquid that is in our lungs if we came through a birth canal. If we're cesarean, we have to clear out even more uh liquid from our lungs in order to be breathed in order to breathe. So there's a lot that's going on physiologically that gets kick-started with that first breath of life. And then if you take a breath and you just wander into it, my goodness, I'm in, I'm in, this is life, right? This is this is perhaps the greatest awakening that happens to us in a lifetime that we open to flow, to feelings, to sensations, to awarenesses, to light, to dark, to all of the chaos and confusion and wonder that exists on the planet. Wow, that's pretty big. And that's that's half a breath. And then we go to the other half of the breath, which is when we exhale, and my goodness, there's nothing you can hang on to. Every thought, every feeling, every attachment, every material piece of wealth, every problem, everything as we are conscious of it, we will release. So perhaps we can take another breath and contemplate, wow, this is actually more than I considered. This is more than I considered because I am, in a sense, rebirthing myself by that act of breathing in, and I'm pre-dying with the act of breathing out. And so that's one thing, but then consider this is happening 25,000 times a day. And how many times of those 25,000 are you aware of your breath? So there's clearly something going on that I'm not paying attention to, and it's not small. Life's it's life force, it's that which I need most urgently in order to survive. Even a free diver can hold it for maybe 10 or even 15 minutes, but we always have to give it back. There's a bit of a paradox here that we call it our breath, but really it's not. We borrow it, and then we have to return it with each cycle of breath. So these are things to me that I find very humbling, first of all, because, you know, yeah, I've worked with the breath for decades, but I feel like I know a tiny quantity of what exists in one cycle of breath. For example, there is argon that exists in the air that never goes away, and we all breathe it in and out. It comes in our inhale and in our exhalation. That means that we're breathing the same argon that Jesus Christ breathed, that the Buddha breathed, that Muhammad breathed, and on the other side of the scales that Hitler breathed and Stalin and some of the most unsavory characters that have existed on the planet. So as we sort of spiritually say, yeah, we want to be one, we are all one, there's truth to that, scientifically, true, too, that we are actually partaking of the same, we are sipping from the same cup, if you will. So there's there's a lot of paradox and a lot of parable, and I think a lot of learning opportunity around this subject of breathwork. And as I said earlier, lending consciousness to it is a major step and creates significant changes. And then I guess the big kahuna in breath work is what everybody's talking about today, which is the conscious connected breath, which is a highly transportative, transpersonal experience where we're actually taking that conscious breath and stacking it one upon the other, each one upon the last. And I kind of see it as a stairway to a different realm because they do stack. And if we do it with diligence and in the right conditions, there are some what we would call extraordinary things that can happen. I think the more that we work with the breath and the more of us that help others work with the breath, we're perhaps less surprised than people who first come to it at some of the transformations that can occur. Some of them are massive, some of them people would refer to as miraculous, and they're definitely non-sequential. They're not they're not about accumulating a state of mind, they're not measurable in that way, they're more in the quantum realm of kind of downloads that we get and awarenesses that we bump into very experientially. It's not an intellectual process of accumulating knowledge. It's it's an experiential process of seeing the other side of the coin, perhaps, or perceiving the world from another state of awareness.

Yuli:

Absolutely. And I've uh definitely experienced some of those things that you talk about, so I can so relate. But I wanted to ask you, since you worked with so many, we worked with thousands of people and you watch them transform. Is there any uh maybe one or two examples of uh really you mentioned miraculous transformations that you can share with us that maybe even surprised you in that breath work process?

Anthony:

Yeah, I want to be a little cautious about this. Yes, I can. I can come up with all kinds of fantastical stories. And at the same time, it's not just the breath. I want to, you know, I think the breath is the most magnificent thing that exists in my life. And at the same time, it is a tool and it depends how we use it, and it can be misused. And certainly in today's world, there's a fantastical approach to breath work as a way of getting high on your own supply and just changing reality and getting out of this kind of mind, an escapist thing of getting out of the mindset that I'm in because I I'm just too miserable and I can't stand it. And I think it has value in that way, but I think also there's a distinction between using breath to cope with life and using breath to transform who I am. And those are two very different things, would be the difference between seeking relief and holding out for resolution. So it's not just the breath, the ability to be in non-resolution, to recognize the difference between relief and resolution, that's where the that's where the transformative moment exists. And I'll give you an example. I did this in a group yesterday. If I sing you eight notes of the octave, do, re, mi, fa, sola, ti, do, those are eight notes, but the first note and the last note are the same, right? It's a scale of seven notes, and then the eighth one is a repeat of the first one, but just one octave higher. If I instead sing the first seven and I stop, just notice how it feels. Dore mi fa sola ti. And now when I I did this in a group, and every single time I do this in a group, someone's gonna do the do because they're so uncomfortable that they have to fill the gap. It's like, you know, and because it's unc it's it's uncomfortable. And this is actually used musically as a way of creating dynamic to the music. And it's called resolution when that final note comes in. And music plays with the suspense that exists before that resolution comes, except for jazz that keeps on suspending and suspending and suspending, and then sometimes comes back, and you could feel your body go, okay, now I feel more comfortable. And I think it's a good metaphor for life and the breath, because in that moment between that seventh and the eighth note is a state of discomfort. It's a little confusing, it's upsetting our normal way of thinking, and we want to skip over it. We want to end it as quickly as we can. And in life, when we look at the problems we have in life, we look for solutions that make us feel better. And this is indeed, especially if we're traumatized, a pathway to the kinds of addictions and habits that are negative for us and that actually keep us limited in life. So it's not just the breath that creates the incredible leaps of consciousness and healing. It's the ability to actually feel what's wrong and breathe at the same time. And this is, I think, the biggest alchemy in breath is the ability to feel sometimes what we don't want to feel and to breathe at the same time, especially with things like fear, with anger, with anxiety, the negative feelings that tend to haunt us, if we can learn to feel and breathe at the same time, they will dissipate because breath works. I've never seen it fail. That said, the kinds of things I've seen happen in a breathwork session are blind in one eye, coming back to sight, chronic um chronic pains that vanish and never come back, repeatedly stage four cancer that is reversed and disappears. Things that we would call medically somewhere between unlikely and impossible, spontaneous healings that can occur. I've also seen on the emotional realms, I think my favorite was very early on in my breathwork career where I had a couple come to me after a breath work and she had her husband by the hand and he was quite shocked. You could tell he was quite open, he was completely soft. And she said, You know, my husband has never told me he loved me in 25 years. Thank you. And so I think those are miracles too, because they're so touching to the heart, and definitely this practice of using the breath in conscious ways is a way of slowing down the normal 60,000 thoughts we have a day and opening up to what exists in the gaps between thoughts. And there's a whole heck of a lot there to be discovered.

Yuli:

I love those stories, and thank you for this beautiful description. Um I wonder how you um came up to your own technique and maybe tell us a little bit about what it is and how it's maybe different from some of the other breathwork techniques that people are familiar with. And I'm curious what was your journey uh realizing that you have something unique that you created.

Anthony:

Well, I I wouldn't claim to be the creator of it, and I and I wouldn't be I wouldn't claim to be the owner of it either, honestly. And a conscious connected breath is something that many practitioners and facilitators share. There are techniques with, you know, putting emphasis on the inhale and the a soft release on the exhale, or like Stan Graff's holotropic breath work, putting more emphasis on a stronger exhale and letting the inhale come more naturally. And there is chest breathing and belly breathing and nose breathing and mouth breathing. And there are different techniques. The one that I use always shifts, it always changes as I explore more. Um, but I I generally focus a little bit more on the inhale and let the exhale be natural and not to exhale all the way, about 70%, and then pick up the inhale again. And that connection is fundamental. The fact that we we don't pause between the top and the bottom of our breath is fundamental to that stacking that I mentioned earlier. But that will occur if I put more emphasis on my chest or my belly or inhale or exhale. It will still occur as long as we connect. I think the differences that I see in breath work is that I mix it a lot with psychology and spirituality and philosophy. I come from a family of philosophers, and I find this I've always been fascinated by a couple of things. Number one, man's or human's effort to build a ladder with psychology that can reach far enough above to touch the spirit world. And it seems like no matter how big a ladder we can build with the consciousness that we live in, it will never be long enough. I find that interesting. And I also find compelling the moment which is breathwork, as we see so frequently, which is such a blessing, that people open to a level of consciousness that they didn't have before. And how that can be it's like, how can I use that? How can I utilize these truths, these these things that actually do happen to help people create the changes that they really want to change? And that is around, as I said, feeling and breathing, going towards feelings rather than isolating ourselves from them, or looking for somebody else or something external that I can take in order to cope. And it also means the way I work is encouraging people to become comfortable with the uncomfortable. Um I was speaking with a client of mine who has stage four cancer today, and we have a particular alchemy meditation that I teach and I do I've developed over the last 20 years, and we spent an hour inquiring into the tube, one of the tumors, she has tumors all over her body, but the the biggest one is in her left lung, and we were we were inquiring into the relationship between the outermost cell of the tumor and the next cell that was not affected, the healthy cell next to it, and what would the conversation look like between those two cells. And that's the kind of intimacy that I want my facilitators to be able to guide people to when we're talking about this level of healing. That we don't leave a stone unturned and it's an intrepid journey, but we really get to go into the heart of the core of what's actually going on and understanding how we can participate in its transformation. We don't just need to take medicines or hope or pray, apart from the fact that breathing consciously is to me the purest form of prayer, which I'll talk about another time. But in this particular circumstance, instead of saying I'm gonna get rid of my, I've got to get rid of my cancer, I'm saying, let's get intimate with this cancer and really understand not just what the obvious messages are, that, oh, I ate the wrong things or I smoked too many cigarettes, you know, whatever those precursors might have been, but to really get granular about this and go into nano detail and put our attention and our focus there as we breathe, and that's the altar upon which the miracles can occur. But there are some things that need to be in place for that, which are somehow difficult for the mind to do. That is, if you have any need for the healing occur to occur, or if you have any expectation that the healing will occur, then it cannot. That's a contaminatory thought. So we need an absolute state of presence in order to allow these very natural things to happen, because the body wants to heal. It's that we have to get out of the way. We put in the interruption. But if we can, and this is the same with any psychological issue that I work with with people, if we can align the deepest of our subconscious, or in this nano-concentration of the physical body, identify the smallest particle that we can with our awareness. And if we consciously bring our breath to it, then we're bringing in something supernatural, which is this life force that's a mystery. It's referred to as supernatural or God-given in every religious document that exists. So I'm suggesting this might be true. And if it is true, what happens when we align our subconscious with our conscious and the superconscious? What happens if we put them in the same test tube in our laboratory? Is the alchemy that I teach is that there's a natural force that will rearrange what's discordant or out of true and realign it with cosmic code or universal force or whatever you want to name it. That's really the process that's occurring. Pretty fast.

Yuli:

That's incredible. And um, I believe wholeheartedly that this is this works and I witness that. But for some people that might be listening and they still need that scientific evidence for all of this divine interventions that we're talking about. Do you incorporate that into your teachings? Like what's your point of view of that, or you just kind of, you know, go go with the with the what your experience and and your understandings?

Anthony:

That's a really good question. And I I definitely tend to lean more into the metaphysical than the physical. Like I said, I I'm from a family of philosophers. So I think the day my curiosity dies is the day I'm no longer alive. And I I tend I love the science, but I think the science is the ladder that can't reach the spirit. So it has its limitations and it needs to name things in order for them to be permissible. So there are there are limits of consciousness. And one of the greatest teachers I ever studied under was an Indian man called Krishna Murti. And his thesis was how can you create new consciousness from existing consciousness? It's actually a mathematical impossibility. So there's something outside our consciousness. If we're going to become aware of it, what does that actual process look like? It has to include something beyond science. Because scientifically, how can you create something, you know, like what I think one of his statements was: how can you ever expect to vote for a prime minister or president that can change things if he is operating within the consciousness that you're operating in? You can only recreate what you've already created. And I think that's demonstrable in our world. I don't mean just politically, I mean even scientifically, that we're used to recreating things all the time. It's only when we can't do it anymore, like we're running out of fuel. I mean, we knew we could have created battery-operated vehicles, you know, 50 or 60 years ago. It's only when there's no fuel left that it really becomes serious enough for us to make ourselves available for other thought patterns. And I think this is where I see that the healing happens is when we think differently, not when we think the same way. There's something that needs to knock us out of our thought processes. And the breath is a really good tool for that. So I don't want to put away science because there are physiological things that are happening, and I think they're incredible and virtually incredible. They're just credible, and they're magnificent, the mechanisms that are working in the body in order for these nonlinear things to occur. But I do believe there there needs to be an embrace of the fact that we don't know what we don't know, and that I bow to the mystery in one breath in order to be able to stand for it creating quantum changes for other people. So I do stand for that.

Yuli:

Love that. Beautifully said. Let's talk about breath work and how it integrates into other healing modalities. Because as you know, people on the healing journey, and to your point, I think something that drastically needs to happen for people to be open to those other metaphysical modalities. And I see it a lot in my work that unfortunately it takes some sort of um uh really um you know thermal disease for to bring people finally to to explore things that are maybe non-conventional, right? So, and it's happening in so many places in so many different areas of life, but when it comes to healing journey, what I'm also seeing on the practitioner side, people come and um come to different modalities and they often don't know where to start, where to begin, what's for them. They come often some sort of desperation, right? Uh, hoping maybe someone like mentions something about this particular practice or another. But practitioners more and more are tasked on the holistic side, they kind of catch everyone who is either desperate with the medical system, right? They're they're uh helpless, they're catching a lot of cases that are very complex, right? What I'm seeing as a response to that in terms of holistic healers, we moving from this idea of like, okay, I'm I'm this I'm a nutritionist or I'm a yoga teacher or I'm a Reiki master to this beautiful blend of practitioners really embracing all those different tools because they have to respond to this greater need for uh this multiple toolbox healing, right, that their clients might be seeking. So I do see a lot of practitioners, you know, they're getting now, maybe it's on the extreme side, some of them getting like 10, 20 different certifications, right? Just to kind of accommodate those different cases. But I do find that breath work is becoming that fundamental modality that a lot of holistic healers are adding to their toolbox. And I'm seeing, you know, yoga teachers are going and getting training in that. I'm seeing um, you know, all kinds.

Anthony:

of acupunctures getting so i'm curious because you trained so many practitioners what is your where do you see breath work fit how do you work with practitioners maybe talk a little bit about the your training program because a lot of our listeners are practitioners and i would love to help them discover this beautiful tool yeah thank you i it's such a valid question and such an important thing to speak to i'm i'm super grateful for that question i agree with you i think fundament I I think the breath is fundamental to all modalities just as it is fundamental to life and I've seen many people who will accumulate certificates of study but still lack the presence that's required to be alongside someone that is in difficulty. You know that the real tool is not there. It's not about an accumulation of knowledge alone. It's the knowledge and the experience and the presence I think most important of all is the presence. And you cannot be conscious of your breath without being present with what is actually happening right now. That's the short answer. That's a subtitle to that is that we're not just facilitating breath work. We're actually facilitating holistic life and that shows up as getting opening a session and starting and stopping at the other end. But actually what we're facilitating is a quality of presence by offering our presence giving someone else a beacon that gives them hope. And the people that I train range from goodness judges, lawyers, police officers, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, brain surgeons, orthopedics all kinds of medical practitioners from doctors to nurses, prison officers, you know, I mean just just every walk of life every one of them is making the same journey to being able to be present in the face of challenge and difficulty because they're using their breath. The journey that I train people on honestly like I said earlier the techniques of breath you know you can get them in a one-month workshop or in a weekend workshop you know you breathe in and out, right? You hold for three, you exhale for four. You know, that that's not really the essence of what we're talking about. I want people to make an inner journey that is going to prepare them to really be in a state of healing and to demonstrate to other people that this is possible. And what I actually see happening is that the greatest challenge that people face in their life actually becomes the greatest gift that they can bring to the world. So I see addicts helping other addicts I see cancer survivors helping other cancer sufferers I see prisoners helping ex-cons, helping other prisoners. I love to sponsor ex-convicts to help people who are in prison transform their lives. All of these things are what really motivate me but they're not going to happen unless we do our inner work. So 50% of our training is based on the book which is an introduction to the inner work that we do. And I know our time is limited but there's I think a really important message to download right now. First of all healing is a state of being it's not a process it's a practice it will always be there. We never complete it. So let's let go of hopes of once I'm healed then I'll we're always healing. That's why the wounded healer is so functional because we get to work with our own wounds at the same time as healing. And secondly this world is changing and it's changing so fast now it's now known as exponentially exponential it's no longer just exponential like we've seen in the technological age. We're now exiting the technological age as a result of AI knowledge has zero value. The knowledge is available depending on the question you ask. Already we're shifting away from a knowledge-based culture into a question-based culture. Where is this going to lead? We've exhausted every material investigation that we can we've now got created an intelligence that's thousands of times faster than we are. There's no way we'll ever catch up with that or get a saddle or a bridle on that. That's just destiny. That's now happening and as I say the word happening it's actually already happened. It's going so quickly. So I think the question that we get to ask ourselves is what role of leadership do we want to take in this post the world, the aftermath of the chaos and the conundrum that we live in today take your position now because and train for that because you're going to be needed and we are already the minority I used to say 1% 9 99% of the world is in trouble and 1% is trying to help them do something about it. I think we're probably up to 2 or 3% now. It's it's amazing it's wonderful to see but let's get ready because the show is coming on and we need to go out there and do things about it. And I do believe it's about spirituality. I do believe that we've exhausted the material consciousness and we've reached its edge and something else is waiting to happen. The question is do we want to participate? Do we want to be co-authors in this transformation that's happening on the planet right now or do we want to be in the whatever they call it flotsom that's what it is that that fish sort of gather as they open their mouths. Are we the flotsom or are we really going to be co-creators of what's unfolding today?

Yuli:

Wow you're channeling my mission so thank you for expressing it so beautifully that's how I I feel in my work and definitely I think a lot of our listeners too at some point of our lives um you know we we have this choice right do we do we step on the other side and start helping others and or do we kind of continue in the um this earth game I mean we're all still in the earth game but at least I love being on the serving side um or at least I like to believe so and I think breath work is just a beautiful way to serve others very simple way right at first but now that you're unpacking it and help us understand all the intricacies and how much uh it takes and this word presence I think that you mentioned it just uh often taken for granted but it's actually one of the hardest things I think to receive today from somebody in this age of distractions is just full presence and um I do agree with you that's part of the healing work. You mentioned your book and um I'm really grateful to have this another tool of you that people can explore and we're gonna put in show notes of course for for people to get but what and and I know we're running out of time but I really want to hear briefly about your journey into all of this and how it changed since discovering Breathwork and the journey of creating the book and all this beautiful teachings that that you share with the world now.

Anthony:

Thank you. I I uh it's it's a bit a messy process writing this book I've lived every mistake I had to live in order to learn enough to help other people not have to live those mistakes and live the pain of those errors. So I'm certainly no hero. I I come to this with a long life of many experiences and many of them seemed irrelevant as I grew up. Many of them seemed contrary even to what I do now. But I'm grateful for every single one of them because without them I wouldn't have been able to see what I see now and to say what I say now. And so the message that I'm wanting to share is that and to save people time with with this book is that there's a template that exists. There's a hero's journey template that exists but there's another template that I call the Miracle Matrix that exists that we don't notice in life. It's what the shaman notice it's what we strive for when we take plant medicines and meditate a lot and do a lot of breath work and this is here existent in our world today and it's a navigable matrix. It's not like the movie where it's the blue pill or the red pill there are still choices like that to be made but it's actually a miracle matrix because some wonderful things can happen and the book is a series of stories and a description of what this matrix might look like for you. And it's also an introduction to the training that I do which is this inner journey which I call the alchemist is this inner journey that I get people to make and is separate from the breathwork training. We pulled it out of the breathwork training because there are so many other practitioners of other modalities that want to do it and it's now become an advanced facilitation program for doctors and nurses and psychiatrists and psychotherapists and everybody, yoga teachers everybody because it develops this sense of presence that we need to really be a beacon in a very dark night of a human soul which is kind of where I see the world at right now.

Yuli:

Incredible what a journey well again it's just so grateful to have your wisdom here and as we are running out of time um I do hope people check out the book, check out your um amazing teachings and I will do so as well. Any last parting words of wisdom for our incredible audience?

Anthony:

God I'm all out of wisdom now I I think what I have is a lot of love for every single person who's on this path and a lot of gratitude to you. And I also I want to ask you to do something whenever you're in a public forum in a group or in a class or online or wherever it may be would you consider ending your transmission by asking people to do a random act of kindness and that's what I would like to ask you to do as you close from me is to think what that might look like for you as your next act out there in the world because I feel if enough of us keep doing this it's going to make a a lot of difference. So that would be my request.

Yuli:

Amazing well I love this challenge I take this challenge although I feel like literally I wake up every day and I really my path is my act of kindness to the world I think working with healers this is my you know after spending decades and kind of in the more of a traditional career and being tech entrepreneur and all that this is my chapter of act of kindness so I'm gonna challenge you back and say it's not just one act can we really leave our path our our life as an act of kindness.

Anthony:

That's beautiful thank you.

Yuli:

I love that beautiful thank you so much Anthony so grateful to have you and um uh again look forward to staying in touch and explore more of your work thank you. Thank you

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Yuli

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