Laughing Through The Pain: Navigating Wellness

Breath of Transformation: Alan Dolan's Journey from PR to Healing Guru

• Richard & Andy • Episode 32

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Discover the transformative power of breathwork with Alan Dolan, the Breath Guru, as he takes us on an incredible journey from his high-stress PR job in Saudi Arabia to mastering conscious connected breathing at a yoga institute in Costa Rica. Alan's story is both inspiring and educational, offering listeners insight into the profound changes breathwork can bring to one's life. Expect to learn about Alan's milestones, including his feature in a major article and his upcoming book deal, as well as the broader impact of breathwork on mental health and personal healing.

Uncover the real-life stories of breathwork's remarkable efficacy, from helping a PTSD-affected veteran to aiding a woman struggling with severe trauma and addiction. Our conversation with Alan sheds light on the challenges and successes of introducing breathwork to the UK, emphasizing its potential for deep personal connection and mental health improvement. We also delve into the significant shift from in-person to online breathwork during the COVID-19 pandemic, exploring the unique benefits of each format and how they cater to different needs and preferences.

Finally, we explore advanced breathwork practices such as embodiment, body mapping, and acupressure, emphasizing the need for rigorous training and professional support. Alan shares wisdom on balancing personal growth with professional skills, highlighting the importance of humility, authenticity, and continuous self-improvement. From the future of breathwork therapy to integrating self-development tools into daily life, this episode offers practical advice and transformative stories for anyone interested in harnessing the healing power of breathwork.

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Introduction to Alan and His Journey
00:43 Discovering Yoga and Its Impact
02:35 The Life-Changing Breathwork Experience
03:44 Understanding and Embracing Breathwork
12:08 Profound Healing Stories
19:11 The Rise of Breathwork and Its Future
31:17 Exploring Embodiment and Energy Flow
32:58 The Importance of Grounding and Mental Clarity
34:46 The Power and Responsibility of Breathwork
38:41 The Future of Breathwork and Professionalization
41:11 Personal Reflections and Professional Growth
49:34 Balancing Breathwork with Life
52:53 Transitioning and Looking Ahead
58:24 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

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Guest: Alan Dolan
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/breath.guru
Website URL: https://www.breathguru.com/
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HOSTS:
Richard Blake
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https://richardlblake.com/
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Andy Esam
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andyesam/

PODCAST:
Laughing Through The Pain: Navigating Wellness
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Speaker 1:

and welcome hello. It was just hello, no welcomes. We do not welcome people anymore, isn't that right?

Speaker 2:

andy new policy? Yeah, no, welcoming at all. We've got someone who's probably been our most anticipated guest, I would say, not least because we had to um postpone, uh, his first um recording, but also because I think he's probably been mentioned the most out of anyone in the world on our podcasts.

Speaker 1:

Yes, yes, Drumroll. Please for Alan Dolan, the breath guru. Short intro because it's a fairly long episode relative for us, because we just had so many questions. We could have gone on a lot longer.

Speaker 3:

A lot longer.

Speaker 1:

So we won't keep you too long here, but we're going to talk about breathwork and the breathwork industry and the miraculous healings that Alan has seen and where the industry is going and how he was featured in the article and how he got a book deal and all these amazing things.

Speaker 2:

And I haven't just drawn the Kool-Aid. I actually had a one-to-one session with Alan. I looked it up in January 2019 and it was incredibly powerful. My first experience of breathwork. So, yeah, another thing I sent you on right, you sent me on that, yeah, you sent me to him January 21, no 2019. It was brilliant. Yeah, really really good, enjoy cheers.

Speaker 1:

Hey, listener, if you're enjoying the insights and stories we share on our pod, then don't miss out on any of our episodes. Hit the subscribe button to download and listen to our conversations at your convenience.

Speaker 2:

Alan, welcome to the show. Start off nice and easy, hopefully, hopefully. How did you get into breathwork and also, can you explain what breathwork is?

Speaker 3:

okay. So I think I got into it. Simply put, really stress. I was in a really good job that really didn't suit who I was and didn't really the the match wasn't there. I was working in saudi arabia riad. I'm a gay. That's probably not a great match. I should probably just have gone the whole hog and gone to Lagos and lived there. But basically I was just really stressed out.

Speaker 3:

I was on a 10, I would say on a 10 scale and I was looking for something to alleviate that. I didn't want to leave the job at that point and I was kind of felt a bit boxed in by it all and I started to do yoga and I knew that yoga would bring my stress levels down and indeed it did. But the bottom line was it opened things up big time and I realized there were so many more dimensions to yoga than purely a de-stressing tool. So I got really intrigued by that and gradually my job became less. I was a PR and communications manager in the aerospace industry and gradually my job became less and less and less engaging and the yoga became more and more and more captivating and I thought that it was time probably for a sabbatical. So I took a year out and the plan was there was no plan because up to that point I'd lived very much by my diary and it's scheduled at the wazoo most of the time and it was PR. So I was out pretty much every night as well. I was smoking a lot, I was drinking a lot, until yoga kicked in and then that sort of fell by the wayside. So I took a year out and the only thing I booked was I went to spa, samui, and had a two-week or three-week detox with the whole bit, colonics and fasting and all of that, and I thought that would be a good way to begin. And then I booked a yoga teacher training and that was my insurance policy so that if nothing else happened, I'd open a yoga retreat. And at that point there weren't really any. There weren't so many around. It was kind of a new idea.

Speaker 3:

And I got to Costa Rica. I was at this wonderful place called the Nasara Yoga Institute, an amazing, amazing place, and I was just in heaven. I was with 53 other people who had an equal love of yoga and we had the most amazing faculty there, people who are really experts in their field. So we studied the scriptures and the Bhagavad Gita and we had a couple of classes a day and it was just a great setup, really, really good. So I was blissing out for that whole month plus. You're on this amazing peninsula in costa rica and literally like sea turtles kind of coming up on the beach to lay their eggs and stuff. It's just, you know, paradisical.

Speaker 3:

And we had a day off and one of the guys on the course in fact two of the guys on the course said oh, we've got this thing called conscious connected breathing. We'd like to give the group, uh, the gift of a session and I I was less than gracious. I seem to remember I was kind of you know, what have you got to teach me about breath? I'm a yogi baby, I've got you know my pranayama and all of that which I loved, and anyway I went along and it was only it was short, it was like a 45 minute session, I think 12 of us rocked up, there were two facilitators, but 45 minutes later the world was a different place. It had really, I call it tectonic plate shifts, when you get those really big quantum movements.

Speaker 3:

And I'd done a lot of work up until that point. I'd been traveling all over the world, I'd been to India, done that trip and the Himalaya and all of that, and I remember, before leaving Riyadh, I'd sort of spoken to the universe and probably prayed and said you know, make it obvious, whatever this thing is that I'm looking for, that I haven't yet found. Make it really bloody obvious, don't make it subtle. I need a real lightning bolt. And indeed that was exactly what happened. It was so clear that was the next step and I think what it was. It was a number of things, but principally it was the fact that breath, like, in a way, the fact that people have such low expectation of what breathwork can do, is like a secret weapon, because often people come in and they're just like, yeah, whatever. And that was very much me.

Speaker 3:

And what in effect happened was, you know, people would probably call it a download. I just really frame it as I was given information that was truth, and one of them was the first thing was really you've been depressed since you were 12 years old I was 40 at that point and it was like a missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle just coming into the picture and slotting in there, and I knew it's truth and also, whatever part of me was communicating was saying and it doesn't have to be this way you can clear out the emotional sort of underpinning of what's keeping this in place. And that got my attention big time because I'd been um ill on a pretty regular basis, almost monthly, and I'd be kind of incapacitated, usually in bed for a couple of days, and in the end I called it my throat thing because I thought it was physiological. I didn't realize that I knew so little about mental health at that point. I didn't even make the connection that there could have been something involving mental health. I just thought it was a throat thing. I had a sore throat usually when it happened and I used to just get a pile of books and just sit it out and wait it out. So when that piece of information came in, it was like light bulb city. A lot of things became very clear to me and I was hooked really.

Speaker 3:

And the other thing that happened which I think really happens to a lot of people who try breathwork is I got a huge connection to whatever you call the all that is. I call it God, but whatever word you want to use is fine In a way that I'd never experienced before. I knew the theory. I'd read all the books, but this was a visceral connection through every cell of my body and it was unlike anything I'd ever done and I'd done ayahuasca and stuff at that point and tried various substances, both legal and illegal, and it was like nothing I'd ever experienced. And the fact that I was generating this and I knew it was me generating it wasn't something alien that was coming into me, it was coming from here, I knew it was coming from my heart, so that just it blew my paradigm. What I thought of as the world, just you know, it opened up and sort of I see as like concentric circles. They just exploded, those and I realized that I knew very little as a human and my life to that point had been very kind of compacted and it put me into a very expansive state of being and I was just hooked from that point on, so being somebody with quite an addictive personality.

Speaker 3:

I then went away, booked 14 sessions on the trot, did it for 14 days with a facilitator and then picked up the ball and did it myself and 12 weeks later, having cried a lot and had various experiences with it, the underpinning, the emotional underpinning had gone. A lot of childhood stuff had been cleared out and I didn't really experience any form of depression from that point, aware of the fact, I don't want to talk about it being cured or anything like that. What I would say is um, I've got the propensity to go back there if I do the wrong things, but now I know how to navigate it and not do the wrong thing. So I so, yeah, I've had no experiences of it since that period, and that's now coming up on 22 years. So that was how I found it. There was two questions, I think well, what is breathwork?

Speaker 1:

but yeah.

Speaker 3:

I mean, what is it? You could be here for months and still not answer that question. I think the the thing I love about it. There's a lot of things I love about it, but one of the things I really love about it is everybody has a unique experience with it. It's not cookie cutter, it's very bespoke and it will work with you exactly where you are on any given day, at any point in your journey, and it will give you exactly what you need at that time.

Speaker 3:

So, in a way, it's impossible to define it. If I define it to a client, if I'm doing a workshop or a one-on-one and I say you know, it's a self-healing modality, it's very much. It's coming from us. It's not anything I'm doing to you, mr Klein. It allows us to open up our respiratory system. Most of us don't breathe very well, we're quite closed down and it does this what I thought of as sort of real magic. It puts the body into what I thought of as a recalibration mode whereby anything that was out of harmony or balance would start to move back to, you could say, optimum factory settings and we'd get to access stuff that is normally not accessible at all. And, as Richard was doing his PhD, he flipped me a paper he'd found which explained it perfectly, and I didn't even know that paper existed. I knew viscerally what was happening, but I had no scientific explanation. And in fact it's called Richard. Remind me it's.

Speaker 3:

Temporal Transient there we go From William's 2007.

Speaker 3:

How wonderful is that I had no clue. I'd had experience empirically of that, but when I saw it you know these people in 2007 had actually tracked it and knew exactly why all these amazing things were happening. And I guess that was it I was just absolutely hooked. And, apart from anything else, the efficacy, it just works really well and luckily, in some ways, I feel lucky that I didn't know that I was experiencing depression, because I probably would have drugged it and gone the conventional medical route. And, of course, now what we're finding is the things like the SSRI inhibitors don't actually work very well and I think there's a huge gap now that breathwork could fill, given the right conditions and the right training and professional approach to it, in the same way that psychotherapy is regulated. I think you know we're sort of moving in that direction now with breathwork and I think it could fill that gap in a very healthy way, you know, in a very effective way yeah, and we want to speak more about the this sort of regulation of breathwork later on.

Speaker 1:

But you have been sort of on the cusp of this. You're now one of the sort of elder statesmen of the breathwork industry in the UK and when you, I guess, first started it, breathwork was even less well-known than it is now. So how did you identify that this was going to be your life work and that this was well? You've been calling it the breath illusion as well, but you you've been calling that for years. How did you know that breathwork was going to explode like this?

Speaker 3:

do you know, rich? I've never, ever doubted it since that first breath session. I knew it was dynamite, I knew it was gold. If it could get you know, with a very left brain kind of cynical approach and just blow those doors open, I knew it would work for everybody. I had an innate knowing of that and an innate trust and I never doubted it.

Speaker 3:

And when I started Breath Guru, the only doubt I had was like too early for the market, because I'm an Aries Leo ascendant, I'm fiery, you know, and I was just go, go, go, go go. And in fact it took me seven years really to get any kind of sort of leverage in there and any kind of opening in there. And I spent those first seven years just educating people because people just like me were saying why do I need to pay you to breathe? That's ridiculous, you know, and of course it's not. And that was a gap in the knowledge, you know, and of course it's not, and that was a gap in the knowledge.

Speaker 3:

So so at the beginning yeah, I'm just sort of scanning back and seeing if I ever I don't really feel like I had any doubt at all I knew the value of it. It was very clear to me that, particularly from the mental health point of view. And of course, since then I've had, you know, thousands and thousands of people and I know that it works in many different areas. I I've only ever seen it do good. A lot of times it just blows my doors off, and sometimes it's just beyond awesome in the original sense of the word. It's almost like what I would have termed miraculous.

Speaker 2:

Some stuff that I've seen is just incredible particularly in terms of time and the efficacy in relation to time. Time that actually was one of our questions in terms of could you talk a bit about some of the profound healing you've seen over the years? Sure what we're talking about here?

Speaker 3:

so. So at the beginning I really didn't know. It was kind of suck it and see, really I was just working a lot I work with, on average about seven people a day and I was hooked and I was just really intrigued, really curious about you know where are the parameters for this? And every time I thought I'd found them, client would come in and blow them away. So what I realized pretty soon was that it was infant. In terms of of my experiences, it seemed like we were infinite and it was infant. And, of course, part of the whole beauty of breathwork is the connection. So you're connecting with yourself at a very profound level and it's really answering that. Who am I question, in a very visceral, understandable way.

Speaker 3:

But in terms of stuff that happened, I think there are two pivotal ones for me. One was a soldier who'd seen active duty in the Falklands and he hadn't slept. When I saw him he hadn't slept, for I think it was about 15 years. He'd had night terrors, ptsd and he hadn't slept properly and he looked like a ghost. He walked in the room and he was just white, like really white. He was hardly there and his wife as often happens, his wife had gently nudged him in my direction and we did four sessions together and they were pretty big sessions, you know. They were quite emotional but certainly doable. I helped him navigate through those experiences and at the end of the four he was sleeping like a baby and we were in Spain and he went back to live in Glasgow, I think, at the time and I kept in touch with him and was checking out and he was absolutely fine. So you know something that's that profound. My sessions were 90 minutes, so six hours essentially of breath work had absolutely cleared whatever it was that was held within his nervous system, his cellular memory, however, however you want to frame that. And that really got my attention because of course there's so many veterans and all sorts of people experiencing various kinds of PTSD.

Speaker 3:

The second one was a lady who was an incest victim and rape victim, and it was toddler rape. She was two and three and four years old when this was all happening and when she came into the room she described herself as toxic and she said I think I'm beyond any kind of help and she was medicated and she was an alcoholic because when she had free time she wanted to numb it. So she just drank and she was very successful. She's a really successful career person and she spent all her hours either working or drinking. So I guess she was mid thirties by the time I saw her and she hadn't had a holiday since graduation because she didn't want to have free time, because when she had free time she drank. So she just filled her life with work and I said well, you're here, why don't we just give it a whirl and see what happens?

Speaker 3:

And again, four sessions, big, emotional, but definitely navigable, and I didn't really know by the end of the fall, but that was all we'd got time for. She was going back to her abode. I was in Spain, spain and I thought that something good has happened here. I don't know quite what and I don't know what the extent of it is. And when she was due to go back home, she actually diverted and went to Ibiza and she had some friends who were over in Ibiza on holiday and she said, I think I'm just going to change my flights and go back and see them and I thought, well, that's a really good sign.

Speaker 3:

And then that was in October and I followed up with her, as I do with all my clients, and she was a little bit like her cards were pretty close to the chest and she wasn't really letting me see much. And then on January the 1st I'll never forget this, it was January the 1st I got downstairs, checked into my mail, my computer blew up. I was like, okay, I guess it's a cyber cafe went down to the cyber cafe and her email was the first one in the inbox and she said I'm sitting in luang prabang in laos. I've taken six months off work. Every morning I wake up thinking that it, in capital letters, is going to come back and I'm slowly but surely realizing it has gone forever, at which point I am in tears, I'm booming and people are looking like what the hell's going on with him.

Speaker 3:

But it just really really touched my heart because this was somebody who thought she was beyond redemption and beyond saving. In fact, four sessions again six hours good to go. And I saw her since I've seen her in her home country and we've done sessions since then and they're really just top-ups that work was done, and the beautiful thing about one of the innumerable beautiful things about breathwork is, once it's done, you don't need to go back and revisit it if it's processed. So that's the one. If I had to choose just one, that would be it, because it was just so huge and so touching and something so extreme. You know, I don't, it doesn't really get more extreme than that, you know.

Speaker 1:

So so I guess, yeah, those would be the ones that would stand out there, andy, yeah, yeah I think that hope is such a valuable sensation when people are struggling because, yeah, when you have mental health issues like depression, like I did for I don't know, 18 years, more than half my life, you just think this is this is normal, this is just, this is life. And when you just get that glimpse of oh no, you can be free from this, it, uh, it makes you want to continue. You know healing, especially mental health issues, chronic issues they are long healing journeys yeah, and often you'll have relapses, but you know you've got the hope that okay.

Speaker 3:

Well, the relapses, they're less frequent over time yeah, and I think the fact that you're getting tangible evidence that it's working is great leverage.

Speaker 3:

The big thing with self-development or healing or that whole sector, is how do you get your client to continue with the work? That was always my conundrum at the beginning and in fact, a certain amount of clients with a certain amount of self-discipline would pick up the ball and run with it. But there's another set who just don't have that yet within their psyche, that kind of drive. But the fact that they were getting these like wow, I'm feeling really good on it, and now actually we've got the opposite end of the coin. Now it's like, oh, I'm feeling great, I don't need to do that anymore, whereas of course, it's a practice, so you do need to continue with it. Technology's helped everybody and it's dogs got that. Now we've got ours and that's been very helpful in terms of having. It's almost like having somebody else in the room there with you as you're doing your practice, you know, to help you navigate whatever it is you're experiencing on any given day.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I was going to ask about that because have you found the sort of online shift with covid? Because, having done both work online and in person, I mean I think you know what I'm going to say, but the in person was just immeasurably better for me.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

So how have you found that shift?

Speaker 3:

So, to be honest, I had to be drag, kicking and screaming into the online world. I was not, because I loved the intimacy of the personalized sessions. You know the physical proximity I'm quite hands on when I work my sessions. You know the physical proximity I'm quite hands-on when I work so and I just was like this is a much less than anyway. I've since learned and what I see now is they're completely different things and they should not be compared because they're not the same.

Speaker 3:

There I use the analogy of fruit quite often. You can't compare an orange to a banana. They're both fruit but they're entirely different in terms of their texture, how they taste, etc. And it's very much the same with online and in person. In some cases online is superior to in person. If you think about anybody with safety issues, acrophobia, that sort of thing, they're much happier being in their safe home environment, certainly initially to establish rapport and all of that sort of stuff. It's absolutely superior to work with them in that way. And then they've got a choice. Hopefully afterwards, once they've come into their bodies a little bit more and grounded and feel a bit more secure, then maybe at that point we've got an option. But there really are different things and that's one of the things when we do the training programs and pretty much everybody is reticent about going into the online stuff when they do their case studies and almost everybody has a turnaround because they see that in fact it has a lot of value.

Speaker 3:

And, apart from anything else, think about the flexibility from the point of view of a practitioner. You can be literally anywhere on the planet. You can work with anybody anywhere on the planet. Talk about a market. You know it's huge. Our mutual friend, rich James he did the program, did a great job. He was right at the beginning of COVID, did some free stuff on Instagram, I believe, got his whole business running online and then he's like, okay, I'm going to move to Costa Rica. It made no difference to his business whatsoever. So the flexibility aspect from a practitioner's point of view is wonderful. Now I enjoy both of them, just for different reasons. I really like the fact I get to work with people who I wouldn't normally be able to work with, but I still love the proximity stuff. I had to London a couple of times a year. I've had the retreat in Lanzarote for over 20 years, so they're both good, but it's apples and pears bananas is the case maybe.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I have some takes on that, given that I conducted my PhD research study online.

Speaker 1:

There were people who said to me leading breath workers who poo-pooed my study. Some said you should never do breath work online. Some said you should never do breath work online. Some said you should never do the first session online. Some said it doesn't work online. Some people a very well known breath worker told me breath work doesn't work for anxiety, so I'm not going to help you recruit for your study.

Speaker 1:

And, of course, yeah, we had phenomenal results large effect size, statistical significance, the largest randomized control trial ever on conscious connected breathing. And you know, people seem to just like form opinions based on very little evidence and without actually testing it. So I certainly think that conscious connected breathing works online and, yeah, the evidence suggests it does and I would really agree that it's. You know, it's different drinks for different needs, as they would say in the office, and that some people will prefer it online. Some people will prefer it in person.

Speaker 1:

For example, if you live somewhere miles from a breath worker and you can only get to a breath worker once every few months, going once every few months rather than every week online, you're obviously going to get much better results by going every week online and, as you said, you know some people when I've been facilitating workshops one of your workshops, alan when, you know, the energy was going wild and people were having huge processes and people doing the kicking and pounding and I was dealing with one lady who was just, you know, very scared of all those loud noises and clearly she was would have preferred online breathwork, because you can't hear people screaming, shouting and crying yeah, yeah when, during the online stuff and yeah, plus the convenience of of not having to travel if you were in london, you have to get the tube and you're in an altered state, that's uh, you're vulnerable there.

Speaker 1:

So I think there's a lot of benefit to online work as well as um as the in-person stuff.

Speaker 3:

Interesting what you were saying about the various reactions you had from people around working with anxiety. I would say 75 of my work at the moment is around anxiety. It's undeniable and I think your stats were very clear in the phd. It was very clear when we did the john case thing, we were talking about it just prior to the recording starting. I worked with the political correspondent for the Guardian, a lovely guy called John Case, and he was very transparent in terms of his journey. He talked about mental health issues, breakdown, heroin addiction and he didn't really know much about breathwork and I think one of his colleagues had sort of gently nudged him in my direction and we did the session and he was very much raised eyebrow and that's fine, no problem with that at all. But by the end of it he'd done the arc, he'd done a 180 and he absolutely loved it and he wrote the article very again, very transparently. He talked about his cynicism and then what he'd experienced and his main thing was anxiety and he posted it on.

Speaker 3:

It came out in hard copy on the saturday. I remember getting about 25 mails and thinking, oh, that's a little underwhelming for the guardian. And then on monday it went online and it went bonkers. The Guardian got something like 23,000 hits from the article in a day. I've got a very robust website. It broke down. It just couldn't take the traffic that was coming through. And the key word as far as I'm concerned was anxiety, because it's just so pervasive. And that was why I got the offer for the book, because they'd seen that and they knew that there was something in the zeitgeist there that was really relevant and particularly post-COVID, people sort of relax and then here it all comes. There's all the stuff we've been suppressing during that very trying period. So I find it absolutely incredible that people would have any doubt at all. I think that the mistake people make around it is I had somebody come in the other day and he said, yeah, I'd like to get rid of my anxiety. And I think you have to reframe that and sort of manage the expectations and say well, you know, anxiety is a human emotion and it's something that we're programmed to feel and we're all going to feel it at different levels. The key is being able to navigate it and get it down to reasonable levels.

Speaker 3:

I woke up with it the other day. It was a Sunday. I woke up and it was rocking around there. As soon as I opened my eyes and I checked in with it and I realized, oh, it's about that, and I thought you know what? That's a reasonable response to what's actually happening. So there was nothing wrong, did my breath practice, 20 minutes later, done and dusted, moved beyond it and got on with the day.

Speaker 3:

I think it's that sort of thing. You know, breathwork is not a magic bullet. You know it's not something that's going to okay. Now I'm evolved and I'm going to wear white and arm all the time.

Speaker 3:

It's a tool and it has to be used in order to be effective and you have to be quite resolute with it. And it won't get rid of your stress, it won't get rid of your anxiety, but it will help you to navigate those very effectively. And certainly, you know we both have experienced depression. Depression is a response to I think of it as the filing cabinet being full emotional content that hasn't been processed. So what it can help us do is open that filing cabinet and begin to process that content so that we don't get those extreme responses, which is really the body's way of just saying we're full, there's no more space and therefore we're just going to pull the plug and go into pause mode. You know so clearly I'm biased because I work with this stuff every day and have done for over two decades. But it is pretty incredible yeah, yeah, they um.

Speaker 1:

The anxiety thing I think lots of people have. Lots more people have anxiety than they used to, and I think there's definite reasons for that. But I also think there is a section of that growing population who are just victims of concept creep. Whereas in the past you would just say, oh, I'm worried, I'm worried about something, and that would be a healthy reaction to a stressor, now people think any kind of worry is a pathology and I think that's um, that's not necessarily the case. And when someone says like I want to get rid of my anxiety, it's a little bit like having a red warning light coming up on your car dash. Uh, you know, let's say it's your problem with your carburetor or something like that, and you're just like I don't want to fix the carburetor, I just want to get rid of that red light. The anxiety is normally a a warning sign that something in your life is, uh, is a rye or a mist that needs attention. So I think that's a nice way of framing it.

Speaker 3:

And of course, there's way more stimulus and stimulants for that red light to be on nowadays just how we live Cities completely not designed to live in a city. Most of the people I see when I go to London are living life at a rate of knots and juggling their various responsibilities to the best of their ability, but it's simply too much and they're normally then deprioritizing their own self-care. That normally goes somewhere down the line and that's the kicker. So my thing, really with the vast majority of people I work with, is reprioritize yourself. It's not selfish to look after yourself properly, and you'll be in a better position to support those around you in whatever that looks like to you once your needs are met. I think that's part of that. Maybe it's a sort of a British thing I'm not sure about. You know, sacrifice yourself in favor of others, which is absolute. It's terrible. Advice A bit more technical yeah, yeah, exactly yeah, irish from in favor of others, which is absolute.

Speaker 3:

It's terrible advice.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, irish can we talk a bit more about the um, physical side of breath work? Obviously it's got undeniable, amazing uh impacts on mental health. But in terms of I'm thinking, two parts perhaps. One is what's happening to you physically when you do conscious, connected breathing, yeah, and two is, you mentioned, you're quite hands-on with your work and I know that you kind of adjust people. If that's the right term, yeah, we talk about what's happening there as well yeah, well, I think actually rich is probably the expert.

Speaker 3:

In fact I'm bringing him into breath guru this year to to look at the physiological side of things within our trainings. We've been training people now for a good few years. Rich was on one of the first training programs and I think my forte is really the psychotherapeutic and also the hands-on bodywork stuff. So to answer in reverse order, that filing cabin analogy is quite a good one in some ways, and when people come with elevated stress levels or anxiety or depression, that is in the body. So it makes sense then that by working with the body we can find out, a where these things are located and, b begin to open up those areas so that whatever energy is is being held there in the file can be released and processed. So that's the idea behind getting hands-on. We call it body mapping. It's a form of acupressure and it really focuses in on key areas in the body. If you just had to choose one area in the body, I would say solar plexus. Solar plexus for me is almost like our intersection between the heart area and then the will down in the gut, and it's a big indicator of how stressed you are if you just stick your thumb in to your solar plexus area now and just check in with it. For most of us, when we go in just a little bit and then just see how far you can go without it getting too painful, there's some resistance to getting in there. So if I just had to choose one, that's really the one I tend to go for most. In fact, the whole body is. You know, we can hold stuff anywhere.

Speaker 3:

I tend to focus mostly on my thing is really embodiment. So most people on the planet right now aren't inhabiting their bodies, which is strange to even say that. And even when I started to work, the early adopters were mostly yogis and people like that and I was thinking, oh, of course these people are going to be super embodied. Really rare, really rare, particularly yogis, because they tend to have quite tight cores and the Pilates people and all that again often really overtoned cores. So I spend a lot of time just opening up that area so their energy can flow down properly. So if you think about the physical body as being here and then the energy body is coming in, and actually the optimum would be, it would be congruent. Most people are more like this a half in and half out and of course, our culture elicits that also. We're a very intellectual, audio visual culture, so we're eliciting being here a lot of the time wearing these headsets and all of that. So it's actually quite rare to meet somebody who's embodied I don't actually remember meeting somebody, uh, in recent history who's fully inhabiting their vehicle. And, of course, what does that say in terms of how we're going to use the vehicle, how you know?

Speaker 3:

I use the rather flippant analogy of you know, have you tried to drive your car recently with one bum, cheek on your driver's seat and the rest of you out in the vehicle? It's quite challenging Both feet on the pedals, hands and the rest of you out the vehicle. It's quite challenging. Both feet on the pedals, hands on the wheel. Now you're talking, but that, for better or worse, that's where most people are. So my thing really is I work a lot with the legs, I work a lot with the hips.

Speaker 3:

Solar plexus is a key one that sort of tends to open up the upper area and just by bringing touch to the area, immediately the client's attention is going to go to where you're touching. So just something as simple as putting your hands on the feet, immediately the client's attention is going down there and therefore, if their attention is going there, energy is going there. Energy will follow attention. So if you want to bring somebody in, simple, you know, in some ways, pop their hands on the feet, immediately everything starts to flow. So in the, the instructional videos we've got on the, the app, I talk about most people being upside down pyramid shape, and what we're going for is at least a kind of a see, if I'm gonna oh, there we are at least equal distribution, if not.

Speaker 3:

You know, pyramid shape, in other words, they're super grounded, super embodied, and then less and less as they go up and in fact what you'll find is from what most practitioners find when they become more embodied, the mental faculties work. You know, it's like your mind goes from that white noise place to laser beam and your mental acuity actually goes up. You know, as opposed to the opposite, it's not like it doesn't actually need that much energy to focus and operate effectively. So I guess part of partway to explaining how we approach the whole thing. And of course, it's like another dimension then on top of the actual technique itself, like another dimension then on top of the actual technique itself. So you can go in deeper. The efficacy is increased, the power, you could say, of the session is often increased and literally just one point can really open things up, and I think that in itself is a little.

Speaker 3:

There's a sort of almost like an inherent danger in that we were talking prior to the recording of, you know, this idea of standards within the profession. I think people can often get carried away by the fact they're like whoa, this is super powerful. I had this workshop experience and I had this big catharsis and now I'm going to go and do that. Absolutely 20 years and I'm still really beginning this. I may be perceived as an elder, but really you just realize how infinite we are and how much there is to learn. So I have a certain amount of capability, but there's every single client you're learning each time. But there's a every single client you're learning each time. Yeah, but it's a. It's like it's an art. For me, it is an art. I don't see it just as a sort of a mechanical rote thing. It's very much. Intuition is as important as any of the technical stuff that we know to feel your way into the field and feel your way into what's appropriate for any particular person you may be working with.

Speaker 3:

So Richard do you want to say something about the physiology.

Speaker 1:

Well, I was thinking. There's no research on acupressure. No one has ever done anything on acupressure. I know I'm in conversations with other potential PhD students about doing future research with other potential PhD students about doing future research, but I would love to see a study of one group doing regular breathwork with affirmations and acupressure and one group not doing it and seeing if there's any difference there. I think that would be an interesting one.

Speaker 3:

But especially with the whole Me Too thing. Now we're very clear that we need permission to go hands-on with somebody. There needs to be boundaries, there needs to be some sort of signaling system so that if it's too much for them we don't have to back off, et cetera. But in fact I always put that out there to my clients and they're often quite the opposite. They're like no, go for it, I want to get the max out of my session. So quite the reverse really of what I was expecting. I thought I might find reticence and in fact I don't.

Speaker 3:

But yeah, you're right. In a way this is a relatively new way of working. Man's been working with breath for at least 25,000 years. The yogis have got recorded data on pranayama. That's that old. But for me it's really as old as we've been conscious, which is, depending on who you look at, 400,000 years or so. So it's pretty obvious to me that man would start to experiment and ask these questions using rhythm, using movement, using breath. So for me it's something very ancient that we've rediscovered.

Speaker 3:

But the rediscovery 50s, 60s and Stangroff and the rebirthers and all of that and the holotropic. They weren't interested in stamina, they were basically hippies who had been dropping lots of acid and then suddenly it wasn't available. So they were looking for other ways to reach altered states of consciousness and data was not really at the forefront of what they were prioritizing. So that was why I was so excited when you did your PhD, really to get some meaningful data, and of course that's now only going to increase. You've sort of opened those doors now, so there's going to be a lot more people doing that.

Speaker 3:

But in a way that's what I love about it as well. It's very cutting edge. We don't have these precedents behind us. Like the yogis have, you know the pranayama, we don't have that with conscious connected breathing. And I find that really exciting because it is really new frontiers and, as I mentioned earlier, every time I think I understand something or I think I know where the sort of perimeter is, somebody will come in and just blow that away for me and at the moment I haven't found any.

Speaker 2:

I just really haven't found any yeah, well, what direction do you think the industry is going in? Then have you have you come so far, but where's it going? Yeah, I think we're at the beginning of the curve.

Speaker 3:

I don't think we're anywhere near the middle. I see a parallel of what happened. I think we're at the beginning of the curve. I don't think we're anywhere near the middle. I see a parallel of what happened to yoga. We're at that point now where a lot of people are getting interested, a lot of people training, and what happened to yoga, as you probably remember, was from it being kind of lentil-eating hippies just back from Goa or India. It then became everybody and his dog was doing it.

Speaker 3:

And I think the same thing's going to happen with breathwork. I think it has an advantage in that there's a certain section of the population that will never, ever go to a yoga class because they perceive it as spiritual and the iconography and all of that sort of stuff will put a certain amount of people off. Breathwork doesn't really have that. So we're ahead of the game in terms of that bit, and that's one of the beautiful things about it. It's the utility of it. Do you have lungs? Great, you know you can do this. Yes, there are chondroindications, but they're quite minimal if you've had a severe mental illness, among others. But the vast majority of the population are really safe to do this. And it doesn't need expensive equipment, and even if you are living in Ulaanbaatar and can't get to a facilitator, there are downloadable tools to help you. So I see, personally, I think it's going to be bigger than yoga.

Speaker 3:

We're not at that point yet. We're at the point now where it's going to be professionalized and it won't be sufficient to go to a workshop, a weekend workshop, and then be like, okay, I'm going to teach this now. It just won't be permitted. You won't be able to be in the space with people, and that's as it should be. You know, it's a very well for me, it's an honor to work with people, but it's also just that you're responsible for this person.

Speaker 3:

You know, if they go into catharsis in 60 seconds flat, you better know your shit, you better know exactly what to do so that they're safe. And you can't do that by attending a workshop and you certainly can't do it by just working online. You've got to have in-proximity training. Our training is launching in. We've sort of revamped it. It's launching again in January. It's going to be a 12-month program. Yeah, that's what we're talking about. Just like if you were to do psychotherapy or any other you know professional vocation, you would expect to go through some pretty rigorous training. Breathwork is no different, and I love the direction it's heading in that sense.

Speaker 1:

Yes. So one thing I've noticed with breath workers is they want to profess to how powerful breath work is. So they'll say you know it's life changing, you can have mystical experiences, it will cure your depression and you'll meet your ancestors, but then they don't want to do the necessary steps to make it safe. It's like you know you won't believe necessary steps to make it safe. It's like you know you won't believe how powerful this is. But it's just going to be me and a hundred breath workers and, uh yeah, way under supported. Or it's just going to be me. It's just a book or something. You're just reading it with no support. So it feels like you know you can't have both things. You can't have. This is a, you know, a nuclear bomb to your psyche and well, we're not really going to take those safety measures.

Speaker 1:

So, yeah, I think, as you're saying, professionalization is coming. Thank God I'm involved in those conversations with the GBPA and other organizations. There is going to be a lot of challenges to regulation because I think a lot of people do just want to do what they want without any consequences and they don't want any oversight.

Speaker 3:

But unfortunately that will probably, you know, sink the whole industry well, you know it, people are going to do what they want to do when all said and done. But the more we can sort of get it out there and talk about not only the the positives and the power and all of that, but also the fact that it is powerful and therefore it should be not treated lightly, it should be treated with respect and it should be delivered respectfully, and part of that is looking after the safety of your clients. So I heard recently I think you know this one Rich, a guy who'd literally just graduated from a purely online training, I think, and he went off and did a workshop for 50 people and it was in person and he simply wasn't equipped to do that. So a lot of people ended up in various states of distress and he was scuppered, basically, and there's a lot. You know everybody's got that story. So we're pretty much coming in from the opposite direction, I think, which the idea of ratio is like. You're working with a group it's five to one. You're working online it's 15 to one. Those seem reasonable. And even when you've got the 15 to one, you have backup people there and breakout rooms in case anybody gets into trouble. So I feel like you don't know what you don't know. So people are having these amazing experiences about like this is for me, this is my work. I don't necessarily want to put the work in, they just want the kind of the power aspect, and I've definitely been there.

Speaker 3:

At the beginning I was like fucking hell, I'm pretty hot, shit, this is really good. And people haven't. And of course, they're projecting all sorts of stuff on shit. Oh, my god, you just changed my life. And blah, blah, blah. And I always remember the George Clooney quote. His dad sat him down at the beginning of his career and just said look, you're going to receive a lot of adulation here. You're going to receive a lot of press. You're never as good as they say you are, but you're never as bad as they say you are. It's a very leveling thing and I think I've always sort of I always bear that in mind when people are, they're extolling my virtues and it's like thank you, and I just sort of bring it back to them and say but you know, of course you know that your body and your being did this. I'm your facilitator, I'm your guide, I've helped you navigate this experience. But actually this was really you and okay, maybe it's a part of you that isn't accessible to you all the time, but it's certainly you. It's not me using my fluence on you or anything like that, ilk.

Speaker 3:

So there is that I had a guy who came in for my interview or potential trainees and I reject quite a few, I have to say and one of the guys came in him and he was like quite young, he was sort of mid-20s, and we use a parallel track when we train people. So one, one aspect of it, I think of a dna molecule. One strand of the dna is how to be an amazing breath coach, and the other strand is what's my baggage and how do I deconstruct it and move beyond it. And what I've realized is that those two are pretty much inseparable. Just like in the same way, when you did your psychotherapy training, you had to be doing therapy at the same time. So it's the same principle If you can get as clear as you can possibly be and then come into the space as a facilitator, you're going to do a much better job than if you're bringing all sorts of stuff in with you.

Speaker 3:

So this guy, I explained the DNA aspect and like, here's how to be a great breath coach, here's how to deconstruct your baggage. And he was like well, you know, I'd love to know how to be a great breath coach. I think I've done all my baggage. I was just like red flag. I did a weekend retreat a couple of weeks ago and it's like, oh, bless him. That in itself tells me he's not my guy, you know, he's not my trainee, because he's not got the emotional intelligence to understand that it's an infinite journey and that I'm 61.

Speaker 3:

Do I have baggage? You bet your ass, I've got baggage, and the difference is simply there's less of it and I know how to navigate it mostly, not always so. So it's an ongoing thing and I and I like that about it. I like the fact you never get to a point where you can say I can do this because you're always learning, you're always expanding.

Speaker 3:

And likewise, you never get to a point where you go okay, I've done my baggage, let's move on and do other things now. No, you know, it's going to be there till I pop my clogs. I'm still going to have stuff when I leave and head wherever I leave. So again, you don't know what you don't know and there's a lot of ignorance out there. So part of what you know our job and part of what you know this is doing is educating people in terms of how to approach it. Yes, it's amazing and yes, it's very powerful and therefore should be treated with greatest of respect, as should your clients or central clients and what would you say to someone who's considering breathwork for the first time as a um customer, whatever you call them, yeah yeah, I mean great, I've had actually I've had people who've come on the training thing come into the interview not having done it, which always seems very strange.

Speaker 3:

Why would you want to be doing this as a vocation when you haven't actually tried the technique? That's something else. Aside, I'm all for people exploring themselves and my advice for me is just go and work with as many people as you can and feel into whether or not they're appropriate for you, because there'll be some people you're going to have better rapport with than others. So, just like I was looking for a psychotherapist a couple of years ago and I knew I wanted to work with a male because I was going to do mummy stuff and I didn't want any transference getting in the way, so I shortlisted three and I went to their websites and I looked at them and two of them were all about their diplomas and their qualifications and I didn't really get a sense of who they were. The other guy his first page was a blog and he talked about being in Phuket when the tsunami hit and his wife and kids had gone off shopping and he thought he'd lost them. And I was like that's my man? You definitely. And it proved when I started to work with him, I was like, yeah, absolutely Very humane, very transparent, incredibly kind and just with a really huge heart. It's perfect.

Speaker 3:

So I think the same could be said of breath workers. Check them out, there's going to be some. In fact, I just had this conversation earlier today with a couple of trainees. It doesn't mean they're better or worse 's just they're not for you or maybe they're very much for you. But check it out and see, because everybody brings their own essence to it and and that's a really important part of what we do you know, it's not cookie cutter, as we said before. I think it's a vehicle for you bringing whatever you've got into the arena, into the space, and that's going to look different for every single facilitator that you work with. So trust your intuition and do ask them. Ask them about the qualities who have you trained with? It's an important question how long have you been doing this? How's your self-practice?

Speaker 1:

you know that sort of thing yeah, and there are bad breath workers out there as well.

Speaker 3:

Oh yeah just like any any profession yeah, the doctor we talked about just prior to the recording, my greek friend just like in a, it's no different to any other profession. There's different levels of competence within it, and that's why the sort of the safety aspect and the procedural stuff that's being put in place now and the professionalization of the whole sector is so important yeah, um, just going back to that point about, um, constant work, I do.

Speaker 1:

I think there is like some nuance there. One thing I see in the wellness industry is this idea of like just perpetual self-development for the sake of self-development. I think so. I like to frame breath work conscious, connected breath work as medicine, like it is medicine for mental illness, mood disorders and things like that, and you don't necessarily take medicine forever. Once you're healed, you don't need to take that same medicine.

Speaker 1:

I like the analogy of a rocket ship. A rocket has different blasters as it goes through the atmosphere. You need different blasters. Rockets, rockets, propellers to different stages and I think for some people, yeah, they once you're out of depression. Once I was out of depression and addiction I needed to focus less on oh, I'm sick and I'm healing myself into. Okay, am I going to make myself more resilient to stress? And there is that brilliant quote from chris williamson where he says you know, there are two types of people in this world people who don't know they need self-development work and people who don't know when to stop.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah for sure, for sure and it's not like you know I work with breath, obviously. I work with it a lot. So I was just on vacation the week before last I was with my partner. It was beautiful, we were on a little island in the Indian Ocean and what I wanted to do there was just drop into nature, and that in itself is healing. So I think the way I look at it and I think the way you're approaching it is it's a toolkit, and breath is a really great tool to have in your kit, no doubt.

Speaker 3:

But I use a lot of silence. I'm in silence quite a lot of the time, stillness. I'm intrigued by grounding and by connecting to the earth, so I'm out in nature a lot. That's walking or being in the ocean. I'm lucky I live near the beach and stuff, so that's very important. I read a lot. I'm still interested in input.

Speaker 3:

I'm always my antennae are always open for stuff that maybe I don't know about or maybe I haven't heard about, and I'll feel, if I get, I call it the flash. If I get the flash, I'll go and check it out, and that's normally my intuition, saying this one is for you, and sometimes I don't get it, that's great, you know. So I'm open to it, but I don't want to be obsessive about it. I want to have a life, I'm about it. I want to have a life. I'm not a, I'm not a monk or something. My body is a temple.

Speaker 3:

Well, yeah, and I love the odd glass of wine and it seems to me like a really nice thing to do. Um, and I'm a bit of a car nut, so there's all that. So it's like you don't become less, you don't become this sort of I think some people are expecting sort of rarefied version one of the best things I've ever heard anybody say about breathwork. It was a friend of mine, alan, and he was asked how are you different as a result of the work you've done? And he just simply said I'm more me, and that was just so beautifully simple and yet very profound at the same time, and I feel that's part of it. I'm just so much more accepting of myself, and part of that is giving myself a break and having my really slow mornings and understanding how I work best and not being noticed the grindstone all the time, whether it's self-development or work, and, you know, giving myself this eight months period to just kick back a little bit and just take stock and and enjoy can you talk a bit about that, alan?

Speaker 2:

I know you're taking this eight months off. You've given so much to to breath, work, and what's this eight months about for you?

Speaker 3:

so uh what it was. I hit 60 last year, right, and people were talking a lot about, you know, the decade and all of that, and I was just like I'm just really happy be here, I feel really glad to be here with a really nice life, and I just feel very grateful. And as that was happening, at the same time I could feel something shifting within me and I couldn't put any words to it, but I was feeling this sort of inner wave, if you like, and the last time I had that was Saudi Arabia, when I left and changed career and did something quite different. Ie this and I just thought you know what? I'm just going to let it roll and just give it its time. Don't try and push it through. You know, and it's one of the things I say to my clients all the time we're taught to want things now, or preferably by yesterday, and I feel like the way nature works and we are part of nature, obviously the way nature works is very gradually. You don't just go from spring to summer. It's a gradual transition summer to autumn and I feel like we're like it's very incremental. You almost wouldn't notice it. So I wanted to really honor that and I let it roll for a bit.

Speaker 3:

And then one of my friends was around for lunch. I think it was January or February and I was still having this feeling. I feel it growing, but I had absolutely no idea what it looked like. And she said oh, do you know, your house has doubled in value since you bought it three years ago. And I was like I did not know. But that is very key information and I realized at that point it was about shifting gears and giving myself some more space and time. And, uh, part of that is writing the book.

Speaker 3:

As a consequence of that guardian article that we referred to earlier, I got an offer from a pretty major publisher who were very interested in collaborating on something around anxiety and and I was love literature. I'm always reading, I like writing, I love the whole editing process. So that was just right up my street and it had been sort of on the periphery but never really had the opportunity to do that. So consequently sold the place Literally from putting it on the market to money being in the bank was eight weeks. That's unheard of. I live in Spain. It took me 11 months to buy the place and eight weeks to actually sell it, so I knew I had some pretty interesting universal help happening there. I was watching it, going down thinking this is outrageous, you know, and it just was so smooth and yeah, and that's now all done.

Speaker 3:

So it seemed like a good time to step back and we've used it for Breath Guru as well, to step back a little bit and for us all to sort of recalibrate and what's come up is we're going to revamp the training and we've got some ideas, richard, actually coming in as part of that revamped. Look for the training and this whole thing that we were talking about earlier, which is professionalization of the industry and the sector, and just very excited about it. It's going to be. We've already got a great program sector and just very excited about it. We've already got a great program. It's going to be even better and I love that and I think it's quite different to anything that's out there. So, that being said, happily I've got some great people in the team who are doing most of that for me and I get to sort of step back a bit and think about how I'm going to approach the book, and part of that is giving yourself space and time to just let it percolate.

Speaker 3:

I'm not somebody who can do a full day's work and then plug in and be really inspired. That's not how I work. I need my rest time. So that's what this period's about, from now until well. When I estimate something, I pretty much always get it 100% wrong. So what I've decided to do is I'm estimating it will take four months, so in fact, it will probably take about eight. So we've got our first training group coming in to Lanzarote in February 2025, middle of. So from now to then should be enough time, I think. So it's exciting. I haven't done this since I was 40. I took a year out to retrain when I was 40. So 61 feels like a good time to take another gap year.

Speaker 3:

It's definitely an intense when do people find you for the time being designed with zero knowledge in mind. You don't need to have done any breathwork whatsoever. And that's happening at 7pm UK time to 9pm UK time three evenings next week. I'll be in London in September, london in November, and I've got two existing groups that are on the go. They're coming in for their graduation weeks. One is coming in on the 28th of this month, the other one is coming in at the end of Octoberober.

Speaker 3:

So it's not like I've stopped completely, but it's definitely way, way less than I'm normally doing. So yeah, it's all good and it's nice to have some space and time. You know, tomorrow I've got a free day that just does not happen usually. So I'm going to be a beach velma, just head to the beach and maybe go for a walk and wander the coast a little bit. So this all feels like very timely. I feel ready to do it differently, absolutely, and also to let other people in, let the world with richard's wife natalia. She's been my number two in the business for a couple of years and with rich coming in at the end of this year, it's great. So this is like a transition period of me sort of stepping back a little bit and letting the younger people come to the fore. There we go, absolutely best of luck excited for that yes, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Well, thanks so much for your time and it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you, total pleasure hanging out with you guys.

Speaker 3:

Nice to meet you, andy, and anything I can do that's going to promote breathwork, I'm up. Whatever it is, whatever it looks like, I'm there usually. So thanks very much for taking time out. Nice to talk with you both and see you soon. Richard and Andy, where are you based? I'm?

Speaker 2:

in London and I didn't actually tell you this earlier, but I'll be seeing you for a one-to-one in about a month's time.

Speaker 3:

Ah, okay, great, You're on the next London trip.

Speaker 2:

Brilliant, because I was just about to offer you a place. You've already done it you beat me to it.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, okay, so I'll look forward to that and thanks so much, both, and take care. Lots of love, take care.

Speaker 2:

Bye wow welcome back welcome back. That was awesome. Um, he's so eloquent, isn't he just? He just um have to do it, so light touch.

Speaker 1:

You just don't have to guide him too much he's just straight into where you want him to go. Yeah, exactly he kind of. We had a running order and he kind of just I don't know, maybe he read our minds or something, answering the next question in the running order it sounds like here we just switched off, but we were actually just engaged and, um yeah, observing him go over exactly what we wanted to go over yes, indeed.

Speaker 1:

So yeah, I hope you enjoyed that. We didn't mention where to find Alan. It's at breathgurucom and at breathguru on Instagram. And, yeah, he's available in London. He does retreats in Lanzarote, does his teacher trainings, which, as you mentioned, I'll be visiting out in Spain. I'll be teaching on those as well in the future and, um, yeah, given that I'll be there, you probably want to sign up now, don't you?

Speaker 2:

yeah, don't let that put you off. Alan's a really good guy and you won't see much of it. Yeah, it's just true, yeah I mean they are.

Speaker 1:

They're discounting now just to offset the, the lack of value you'll get from me.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's a's a big discount, to be fair there aren't many people in the world who've done as much for breathwork as him. Over what did he say? A 20-year period. So definitely well worth checking out his work and he's such a nice guy as well, totes.

Speaker 1:

All right, Well, thank you listener. You find us at Andy Sam at. The Breath Geek and.

Speaker 2:

Rich's website RichardLBlakecom.

Speaker 1:

That's right, and all good podcasting hosts Apple Podcasts, Spotify. You know how to find a podcast by now.

Speaker 2:

All right, cheers Andy, cheers Rich, take care, bye, bye-bye.