On the Spectrum Empowerment Stories with Sonia Krishna Chand: Adult Autism, Neurodivergent, and Mental Health Expert

Rethinking Bipolar Disorder with Sean Blackwell

• Sonia Krishna Chand | Adult Autism and Neurodivergent Mental Health Expert | Empowerment Coaching • Season 2 • Episode 52

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Disclaimer: This is not to be taken as a therapy directive, but rather this is for learning and entertainment purposes only! Please consult with your physician and/or mental health care team to decide whether this approach is appropriate for you. 

Sensitive topics such as trauma and SA are discussed in this episode.

What if the loudest story about bipolar disorder—the chemical imbalance—misses the point? We sit down with author and facilitator Sean Blackwell to peel back that narrative and explore bipolar through a wider lens: trauma held in the body, spiritual emergency as a potential breakthrough, and why empathetic presence can do what power struggles never will.

Sean recounts his own 1996 crisis that looked like acute psychosis yet became a turning point that reshaped his life. From supporting his wife’s nieces through multiple episodes to building retreats rooted in holotropic-style breathwork, he shows how non-ordinary states can surface buried memories, emotions, and meaning. 

You’ll hear specific case studies, including a client whose years-long coccyx pain disappeared after a powerful somatic release and another who reclaimed traumatic memories months after retreat, finally aligning emotional truth with experience. 

If you’re curious about alternatives to one-size-fits-all approach,  this conversation offers a compassionate, grounded path: respect biology, honor the body, and allow meaning to emerge. For books, videos, training, and retreat details, visit https://www.bipolarawakenings.com/ If this perspective resonated, follow the show, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review to help others find it.

SPEAKER_01:

This whole idea of your mental disorders being caused by chemical imbalance, there's no science behind that. There's nothing. And all the tests will show that you're biologically normal. Your serotonin levels are normal. Your dopamine levels are completely within range. All the science shows that you're normal biologically. So then what's going on?

SPEAKER_00:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's episode. When we think about the term bipolar disorder, we often think about the erratic mood swings, that people tend to have a perception about what that is, or you know, we tend to think about medications, we tend to look at that as we we know it as a depressive disorder. In the mental health world, especially, it is grouped under depressive disorders. And as we know it, most people who come to therapists who have bipolar disorder have a psychiatrist prescribe them medication to handle the mood swings. Today, we have a very special guest, Sean Blackwell, who is here to challenge our perceptions and any notions of bipolar disorder and instead reframe how we think about bipolar disorder so that we can look at it from a different lens and think about it differently to gain a better understanding not only for if perhaps any of us have bipolar dis, but for people whom we may know who may have bipolar disorder. So without further ado, let's please welcome here Sean. Thank you so much for being here, Sean.

SPEAKER_01:

Hi, Songa. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00:

So, Sean, why bipolar disorder? What made you choose to go into that?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, to a certain degree, it chose me. In 1996, so over 30 years ago, about 30 years ago, I had a experience in an intensive self-help seminar that during an meditation, I felt kind of an explosion of energy at my heart center. And I started intensive crying and I was feeling a lot of fear. It was part of this meditation to focus on our fears. And by the time that meditation was over, all my senses had sharpened. I could see detail in curtains that I couldn't see before. I had a sense of oneness with things. I had a feeling of like all-knowingness, like, well, not all-knowingness, but I finally knew things that I felt like I didn't know enough about before. There was a knowingness there. And after five days of being in that state, uh being very emotional with my family, bringing up issues from my childhood, was eventually eventually came to the conclusion that I had died. And I had died in a scuba diving accident that I had two months earlier. And that's what brought up the fear. Because when I was in that meditation, all of a sudden I was focused on fear, and then all of a sudden I saw my depth gauges in my hand. And I had lost my weight belt 90 feet below sea level. And there was one moment where I was just watching my depth gauges, wondering if I was going to die or not before I hit the surface. Because I had lost belt and my whole body was going up to the surface very quickly. But if you panic in that situation or you feel fear, you can die right away from an air embolism. I had been trained for my scuba train training to just relax. And so that's what I did, but I didn't know that it had traumatized me. And that trauma came up in this intensive self-help seminar, which led me to being thinking that I was dead. Now, from the very beginning, I felt like things had opened up for me. I had been in depression, in and out of depression for seven years, extremely frustrated with my career. And um what was your career? I was in advertising and it really wasn't going anywhere. You know, it was really stuck. And uh, so when I took the course, I felt this big opening. And so I felt like things were much better. And uh that was really the beginning. Well, because I was put to the psychiatric hospital. And there they were giving me a psychiatric diagnosis of perhaps bipolar or schizophrenia, or a one-time episode. But I always knew it was very good for me. And uh after that, my life got a lot better. I took a few months to integrate, but then when I went back to work, my salary tripled within three years. I went from$30,000 to$100,000 a year in Canadian dollars, you know. It was a big move. And uh, everything just got better. But I always knew it was a spiritual process that I was in, you know. I never had to go back to the psychiatric hospital, I never got medicated. It was just a big leap forward for me. And a year later, I discovered the work of Dr. Stan Groff, and he had coined what he termed a spiritual emergency. Now, for him, a spiritual emergency was a crisis that could be taken as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, but that it actually could be a breakthrough, like a really uh spiritual breakthrough for people could be very good. And so that's what happened to me. And I was like, oh, this is what happened to me. And I told my parents and I told them to read the book. Of course, they didn't. Anyways, so that went well and life went on. I eventually met a woman from Brazil, moved to Brazil, that's where I live now, and um, we were married. We recently divorced, but we were together 27 years and we're still friends. Um, 24 years actually. We're still friends. But then it was 10 years in Brazil that her nieces started to have episodes, and they were being diagnosed with bipolar and they were being given psychiatric medications, which I had medication when I was in the hospital, but never after that. And then I spent the next four months trying to figure out what was happening to them versus what happened to me. And that's when the whole journey started of exploring what I would call the spiritual dimension and healing potential of bipolar disorder. And that was 2007 when I started this work.

SPEAKER_00:

So, when you were in the hospital, what medication did they give you? And what did you believe about when you were diagnosed with bipolar as a potential diagnosis for you? What did you feel like you could resonate with with that diagnosis?

SPEAKER_01:

I couldn't resonate with anything, and I and I never did. I just thought this psychiatrists are making a big mistake, and I've got to get out of here. So I told them what they needed to hear, which was told them my name and that this is my family, and I think I had some sort of PTSD response to the scuba diving accident. I thought that would impress them. And I was very lucky, lucky, I was out in four days. I was out in four days. And so for me, I I never internalized the idea of a mental illness. And what broke my delusion of being dead was just the fact that two days later, when I finally woke up from the medications, and I don't know what they medicated me with. It was a forced injection. It felt like rape, it was horrible. And I thought, well, if I'm being, I thought I was being tested by God, but when they forcibly injected me, that kind of broke that delusion. I was like, well, God wouldn't be that mean, you know. And then I was still in the hospital two days later. I hadn't passed on to some other dimension. So I thought, well, I just I don't know what's going on, but I need to get out of here, you know. And so just the fact that I was in the hospital started to break down my delusions, you see. And so it wasn't that, it wasn't that bad for me. It was very like if you look at what happened, I mean, when the police arrested me, I was naked, I was down to my underwear in a five-star hotel ballroom, you know. That's where the course was taking place. And I was in the next room. I had taken everything off, I had peed on the carpet, I was waiting to be taken to heaven, you know. So I was having, from a psychiatric uh perspective, a quote, acute psychosis. There's no doubt. It was the acute psychosis that these days usually gets labeled as bipolar one, where you have mania going into psychosis. But back then, you could also get a schizophrenia label as well, you know. So that's what I did it. So I never internalized the diagnosis. It was never part of my reality. It only came because I thought like a spiritual experience and a mental illness were completely apart, you know, like far apart. And then even from my studies, I thought, well, these are completely different things. They just get confused. But then once I saw what happened to my wife's nieces, I was like, okay, what's going on here? And I realized that actually there's a big gray area. There's a big gray area between the breakdown and the breakthrough, you might say.

SPEAKER_00:

When you got out of the hospital, you went on to go ahead and eventually write a book, Bipolar Awakenings. What have you learned throughout your journey in this awakening experience that you've had post-hospital?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, the first book I wrote in 2011 was Am I Bipolar or Waking Up? And that's my story. That's where I tell the story of my family history, my hospitalization, my trip to Brazil, um, and starting to work with my nieces, okay, or my wife, my wife's nieces. That whole story I tell in Am I Bipolar or Waking Up? And uh that's basically what I've summarized for you right here in this first question of yours was that. And then working with my nieces, we actually had a lot of success. It was complicated, but the first niece who had these episodes episodes, when we brought her back to the psychiatrist, they had said that they had never seen someone bounce back so quickly from a period of psychosis as what we were able to do with her. But they still medicated her for apparently months. While I was studying the difference between what happened to her and what happened to me, I realized from the work of some pioneering psychologists in the 1970s and psychiatrists, that people like Artie Lang and Lauren Mosher, they felt that psychosis was an intended reorganization of the psyche. And back then they actually had clinics that the clinics would support people while in psychosis just by being empathetic without any medications. And they actually found that empathetic undergrads from university in San Francisco were more effective at dealing with people in psychosis than trained PhDs. And the reason was that when tensions struck, the PhDs would pull rank and say, Listen, I'm I'm the doctor here. You know, you need to listen to me. And that would break down the relationship. Whereas the empathetic undergrad would say, Hey man, you're scaring me. Do you think you could sit down? Let's let's relax, you know, had a more empathetic tone. And that made all the difference. So when I learned that it was better to have untrained, empathetic college undergrads working with people than PhDs while they're in psychosis, I was completely floored. I was just, I was just floored by that. And I realized that I could do this work. But the trick was that also what I was learning was that it got more difficult to support people as they had multiple episodes. But still, it was early in the game. So I thought, we'll take our niece off the meds and then I'll talk to her parents and we'll say, look, when she goes into psychosis, we'll support her the next time and see how it goes. But it wasn't her that went into psychosis, it was her sister. Her sister came back from Europe and the mix of triggers of coming back from Europe, having to go back to university, seeing her own sister in psychosis, she went into psychosis and she called us first. And my wife and I were able to support the second sister. So the younger one was Ileana, she was the first Anna, she was the first one. Second one was Ileana, and we supported her. She had three episodes one summer, and we supported her in two or two of the three. And she was able to go back to university unmedicated, finished with masters, finished, um, finished with an honors degree, went on to do her master's, was able to go seven years with no medications, and then it started to happen again. But just the fact that we were able to get her through these episodes meds-free, and then have her go back to university and continue to do a master's degree, told us that we were on the right track and that this work had real value in supporting people. And so the beginning of that work was the book I've got here, Bipolar Awakenings, which I published last year. And that book or this book really talks about where my work went from there because I started to work with people around the world doing private retreats for people using techniques based on the work of Dr. Stan Groff. And and there's a lot of learning that's gone on into the book.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, I just I was just curious to know then, too, even in this course of this work with breathing, the spiritual retreats, what was it like when it hit closer to home when you were dealing with watching your nieces go through psychosis and then them not being on medication? What was that experience for you? And can you kind of walk us through what your steps were in supporting her when she was in that, so that people can have a better understanding exactly as to, you know, just so you could just loan us what your journey was in that.

SPEAKER_01:

The the general technique from the Ceteria method, and there are Coteria clinics around today, is that if you've got a person in their first episode or second episode of acute psychosis, which is basically a break with reality, they think they're dreaming to a certain degree. If you support them with empathy, that they will be able to work through this thing. So there's this concept of being with the person as opposed to doing something to them. So as long as you can bring them presence, even in their most extreme situations, bring them presence and keep them protected, then you're doing a great service for them. You're you're helping them process what's going on. If you try and manipulate them or stop them from screaming or being angry, that's going to go nowhere. You have to be able to be supportive in those that first week. And that was the technique I used. And to a certain degree, it was very emotional for me because it took me back to my experience 10 years earlier. An experience that could be so extremely beautiful, you know, does feel like uh a kind of an awakening, a samadhi, you know. And both my nieces had experiences like that. It looks on one level like a Buddha awakening, right? But then there is this other side that you you really need to take care of because they're not functioning, right? I was much more functional than they were, for sure, for sure. So yeah, it was very powerful for me. And to a certain degree, it sort of became my life mission. I was like, okay, so this is why this happened to me, because I was the last person that anyone would ever think would end up in the psychiatric hospital. I was the guy in school, I was like one of the most popular kids in the class, straight A student, I was good at sports, I won awards, I went to the top university, University of Toronto in Canada, did good grades there, started a career. There's nothing in my history that would indicate mental illness, you know. And so, and so it was confusing for me. Like, why did this happen to me? I just didn't fit the profile to a certain degree. And then when this came up and I was supporting them, it was like, okay, that's what that's what this is all about, and this became my mission. And I started to make a lot of videos on YouTube and quickly grew a following of 25,000 subscribers between 2007 and 2012. It just all kind of took off for me.

SPEAKER_00:

You mentioned that one of the works you've done is breathing techniques. And you've written in in your bio about a patient you've treated that uh she used to have a lot of spine issues, but then when she started doing the work with you, a lot of the pain that she was carrying in her body had disappeared eventually.

SPEAKER_01:

I researched I did a lot of work with people voluntarily and psychosis and things like that while they're in psychosis between 2007 and 2012. But it was always very chaotic. And my book talks about those stories. Some people calling us when they're in a non-ordinary state, my wife and I would run off and support them, and it often ended up not ideal. We would be able to help a little bit, but without family support, it just wasn't working. But then I realized that there's this technique that Stan Groff had for holotropic breath work, where you could breathe people into a non-ordinary state. And in that non-ordinary state, trauma would release. And the trauma was at the root of the disorder. So this whole idea of your mental disorders being caused by chemical imbalance, there's no science behind that. There's nothing. And all the tests will show that you're biologically normal, your serotonin levels are normal, your dopamine levels are completely within range. All the science shows that you're normal biologically. So then what's going on? Well, from the Graf perspective, we've got a bioenergetic system or a kundalini system. You could call it kundalini, could call it a chakra system. And these words, of course, come from India, and the knowledge of kundalini is from the mystic yogis of India, right? And in China or Asia, they call it qi. But you don't have any of that in uh psychiatry, right? It doesn't exist. But when I would talk to people online, I I realized that a lot of people were having somatic symptoms, which psychiatry would dismiss as psychosomatic systems, you know. Realize so psychiatry doesn't really see Qi or Kundalini as any part of our psyche or any part of our mind at all. It doesn't really exist. And and to be honest, from a scientific perspective, where the only things that exist are measurable, it doesn't exist. You cannot find this scientifically. It's a spiritual energy, you know, it's a little bit different. It's a spiritual energy. But the more I talked to people online and even working with my nieces, I saw there were somatic aspects to things. And Eliana, while she was on the sofa in our house, she started to accelerate her breathing. She started to, you know, really go into this sort of accelerated breathing because her heart accelerated. And when I saw that, I remembered the holotropic breath work from Stan Groff. And I thought, well, maybe there's a link here. Then I started to research more about holotropic breath work, and I thought, well, I think something can be done to help people heal their trauma with this technique. And basically, now it's contraindicated for people with bipolar disorder at this point, because the typical session is within a group in a limited time frame. But I thought, well, what if we gave people an unlimited session, an unlimited session and an unlimited time frame, like on a retreat for 10 days, for example? And so that's what I started to set out and do. I created a retreat program for people, private, where they got unlimited access to me, where we were together 24 hours a day. And when we did the breath work, they could start and stop whenever they wanted. And then I would facilitate for them. So eventually I got my training as a holotropic breathwork facilitator. But because the whole thing is uh formatted in a specific way, I call mine bipolar breath work because it gives me more flexibility and attention to people. And so doing that with people, we saw that we can start to activate their bioenergetic system and that that would lead to healing. And the the best example was my first client. Her name was Livia, she's from Romania. And she had told me on a call before I went to Romania and worked with her that she had pain in her coccyx that was so bad she had seen six doctors. And she had she had had a history of bipolar that was over 10 years. She'd been hospitalized many times, but she couldn't sleep on her back. She had to sleep on her side. She couldn't sit in a chair for more than 10 minutes. And in her fifth breath work session with me, she felt hot energy go right out of the coccyx, up the spine, into the shoulder blades, out through the hands. She had warm hands for the first time in her life, and the coccyx pain permanently disappeared, gone. And she said to me, she said, Sean, I've been to six doctors for this, and you made it disappear with five sessions of breath work. You know, some of them had recommended surgery.

SPEAKER_00:

So, what exactly would be um an example of holotropic breath work? How would that work as opposed to other breathing techniques that are out there? Question.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, what's really difficult to explain with breath, holotropic breath work is it's not a particular breathing technique. It's not pranayamo or a breath of fire, which you might find in in Hinduism or yoga. You're not doing a particular pattern of number of inhales or number of exhales. Wim Hof breathing. Belly, chest, head, hold, release, belly, chest, head, hold, release. You know, it's not that technique. What it is is more of a format. You need to have a very safe space. You need to have a trained facilitator. Then your client lays on a yoga mat in sweatpants or a mattress, okay? They're in sweatpants, they take off all their jewelry. Then we pay play powerful music. Then we encourage them to start to over-breathe in their own style. Okay, and we don't guide the breathing. If they want to breathe very gently, they can. If they want to be more aggressive, they can. If they want to use the nose or the mouth, it doesn't matter. They do it the way they want. They trust their own inner healer, we call it.

unknown:

Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

And then what will happen within five to twenty minutes is that the inner healer will bring on conscious material that's buried in your chakra system or your kundalini system. It'll bring it to the surface, and you'll have memories and emotions come up most of the time. Sometimes no, but most of the time, yes. And then once you've got these emotions come up, you're supposed to work with them. You're supposed to move your body, you're supposed to vocalize. Sometimes the person's dancing. It's a very somatic therapy. And there you can unblock these traumatic blockages. And that can go right back into things, for example, like the birth process, where a facilitator will need to hold you in a particular way. Once you both realize that you're going into birth trauma, the facilitator needs to hold you in a particular way so that you can struggle out that birth canal from head to toe. So the facilitator will hang on to you as you get your head through his arms, through the shoulders, the waist, the hips, the legs, all the way out to the feet. And that's the trickiest part for the facilitator because you could you can be kicked. And so you need to keep an eye on those feet because they might come out at you in a particular way, and you've got to get your head out of the way, you know. So it's a very somatic therapy, right? And but particularly with this case of Livia, with the Kundalini energy clearly coming out of the coccyx, it was a very direct example of how this was linked to her bipolar disorder. And we did a retreat for her the next year as well. And then again, she was medication-free for five years, something that was impossible for her to do before we worked together. So it was a big success for being my first client.

SPEAKER_00:

When you say that she had pain that was linked to her bipolar disorder, how are those two related?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, the best I can see it is that there's trauma in your life that you haven't acknowledged. That's why it's trauma. Trauma isn't something bad that happens to you, it's an emotional dimension of your life that you have blocked from feeling because it was just too painful. But those blocked feelings, the trauma, get lodged in this kundalini system or this chakra system. And it could be anywhere in the body. It can be in the feet, it can be in the hands, but a lot of the times it's along this chakra line. And in the case of Livia, was in her coccyx, was really strong. And she also had a tumor in her throat that doctors didn't even want to touch with surgery because it was too risky. The area was too risky. It was a seven-inch tumor. And after we worked together, that tumor shrunk as well. Okay. So there can be blockages, you know, throughout the body. And then breath work unleashes these blockages a layer at a time. All right. And it does it not because of the breathing, it does it because of the healing intelligence, this healing field. Groff called it an inner healer. I'll call it inner healer for now. This inner healer starts to work through you. It's a divine intelligence. It's God. Could be angels, could be aliens, okay? But we could call it God. And this intelligence works through you. Um and and the trick is that you need to trust it, trust it as part of your intuition to a certain degree. If you can't trust it, you'll stay blocked, you'll stay locked up. And so when things get very scary for breathers, for example, you'll hear facilitators say one thing. Keep going, keep going, keep going. The only way out is through, you know? So if you're just on the mat and you're like, I can't listen, I can't deal with this, I can't deal with this. It's like, it's here. You have to deal with it. Go. I'm with you. I'm supportive. You can do it. You know? Oh, we'll come back to this later. Well, I mean, if someone really can't deal with it, yeah, you got to respect people's limits. But we really do encourage people to open up.

SPEAKER_00:

Does that answer your question? It does, and it helps make help helps me understand. And I'm sure many of our listeners who are listening to this, I mean, as myself right now, we're fascinated by what we're hearing. So what would be, what would you say would be like some of the biggest revelations of people when they've had psychosis? Like, what were some of like the biggest revelations you've heard that people shared back to you?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, one revelation that comes up is when people are traumatized, they can have blocked memories around certain situations. And the most common is sexual abuse. We don't remember what happened, but we suspect something that happened. When people go into mania, they feel the abuse has taken place. And it's very common for people in mania or in psychosis to start to point fingers and blame somebody for abusing them who may or may not have been the culprit. Because we often blame the person who's very close to us because they're there with us in the psychosis, you know. But it can often be another relative or a friend or a neighbor. And it's just that because your your mind's not there, but your bot, your your emotions are, then you start to point fingers in the wrong direction. But the truth is coming out. I was abused. But then when I go, oh, I was above I Sonia, you abused me. No, that's the mistake. And that can happen. But we often throw the baby out with the bathwater. We think, oh, see how crazy they are? She's saying that I abused her. I never abused her, but she was abused. See how complicated it can be? And also, I've had clients after retreats, memories start to unfold months later. I'll get a phone call three months later. Uh, this happened to me once with one client. All of a sudden, he remembered his uncle on top of him, you know, three months after our retreat together. You know, and this is another guy who was medicated for life. And to this day, as far as I know, he's unmedicated. Last time we talked, he was unmedicated, he put bipolar disorder behind him. But he had to confront a number of layers of trauma, and one of them was this abusive side, you know. So memories are coming back, feelings are coming back. And you can also, on the other side, get in touch with deeper feelings of belonging. Like you belong to this world, the world is a beautiful place, I'm here for a reason, a sense of mission, my life has value, and that could be a big shift from somebody who was like, I don't fit in this world, you know, this kind of thing. So people's insights can be very personal and very different, but those are just two examples of how they can come through.

SPEAKER_00:

When people are going through their psychosis during the breathing exercise portion of the treatment.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

Now I know that you say that there's a facilitator in the room that will say, keep pushing, keep going through.

SPEAKER_01:

Have people ever maybe I should clarify something first? On the retreats, I don't work with people while they're in acute psychosis. I work with them while they're grounded and they remain on their medications because they've often had multiple episodes. They've often had five or six episodes of bipolar. And so by the time I get to them, it's beyond being able to help them in psychosis. So we work from a grounded place, and that's where we start.

SPEAKER_00:

And okay, so that's where you start. But at the moments where you have worked with people that were going through psychosis, in the moments that you have in you said that, you know, there are people who maybe like, oh my God, I can't take this anymore, you know, things of that sort in the breathing, the holographic breathing exercises. Have people ever during that time just yelled out loud what's happening as it was happening in real time? Have they ever ever said, oh my God, like get off me or you're hurting me, or something like that during the time that they're deep in it and that the trauma memory is coming up?

SPEAKER_01:

I don't know. I can't I can't recall that happening with any of my clients in particular, but certain situations have come up where it's, for example, when you're working through sexual abuse, all right. And I haven't had a ton of experience with this, but I've had a little bit. And I think other types of abuse. As well. It can come off in layers. All right. So with one client I had, first they had to deal with the fact in the non-ordinary state. Now they're not in psychosis. They've been breathed themselves into a non-ordinary state, but it's not psychosis, okay? Once they've breached into that state, this particular client, she had an encounter with her father. And while I was holding her, because that's part of the work sometimes, is they want you to be there as a father figure or something. She started talking to me as if I were her father. She had this conversation. And this um the conversation was very meaningful to her. He had died. So it was as if she was talking to her father through me. Now, having that conversation was healing one layer of the trauma. But then later on, a few years later, she went to the place where he was actually physically touching her and reliving the feelings of being touched as a child by her father. And that was terrifying for her. That was terrifying. But because we had done a number of retreats together, she had the trust in the technique and the trust in me that she could go there. And that's where the most powerful healing happened at all. But it scared the living daylights out of her. It was terrifying. It took a lot of courage for her to go there. And I I had one other client who went through a similar kind of encounter with something extremely painful where it led to her, she was doing breathwork on her bed with me and her supporter. And she screamed so loud and she bounced off the bed. Like she just bounced right up. And it had to do with how they treated her in the psychiatric hospital. And I said to her, How did you have the courage to go there? And she said, Well, at one point I told myself, I either open up to this or I'm going to be a schizophrenic for the rest of my life. And she had been hospitalized 11 times and over a 20-year period and hasn't been hospitalized since. We needed true two retreats with her as well. But that was the first retreat, and it was just really powerful. And I'll be honest too, once I started working like with these really powerful moments, because I've just given you highlights of my first three clients, I didn't have any experience like doing this. You know, I had my experience working with people in psychosis. I had experience from the books that I had studied. So it had been a six-year process to finally get to the place where I was doing the retreats. But in terms of giving a bipolar or a variation on holotropic breath work to clients on a retreat in an intensive way, 2013, I just jumped in the cold end of the pool. You know, it was like it was jumping in, it was like jumping into ice water for me. But I was prepared and fortunately the healing field or the inner healer knew, knew my clients, knew I was there, knew my experience level, and gave me the kind of positive experience with both those three first clients that made me realize I was on the right track and I had to keep going despite any adversity.

SPEAKER_00:

People go to the spiritual retreat. Now you say that you these people have been now in a more kind of calmer place. They're not right, they're grounded. In full, they're not a going active psychosis at that time when they come to the retreat. What do people gain out of the retreat? Like what goes on? What is the agenda in the role in those retreats?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, we started out with a mix of therapies, you know, the typical things, meditation, maybe some art therapy, some exercise, and then breath work, the bipolar breath work. But then we just realized that all the healing was happening during the breath work, and that the breath work was so intense that there really wasn't much point in doing anything else afterwards. So we would do the breath work, and then whenever that stopped, then we would do a mandala drawing, which was kind of an art therapy to integrate the experience, and then we would share and talk about what happened. But then we would rest for the rest of the day most of the time and maybe get in a second session, but a lot of the times we would just be back at it the next morning, you know. So it was a lot of downtime because the processing was so intense that sometimes it would leave clients in bed the entire day. Just in bed the entire day after the work.

SPEAKER_00:

I can only imagine because I know like how tiring it gets when you come out of an anxiety attack. So I can only imagine it must feel like these people may have ran a marathon by the time they finish the breath work. And you know, especially if things start to resurface or things should come up again or something, and just getting through and processing everything through sharing with others.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's um it's deceptive, it's often deceptive in how it works because it's in some ways it's similar to psychedelic therapy. You're taking a psychedelic to open yourself up to your unconscious. The psychedelic is not doing the healing, it's just opening you up. The breath work in the same way is opening you up to what will surface, all right? But then I lost my train of thought.

SPEAKER_00:

You were talking about like how it's the breathing just opens you up through the breath work to different experiences.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and so then once you once you open up to these different experiences and then you process them, you're just kind of wiped out. Like that's it. I think I had a better point to make. It'll come back. My apologies.

SPEAKER_00:

No, no worries. So, what do you think about with, you know, because you know, there's other work that people are doing as well, such as EMDR, right? With the eye movement desensitization, where there are different techniques to also help people process their trauma. There's also hypnosis as well.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

That people can use for trauma. So I'm just wondering, you know, like what do you think about those other methods as well? And like, have you ever explored those things as well?

SPEAKER_01:

I've explored them a little bit. The MDR, I just don't think goes deep enough. An MDR therapy uh therapist criticized me once through a client and said that what I was doing was like taking a chainsaw out of the psyche. And I told the client, I said, Well, what he's doing is like taking dental floss to the psyche. You know, it's like if you've got bipolar disorder, you're just not gonna get, I just don't think you're gonna get that far with the MDR. Maybe it helps some people, maybe if you stay with it for years. But when people have hired me for these retreats, I got to hit the ground running. I've got 10 days to change these people's lives, you know. That's it's not gonna work with the MDR. Hypnosis, I'm even more skeptical of because for the most part, from what I understand of hypnosis, it's about putting ideas into you. It's not about releasing trauma. And if the roots are in the trauma, then I'm just masking it over with hypnosis. Now, I know not all hypnosis works like that, but to me, the key is releasing trauma. If you can release trauma with another means, and maybe EDMR is is the way to go, um, I think that trauma can be released, for example, through deep massage, right? That can help and can happen, but uh the holotropic breath work and my deviation of that or derivative of bipolar breath work is really the only therapy that I'm aware of that stays focused on that trauma and just trusting the healing field process. It's the only therapeutic approach on a somatic level where we don't manipulate the situation in any way. There's no guidance by us. We simply support what's already going on. And that's a big part of the training is training people not to manipulate what's happening. I'm not taking you back into your childhood. The healing field or the inner healer is taking you into your childhood. I'm not taking you back to that car accident. No, the healing field will do that in the in the right moment. Do you understand? And that's what's unique and special, I think, about holotropic breath work and the style that I do bipolar breath.

SPEAKER_00:

So, where can people learn more about your retreats and your book? Or books, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, well, just again, my my book is Bipolar Awakenings, The Quest to Heal Bipolar Disorder. And it documents doing this, being involved in this work in eight for 18 years since 2007. And what you'll read about are sort of stories that are actually kind of like case studies of all the mistakes I've made along the way, everything I needed to learn, you know, along the way on my journey. My theoretical orientation is there too, right? And uh everything can be found, including access to my videos on YouTube, a training program, and distance work that we haven't had time to get into, but I think it's better left for another day. I I do some distance work or work at a distance with people. You can access everything from bipolarawakenings.com. Okay, bipolarawakenings.com. That's my website. Very proud of the work that's there. And I'm just here to try and bring about cultural change. That's why I've decided to start doing a lot of podcasts lately.

SPEAKER_00:

And what about your retreats? Sure.

SPEAKER_01:

You can contact me through the the Bipolar Awakenings.

SPEAKER_00:

And is that the main way that people can also find you, or what are other ways people can find you?

SPEAKER_01:

That's the best place. That's the best place. I know there's Facebook and there's Instagram, but I don't visit those places that often. I'd just rather people go to my website.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay, great. Well, we thank you so much for your time for being here. Um, this was definitely very interesting to learn about and explore more into. So I want to thank you for sharing your knowledge and your perspective with us. And everyone, please go and check out bipolar awakenings.com and get a copy of Sean Blackwell's book.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you, Sonia. It's been a pleasure.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you very much.