Breath That Changes Everything

Breath is the first thing we reach for in crisis and the last thing we notice in the rush of daily life. This conversation dives into a living lineage of breathwork—from the roots of Anapanasati to the modern, transformative practice of conscious connected breathing—and shows how a simple, continuous inhale-exhale can change how we heal, love, and lead.

Visit Anthony's website: Alchemy of Breath

We sit down with Anthony Abognano of Alchemy of Breath to unpack his facilitator training and the inner journey at its core. Anthony explains why students write autobiographies, examine birth imprints, and practice early in real-world settings, so they can hold space for grief, trauma, and even end-of-life with steadiness and compassion. We contrast count-based pranayama with surrender-led connected breathing, explore the physiology of CO2 shifts and frontal lobe quieting, and map how speaking from stillness creates safety in intense sessions. Stories weave it together: couples who defuse conflict with ten shared breaths, classrooms that settle after recess, practitioners who turn personal wounds into gifts for their communities.

Along the way, we reconnect breath to body, mind, and heart, integrating mindfulness, embodiment, and mythic frameworks like the hero’s journey. Anthony’s billion-breath vision—ten people inviting ten more across nine waves—feels less like a slogan and more like a blueprint for global nervous system care. If you’re a therapist, coach, educator, or curious breather, you’ll leave with practical ways to start: try a short connected sequence, write a few pages of your life arc, and test the ten-breath reset with someone you love.

Take a moment to breathe with us, then share this episode with one person who could use a calmer nervous system today. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell us: what changed for you after ten conscious breaths?

Chapters

• 0:00 Mindfulness Of Breathing Foundations
• 1:45 Linking Breath To Body, Feelings, Mind
• 2:39 Introducing Alchemy Of Breath Training
• 3:34 Online And In-Person Training Formats
• 4:37 Practice Early, Real-World Breathcamp
• 6:05 Conscious Connected Breath Explained
• 8:10 Autobiography And Inner Journey Work
• 11:30 Birth Imprints, Trauma, And Will
• 13:56 Holding Space For Deep Processes
• 16:03 From Personal Challenge To Gift
• 18:15 Careers, Referrals, And Rapid Change
• 20:44 Embodiment And Alchemy Meditation
• 22:44 The Billion-Breath Vision
• 24:00 Cohorts, Peer Teaching, Community
• 26:40 Host’s Personal Breath Insight
• 28:15 Dissociation Versus Conscious Witness
• 30:15 Inner Journeys And The Bridge
• 32:14 Origins: Outsider To Service
• 35:20 Forgiveness, Compassion, And Purpose

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

I think it's helpful for some of our listeners to remember that mindfulness of breathing was heavily emphasized by the Buddha, many Buddhist traditions, as one of the more powerful practices, and that the Buddha's path to enlightenment was fueled by mindfulness of breathing or anapanasati. And as I was hearing you talk about cataloging our breath, it reminded me that the practice of mindfulness of breathing in its fullest sense incorporates awareness of our body, our feelings, our mind, and what are called the dhammas or say awakening factors. So with mindfulness of breathing, we can be aware of breathing long, breathing short, experiencing the whole body, and tranquilizing the bodily activities. So relating breath with the body, and we can relate breath with our feelings by breathing and experiencing rapture, bliss, mental activities, and then tranquilizing mental activities. And then there's practices for relating mindfulness of breathing with the mind, and then the awakening factors. And we'll put a link to full Anapanasati practice in the show notes. But I just thought that there was some relationship with cataloging our breath with relating mindfulness to various aspects of ourselves in sort of a more traditional classic sense. Anthony, you have been training people with breath work for a long time. And at alchemyofbreath.com, you offer certified breath work facilitator training. Many people in our community are highly interested in certification programs that they can use for supporting their clients, whether they're a therapist or a counselor, a coach, yoga teacher, etc. And your facilitator training program is very impressive. You have more than two million people who have attended your seminars or workshops. You've been endorsed by many, many, many people. You have over 2,000 certified students, two million breathers with Alchemy of Breath as the first online breathwork school, and the leaders who originally brought breathwork online reaching millions of people. Can you talk a little bit about your breathwork training program, who you serve to become breathwork facilitators, and what that training looks like?

SPEAKER_01: 2:47

Yeah, I'd love to. That's my passion. First of all, this is driven by passion. It's driven by a wish to contribute to a tipping point of human consciousness. So we have a little motto at Alchemy called 10 to the power of nine, which adds up to 1 billion people. If 1 billion people could take 10 breaths at the same time, everything would change. The trainings that we do have been online for the last 10 years. And then just recently now we've brought them back onto land again. So we do both. We do trainings on land at Asher and we do trainings online as well. The facilitated training we do both many ways I prefer online, I have to say, probably because of my own trauma being at school and the way that I was taught back in the 50s and 60s, which was to do it or die, you know, get the blackboard dust thrown at you, sort of thing. I like the online training because it's a once-a-week class and it gives you time to absorb, to reflect, and to practice. And it's an eight-month period that concludes with one month at what we call breathcamp, which is where all our graduates come together and it's where they kind of they come out, really. They we have the public that are invited to these breath camps as well. So it's a very real life situation. It's not laboratory examination, it's a real life situation. And we like to get people practicing within a month or two of the trainings beginning. We want people to start practicing for themselves and with any other victims they can find, you know, mum or dad or the dog or whatever you can do. So by the time they come to this graduation, they're really very professional. I'm really speaking more than anything now about the conscious connected breath. I'm not speaking about a breath of four in and eight out, which anybody can do and you can get anyone else to do. But the conscious connected breath is the most transportative, natural way of opening our consciousness that I've ever found and the quickest. And I've had experience with a fairly long life of psychedelic exploration and plant medicine exploration and different meditations. I've found this to be the most effective and the quickest. But it also calls us into a very deep inner journey if we bring the conscious connected breath. So I've made it the backbone of my training to be an inner journey for the facilitators. So I require them to start by looking at their biography. They actually write their own autobiography. We kind of have a little teaser. We say write a minimum of 50 words for every seven years of your life, beginning with the seven years before you were born. So what were the conditions that your parents lived in and so on? So they articulate this, but nobody ever sticks at fifty words. People sometimes have a bit of resistance about doing it, but by the time they get into the flow, they just keep going. Most of them will write much, much more because it's a journey of such discovery. People don't know until they start focusing. And then things come into awareness, and then they discover more. And the more that they discover, the more they can discover, the more strength they develop. So this might involve going and talking to mum and dad or to grandma or to peers that you grew up with, and you know, just gathering information. What was I like? I was cesarean, for example, and as a child found it very difficult to sustain interest in anything. I didn't have a lot of stamina until my father somewhat shamed me into developing it. I wasn't able to continue doing things more than two or three times. I'd get bored and I'd need something else to stay stimulated. I think we might call that ADHD today, but in those days they didn't have letters like that. So you find that every condition at birth, for example, of which we have eight pages of different things that can happen during your pregnancy or your birth process will show up in habits that you have today. They generally show up as one or the other, as sort of polar opposites. So someone who's a cesarean like I am might have very little willpower because it was all done for me. My mum was just cut open and I came out, and what's more, she was under very heavy anesthetic, so I was anesthetized as well. It gave me a very strong powers of dissociation, almost automatic. If I didn't like something I could just detach. But it wasn't a healthy detachment, it was a trauma reaction. So now, having done my inner work and done this inner journey, then I've understood that these things can be transformed. If we can understand what happened to us as children, we can bring a sense of choice from our adult conscious awareness back to times that we really didn't have any choice at all. And that's really what that inner journey is about, is taking stock of the challenges that we faced and the trauma that we suffered and how we can bring not relief but resolution. That's a fundamental part of the training because when a facilitator sits with a breather, the breather can go into some very deep spaces. And it's imperative to me that the facilitator is able to be right alongside. You can't do it for them, but it means the world to them to know that you're there and that you can understand. And that includes even death. One of our facilitators works with the maid program in Canada, and so she'll be with the individual that's chosen to die plus the close family members and give support and guidance and use the breath for them all to craft the most beautiful, gentle experience that is possible. But in order to do that, that's got to be someone who's ready to face their own death. It's a calling and it's exacting, I would say, as a journey, but it is the most rewarding thing possible. And what I've found with the students that I've taken through this training is that almost invariably the biggest challenge that they uncover in their own life, which might be showing up now as addiction or any one of these habits that we mentioned earlier, dissociation, whatever it might be. Once they've been through this inner journey with alchemy, and that's the whole point, is to use the alchemy in the breath to make this transformation possible and easy and graceful and kind, not violent and not damaging, not reactivating trauma, but resolving. Almost invariably the biggest challenge that a student has to face becomes the gift that they offer. We have a system after people graduate now that we help them find work, because so many people are asking me, like, hey, I need a good facilitator in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, or I need one in New York, or I need one in Spain, wherever it might be, and we have facilitators all over the world. So we want to support them after they've done the training, and we refer them when we're asked for good people, we refer them. So I have one addict who used to be a porn addict, and he's now resolved, and he's now going to help a wonderful clinic in Switzerland that has a ratio of 15 therapists to one client, and he's going to be doing the breath work part. And what I've found with all of the doctors and nurses and psychotherapists and psychiatrists that have studied with me is consistent that using the breath can make things happen really quickly. In one hour, sometimes equates to ten or twenty years of analysis or process work. That all of a sudden there's something that happens when we import this supernatural quality of breath that allows us to take a quantum leap of understanding. And we use the body a lot with alchemy. I find it, I feel it's a very powerful embodiment process. And we have something called alchemy meditation that's really quite similar to vipassana. There are similarities, I would say, except that we actually speak from a deep state of meditation. We actually talk to each other and communicate. And so our facilitators are taught to do that. That means we can achieve a deep state of presence at the same time as communicating. So we're not just withdrawn, we're actually actively engaged, but also speaking from a very, very deep, slow, still space of awareness. And that really helps people feel safe. And I think some of the navigation that we need, if we're going to change this world that we live in from inside out, we need to do this work. We need to help each other. That's why I'm passionate about it. If I can just get one more person to breathe, or one more student to go out there and get another ten people to breathe, that we'll get to that ten to the power of nine. Ten to the power of nine, by the way, means if ten people go get another ten people and each of those ten people get another ten people, and that happens nine times, that will reach one billion people. Honestly, I don't think it's that big an ask. I've been asked to do an app, to work on an app now which will be having a reach of about 50 million people. So that's already 5% of the way to a billion. So I really feel hopeful that the more of us that come together and join this wave, this movement of awakening consciousness, that the bigger the wave will get and the faster it will travel. So that's the online. In real life training is a three-week coach, breath coach training. And the same principles apply. They still do an inner journey and it's in presence, which has its advantages as well, because you're practicing, practicing, practicing, and you're getting feedback, feedback, feedback. One of the criteria that I feel is really important about a breath work training is to be teaching each other. So I have sometimes a 25-year-old and an 80-year-old in the same class, and they've got so much medicine for each other. A life that's full of experience and contemplation as we age, and one that's fresh and innocent and bright, and in so many ways cuts to the chase. It's not so heavily conditioned as a mind. It's beautiful to see people help each other. So I kind of feel even with our best trainers, you know, we have faculty and I'm the head of faculty obviously, but when I go into class, it feels for each student that there are 20 trainers, because all the other students are their teachers as well, and it's a beautiful atmosphere, great community.

SPEAKER_00: 12:56

I hope to come visit Asha in Italy here in about a month or so, get a taste for some of the training. Thank you for sharing your story about being born via cesarean and the relationship with willpower and having all the drugs in your mother's system being absorbed by you. It reminded me of my wife and daughter and some of the trauma involved during my daughter's birth. And as you were talking, I noticed my breathing becoming very different. I was kind of reliving that a little bit as you were speaking, and I noticed my breathing. I'm not trained yet in conscious connected breathing, but I just intuitively breathed with some investigation and care and consciousness and connection with the body as I kind of relived that to some degree and noticed quite a powerful change. Some energy moved, started to feel lighter. I don't think it was dissociative, but it did feel like I was integrating some form of healing with that. I'm sure I just scratched the tip of the iceberg there, but I can see how conscious connected breathing may be the most powerful breathing technique that you've come across. You've been skilled in lamas, pranayama, Sufi prayer, holotropic breath work, etc. And I'm not wanting to rank them, but you have a lot of experience with a variety of breath work. I'll sign up for the facilitator training to get more of a taste of it. I've been in Vipassana for quite a while and you know, different practices, and they're all wonderful. And I notice sometimes that some of us, including me, we can get stuck in story. Some of it can feel a little heady sometimes. Incorporating body-based practices are very powerful and very complimentary or supplementary. And when I hear you speak, you seem quite grounded, quite heartfelt. How do you find that balance, say, between cultivating body awareness, working with the breath and the body? Well, it sounds like with conscious connected breathing, you're incorporating a lot of heart work into this. Do you find much value or do you personally practice anything that's not quite body-based or heart-based? Do you practice mental awareness of things as well? How do you find that balance of integration?

SPEAKER_01: 15:24

You said something so significant earlier on, because I think it's such an important lesson for us all when you spoke about the memory of when your daughter was born and you noticed how you were breathing. You mentioned, I don't know if I was dissociating or not, but you did recognize that there was some kind of shift that happened. And that's just the power of the conscious breath. I like to think of it that when the trauma occurred, we lost our breath. That's what always happens. That's the first thing. And many people would say that as a result of that, that's when we embed not just embody, but embed the trauma into our cellular structure. So think of it as if for every time I lost my breath, I can now make a conscious choice to take a breath from now back to then. And there is a sense of healing. This question of dissociation, I think, is an important one because there's a distinction to me between unconscious dissociation and moving into the observer position consciously. Those are two very different things. Really, with your practice and all your experience, it's an easier thing for you to do than someone who doesn't have that practice to move into the observer. And the way that you spoke of your psychological state was from the observer. So I wouldn't call it dissociation, I would call it self-care.

SPEAKER_00: 16:47

If it's okay to continue in this thread for a moment, one of your websites at asha.global, that's as h a dot global, and reading more about you. You offer these inner journey workshops inspired but not limited to Joseph Campbell's Heroes Journey. These breathwork-based sessions offer a deeper, more embodied path of transformation. Your evolved framework integrates myth, neuroscience, and the intelligence of the breath to help you meet life's challenges, reclaim your truth, and return renewed with clarity, courage, and purpose. And then you offer The Bridge, a six-step guide to help you understand yourself better, tackle old emotional issues, and build a strong bond with the younger side of you, your inner child. And then you have breath work for transformation, a powerful group experience for anyone seeking personal growth, spiritual insight, or connection with the body. I've never heard of breath work related to all these things, but as you talk about this conscious connected breath, it sounds so powerful, so simple, and so integrative with one's whole life, and as you said, even the seven years before we were born. Did you come up with this sitting in India when you were practicing? Like, did you start integrating breath work as you were healing your past in deep silence under the Bodhi tree? Like how did you come up with these ways of integrating breath with our past and our hero's journey and healing trauma?

SPEAKER_01: 18:25

I can there are a few different approaches to the answer for this. As a youngster, I was an outsider. I mentioned I was unhappy at boarding school. I'm half Italian, so even though I was brought up in England. But in those years, it was shortly after the Second War, and Italians were not well received or well regarded. So I was pretty much ostracized from any groups. I was marginalized, and I became an outsider. Being the one that never spoke meant that I was the one that always listened. Again, it's this transformation of something that was quite horrid at the time into an asset, which is that it gave me the power to listen and observe. I've always been an observer of life. So that's one part of it was this alertness that I created and also the unhappiness that I felt, which resulted in an adolescence and in my twenties as not a very nice human being. I wasn't particularly you know, I did things which I'm not proud of in my life today. That led me down the pathway of understanding that there are parts of the human condition that are really very dark and capable of doing some awful things, as we see even today, happening today. And for humanity to feel it's justified to kill another, for example, in whatever form. So my study of the human condition was really motivated initially from a selfish perspective of wanting to find a way to forgive myself because I've hurt other people. How do I do that? That meant that I really have had to take A very hard look at myself. If I have a tendency is probably to be too self-judgmental. I'm curious as to how many people put their hand up if I said, Do you judge yourself harshly? I think, yeah, that's also part of our human condition. That we can be very self-punishing. But it was as a result of these parts of my life. And a third element, I'm sure there are many others if I dwelled in it, but a third element would be that I'm teaching what I need to learn. I think many of us are. We teach it because we want to live in the center of this way of being, rather than keep it just intellectual and something that we know. We want the jnana, we want the inherent knowing that some people say we came to this planet with, that we were then taught to forget. Certainly what I see with trauma is that we do cover it with layers of forgetting. We've become quite good at forgetting. And as I observe this and as a youngster, and the way I was unconsciously hurting people, mostly women, honestly, because I was looking for my mum. I didn't really have a relationship with my mum, and I was doing what young boys do when they're looking for their mum, which is go look for girls, right? So as I reflected on this and with a very astute awareness of inquiry and insatiable appetite for understanding, not really intellectual understanding, but an emotional understanding and the study of forgiveness and compassion led me to where I am. I think there might be a time in everybody's life, I hope so, when we reach a point and we look back and we understand that all of varied experiences that we've had, some of them might have seemed quite nonsensical and some of them might have seemed awful. But there comes a moment or they did for me when I looked back and it was as if a needle and thread had been woven through these really weird experiences. And I was inducted into a cult, I managed to escape, really some of them horrifying, but all of a sudden it was as if that thread that had gone through each of these experiences was just pulled straight, and they all became the perfect plan to arrive at where I am today. And that's moving from survival to service, understanding that that is the true wealth of life. Because I've done the money thing, I did that with my architecture career, and it doesn't work. It was a false promise. That was a false promise. But the feeling of helping people forgive, and the feeling of helping people understand the power of appropriate compassion is the biggest wealth I could possibly experience. It is just untiring. I'm 70 and I feel like I've got another 50 left doing this. I've got an incredible amount of energy that I devote to the work that I do.

SPEAKER_00: 22:45

Beautiful. You referenced, you know, that we're very good at forgetting. What was it that you said that perhaps we came into this world knowing and that we were taught to forget? Did you reference what that was?

SPEAKER_01: 23:00

There was a great book written by a man called Colin Tipping, and it's called Radical Forgiveness, and he tells a beautiful story in there of a young family going to hospital to have their second child, and the birth goes well, and they come home and it's a girl. The child they already had was a girl, and the elder's so excited when they come home, she goes, Can I see the baby? And they say, Of course. But I want to see her on my own. And they were like, Okay. So they let her go into the room and they kept the door open a crack and kept their ear to the door. And she said to the little newborn child, she said, Baby, tell me about God because I'm beginning to forget. And there's such a sweet story. There are theories of tabula rasa, right? That we come to this earth with a completely clean slate. I'm not a believer in that, especially working with trauma and working with ancestral trauma and cultural trauma, and seeing that what doesn't get worked out gets passed on from my own family experience all the way to all of the people that I've worked with as a practitioner. So there is definitely something underneath all of this, and I think most of us experience this once or twice in our lives. There's a moment of understanding that the question and the answer are actually the same thing. That there's a deep inner knowing. It's strongly connected to our intuition, but we don't want to give ourselves credit for it. We've had it kind of beaten out of us, the fact that we're an intuitive species and that we have even powers that some people would call supernatural, telepathic communicative abilities and other things that we call miraculous. But my experience tells me time and time again, and not just seven or eight times, but thousands of times, that underneath, if we can become still enough, in the center of the center of the center of that stillness, lies the wisdom spring, and that deep inside us, each one of us exist all the galaxies in the universe. It is all one. It all sort of hologram of the same thing.

SPEAKER_00: 25:06

Yeah, I fully agree with that. Part of my time as a monk was focusing on the center of the center of the center, and then that awareness of that intergalactic connection becomes apparent. If it's okay, I'd like to wrap up with one question and invite you to share anything else that you'd like to. But I'd like to ask how you would describe this conscious, connected breath, dissecting conscious part, the connected part, and the breath part. On the face, it seems simple and obvious. You've talked about opening to the mystery and investigating and connecting with parts of our past, present connection with heart and body. But can you just talk a little bit more about what you mean by conscious connected breath?

SPEAKER_01: 26:00

The start will go from the more simple toward the more complex. The first thing is a conscious breath. I mentioned that before. Imagine that every breath you take consciously, you take it back to a time in your life when you lost it unconsciously. There's a repairing that's going on. Sometimes I call it remembering, as in making membership with again. So that's where I believe the deep healing is, just in the conscious breath. The fact that I'm going to stop what I'm doing and I'm going to give my awareness to my breath is half the task. And that's when you can make up any breath that you want that suits you. What's important is that you're giving it the priority that I'm going to meet this moment with the breath. And it's a clear step into the witness and into the observer and into presence. The connected part of it, really imagine a beautiful violin solo, and you can imagine the bow crossing the strings, and it just never stops. Each note just meets the next fluidly. It's a beautiful piece of music you're listening to, and it's really quite similar with your breath. You're either breathing in or you're breathing out. And this breath can be done through the nose or through the mouth. I'd love to show you just four or five breaths so you can understand what I mean. I'm not a hundred percent sure it will come across on the internet, but I'm gonna put original sound for musicians on and see if that helps. But I'll use my hand and you can see what I'm doing, even if you can't hear it quite clearly. I'll try five breaths. Now use my mouth because it's louder. You can probably hear it more clearly. So things start happening really quickly when you connect your breath like that. I just need a moment. And it'll happen more quickly if you breathe through your mouth. It'll happen a little bit slower if you breathe through your nose. What is happening physiologically is that you're increasing the oxygen flow in your bloodstream, and that means that you're decreasing the carbon dioxide. You're also decreasing the amount of oxygen that goes into your frontal lobe. Your frontal lobe needs the oxygen in order to process. So you're beginning to interfere with your mental processing power or the mental processing power that you think you need. Which then brings the question well, what happens when I don't have that processing power? Then what happens? Well, if you considered that the breath, we call it inspiring when we breathe in, right? And we call it expiring when we breathe out. So breathing is the practice of life and death. It's the practice of being born and dying, it's the practice of will and surrender. And there's going to come a time when we're going to need to surrender that way. So as we breathe this connected breath and we don't have the normal sixty thousand thoughts a day that are running riot in there, what is it that happens in the space? What is it that might exist in the space between thought? And what if it's something to do with a supernatural interference? Why do we call it inspiring? Which means to bring in spirit. What happens if we're willing to accept that we are bringing in something supernatural and let's call it spirit or whatever that word might mean for you? What's going to happen in this physical dense body that we live in, that is actually mostly space, but it's so dense that we can see it and touch it and touch each other? What will happen as we live in this dense existence of horrid conflict and love when we bring in spirit? What happens to the equation when we bring in this foreign entity? That which is most subtle, we're bringing into that which is dense enough to see. What is that combination? What kind of alchemy might exist in there? We've lost a part of our processing power. We're allowing you can choose not to, you can choose to just breathe and not do that. You can overcome it with your will if you want, but the game is to surrender. The game is to allow. This is different than pranayama, which means energy and control. This is the energy without the control. And you feel it as it comes into your body, and some of the things that will happen can be completely unexpected. The breathwork world says you will always get what you need, but then sometimes you didn't know that you needed it, right? So it can be quite surprising. So that's the conscious connected breath, and that's where the quantum aspects lie in breath work, the pivotal moments, the leaps of awareness. And they're all to do with intimacy with oneself and allowing a greater power to be present in my life. And if I'm willing to believe that that's possible, then that greater power can help me. If I'm not, then I'll just breathe normally until I, you know, smoke cigarettes or whatever my habits might be until I die, and that will be it. But if I stop for one moment, imagine the mystery that's in one breath, that we're breathing argon that Jesus breathed, we're breathing the argon that Hitler breathed. There's so much to discover if we're willing to stop and consider it. It's a contemplation that will last as long as I live, at least for me. It's a complete mystery. And I love the idea of, and this is part of my teaching as well, and you mentioned the hero's journey. I do lean into I have learnt into Joseph Campbell's work. I think it's an enormous piece of work. And at the same time, there are some teachings that come from it that I've extrapolated that I use more than others, like there's always something waiting to happen. What do I have to do in order to discover what that is? In other words, how can I make my life effortless? It doesn't have to be a struggle upstream. This cliche of go with the flow that came from the sixties is actually well spoken, and there's purpose to it. These are the things that are on offer if we use the conscious connected breath, and that's where I've seen miracles occur, like people with no sight refind their sight, both inner and outer marriages that are on the rocks. One beautiful story which I use a lot, it's by no means the most dramatic, but I it's one of the sweetest, just where a couple breathed with me ten years ago when I lived in Bali, and the wife came up to me after the breath work and she had her husband in tow. She had him by the hand and she said, My husband hasn't told me he loved me in twenty five years, and that's what he just did today. To see that happen to humanity, I get goosebumps, you know, I just get waves and waves of goosebumps, knowing that this is what the breath can do for people. Couples that breathe together stay together.

SPEAKER_00: 32:44

Yeah, and through Lamaze with Damien's mom, you connected with her, and I'll be sharing this with my wife and invite her to breathe with me.

SPEAKER_01: 32:54

Yeah, that's beautiful. When the chips are down with Amy, who's my wife, we have a contract with each other that either of us can say, even in the heat of the moment, either of us can say at any time, ten breaths. Then we sit down and we look at each other in the eyes and we take ten breaths. You would not believe what happens. From the height of an argument or difficulty or frustration or anger, whatever it might be, those first breaths you're kind of like sometimes she'll breathe through her nose and make it look like she's not breathing. It takes a lot for the inner child to trust. And yet at the same time, when we breathe and we look at each other in the eyes, it's the most tender, beautiful experience.

SPEAKER_00: 33:32

Yeah, maybe for family dinners at the dinner table we can breathe together as a way to land and connect with each other.

SPEAKER_01: 33:40

My niece, who's now a psychotherapist, she was a breath worker and she worked at a charter school in Oakland. It was full of some very disadvantaged children with broken homes and gangster parents and imprisoned parents. She would do free meds after each break and after lunch break and first thing in the morning. And she had the only class that everybody was on time.

SPEAKER_00: 34:04

Beautiful. You know, and then the kids bring that home in some way as well, and then that continues. Anthony, this is definitely one of my favorite conversations that we've had on our podcast. Thank you so much for sharing everything that you've shared. I hope to meet you in person andor do the certified breathwork facilitator training. And I see that you have private intensive two. Is there anything you'd like to share before we fear each other well?

SPEAKER_01: 34:34

Well, a deep-hearted thank you to you to have spent the time exploring this with me. I'm very, very grateful. If there was one message I wanted people to receive, something along the lines you never know when you've only got ten breaths left. So make each one count and count each one whenever you can.

SPEAKER_00: 34:53

Anthony, thank you so much for joining us today. For everyone listening or watching, please check out his website, alchemyofbreath.com. There you can also find information about his new book, Outer Chaos, Inner Calm, your practical guide to clarity in a world of chaos. If you find yourself wanting to go to Italy or just participate in an in-person retreats or trainings, you can go to Asha.global. That's A-S-H-A.Global to learn more about their in-person offerings. We'll put the website links in the show notes, promoting the book in our newsletter. I'll be staying in touch. Anthony Abognano, thank you again for being here. Thank you for the great work that you're doing. We'll play our part in the 10 by 9, 10 times. 10 to the power of nine, thank you. So that we can all reach that billion people and create this tidal wave of healing and change. So Anthony, thanks again and be well.

SPEAKER_01: 36:00

Many blessings. Thanks, Sean.