EP 195: Anthony Abbagano | Resilience Through Breathwork

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Welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Fleet Maul. In today's episode, I'm having a conversation with Anthony Avignano, a visionary thought leader, breath expert and founder of Alchemy of Breath. Anthony shares his transformative journey with breathwork and its profound impact on both his life and the lives of others. He's a leading teacher of breath work. He's based in Europe and we're going to talk about how breath work can help us harness energy that can really inform mental, emotional and physical resilience and how.

Breath work is easily accessible. It's something we can all do. It's just immediately accessible. It has immediate results. So I really encourage you to give this listen because it's a really practical episode, giving you some skills that you can immediately use to enhance the quality of your life with Anthony Avignano.

Welcome, Anthony. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Faith. It's an honor and a pleasure.

Well, it's a pleasure to even just to anticipate a great conversation with you about breathwork, one of my favorite subjects just for our audience. I'm Fleet Mall, the co host for this session and we are here on day one of the summit where we're focused on individual resilience. To begin with, I want to share a little bit of your background for our audience and then we'll get started. Okay. Anthony Avignano is a visionary thought leader, breath expert, and founder of the internationally accredited breathwork school Alchemy of Breath, which is a 100,000 person online community dedicated to evolving collective consciousness. He currently lives in Italy where he co founded Alchemy School of Healing Arts, or asha, with his wife, Amy Rochelle Abagnano. Asha supports breathwork, holistic practices, sustainability, growing food and building community. And I love that part of it. Maybe we'll dip into that later in the conversation because we could be interviewing you for day four of the summit, which is focused on climate resilience and sustainability.

This has been.

An incredibly challenging time, as we all know, these last few years with the pandemic.

I know it ravaged Italy at various times. I'm trying to remember way back to the early parts of the pandemic, but I know it hit Italy pretty hard early on, if I remember correctly. And we've seen wave after wave and we're kind of hope we're coming out of the other side of it, but not really certain yet. And, you know, it just seems like the world's getting more challenging and a bit crazier. I mean, things are so divisive and polarized culturally and politically, certainly here in North America, but I think there's a lot of that in Europe as well. And now you have a. You know, we have ongoing geopolitical conflicts and refugee crises, just seemingly ongoing in the Middle east and all around the world. And now we have this terrible, tragic invasion of war in Ukraine and a refugee crisis in Eastern Europe. And I know that's probably from what I hear from European friends, it's really had a huge impact Europe wide for people. And so, anyway, these have been challenging times and continue to be. I wonder what these last two years have been like for you and your community, your family, and. And whether having the focus you all have on breath, work and on community, on sustainability, has kind of helped get your community through this period.

Well, indeed, it's been staggering. First of all, it's been a staggering shock for us all. And I think we're perhaps beginning to believe now that it's not a question of one being over if it's not a question of another one replacing it. In other words, we're kind of getting used to a continual battering of these worst circumstances and conflicts, of either conversations or actual armies that really could drag us down. And I know in my community, actually, we bought the land for this community just before COVID hit. And we did it with the vision, which has been held for some 25 years, of creating a safe haven, a place where there's clean water, clean soil and clean air, and where we can really come back to basics and regenerate an old town and bring it back to life again. But really, what I've seen since COVID in my breathwork community is probably doubling almost a tripling of the size of the community that you just mentioned. And that the breath as meditation itself has been.

An extraordinary teacher and a teacher because we've understood that what we thought were borders of the mind and boundaries of the heart have now vanished. And that by coming together and by breathing together, we can create a sense of unity that is unassailable. Doesn't matter whether it's the last breath of my life. If I can breathe it consciously, it means I can be with all those other people that are committed to that same awareness, that it's the greatest gift that I've ever been lent because I always have to give it back. And it keeps me small enough on this world stage to.

Just want to serve. And I think what's happened in this, with this sense of urgency, especially as you said, in Italy, we were the first country to be locked down and the last. It's still happening now that people are locked down in Italy. And.

What comes to mind is, if this were a war on our own frontier, what would your calling be? You know, and our calling as breathworkers and as a community of breathworkers is to bring some sense, breathe some sense into this human mass that we've created. And it's really where we meet. It's what unifies us all this dependency, this vulnerability that we can access as a result of a breath practice and doing it together.

Wow.

Yeah. Well, there's a lot of places both my mind and heart want to go with you on this conversation, but I think I'd like to, and I think we're going to start from the practical and try to go deeper. But first, first of all, I'd like to get a little bit of sense of your journey and your background, like what brought you to breathwork? How did you get involved in breathwork?

Well, I was actually involved in breathwork for a long time before I understood that it was my calling. I managed to refuse it for a few decades, but I first met the breath when I was 10 years old. And I remember being at boarding school and a young kid coming up and having me breathe into a paper bag. And he said, do this 20 times. Breathe big. And so I breathed, huffed and puffed, and then. And he said, okay, now hold your breath. And he squeezed my chest from behind and then very gently let me down onto the ground. And that experience was extraordinary for me.

It was a visionary experience. And as a 10 year old, I was astounded because I guess the cliche would be I saw stars. But actually what I connected with was a sense of oneness that I'd left sufficiently recently to actually remember and want so much. I remember as a young child, the aching for this sense of belonging that just wasn't here in human form. And so it was a real reminder of, like, you just hang in there. It's okay. You hang in there. This does exist. It wasn't just a fantasy or an illusion. And then I kept meeting the breath and every time I did, I wanted to explore it more. So I remember being a kid and how long could you hold your breath for in and how long could you hold it out and how quickly could you breathe and how slowly could you breathe? And all of those little experiments that we used to do as children. But then I was a very young father at 18 years old, and we used something called the Lamar's breathwork method for birthing my first son. And then I changed to the LE Boyer method for my second son. And both of those experiences meant teaching, coaching my partner during the pregnancy so as to be ready for the actual delivery itself. So I didn't realize I was a breath worker. I never really put them together. But then it was in my 50s that when I had a critical illness that I refer to as the great teacher, I was reduced to breathing. I couldn't move, I was swollen. I had something called polyneuralgia. It was extremely uncomfortable, and I had to breathe so slowly so as not to contract any muscles at all. I just so gently. And this lasted for about, oh, gosh, six or eight weeks before they found out what the problem was. And this was really where I developed intimacy with the breath because there was very little else to do. And so I'd monitor it as I breathed in and out. I'd make sure I didn't cough or sneeze or anything that would shock the body. And this gradual, sensitive, delicate breath was just like being at the edge of not even being alive. It was just the barest minimum that I could do to stay in touch with life. And it was such a gift because it stripped down.

All those distractions. It stripped away all of the architecture that I'd created in my past to be able to meet a tough edged world. And I just lived in that state of pure vulnerability for almost two months. And I came out of that a very changed man. And I realized that, oh my gosh, this is. I want more of this. I want to get more involved.

Wow. Wow, what a profound journey. And that's an organic unfolding of how you ended up in discovering and finding your calling or it finding you. I can certainly resonate with what you spoke about early on. I remember my early childhood, that experience of oneness and feeling really plugged in and connected. I mean, and just really living in this kind of magical world. And then it just disappeared. And I don't know whether it had to do with alcoholism in my family or it's a normal developmental process, but I wasn't happy about it. And my search to get back to that took me down a lot of twisted roads and highways. Fortunately, I did find my way back in through meditative traditions and so forth. But, yeah, I think for a lot of us, our journey begins with the memory of being plugged in in some way when we're very young and then losing that or feeling like it's stripped away from us in some way. Yeah.

And I think that the tools that we pick up to comply or rebel.

Are ones that actually don't really service achieving a sense of inner peace. They're ones that we have to lay down at some point. There's a moment of handing it over and surrendering to something deeper in the soul. And my wishes, and that's my work is my passion is to help people in that journey. So it can be, let's say, an orchestrated deconstruction as opposed to it having to be a great illness or a car accident or a loss or something dramatic that if we can orchestrate it ourselves and do it in a gentle and caring way, that we can achieve that sense of peace without the accidents having to happen.

Yeah, yeah, one would hope so. I've been through some pretty tough situations myself in my life and people have all been asked me, well, how absent going through something like that, do I get that wake up or that sense of urgency? And, and you know, that's a $64,000 question. How can we invite people into that kind of ship without them having to go through some cataclysmic life events and so forth? And breathwork certainly seems to be one pathway. Well, that's, you know, this summit overall is really an inquiry into how can we cultivate deep and sustain the individual collective, systemic climate, resilience. We need to really face the daunting challenges facing humanity today, to address those with compassion and skillful means. And it seems to be more urgent than ever. And so over the six day summit we're covering that whole range from the individual to the collective to the systemic to earth based work and so forth. But today we are focused on individual resilience. And to begin with, how might breath work help enhance just physical, physical mental health and well being and resilience in very simple terms?

Well, first and foremost, I think half of the discovery with any form of breath work, no matter what discipline or practice or style, is the awareness of it and our willingness to be aware of it. Because if we commit to that, let's say everybody here right now, everybody who's watching and you, you decide, okay, I'm going to be committed to being aware of my breath. Well, you kind of know how long that's going to last, right? That's going to last as long as this thought lasts, then something's going to happen and you're going to forget about it again and it could even be nothing that happens. But you'll soon enough forget about the awareness that you can have about your breath. So we get to reverse a lifetime of not paying attention.

Therefore, we have the rest of our lives to use as an opportunity to learn to develop this intimacy with the breath that I referred to earlier. That really means paying attention to the kinds of breath that we have in differing circumstances. Because one of the beauties about the breath is that if I ask you to consider something that raises your stress level or your adrenaline level, it's probable that your breath will become shorter and more choppy. If I gave you some impactful experience, you might hold your breath altogether and lose it altogether.

But conversely, if we develop intimacy with the breath, we can manipulate our breath in order to be able to recondition ourselves and actually reverse manipulate from symptom to cause. So if I'm feeling stressed and I begin to employ long, slow, considerate breaths, then that stress level cannot remain there. Fritz Perls, the co founder of Gestalt Therapy, said that anxiety is enthusiasm without the breath. And he also said, so anxiety is enthusiasm without the breath. So how can we transform something that we consider to be a negative energy into something that can be an energy that we can actually saddle and bridle? We can harness it and we can ride it, rather than it being something that is to our detriment. And I believe that breath is the key.

That's really interesting. I've often thought of anxiety basically through my own experience with meditation and teaching meditation, working with a lot of people, that on one level, anxiety is kind of just the energy of life. And.

If we're able to kind of flow with it, and I think breath work is one of the means, then we can experience it as aliveness and enthusiasm, as Fritz Perl said. But there are other ways in which we're blocked and it's very unsettling and we're not comfortable with it. And then we describe it as anxiety.

Yeah, that's right.

Breath is all about flow, of course. How does breath flow? You know, we often say that the way you breathe is the way you live. So if, you know, if you breathe a short, choppy breath, you're going to probably have a more jagged and more volatile life. If you can return and you can be conscious of your breath and return to something that's easy and long and smooth, then that's probably the way your life's going to start showing up for you now.

Well, I like that you just Began with breath awareness altogether. And often in my teaching work and facilitation work with others, especially in the world of first responders and criminal justice and so forth. I often say that any moment you're taking a breath and you're aware of it is a good moment. That's another moment in the bank of your resilience, right? Just having that breath awareness even before you think about manipulating or regulating the breath. In terms of breath regulation, though, the fact that our breath is very connected with the autonomic nervous system. We breathe in, there's a slight activation of the sympathetic branch, the, the upregulating branch, which is alertness, and then goes into stress and all the way to fight or flight out. Breath parasympathetic, which is relaxation, rest and recovery. So that's happening all the time anyway. And so that really allows us very simply to start taking ownership or regulating our own autonomic nervous system. Because if we're not, who is the world around us.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

I love that analogy. Because if we are able to accept that our outer world is a reflection of our own being, that we're seeing mirrors in different places that are really helping us understand our own place in the world and our own position and our own condition, then why can't it be the other way around too? That our inner world can then reflect on our outer world. So instead of having to be subject or the object of outside circumstance, that we can actually reclaim our choice. And the one thing that happens when we get pressured or tense or beaten down or traumatized is that we lose our choice. Right? We self lobotomize. As Bessel van der Kolk says, we just lose our front frontal lobe function altogether. That's why I said step one is breath awareness. Because if I can make that choice, then I've created the space, the breathing space for another choice. So it can also almost be an automatic choice. If I can condition myself in the good times to become aware of my breath when the bad times hit, then that's my go to place. That's the first place I'm going to go. I had one of my students said something beautiful in a workshop that I attended, which was, he said, my definition of emotional leadership is the ability to take a breath when I'm under the most intense pressure. It's a bit like that element of meditation which you think is counterintuitive because you're stressed and you have no time. But it's actually the most important time to take that moment and to create that space.

Yeah, the.

Beloved teacher of Kundalini, Yogi, Yogi Bhajan. We used to have a plaque of his in a house where I lived. It was actually in the kitchen above the sink. And it was just a saying of his, Stop, don't react. Therein lies the whole of life. It's just that pause and it's breath awareness that gives us that ability to pause and not just get taken over by emotional reactivity, fight or flight response, all the rest of it, and just have enough space to kind of just make a simple assessment. Okay. What's even in my own enlightened self interest to do here?

Right.

And yeah, and breath is really the key to that pause. I mean, we all intuitively know that, right. You know, just, you know, when you, when you're up to somebody says breathe, don't forget to breathe. Breathe. Right. Or take a breath or, you know, just that intuitively we know that that ability to pause and reflect is very connected with our breath.

Yeah. Isn't it amazing how quick we are to forsake that awareness, how quickly we'll throw that out the window in favor of accepting the pressure as the normal?

Yeah.

So I think one way to describe health and well being and resilience could be being in a well regulated state.

Right.

Being in a well regulated state. So you think of Dan Siegel's idea of the window of tolerance. You think of Stephen Porges talking about having our social engagement systems online. It's that bandwidth of our experience where we can respond from our best self.

Right.

And we're not triggered into some kind of dysregulation. And even when we're experiencing, certainly when we're experiencing any kind of mental illness or emotional distress, but even physical illness and physical distress is some way that dysregulation is showing up. Right. Is distress in the body. And so it seemed like the more time we can remain in a well regulated state and that's going to have a band. It doesn't mean that we're like just super chilled out, but we're well regulated enough to be in a relational, responsive mode with our life and our environment rather than caught and triggered into that reactivity. But the more time we spend in that well regulated state, the greater health and well being and resilience we're going to have, it would seem like.

Yeah, I would totally agree with that. And I think that's why when that resilience is not called for, is the best time to put those practices into place when we've got time and we can say, okay, from eight till nine, I'm just going to award myself this opportunity to create practice and to put it into rhythm. Then that is what we will turn to when we're under pressure and when we really have to call on that resilience.

Well, I think you're pointing at something very important there, that all these kind of practices that can become our go to practices when things get tough. The time to practice them is when things are okay. Right. When we, when we have the sort of luxury of practicing. But if we do that on a regular basis, it becomes instinctual. And I know this for a fact. You know, when I have plenty of stressors in my life and I go out and work and some pretty crazy things in the world where there's a lot of demand and a lot of stress, and I've trained myself enough that I just immediately go to some kind of breath awareness, some kind of breath regulation. The minute I'm. It just become an automatic reaction.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

So you named your school the Alchemy.

Alchemy of Breath Academy. Yeah, yeah.

Alchemy of Breath Academy.

Right.

And so alchemy generally describes a very deep transformative experience. You know, the idea, the original idea of turning lead into gold and so forth, but you know, and it can involve the idea of a crucible or heat or pressure, but some really deep structural change, really deep transformation. We're not talking about superficial transformation. So I'm curious as to, you know, why you chose that term for your school. And maybe that could lead us into a conversation about some of the deeper aspects of breath work in terms of emotional well being and resilience, spiritual well being and resilience, or even the kind of experiences like you had in the midst of your illness that can really change everything for us, give us a whole new context for our life.

Yeah. Thank you. Well, the alchemy, I'll tell you what I want to do just for one second is to stop my video so you can see that image there, which is our. Which is our seal. Really, it's our beautiful.

It's a beautiful image. Absolutely.

Thank you. And what it represents is our ability as humans in this dualistic world to extend our embrace, to hold the opposites that exist, the opposites of duality. And my feeling and the philosophy of alchemy is that of alchemy of breath is that our human task is to bring these into convergence. So to embrace all the opposing opinions and polarized judgments and both sides of any conflict, to be able to embrace those in our hearts and to bring them together. And so if you will, that gold part, that what is known as the mandala, the almond in the center of those two converging circles, I kind of see it as the portal that we get to pass through when we go through our next birth canal into the next existence, whatever that may be for anybody's understanding. So very much our philosophy is doing that within ourselves in order for that to replicate naturally outside ourselves. So our work is really dedicated to embracing the truth of this dualistic existence and learning to really love those parts of ourselves that we might have felt ashamed about in the past. Or let's say to.

You know, as you grow up and you learn to cope in a hard edged world that you create constructs that help you manage, I get more protected and I get more hidden and I learn to behave in certain ways and in order to meet the trials and the, and the challenges of life. But there comes a point where we realize that.

That construct, that architecture that I've created has now become the cage that I need to get out of in order to feel a sense of freedom, of soul and heart level freedom. So that's very much the process that we take our students through and we train them to become breath workers in order to be able to help other people in that transformational process.

So you know, that architecture, that kind of fear based architecture that, I mean it's really the human condition, we all have it. No one can come into, through childhood and adolescence, into adulthood without having established this architecture that is fear and survival based. It's just, you know, that's job one for any species is survival. So we all have that and for some of us it's high, it's really well designed and highly functional, which may make transformation more difficult or you know, to wake up more difficult. For some of us it's riddled with pain and there's a lot of suffering within it. And so sometimes that may actually lend itself to, you know, having an opportunity to wake up and begin to do our work. But to begin to allow that architecture to deconstruct or dissolve. If you think about you're out in the middle of the ocean, kind of storm tossed ocean, you're in a boat, and it's not a great boat, but it's a boat. You're not going to leave that boat unless there's a better boat to get into.

How do we create the safety that would allow us to begin to let go of that previous architecture that we've unconsciously depended on for our very psychic emotional survival? For 20 years, 30 years, 40 years. And I'm thinking that breath work may lend itself to creating that safety. Just to follow up that one more point and then I'll invite your answer. There's some anthropologists that have looked at what is the ideal configuration for human beings to be born into and raised into. And they often point to small hunter gatherer clans, which there are still some extent in Africa among the Bushmen, or in some small.

Tribes in the Amazon and so forth. But in those small hunter gatherer clans, a new infant, a new human being is born into a nested set of relationships. They're always held, they're always attended to, like they're just always loved, attended to, nurtured, held. And we modern human beings, we're born into like a world of disconnection. You know, we're born into a complete world of disconnection. And many of us, you know, didn't have the advantage of, you know, our mother or surrogate parent doing the Lamaze work or an underwater birth or any of those kind of things. It was just this shocking, the glare of the light. But we're born into so many layers of disconnection now. And some people talk about what we really need. Maybe if you could be born into that other world, it would be more like being like a fourth trimester, like, you know, and so I'm wondering if, you know, the transitionary womb where you still experience that safety and that connectedness. So I'm wondering if breath work, in one way to think about it is creating that for ourselves so that we would be willing to begin to let go of a previous fear based architecture, to drop into and rely on some depth of our being, which is not that.

Thank you. I think this now speaks to the subtlety of the breath and it also engages the world of paradox, if not irony as well. Because.

We talked about this architecture and as you were speaking, I was thinking of the boats and I was thinking of the bars of the cage that I've built to protect myself now, the bars that I need to widen to get out. But actually, if we look between the bars, if we look at the gap, it's full of air. And there's no mistake in that. There's a lesson in that that we don't pay attention to. We look at the bars and we think, oh God, how am I going to get out of it? We don't look at the air and what that represents, the space and what that represents. We see that as a lack rather than an abundance. And I think just Like a drop of water on rock will eventually wear a pathway through it. And it's the same with the breath, that something so gentle and so obvious and so taken for granted when it's picked up and used as a conscious tool has that kind of a power, a gentleness and an ease and a grace that really helps us navigate the darker corridors of our own psyche, the things that we really would want to turn away from, the things that bring us the fear, the automatic sense of fight or flight that comes just. Just by even thinking about it. So I really believe in using the breath in gentle ways. There's no point pushing the boat out so far. There's no point seeking to harvest more than you can carry. You can harvest what you can carry. And I think this is where the conscious connected breath becomes important. If we look at the word inspire. When I feel inspired, I feel good, I feel vital, I feel resilience is not even in question. I'm present. I'm in this moment, and I'm present, no matter what's happened to me. So what does inspire mean? It means to import spirit, to inspire. So when I do this, I invite a gift beyond the knowing of my little monkey magic mind that I have. I invite my body to be involved as well. And I invite that which is perhaps most subtle. And a great way to describe this, I think, is if you think of a piece of string and put at one end us in our human form, in our human condition, like you expressed earlier on, we're so base that we can see and touch. And even though we're mostly air and space, but we're dense enough that we can see each other. And if you put at the other end of that piece of string that which is most subtle, awareness, just the purity of consciousness and awareness without form, completely abstract from this dense world that we live in. Well, when we breathe, we're bringing that kind of subtlety into this kind of density. So it's as if we're making a circle. And when that happens, something remarkable can occur, even something that we would call miraculous. There's a circuitry that can flow again. And it feels to the breather like, oh, my, I've waited for lifetimes for this circuitry to work. It's like, oh, so that's how it works. All of a sudden, the other perspective comes into play, the one that the mind can't grasp. The, as Krishnamurti once called it, the. The intelligence that lies between thoughts. Not the intellect, that is the thought, but our natural human intelligence that lies between And I consider that to be an embrace of, call it the God of your understanding, the cosmic code, universal consciousness, whatever it might be. And so even though your breath may be gentle if it's connected and if you give your awareness to it, we grant ourselves the possibility of an alignment beyond any we've ever had. And that is from this density to that which is most subtle and high. And that includes the consciousness too. So we have subconscious, conscious and the superconscious can all be aligned. And when that happens, something marvelous can occur. And so even in, for example, one of the prison programs I ran in Indonesia when I lived, there was something we called inside out, which. Which was really designed for people who were committed to prison. And felt locked up and locked away. And all of a sudden they could understand that, oh, no, this is all a paradox. I'm actually inside nothing. I'm inside the bars of my own consciousness. I can be out of here with three breaths if I. How to do this. So we get to look at what we consider as limitations or stages or sequences or hierarchies as notions, as human notions and ways that we've designed to cope with the harshness of reality as we experience it. Whereas actually, I mean, I always used to wonder why they said when I was a kid, God is in you and he's outside you, and God is everywhere. And I'm thinking, what? How does he fit in this little thing? And how is he in that wall? And how is he? But only more recently do we understand that everything vibrates. Even a stone vibrates. A wall, a piece of wood vibrates. Every organ has a vibration in our body. And when we think of this concept that we've relegated to God, that God space as something that is just spirit and it's just a breath, then we can begin to hop the fence. You know, we can hop the fence of our own consciousness and go into the otherness and discover there are so many more perspectives that we can employ to consider where we are in this mess. Is it really that bad? Is life and death? Is it really like. Is life or death so dramatic? Can we practice dying now with each exhale? So when the time comes, we can pass through that portal with grace and ease and a conscious choice that, yes, today is a good day to die.

I think you could certainly look at breath work as a practice for dying. I did hospice care in prison for many, many years. And I remember being with.

One of.

My early patients or friends. This gentleman I didn't actually get to know well because he was really unconscious when I was introduced to him.

But I just tried to get in relationship. Spent a lot of time beside his bed and I was, you know, kind of inviting him into a co breathing practice and I was just tuning myself into his breath, right? And I'd get lined up with his breath and then. And then just subtle changes in my breath that we. I could just tell we were making a relationship. And this was a very weird experience for me early on and maybe the first year of doing hospice care. And.

I actually was with him when he died. And it really, you know, I just kept slowing my breath down and slowing my breath down and slowing my breath down. And he was slowing down with me and slowing down with me. And then finally there was that last breath and there was just space and he didn't breathe in. And I had kind of a weird, funny thing. My first thought was, oh, my God, I killed him.

Fortunately, I quickly got over that because I could feel the peace and the serenity in the way he passed. Right. But yeah, it just seems like you mentioned anxiety early on in our conversation. You know, it seems like breath awareness and fear and anxiety. There's just this, you know, what is going to allow us to be with our life and be with our experience at any moment of life and especially at the end of life, but this quality of breath. So I think we've made the case both for the practical benefits of some kind of breath work and breath regulation, as well as the profound possibilities. So where would someone begin? We have someone listening to us right now in our audience, and they say, you know, I haven't tried breath work. I mean, I breathe, but I've never done any formal breathwork practice. How would you suggest people begin?

Well, as I said, breath awareness, but I think that means breath inquiry. So really, if you have the ability to start taking some notes, see how many times in a day you remember that you're breathing. Just start with that and notice how you're breathing under certain conditions. You're in the supermarket queue and the woman in front of you can't find her credit card and you're frustrated. How are you breathing?

You come home and you see your children and you've missed them. How are you breathing? Someone swerves in front of you while you're driving. How are you breathing? And just see if you can notice how many times in a day that you are breathing. That's really 101. And then you can start to invent breaths. If you're stuck at a traffic light or if you're waiting for a bus or someone's late for an appointment, don't consider it as wasted time. Consider it as an opportunity and to explore. What does it look like? How does it feel to breathe in to a count of eight and to breathe out to a count of 40? What happens to your body when you do that? Try it the other way around. Breathe in. See how much you can slow down your breath. Or see what happens if you take 10 breaths and then hold 10 big breaths and then hold. Explore and experiment and keep notes and actually we get to become our own breath worker. That way you can design breaths that work for you and share them with other people. It's fun and people love it. I have one student who, way back when in the Bali days, she, she said, you know what I do? She said, I set my alarm on my iPhone for every 30 minutes and then I stopped the person that's closest to me and I asked them to take three breaths with me. And they take three breaths and they look at each other in the eye. And she said, I've made so many friends. It's just extraordinary how many people I still am in contact with because I've done that as a practice. So there are ways we can play with it and have fun with it that are lighthearted. It's not about, you've got to do this for an hour at dawn before you do anything. It doesn't have to be heavy or serious. It can be joyful and playful. And then you can join us. We do almost 300 free events a year in order to spread the breath. We have one called Breathe the World that happens every Sunday in the morning and the evening. So it covers all time zones. And the US one is.

Every Sunday.

At 5pm UK time. So whatever that is, depending which time zone you're in. And you can breathe with me. With our top trainers, we all rotate and do little half hour practices together. And sometimes they're themed. One of my favorite things to do with breathwork is to use it as an embodiment practice. So if we talk about something a bit hypothetical or intellectual, there's no better way to understand it more completely than to breathe it. Have breathe it into your body. So I do workshops every, every month or two.

Which would posit different themes or different concepts and then we breathe into it as a group and we co create a result together. So that's another great way that people can get closer to the breath. And I also do a quarterly program called Breath Secrets which is all the tidbits and Bits of science that are coming out and new information about breath. So I mean, breath's my life.

It'S my passion. So I can't expect everyone to be as passionate as me. But I'd love to flick that inner switch and make it happen. But really every stage of the way, you'll find something rewarding in it if you make that choice.

Well, I love that you encourage people just to experiment on their own with breath awareness and kind of tracking your breath and trying different things like that. And it's like what you were doing when you were a kid, right. And but even keeping in mind, even if you go way back into the earliest Vedic teachings on pranayama and so forth, that was developed by human beings like us who experimented like that and they came up with these things. Right. So I like that a lot. And you know.

I'm curious as to whether when we get involved in regulating our own physiology with the breath and manipulating the breath or regulating it in different ways, are there any risk involved? Can we destabilize ourselves? I think most of it's very gentle, but some people tend to get kind of ambitious about things, may push too hard. Are there any risks involved in getting into breathwork?

Well, I think there's a yes. I mean, there's a risk crossing a road and there's a risk. There are risks involved with breath work. There are some things, there are some breaths that are more activating than others. And that conscious connected breath, which is out there a lot in the world today, is one that can activate some counter indicated medical conditions. And they're things like schizophrenia or bipolar epilepsy, high blood pressure, heart disease, glaucoma. If you're in your first trimester of your pregnancy, that's something that you should be cautious about. But in my group breathes both live and online, I always welcome people who have those conditions. But I just say, please just breathe your normal breath. Because what you'll find is that when you're in group and you're breathing, the energy of the other people will actually do the work for you. You could almost be reading a book in a room with 50 or 100 or online, sometimes four or 500 people that are breathing, but the energy still comes. So don't feel that you can't do it. But I would say that the conscious connected breath, two things that you should certainly not do it unless you have a facilitator with you. And secondly, that you should be absolutely sure that that facilitator is qualified. And one of the problems in the world today because breathwork is growing so exponentially right now is that there are a lot of DIY quick type fast track weekend courses or one week courses, but please check not just that you're getting certified, but check the accreditation of the person that's teaching you just to be safe because we can't tell what will happen and it's not as regulated as it will be in the future.

So do your diligence.

Good advice.

And I think it's always helpful to begin with gentleness. I think all spiritual practices, there really is no place for ambition. I mean with right. Facilitation there can be intense practices that can be transformational, but they're not driven by ambition properly. It's something else that's facilitated in an effective way. And so. Oh, it's just coming back to gentleness and non aggression and you know, because what's the. What are we trying to do anyway? We're trying to relax into flow and being this. Right. So it's not about forcing something.

Yeah, exactly. And that just repels the possibility. It doesn't bring it closer at all for what we're looking for.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I'd like to invite you to lead us in a little breath practice if you would. In a moment. But first I just wanted to circle back to when I read your bio. You said you support breath work, holistic practices, sustainability, growing food and building community. This is the alchemy school of the healing arts. And so I love that you emphasize community and you've been sprinkling that in through your responses today. And even the very beginning, you talked about the relationality of the breathwork. So I wonder if you could just say something about connecting breathwork to community and sustainability for a moment.

Yeah, well, you know that I was describing the image that was on the screen about bringing these two opposites into unity. And I mentioned how it's an inside out job. Right. The only way out is in. And so it's very much based our community experiment, because I'm going to call it an experiment because it's continually evolving and ever challenging and morphing. But it's really based on the concept of bringing the parts of myself that I don't know into unity and that becoming a natural expression to the world around me, which then inspires other people to follow that example. So it's not about preaching, it's not about, in a sense, it's not even about teaching. It's about.

Working on my own self and my own being and bringing those Parts that may have been abandoned or forsaken because of trauma. And I had to archive them because they're too bad, too difficult to remember that, that I can actually begin to work on bringing them back into unity. And our Asha community.

In Tuscany is two things. It's first of all, the center and the landing place for all of the alchemy of breath following. So people come there all year long. We do breath camps. We have different programs and so on. But it's also a community center, and it's the core of.

Very young days. And when it was started just after Covid began, so we didn't really get going until a little over a year, but we already have about 100 or 150 people that have moved there. And we particularly chose a location that was a forgotten old mining town and was mostly abandoned. And what's happening is that people are coming. I think we've already 25 houses have been bought there, and people are beginning to move there now. And really our purpose is to hopefully reclaim a righteous way of being in peace with nature, honoring the natural resources and not abusing them, and also generating circular economies, which are win, win economies. We have a charitable arm that is seeking to integrate with the local culture. It's a very delicate thing when you've got someone who comes from America and moves to Tuscany. Why isn't there a McDonald's kind of question? And beyond? I mean, there's a lot about that integration and about carrying with us a humility and a respect for the local community. How can we learn from their folklore? Because they know what plants to eat when they feel a certain way. So how can we learn from them? And how can we help them repopulate this village? How can we regenerate this town that is 75% empty? How can we bring the grandchildren back? How can we bring some schools back? So we have initiatives that we're developing that can help generate funds that we can then give to the old community, the one that was there before we came. And this is a model that's being studied by some very key people who might be interested in replicating it in other parts of the globe. So the idea is to be able to have an example that can be repeated.

Wow. Well, it sounds like a fabulous project and vision and a great excuse to visit Tuscany. I'm on my way.

Yeah, please don't.

Absolutely. Okay. So would you lead us in a little breath work? Yeah, let's do that introductory or.

Yeah. We mentioned anxiety before, and I think perhaps that will be A wonderful little thing to offer. It's something that I call the transformer breath. And it's about that transformation that Fritz Pearls talks about. How can I take this tension and this feeling and there's so much of this around right now.

It's sort of an unlanded anxiety, it's a floating anxiety of where's the next sort of that wincing of where's it going to come from next. And it's being expressed because we're not able to metabolize this into a directed energy. It's being expressed in more and more polarization and conflict. So I would love to share a breath that I use and have taught for some time. It's very, very simple and straightforward and it's a great thing to do both as a preventative and but also as a go to if you feel like a flash of panic coming. It's a great breath to go to if you feel that way too. We're going to start with a four count on the inhale which is actually quite quick you'll find. But then on the exhale we're going to exhale for longer and we'll start with a count of eight and then after a couple of cycles we'll increase it to nine and I'm going to take you up to about 12. Now what I would advise is you, you keep doing this, practice yourself and see how long you can make that exhale. Always keeping the inhale to account of 4. But then see if you can keep extending that exhale. Now a lot of things are happening when you do that. First off you're activating your vagus nerve which is your well being nerve, right? So the more you can extend that exhale the more your vagus nerve is coming into play and the more well being you'll feel. The other thing you're doing is you're breathing less than six times a minute which is exactly what Fritz Perl said. He said if you can breathe less than six cycles a minute you cannot stay anxious. So just know it might take a minute or two but the work is happening, it's going in the right direction.

Anthony, on that, on the in breath on account of four, is it a relatively full breath with a count of four or.

Yeah, it will be a full breath. And what you'll find at first when we begin is like oh, I didn't get enough, I didn't get or I filled up after two or something. It all goes pear shaped to begin with. Don't worry, it's not about how Many times it goes wrong. It's about how many times you can pull it back and you can be aware that it's wrong and you can pull it back in the right direction. So there are two prerequisites here. Number one, zero, self judgment and number two, lots of self acknowledgement. And if you can put those two together, then you have a win. Win. Okay, so I'm going to, I'm going to count, count it out and use my fingers.

And I'm going to do an exhale for eight. So it'll be an inhale for four and then an exhale for eight twice and then I'll do an inhale for four and an exhale for nine twice. And then I'm going to go up to 10 and then 11 and then 12 and hopefully that will then by that time you should be met, you should be learning to measure your breath a little bit better that.

So let's just take three breaths together to come back into the body a little bit after all this talking and listening.

And we'll start with just noticing.

Happens to the body as you breathe in.

And breathe out.

Your shoulders rise and fall.

Does your belly expand?

Perhaps your ribs expand sideways too?

Just noticing.

Curious.

Now let's take a big inhale to exhale and then I'll start counting.

So we're going to inhale, 2, 3, 4. Exhale, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Inhale, 2, 3, four. Exhale, 2, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Inhale, two, three, four. Exhale for nine. Two, three, four, five, Five, six, seven, eight, nine. Inhale, two, Three, four. Exhale, two, three, Four, five, six, seven, 8, 9. Inhale, two, 3, 4, exhale for ten. Two, three, four, Five, six, seven, Eight, nine, ten. Inhale, two, third, four, four. Exhale, Two, three, four, five thousand six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Indhale, two, three.

Three, four, five, Six, seven, eight, nine, 10. Inhale, 2, three, 4. Exhale for 11. 2, 3, 4, five, six, six, seven, eight, Nine, ten, eleven. Inhale, two,3, four. Exhale, second, three, four, five, 6, 7, 8, 8, 9, 10, 11. Inhale, 2,3, 4. Exhale for 12. 2, 3, 4,5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9, 10, 11, 12. Inhale, 2, Three, 4. Exhale, two, 3, four, five, six, Seven, eight, nine, nine, ten, eleven.

Twelve. Inhale and relax.

And just take a.

Few moments to notice any changes there.

Might be.

Notice anything different.

And when you're ready, you can come back again.

Wow.

Wonderful. My mind was just so clear, just all space, no thought clear and things had slowed down so much and my sensory awareness had gone up my hearing and. But there was no thought simulation, just basically space and I can just still feel. I'm just, I just feel this flow from. I can feel it tingling in my toes. It's a flow from head to toe. Beautiful.

It's beautiful.

Wonderful, Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Anthony. This has been incredibly rich and a great way to get our summit off to a really good start. And I really encourage all of us to, to maybe take a challenge. We're going to be offering kind of a resilient challenge each day. Maybe we could begin today with, you know, the challenge is to start some kind of breath awareness practice at least for the next six days. Just, you know, we encourage everyone to have a journal for this summit to be taking notes and learning from all of our amazing presenters like Anthony here. And you know, just start making notes about your breath and your breath awareness throughout these six days. Who knows where that might take you and what that might begin.

Thank you so much, Pete. It's been a pleasure to be with you and it's a pleasure to be with you all too. Thank you for being here. These things happen without you being here too.

So we get to chat. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you.

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