Experience the revolutionary power of transformative breathwork that is helping millions shift their physiology and perspective. Former architect turned breathwork expert, Anthony Abbagnano, joins the show to share his personal journey—from restoring old stone buildings in Italy to designing the “architecture of the human experience.” He explains the profound science behind techniques like the conscious connected breath, detailing how the shift in oxygen and carbon dioxide levels slows the “monkey mind” to create profound “quantum shifts”. Anthony shares incredible stories of healing, including remission from stage four cancer and sight restoration, and introduces his concept of “trauma repair” using the breath as a safety mechanism to achieve greater wholeness, agency, and presence in a world of chaos.
The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.
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Unlocking Quantum Shifts: The Power Of Transformative Breathwork With Anthony Abbagnano
This conversation is one I’ve been genuinely excited to bring you. We’re joined by Anthony Abbagnano, breathwork pioneer, author of the new book, Outer Chaos, Inner Calm, and Founder of Alchemy of Breath. It is a global community that has guided hundreds of thousands of people toward greater clarity, healing, and inner peace. For decades, Anthony has been helping people access deeper layers of healing and self-understanding through the breath. If you’ve ever joined one of his sessions, you know firsthand that this is not just breathing. This is a doorway, a catalyst, and a remembering.
I participated in one of his breathwork sessions myself. It was unlike anything I’ve experienced. It gave a sense of clarity, emotional release, and inner spaciousness, a glimpse of what Anthony calls the calm within the storm. Anthony will share with you how to have access to that as well. His new book, Outer Chaos, Inner Calm, is a guide for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the world we’re living in. Let’s be honest. That’s most of us. It’s a roadmap for personal transformation grounded in breath presence, and what he beautifully describes as the heroic quest each of us is already on.
In this episode, we explore why the breath is such a profound tool for healing, what’s happening physiologically as we’re practicing breathwork, and how to find inner calm regardless of what’s happening around us. If you’re seeking resilience, craving more peace, or simply are curious about how breathwork can transform your life, this is an episode you won’t want to miss. Take a deep breath, settle in, and enjoy this conversation with the incredible Anthony Abbagnano.
Anthony, thank you so much for being on the show. I’ve been looking forward to this so much. You’ve launched this amazing movement and are helping to transform the lives of millions of people around the world. I’m honored to have you and learn from you, and for our audience to learn from you. Thanks so much for being with us.
That’s a win-win. I’m excited to have a chance to be able to reach anybody with anything that might be able to help in these times, which can be so challenging. Thank you for the opportunity. I’m delighted to be with you.
There are a lot of ways we can go. I want to dive into some of the concepts in your new book, Outer Chaos, Inner Calm. I want to talk about the breathwork, the techniques, the things that you’re teaching, training, and promoting, and my own experience with that, because I did get to experience that. I want to ask you about all of those things, but maybe we could start with a bit of your personal journey.
I know you shared with me previously that you started off as an architect. Now, you’re in a much different field. I’m so curious. How did you end up where you are? How did you get started in this work and learn the things that you’ve learned to be able to share those with millions of people around the world?
I had a very impactful first experience of the power of breathwork when I was a little boy. I was only eight years old. I was at boarding school, and I wasn’t happy. I missed my family. This kid came up to me, and he had me breathe into a paper bag. He gradually let me down to the ground and squeezed my chest from behind as I did my last exhalation. He put me on the ground.
The best and simplest way to describe it is if you read about any of those near-death experiences that people have, where there is a bright white light and a huge sense of oneness, acceptance, and final rest. It felt like, “I can rest, not just in this experience, but in this lifetime because there’s something much bigger going on than the stories I tell myself about my unhappiness or struggle.” They put it into perspective. They helped me understand. These breathwork experiences that I’ve had and I share with other people help me see the other side of the coin of life. When I get bogged down, I use the breath, and it illuminates me. It always brings a different perspective to me.
I never thought that architecture would play out the way it did. My interest is the architecture of the human experience and the structures that we live our lives upon. We’ve seen that movie, The Matrix. It’s challenging and troubling to consider that we might be inhabiting this matrix, and we can’t get out of it. Yet, I’ve discovered another whole matrix that exists in the breath state. I like to call it the Miracle Matrix because it’s a timeless, non-space, orientated place and/or lack of place.
All the sequential coping systems I might have used in my life, and all the sequential logical processes that I might have employed in my life to reach my goals or conquer my challenges are all great and wonderful. It’s a wonderful skill, but there’s also something else, which is a very simple gravitation into another matrix altogether, where things don’t need to be sequential. Quantum understandings can be achieved. That’s where I found deep peace.
I’m here in New York. We’re filming for Hoda a whole series of how to breathe in tight places. We’ve chosen New York for a good reason. We’re going to be choosing the noisiest, most chaotic places that we can. We’ll be doing some videos on how to create a sense of calm when there is this much chaos around how we can create some breathing space here.
You were in your mid-40s when you left architecture as a full-time career and moved into what you’re, you’re doing. Is that about right?
That’s right. I was very successful. I had maybe 30 or 40 buildings that we were restoring at a time in Italy. They were old stone buildings. They were wonderful projects. We were making people’s dreams come true from little cottages to castles, convents, monasteries, and all kinds of things. It was great fun. I’ve always had a mind for designing things and how they can feel better and look better, so it was enjoyable, but I have to say that there was something that was missing.
If I describe that experience as an 8-year-old and then compare it to the existence I had in my 40s, it was like, “I’m not living up to this. I’ve got everything I need. I’ve got all the material wealth that I need, and I’m helping people in a way, but there’s a part of me that’s not being met. There’s a part of me that’s not being employed.”
I’ve always had a fascination for the inner life that we live and an understanding that if we tend to our inner life, then outer life corresponds. It resonates with the way we are inside. I was curious about, “How can I use this relationship with the breath?” which by then was already 30 years old or more. I was like, “How can I use this to help a human redesign their life? How can we use these pearls of wisdom that can access our inner oracle, if you will? How can we use it and apply it in a practical way?”
When we care for our inner life, our outer world begins to align and resonate with who we are inside.
Those who’ve heard about breathwork before know about yoga and pranayama, perhaps. They’re all wonderful practices. There are also a lot of woo-woo approaches to breathwork that make it entirely a spiritual experience. My interest was to get all these into the same soup so we can understand how we can employ the breath in a pragmatic and practical way in our lives, in the business world, in my relationship, and in my own inner life.
As a result of that and many years of studying the human condition, I designed a series of a body of work, if you will, that is all about how to use the breath to gain a sense of agency in a world where sometimes we feel it’s not only threatened, but we lack it. Those things that we secretly wish for, we don’t understand that we’re unconsciously orchestrating an impossibility for it to happen when it could perhaps be, a great deal, simpler than we think. That’s what fascinates me. It is how to help people understand that they do have that sense of agency. It’s about reconnecting with it with our empowerment, our choice-making, and creating a wonderful life.
I’m sure millions of people around the world, myself included, are grateful that you’ve developed this. I got to experience this. I did one of the sessions with one of your facilitators that you’ve trained. I’d love to dive into that a little bit, so people can understand when you say breathwork what we’re talking about and what that means.
It’s about a 40 to 45-minute experience. It was on Zoom. The facilitator teaches you how to do the breathing. It’s open-mouth breathing in and out, but she paced it in a certain rhythm. You don’t stop in between. It seems quite simple, but it’s profound. I’ve had other breathwork experiences in the past in different settings as well. A similar thing has happened. It’s like a detoxification.
Maybe you could explain to us what’s happening physiologically as we go. My experience was that I started sweating. My hands experienced what is called tetany, where your hands clamp up, and they’re stuck like that for a good while. Why does that happen? Can you explain some of the physiology and what’s going on?
Thank you. First of all, the breathwork that you experienced is one of the more powerful types of breathwork you can do. You mentioned it yourself, where you are connecting each breath. You’re not pausing in between each breath or halfway through a breath. It’s a continual in and out. What’s happening when we do that physiologically is that we’re, first of all, boosting the oxygen levels in our bloodstream. When we do that, in order for the oxygen in our bloodstream to rise, the carbon dioxide needs to diminish.
This adjustment of oxygen and carbon dioxide is what creates the experience of tetany that you experienced on a physical level. That can show up as tingling, a tightening of the skin, or, for some people, in more extreme cases, a numbness. It might sometimes even be stiffness. You might find your fingers go into a curling pretzel shape, and you can’t move them. This is all because of the carbon dioxide and oxygen reading levels in the bloodstream that this happens.
We know that the brain requires 25% of our oxygen supply in order to function. Our brain is very dependent on oxygen. If you’re not a practiced free diver, for example, brain death can occur in a few minutes if you’re not able to take on board oxygen. What we’re doing with this particular breath style, this conscious connected breath, as it’s called, is as we raise the oxygen level in the bloodstream, we’re slowing down the oxygen level to the frontal lobe, the prefrontal cortex.
As a result, it generally stops the flow of those thousands of thoughts we have every day. It stops the monkey mind, if you will, that’s running fast and thinking about the list of things we have to do. It’s like, “What is there to worry about? How good am I today?” All of these sorts of stories we do tell ourselves, it slows them down. As a result of that, the brain functions in a slightly different way. That’s where the quantum shifts can occur.
Our minds would like to think they’re in control of everything. What we’re discovering as we do this breath practice is that there’s a whole thing that we don’t know, we don’t know. We’re beginning to conceive it. We’re beginning to give birth to an awareness of something that we were not aware of before. That’s where it’s very helpful.
It’s also surprisingly quite precise in the sense that in the breathwork world, since the ‘60s, there has been a saying, which is that you always get what you need. Even though you may come into a breathwork with an idea of what you need, somehow, the breath will decide what it is that you need, and it might give you something quite different.
That statement still stands true. Every professional breathworker would repeat it happily, that in some curious way, it always gives you what you need. That’s a sense of expansion and a sense of more ample contemplation and reflection. Sometimes, it can be very transpersonal in the sense that you might meet a dead relative in your experience, or you might discover things about somebody or something in your life that you didn’t even know existed before, and it will be true.
We’re moving into a realm of, “This is not normal.” I have to say, after years of practice and after teaching many people not just how to do it, but also how to teach it, I’ve discovered that it’s a different normal. When I look at the normal that we consider normal in this matrix that we live in, it’s quite easy to see that it’s not very natural. The things that we take as normal are all the stressors and the turbulent adrenaline level that we’ve learned to live with because of so much outer stimuli, and the way we meet our problems in life. We try to accelerate to accomplish more.
We’re a very fear-based society, which is damaging to the nervous system. If we can accomplish what we can to escape the fear, then we reach zero, but then it haunts us again. We have to scramble forward to try to avoid it again, instead of living on an entirely different continuum or process of life, which is from zero going the other way to absolute joy, ecstasy, and happiness. Why can’t those be normal? What would it take for us to recreate that?
Often, I refer to miracles at this point. For many people, if we said, “We can alleviate you from 90% of the stressors that you’re experiencing in your life right now,” they would say, “That will be a miracle.” I see it happen time and time again by expanding our consciousness with the power of the breath. Isn’t it interesting that we’re slowing down the normal function of the brain that we use, and yet we can expand our consciousness at the same time? That tells me that consciousness doesn’t belong to the brain. It belongs elsewhere.
Consciousness doesn’t belong to the brain. It belongs from elsewhere.
Many people would say that the word breath means to inspire. You know what it feels like when you’re inspired. You’re ready. You’re excited. You’re enthusiastic. You’re motivated. You are alive. You’re vital. You are awake. In Latin, the word inspired comes from in spirit. What you’re doing is you’re becoming spirited. If you are a spiritual being or a religious person, you are inhaling spirit.
What would happen in this life that we’ve accepted as normal, which is a low ceiling, if we lifted the lid? This is exactly how we use the breath. It is to help people lift the lid, peek out of the box, and discover that there’s something much more ample than we thought. That goes all the way back to when I was an eight-year-old, suffering and crying myself to sleep at boarding school, and then having this experience, feeling completely at peace, and understanding, “That’s not what life is. There’s something else.” It puts it all back into proportion again.
This is exactly how we use the breath: to help people lift the lid and peek out of the box, and just discover that there’s something much, much more ample than we thought.
That’s amazing. We’re shifting the oxygen and carbon dioxide ratios within our bloodstream. A lot more oxygen and a lot less carbon dioxide also slow down the prefrontal cortex. We’re calming the monkey mind, so we can experience quantum shifts or expanded consciousness. We’re not so filled with our own thoughts that we can get beyond those and have those shifts. I want to go back and understand. How did you develop this practice? Was it something that you’d been practicing for all those years in your own life? How often do you recommend that sort of thing? How did you put this together?
First of all, a cautionary word because I know you breathe through the mouth. In normal life, you should not breathe through the mouth. It’s very important to breathe through the nose. That’s why people are mouth-taping. If you’re snoring or you have apnea, that often happens because we breathe through the mouth. In normal life, you should be breathing through the nose. With these breathwork experiences that we provide, you can also do breathing through the nose. It’s a choice.
I like breathing through the mouth because it brings on more oxygen more quickly. It’s uncomfortable, so it helps us stay focused on what we’re doing. Also, when we breathe through the mouth, by opening the back of the throat, we tend to find it easier to access our emotional realms. That’s a caveat that I want to put in there. I don’t want people to walk off thinking, “I’ve got to breathe through my mouth all day.” That’s not what this is about.
A breathwork session can provide a peak experience. There are a lot of breathwork facilitators out there in the world that are all about that. They’re like, “Come to us. We’ll give you a great time. It’s a bit like having a drink too many or getting high in some way or another, and then you’ll go off and go back to your normal life.” What is interesting to me is how we get traction with this because it is a beautiful experience. It can be a peak experience. How can we make it work in daily life? With that, I need to come back to ask you to refresh the question because I’ve gone over a couple of hurdles. I don’t remember what it was. Remind me.
A breathwork session can provide a peak experience.
Thanks for clarifying that, because it was breathing through the mouth repeatedly like that. It’s multiple questions. How did you develop this practice? Was it something that you’d been practicing for a long time, and then you put this framework together so that you could do it yourself and teach others? Part two of that question is, how often do you practice this in your own life? Do you recommend others to practice?
We played with breath at school all the time. I don’t know if you did, too. You’d see how long you could hold your breath in. You’d see how long you could hold it out. You take a few deep breaths and then try it again, and you could hold it for longer both ways. That was an exploration a lot of children had. I certainly enjoyed it. After I had that experience at school, there were paper bags going around all over the place. All the kids were practicing it because it was such an amazing experience.
I next met the breath when I was seventeen. I was going to be a young father. I still am, I hope, a very young father. My wife and I took classes in something called Lamaze breath, which was about how to prepare for the birth during the delivery. That required me to coach my wife every day. We’d go to class once a week, and every day, we would practice the breath for half an hour or so. It was to make sure that it was embedded well enough so that when the moment came, she could employ it.
I didn’t know that I was already being a breathworker. We did it studiously, and it helped with natural childbirth. That was back in 1973. After that, I had a second child. I used a different Le Boyer breath system, which was different than Lamaze. I studied pranayama for many years when I was an active yogi. I found it interesting how there’s so much power in this. It’s such a paradox because we forget about it all day long, but when we give it our attention, something shifts. Something changes. The act of giving it our attention creates change.
As I moved on through my life from pranayama and then I started different breathwork techniques like holotropic breathwork, transformational breathwork, and Sufi breathing, which is mostly around chanting and Sufism. It is designed to use your lungs in a disciplined way, as you need to last the whole line that you’re chanting, and then you have a short time to breathe in. Sometimes, you breathe in halfway through a line, much like chanting would be in our own culture, Western Catholic, or ancient Christian culture.
In fact, the word chanting means calling. Cantare, to sing, means to call as well. In South American culture, they call them the chamadas when they have plant ceremonies. They sing songs to call in a higher being. Chanting, historically, has been a form of breathwork because it calls for not just a very disciplined use of your lung capacity and your consciousness, but when you also do it with other people, it creates resonance. Resonance is a very important part of this whole puzzle that we live in. An important part of what I call the miracle matrix is to understand what resonance means.
The breath is a vibration. You could give it sound, or you could do it silently, but sound itself is a vibration. An example of this is if I put two guitars on each side of the room and they’re in tune, and I play one of the strings on one guitar, the exact same string on the other guitar will vibrate. That’s because resonance is occurring. That’s indiscriminate. It will go either way.
If we look at the way we live life, we tend to resonate at the frequency or the vibration that life requires of us. I’m in New York. You can imagine what’s going on outside on the streets with sirens and people weaving through traffic and each other. It’s a very fast vibration, which creates a high stress level. Equally, and this is why I use breath to help curate my inner world, if I’m focused on my inner world, the vibration that I carry will also resonate with other people.
It’s not a one-way story. There’s a choice that we’re making of how much of the outer vibration we’re allowing to inform us or invade us. They’re not always negative. If you’re listening to your favorite music, a beautiful concert, or something wonderful, you want to resonate with it. You want to feel it with every cell in your body. If it’s something that’s hostile and you don’t want, then you want to create a barrier or a boundary to protect your own sovereignty. Your own sense of self or your own agency, you don’t want that to be worn down or encroached upon. Using the sound with breath is fundamental for us.
In my own personal practice, I do a conscious connected breath probably four times a week, something like that. It’s wonderful because it always renews and refreshes the perspective I need to be able to navigate through a pretty sketchy world or a pretty challenging world. Emily, with whom you did the breathwork, sometimes says this. It’s a bit like polishing the diamond of who you are inside. I like to see it as polishing the lens through which I look at life.
If you imagine my window in my apartment here in New York, it is grimy because of the dirt outside in the air, the pollution. If I look out that window, I can see shapes and forms, but I can’t see detail. When I polish my lens by using the breath or when I polish my perspective and give it other information than a muddy window, I get to see things very differently. I see things much more clearly, in much more detail, and much quicker. It’s even quicker than my mind. I’m taking on things in huge quantities.
You can do this every day. You can do it even twice a day. It’s not like you have to. It’s a tool in your box. For me, it’s the biggest and the best that I’ve got. I hear a lot of people say that, too. It’s a part of that continual resourcing, refreshing, and developing resilience for the times that I do get knocked down or over-challenged. I have a way of bouncing back, and I can restore perspective very quickly.
I’ll give you an example. With my wife, as a part of our marriage contract, we have given each other the right and the commitment that if one person asks the other to take ten breaths together that we agree to do that. When life gets troublesome, or you’re in a nutty, gnarly part of relating with whoever it might be, if you decide to take ten breaths together and look at each other, I promise you that your point of view that you’ve been clinging to up to that moment will transform.
Why is that? It’s because you are harmonizing. In harmonizing, you are resonating. You are making a conscious choice, “Let’s resonate together and see if we still feel the same way at the end of ten breaths.” When you look at each other and do that, there’s a whole other level of shift that’s happening because you see each other’s humanity. You see the face go through the wall, the shrouded, closed-off, “I don’t want to talk to you. I want to stay grumpy.”
Instead of being grumbly and hateful, that transformation is taking someone into being humbly grateful again. By the time you’ve got to the tenth breath, you’re looking at this person and realizing, “You’re human like me, and I had you all set up to be the villain. I get it. You’re another beating heart that’s trying to figure out life. I’m right here with you. Thanks for doing this together.”
I’ve tried that in many different places. I was doing a talk in San Diego a few months ago at an HR conference. I said, “Have you noticed how the person in any situation who says, ‘Let’s take a few breaths,’ is the hero of that moment? It’s always the person who’s bringing in the wisdom of, ‘Let’s create some breathing space here. We don’t have to be approaching this the way that we are.’” It always works. The breath always works. I’ve never seen it not work.
The breath always works. It has never not worked.
Thanks for sharing that practice. I need and want to start incorporating that in my own marriage. That’s an easy one to take away from this. Take ten breaths together and look at each other. Another thing is that when I practiced the breathwork with Emily, afterwards, I felt emotionally light and peaceful. I’m sure you’ve seen thousands of people through this process. If we’re carrying emotional baggage, it affects our bioenergetics and dis-ease. There are a lot of chronic ailments, illnesses, and things that can be related back to stress. What kinds of shifts in people’s health have you seen happen, or stories of transformation as a result of practicing breathwork?
Some quite remarkable things can happen. There are all the obvious things, like we can learn to transform anxiety into enthusiasm and empowerment. We can do the same with stress. Some things are very surprising. We’ve had a lot of, a lot of students who have stage four cancer who’ve been able to go into remission as a result of this work.
We had one young Indian lady from England who was blind in one eye. She couldn’t open the eye, and she couldn’t see through the eye. That happened for her in one breathwork. She restored her sight. Many times, there are things like this that chronic pains and chronic illnesses have been removed or disappeared as a result of this practice, but there are formulas you need to use. This is not just about breathing.
I studied with a chap called Richard Bartlett many years ago, who wrote a book called The Physics of Miracles. I was studying. I wanted to write my own book about miracles because it fascinated me how remote they seem in our lives. I wanted to study if there were mechanics involved in how these things occur. The breath is certainly the best tool I’ve ever discovered to open to the quantum realms, but there’s one thing. The big challenge in order for these things to occur is that we need to change the way we deal with negative emotions. As humans, we need to make a 180-degree turn.
We are so frightened of fear that we get frightened of being fearful. We are so frightened of our anger that we do everything we can to not feel it. We are so frightened of our shame, our sadness, and the darker side that we’ll live a whole life denying that it exists and will try to outpace it. This is part of what we call normal. It’s like, “Take another pill,” and then underneath, you see these horrifying disclaimers about, “If you take this pill, make sure you check your blood,” and all the ailments that will come as a result of taking this pill.
This has become normal, especially in America, to see this on your screen. The person is smiling with their dog and their partner. At the same time, there are all kinds of by-products of taking this medication that are quite horrifying sometimes. This is normal. What we need to do is to learn how to turn around and be with these emotions that we find the ones we want to avoid.
I like to say breathe and feel, and feel and heal. The unease that is normal is a highway to disease. When we feel unease in any given situation, we’re adding to that side of the scales of ill health, lack of length of life, and lack of quality of life. When we accommodate it and use a coping system rather than find a resolution, then we’re stacking the odds against us.
Resolution is sometimes uncomfortable to wait for, but part of our human condition is that we don’t want to be uncomfortable. We’re like, “I’ll take the pill or the aspirin. I’ll go shopping. I’ll get my nails done,” or whatever it is we do to try to keep ourselves above that threshold of fear or danger that we are seeking to get away from our whole lives.
Here’s the deal. I’m going to mention trauma. It’s a whole subject that we clearly don’t have time for in this episode. One thing we know is that time we had reason to have fear in our lives, no matter what it was, especially in our early childhood up to 7 or 8 years of age, the impact of that danger or that trauma, one thing always happens. We lost our breath. It was a moment.
That is a moment when we embody the vibration. The intrusive, invading vibration of that moment might have been from a hit, loss of seeing something, or being shamed in some way. It doesn’t have to be physical. It can be emotional. We’re discovering more and more that just hearing about someone else’s trauma can be traumatizing.
We’re sensitive human beings. We’ve learnt how to become less sensitive because we don’t want to feel the pain. There’s a distinct difference between the relief of coping with something for a moment or two or for a period of time and resolution. The bridge between those two, between relief and resolution, is the ability to be with the discomfort and to breathe. It’s not just a breathwork that’s going to make you see or help you go into remission with stage four cancer. It’s using the breath in an applied way and exploring those darker emotions from a safe place and in a safe way. You don’t have to be re-traumatized. You can learn that your trauma can be your teacher.
Mo Gawdat, who was number two at Google for many years and is a superb mathematician, wrote a book on happiness. He did a research project where he asked 12,000 people if he could remove their trauma for them. He said, “I’ll wipe your trauma free. Do you want to do it?” 98.5% said, “No, I’ll keep my trauma. If I didn’t have that trauma, I wouldn’t have learned how to grow up. I wouldn’t have met all the incredible people that I have. I wouldn’t be the depth of human being that I am.” That says a lot.
Once we develop the will or strength to turn around and feel that feeling that we’ve been running away from, and we use our breath as our safety mechanism, it becomes easier. It’s never as scary as the stories we’re telling ourselves. It is never as bad. It’s never as dramatic because we’re taking our breath in there. It’s like if you’re going to go underwater, take your oxygen tank. It’s that simple. It’s that straightforward.
When we go into those darker realms of humanity, we need the breath with us. We are automatically staying present, but not over-identified with what the original problem was. That’s a sketch of the secret formula to be able to transform the whole world from the inside out. If we start from inside, we are impervious. We’re emanating this vibration, this music, or this energy from ourselves that other people will resonate with. That’s how we gain agency. That’s what effective leadership is all about.
When someone walks into a room, and you are attracted to them, and you like their attention, and you feel uplifted by meeting someone, that’s because they’re resonating. They’re offering a resonance that is higher than your own. Those other times that you are meeting people and you walk away, and you feel drained and tired, it is because they’re resonating at a lower frequency than you are.
These are all choices. When we’ve identified them, they’re all choices that we can make. Unfortunately, many people who don’t know that will live, duck and dive, find a way through, muscle up, and all of those things. It’s not always about muscling up. Sometimes, it’s about surrendering, too, and knowing when to do which.
Your breath is a metaphor. An in breath is an act of will. In fact, it’s the strongest act of will you could ever use because you are claiming life. Your exhale is the strongest surrender you could give because you’re expiring. You’re letting spirit leave you. You’re letting life force leave you. We need to practice that because one day, that’s going to happen. The more aware we become of it, the more masterful we can become in any given moment that we’re living in. The breath informs every single moment that we live if we let it. I’m an evangelist.
Thank you for sharing that. It’s to imagine people going from having stage four cancer to having their remission by way of doing breathwork, these practices, and the framework you walked us through. To recap that a little bit, it’s going back to those moments of trauma, but breathing in those moments of trauma. In therapy, you go back and invite a different perspective into those places to be freed from the emotions or feelings that you have attached to them. You’re letting go of those experiences, but in your description here, it’s breathing in those moments.
It’s not about revisiting the trauma. There’s a new term I’ve started to use, which is trauma repair. Everybody’s talking about trauma release, like you can shake it off. Physical trauma, we do shake off. In the animal world, you can see that if an animal is hit by a car or something, it will go into an involuntary shake, which is discharging trauma.
What I’m talking about is trauma repair, not trauma discharge or trauma release. When I say that, the word repair is key. What we’re doing is we’re not working with the trauma. We’re working with that part of us that was traumatized. It’s not the trauma itself, but the person who was traumatized. We don’t need to relive that impact or the horror. We need to reconnect or repair with that person we once were, because one of the things that happens as a result of trauma is that we fragment.
As human beings, we lose, freeze, fight, or flee in that moment of trial. We want to leave that behind. The mind is saying, “I don’t want to remember that. That’s not where I want to go. That’s dangerous. I want to stay away from that.” When we do that, we throw out the baby with the bathwater because there’s somebody who had that experience, and we forget about him or her as well. By design, we can’t afford to go back there.
The way I work with people and the way we do at Alchemy is about designing a way to go back there, which does not involve having to understand the scope of the trauma or the nature of its impact, or relive the terror or any of that. It’s about repairing. It’s about going back and finding out that part of us that got isolated and left behind as a result of any trauma we had. That’s where we begin to feel when we do that.
I have a process I take people through that I’ve done thousands of times called The Bridge. In a 30-minute process, we build a bridge over which that forgotten part of who we are can come and join me here. You see the empowerment that people go through in just 30 minutes. It brings you to tears. It’s so extraordinary. It’s like getting more whole.
When I build that one bridge, then all of those parts of me can come over. It becomes a practice. It’s very easy and simple. I become more whole. I become of more integrity. The word integrity means wholeness. It doesn’t just mean honest. This is why I spoke of architecture before. It’s the awareness that I’m picking up old pieces of myself that I’d forgotten. I’m becoming more playful, more joyful, more alive, more vibrant, more capable, and more in control. We spend our lives trying to control everything because we’re frightened. I’m talking about empowerment, the difference between being empowered and trying to control things, which are different things.
The word integrity means wholeness. It doesn’t just mean honesty.
Thanks for clarifying that. That makes sense. The bridge metaphor. I’m sure, is very helpful. For the people who are tuning in who are scientific or data-driven, have you ever done testing before and after breathwork? I imagine the heart rate variability, blood pressure, and other biometrics you could measure before doing a breathwork session, you measure them after. Do you have any of those kinds of data or stats?
Yeah, we do. It’s varying data. Unfortunately, breathwork hasn’t had as much research as we’d like. Wim Hof, who has been extremely successful, has been able to pay for a lot of research, which is very positive, both about heart rate variability and also immune system regulation. We know that the breath regulates your nervous system.
We can shift from stress points back to rest and digest very easily by using our breath. We can activate our parasympathetic nervous system at will whenever we want. In fact, I’m going to be putting one of those 32 electrodes on my head. We’re going to be doing a test with a young startup here in New York as a part of our experimentation. We have 2 or 3 neurosurgeons who have studied with us. One is here in New York, also, who is a facilitator of my work.
Sussex University in England came out with a study of breathwork. It’s a good study. There were 3,000 people or something. They were showing how people confront their problems and their issues with the use of breathwork. This is a bit we’ve skipped. We went straight to that conscious connected breath because that’s what you experienced.
The breath can be used in a myriad of ways. When you start to look at pranayama and all of those techniques, these are things that have been kept secret for thousands of years that you had to qualify in order to learn. In the old days, you had to be ready in order to learn these things. Kundalini yoga has become widely available. That involves a breath practice that’s very transportive.
I don’t want to call them the lesser breaths, but there are the more normal breath starts that we can use in our day. For someone who wants a takeaway that they can play with right away, I would suggest something like the coherence breath, which is a very straightforward breath. You are breathing in for 5 seconds and breathing out for 5 seconds.
The best way you’re going to do that is to record into your phone 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and then 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Do that. Record that in your phone for five minutes, and then play it back so you can breathe to it. That’s, by far, the easiest way you can do it. That will increase your heart rate variability. It’s called the coherence breath. It’s a very powerful breath.
If you do that breath and practice it three times a day, morning first when you wake up, in midday before your main meal, and in the evening when you go to sleep, first of all, you have the greatest tool of all to meet general life situations. You develop equanimity. In the first week, you find it’s your go-to breath. Anytime you feel challenged, like when you’re in the supermarket queue, and someone’s looking for pennies, and you’re in a hurry, you’ll go to that breath. That’s a breath you can use when you’re driving or in a situation where you need mental alertness.
You’ll find, after a week, it’ll be your go-to breath. It took me 2 or 3 days. I was like, “Every time I feel challenged, I’m going to do that coherence breath.” What happens after 2 or 3 weeks is that it becomes your conform breath. Normally, you find yourself breathing that way without even thinking about it. You’ve created a positive habit. I promise you that if you do that, you’ll live longer. If you don’t live longer, come to me, and I’ll do something about it.
Good to know. That’s breathing through your nose, the coherence breath?
Yeah. A 101 is to pay attention to how you breathe in different circumstances. Take a mental note 4 or 5 times in a day, “I’m on my way to work, and I’m late. I’m breathing this way,” or, “I’m feeling tired. I have to go into a business meeting or do a talk. My breath is sagging,” or, “I’m alert and excited. How am I breathing?” You can use that breath to recreate that feeling. That’s how you can hack your nervous system. If I’m exhausted and I have to do a talk, let’s say, I stay out of the room and take a few huffs and puffs. If you’ve seen Tony Robbins in the Date with Destiny film, before he goes on stage, that’s exactly what he’s doing. He goes out there, and he is ready to meet people.
That applies in every moment of your day. You can craft your experience by using your breath a certain way. That even includes when you make love. If you breathe in a certain way, you can have a much richer and beautiful experience. That is, in a nutshell, a slow, measured breath. That will help with things like premature ejaculation for a man. For a woman and for a man, it will create an orgasm that is beyond a normal orgasm. It’s a whole body experience rather than a genital experience. That’s with the power of the breath. Welcome to this new world. I hope it’s inspiring enough to get you off your bum and into the breath.
You can craft your experience by using your breath a certain way.
There you go. To clarify, too, in the coherence breath, there’s no pause in between, right?
You can pause, but that’s not the important part. When you connect your breath, which is why I call it the big kahuna, you are stacking all the advantages of every single breath or every ten breaths. You’re stacking them, and you continue stacking them until your whole consciousness shifts. The first shift comes because you’re giving your attention to your breath. You’re like, “I’m feeling stressed. I’m in an argument. Excuse me. I’m upset. I’m activated. I’m going to take a few breaths and come back to homeostasis again. I’m going to calm down a bit.” That is not a huge act of responsibility, but it’s changing your nervous system.
It doesn’t take long for the adrenaline or the cortisol to shoot up, but it does take a little while for it to calm. When you feel that adrenaline coming and feel that tightness in your belly, and notice that you are figuring out what you’re going to say back before you’ve even heard what’s being said, that’s a good time to take a couple of breaths and settle down.
Thank you for sharing that. I love that. Anyone reading can go practice that. Record it on your phone. Practice it morning, noon, and night or a few times a day, and then it becomes your normal go-to. In the few minutes that we have left, what about your new book, Outer Chaos, Inner Calm? What led you to write this book at this time? What inspired you to put that message together and share it with us at this time?
It is a book about breathwork. It’s not about breathwork in itself. It’s about how to employ the breath and all the times we can learn to use it to our advantage. A lot of my work and a lot of my students, I like to consider them agents of change. They go out in the world and help people in all areas of life, whether it be in the corporate world, their relationships, their spiritual growth, or their personal development. That’s the work that we do. I want them to have agency. I want them to be empowered examples.
Part of our training is very deep. We call it the Inner Journey. It’s about taking stock of my own life, becoming the master of my own life, and picking up the pen so I can write the book of my life rather than letting life do it for me. That’s a fundamental part of our training. I’ve extracted that because it has been so popular, it’s not just people who are studying breathwork who take this thirteen-week journey. It’s from 7 to 13 weeks, depending. I decided to write a book about it as an introduction to it, because then I can get that message out to more people.
The book is about helping people discover this other matrix that exists, and giving them the tools that they need to transform from being, if you like, the tail on the dog or being at the will of the outer world, for people to create enough inner space so they can re-evaluate, think for themselves, and make fresh choices. Watch what happens because then the people around you get a whole new you. You become much more compelling, much more significant, and much more an agent of your own change. That’s why I want to do it. I want everybody to get the message.
Thank you for taking the time to put that together and craft the message to share that with the world. Where can people connect? I know it’s Alchemy of Breath. It’s very easy to sign up for a free breathwork session on a Sunday at any time zone around the world. I like that you have a time zone converter on there that makes it helpful. Can you tell us how we can connect with you, your company, and your organization? If a reader is dealing with cancer, chronic illness, or chronic pain, or things like that, how can they get some help from you?
We are at AlchemyOfBreath.com. That’s our mother site. You can reach us through there. In fact, you can join the #BreatheTheWorld Initiative, which is what we do every Sunday. There are two breathworks in the day to suit all time zones, and that’s free. You can join us and enjoy it. See if it works for you. You could get the book on Amazon. We have a very special deal. I have it on Kindle for $1. That’s for people who might not be able to afford the book, and they want an inexpensive and affordable way of getting the message.
Otherwise, I’ve got an offer you can’t refuse. The offer is that if you buy the hardcover copy and send a message to Anna@AlchemyOfBreath.com, we will give you a free one-to-one breathwork session from one of our staff facilitators. If you want to experience a one-to-one session, you can get the book, and you can get that session as well.
Thank you for sharing that. This has been fascinating. I’m sure we could spend hours more diving into so many of these different areas. Thank you for the amazing work that you’re doing. It’s clearly transforming people’s lives all over the world and making a significant difference. Thank you so much for sharing with us. Thank you for being here. Thank you for joining us. We’ll have to do it again sometime. We can dive in a little deeper, even.
I would love to. Thanks. It’s been a joy. I didn’t even know. An hour has passed in ten seconds.
That’s when you know you’re in the flow, then, right?
Yeah, for sure. Thank you so much.
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It was an amazing conversation with Anthony Abbagnano. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. I love that we were able to dive into a bit of the science of what’s happening physiologically as we experience and practice breathwork. We’re increasing the oxygen levels and decreasing the carbon dioxide levels within our bloodstream, and how that impacts our brains and our bodies as we experience this.
We talked about the way of repairing trauma. I love that he shared some stories of how people have gone from having stage four cancer to being in remission. People have gone from experiencing blindness to restoring their sight through breathwork and repairing trauma. It is amazing. I’m sure there’s a lot more research and things you could dive into yourselves.
Check it out. AlchemyOfBreath.com. You can get his new book, Outer Chaos, Inner Calm. Send an email to Anna@AlchemyOfBreath.com for a free one-on-one session. Not a whole lot to lose there, right? He also shared with us the takeaway practice of the coherence breath, which is 5 seconds of breathing in followed by 5 seconds of breathing out. You can record that on your phone and do that for five minutes. That can be a new way of resetting our nervous systems throughout the day.
Thanks so much for tuning in to the show. I hope that you found some amazing nuggets in there and that you’ll dive into this a little further. You may even check out one of Anthony’s sessions, as I did. It’s free. It’s on Sundays. There are multiple time zones available for everybody around the world. If you’re reading this, try it out, and then you can let us know what you think. We’ll see you back here next time. Thanks so much. Have a great day.