Greg Voisen 0:01
Well, welcome back to Inside personal growth. And I have Anthony Abbagnano joining us. And you are joining us from somewhere in Italy. I don't know. Remember, you're not in Tuscany. I know where are you exactly. I'm in Tuscany. Andy, he is in Tuscany, all right. Well, I got that right. And we're going to be speaking with Anthony today about a new book that he's written called outer chaos, inner calm. Anthony, do you happen to have the book there? If not? My video guys are going to have it slide across the screen. Regardless

Unknown Speaker 0:41
screen there,

Greg Voisen 0:44
yeah, yeah, it looks good. It looks really good because all we got was the PDF of it. But I want to thank you for showing the book so all my listeners, by the time you hear this podcast, this book will be up on Amazon. You'll be able to get it. We'll put links to that as well, Anthony, I'm going to let our listeners know just a tad bit about you, and then I'll let you tell some of your own story. So Anthony is a visionary breath worker, pioneer and founder of alchemy of breath, which is where you can go to the website to learn more about what Anthony how Anthony helps people through their what I would call outer chaos, so that they can stay calm inside. Is internationally claimed organization dedicated to promoting the integration of breath work with both Western medicine and holistic modalities. With over four years of personal breathing practice, Anthony has established himself as a leading voice in the global breath work movement, giving a community of more than 100,000 practitioners across 40 countries through his innovative brave the world online. And you will put a hashtag for that as well, breathe the world online. Well, Anthony, you have had an interesting story and as much more to it than what I said. But I think for the listeners out there, for many of my listeners, breath work is not work new. Yoga is not new, uh, cold plunges are not new. Hot Saunas are not new, um, but your book is and that's really where we're here to talk about is the book and the breath work. And you know the breath work, the book begins with this beautiful Prolog about elder sharing wisdom. Now you and I have both talked about our age. We're about the same age. I'm sharing wisdom through a podcast, and you're sharing it through breathwork. What inspired this opening and how has your own perspective on wisdom evolved throughout your life and your journey, and obviously sharing it with so many people.

Speaker 1 3:12
Gosh, I think the mistakes add up, don't they, the mistakes we make as we, as we, as we grow up, from youngsters into adulthood, and every one of them, of course, is a learning opportunity. I always used to wonder why I was doing things in life. I was thinking like, I mean, I worked in a foundry in Oregon, all kinds of different things I've done in my life. I was inducted by a cult, and I had to escape just extraordinary experiences. But there came a moment in my life that I looked back and they all made sense. I don't know if you've ever experienced that, that all the diverse experiences you had there was actually as if a thread had been weaved through each experience, and all of a sudden they got pulled tight, and it actually became sequential. It actually made sense, and I think that I've been blessed to have a very varied life, and many, many experiences, and not all of them have been easy, and there have been a lot of mistakes made, but I believe it's in our will to recover from those mistakes and stand back up again, that we really learn what resilience is. And I also have found in my own human experience that if unconditional love is my deepest dream, then that means learning to love myself first in all my conditions. So that means, really a degree of acceptance and a will to be alongside people in any of their conditions too

Greg Voisen 4:57
well. So you know, breath work is in. Interesting work, and a lot of people are drawn to it today. And we see all these various places popping up where people can go to breath work, and you're helping people do it online and in person, and you have all kinds of events that my listeners can attend, and you can learn about that again, and I'm just going to repeat for them, it's alchemy of breath.com. There you can learn about breath camps and his retreats and his breath training. What drew you to this, you know, as you weaved your wife life, from working in a foundry to being in a cult to, you know, getting out of that and then saying, Oh, yes, you know, this is the kind of work that I want to do. And you said, there's a thread. And I do believe there are a thread in a lot of these things, if you have the awareness to realize that you are threading them together. When did that awareness come and when did you start doing this work? Well, the awareness kept

Speaker 1 6:05
you there when you were living these things. But unfortunately, I was in the cult for only about 10 days, and I managed to literally escape. But that's a perfect example to choose, because it helped me understand, as a leader of really a significant breath work movement. We have millions of people that have breathed with us now, and we have 2000 facilitators helping people breathe in almost every country in the world. And it will be very easy to take a role of guru, or for someone to project upon me that I'm the solution to their problems, but I'm really because of that cult experience, loathe to lead people anywhere where they don't want to go or they're not willing to go. So really, this the essence of leadership, to me, is a servant leadership, and that's in you where you want to go. And if we're aligned, then how can I help? And breath has been instrumental in that process for me in my own life, from being a little eight year old discovering the power of breath for the first time, and also many times since, until I became a professional in the field, and since then, I've started to teach, really, because people asked me to, I didn't think that's what I would do at all. But one after one significant breath work, there must have been a few 100 people there. A young fellow from Switzerland came up to me and he said, Can you teach me how to do this? And I said, Well, it's really in and out, right? I mean, it's not that complicated. We're breathing and you're doing it now, you're just going to do it consciously. And he said, No, there's something else I want. And I said, Well, what's that? And he said, I want to be like you. And that really threw me, of course, if someone says that to you, perhaps one's first reaction was would be like, Oh, wow. I must be good. You know, I must be there must be something good about me. But on reflection, I understood that what he was really asking for was, how can you help me be me? And I think that's really the essence of a facilitator of anything in life that we need to learn how to be comfortable in our own skin and not to be a composite of the personalities we had to invent in order to cope with life, not to be a composite of the personalities we had to invent to cope with life And to me the breath and the use of conscious breath work has been the tool, the major, quickest, most instant tool to achieve that state of being, the person I am underneath the facade. It's been the most useful tool to get me there. Well, it gets you anywhere else. It's just bringing you home to who you are, really so well,

Greg Voisen 9:07
I think it is the tool, whether it's breath work in combination with meditation practices, or breath work in combination with many other things that people can do. I remember an interview with George Leonard, and he is the founder of ITP, integrative, transformative practice. You know, he took three practices and put them together. And I think what happens is you help people create an awareness that they never had. And I let's face it, we're talking Eastern philosophy. Here. It is an awareness. It's an awareness of who I am and who I can be and how I can be in the world. And you describe a real, transformative illness that brought you face to face with your I'm going to just say, finitude. How did this experience reshape? Your understanding of what truly matters in life. Because, you know, like when we take this traverse across all these fields and hills and valleys of life, as you said in the beginning, we we gain a lot of wisdom if we're awake and aware. And I think it's important then, when you get to this point, like you did that you you made another shift, but a major shift. So what? What shifted for you?

Speaker 1 10:36
Well, freedom is another word for nothing else to lose, right? That's what Chris Christopherson wrote a few decades ago for a song. And I was in a state of being because of this illness where I really had nothing else to lose. The only thing left to me was my breath, and it was we didn't know at the time, it was a parasite, but a parasite had inhabited my body for several years, and I was reduced to eventually lying down and quite emaciated. I went down to 58 kilos. I don't know what that is, in pounds, not a lot. You know, I'm now 84 kilos. So you know, well over a third of my way was lost, and I was in such pain that I couldn't move. And every time I did move, the pain would be a spasm, which would make me flinch, which would create more pain, which would just set the whole ball rolling, and it would get so intense that eventually I'd get to the point in maybe 15 or 20 seconds of this fleeting pain, I would just just have to just stop moving. I just have to surrender to the pain and be as still as I possibly could. And this was my understanding of what surrender actually means, like, when you finally Stop squirming, something else can happen, but I'm still trying to negotiate with this experience, like, Why me? Why? How did this happen? Nobody knew. You know, this was a mystery illness, and I was probably a week or so from death, and I didn't have answers. I couldn't find answers through song, through prayer, through meditation. But one thing was true was that I had the breath, and I had to breathe in such a way so I didn't even expand my lungs. I was on the thinnest thread of breath, because if I notably expanded, I would feel the pain again, and it would set the whole process in motion. So that was a that was a probably a seven or eight week period of time, and I'm so grateful that it wasn't longer. And I'm also, you know, I was just working with a a client today who's who's 68 and has been in pain since the age of 22 that the same kind of pain. So I was really very fortunate and and it taught me that I can surrender. I can let go of control, and I can just be with my breath, and that will actually be enough, and then everything beyond that. Because fortunately, my wife, who was a friend at the time, is she's an intuitive, and she said, You've got to go see this doctor in New York, and I got into a wheelchair and got into the plane and managed to make it to see this doctor, and he found the parasite. But, but without that, I surely wouldn't be here. And every moment since then, I've understood that the breath is of an abundance that the human mind can't quite grasp. I've I say often in classes, one breath is enough for a lifetime of study. Not even a lifetime of study can really understand what's going on with one single breath. So imagine all the breaths you've taken and you've forgotten, and imagine what might happen if you actually give them your attention, your conscious awareness. Oh, yeah, yeah,

Greg Voisen 14:33
it's you know, as you were telling that story about your condition, what bubbled up for me was constriction versus expansion, because you were having to actually constrict the breath. And I have a good friend right now who's up at Everest, and he's actually going to ski down one of the slopes in Everest. He's kind of a crazy guy. And I keep thinking about the the air, and how thin it is and how much effort it takes just to kind of exist at 26,000 feet, not only that, then to try and ski it. And as you were talking about that, I was thinking about the constriction of the breath. And that brings me to kind of this point of your book, you know, you write about finding inner calm amid outer chaos. Now, the perception is that the world's increasing turbulent world depending on our perception and how we look at it. And I would say, obviously the outside world's noise is extremely noisy, and it's extremely distracting. What practical advice would you give one of our listeners or viewers here today who's struggling to maintain their center, to maintain their calm amidst, amidst this chaos that's in the outside world, versus you providing them with a tool to go to the inner world, which they can choose to actually sustain calmness, peace, joy, abundance, love, compassion,

Speaker 1 16:30
yeah, thank you. Well, one small breath for mankind. Yeah, that's really the first step. No matter what your condition is, if you can remind yourself that a new possibility begins with one breath, and you're willing to make a commitment to do that whenever you find yourself in difficulty, then that opens a doorway to something different that can be noticed so it's not the usual Same old, same old. When you learn to think differently, then different things can happen. So if you can commit to that one breath, then you can use that one breath to create the space for another one, or another 10, or as many as you need. And I think the next thing to do, really to be to close the eyes, if you can, as long as you're not driving or doing something where eyesight is critical, but by closing down your outside, you automatically open your insight. And so the act of taking a breath and closing your eyes allows you to contemplate a different landscape of possibilities, and then it becomes a question of, how do you navigate that landscape? And the book is really a template, if you will, of two things, the natural hero's journey that we live on this planet, but also it examines the stages of life we go through. So whether you are 20 or 80, or anywhere in between and beyond, either way, the book has relevance for you in terms of being able to forecast what's going to happen in your life or being able to put to write something that already has happened in your life and to be able to transform it into the compost for a new being to grow from.

Greg Voisen 18:31
And I love your reference to Joseph Campbell's work, the hero's journey and and I don't know if there's a listener out there that doesn't know about it, but I would certainly recommend to any of my listeners to go get one of Joseph Campbell's books. He's got several about the hero's journey. You You should probably already know about this. What's interesting, though, is the connection to Joseph Campbell for me came through Mark watts, Alan Watts, his son. And the interesting work is that, you know, there is a foundation. So for all my listeners, go to the Joseph Campbell foundation. There. You'll find all kinds of works of his. Go back and look at some of the old PBS things that he did. Now that brings me to this question, you know, you discuss the bridge technique for inner child healing, which kind of seems central to your work, and we talked about this on the pre interview, which was the adverse childhood experiences, the things that people are dragging around from childhood that or are, I'm going to say, trapped inside their mind, subconsciously, what led you to develop this specific methodology, and how have you seen it transform the people's lives that you've worked with? Because, again. It's in the book. So for my listeners, when you get this book, you're going to come across the valley of shadows, you're going to come across the bridge, you're going to come across a lot of things that you can use and apply. But I thought this one was important.

Speaker 1 20:14
Yeah, the bridge was born from my own negotiation with my own inner child. And, you know, I, like many people today, at the time, didn't understand what the term really meant, and and once I did, then a lifetime, the last 30 years, has been spent seeking to understand more about what this means and the tragedy of the inner child. Some of us have that inner child in us now, and it's joyful and playful every time we giggle or laugh unreasonably, that's usually because our inner child is coming to the surface. But also, most of us have parts of our past that we are we have hidden. We've archived them away because they were less comfortable than joyful, and they may have been really very badly traumatized. And so this lends towards now trauma work, and most trauma work doesn't really address that, being that we once were that got traumatized, it's dealing with the trauma itself or trying to integrate it, or trying to with CBT or other therapies, trying to modify or modulate our human experience in today's moment, the bridge is an extremely simple technique of not going into the trauma, but going to The little one inside that got damaged by the trauma, and restoring contact and creating a bridge for that little one to come back into the hole again. So we know that trauma fragments us. It breaks us into pieces. A piece of us breaks off each time that we're traumatized and gets hidden, gets, like you said, Put away, put into the cupboard, or the hidden. And then when we get activated, or triggered, as we call it, that little one might rear up and say things that we don't want to say and get us into situations that we don't want to be in. And I don't know if you know those times when you're you know you shouldn't say what you're about to say, but gosh darn it, you're going to say it anyway, and that's when the inner child is rearing its head and is not with you. It's actually working against you. So the bridge is a very simple six step process to restore connection with the inner child, and it starts off with one fragment, but then it becomes almost automatic for all of the other ones to start moving into wholeness again. So I spoke about the personalities we need to invent in order to feel protected earlier on, this is really about enabling ourselves to uncover ourselves in a in a safe and easy way to shine as the human beings that we are not the constructs that we thought we had to make to feel safe.

Greg Voisen 23:14
Well, no conversation with you would be complete unless we talked about forgiveness and one of the things that you write about is this relationship with your brother, okay, what's the most challenging aspect for anybody listening out there about forgiveness and the journey of forgiveness. I don't care if it's a fellow coworker or a family member or whoever it might be, but in a lot of cases, is it is family members. And I think that, you know, sometimes we're born into families to learn a lot of lessons, and you kind of think it was a mismatch, or you you get married and you expect it to be this perfect thing, and it's not, and you are learning again, and a long life, you've got all these learning lessons. So speak with us about your situation with your brother and your journey with forgiveness.

Speaker 1 24:24
Yeah, thank you. My brother was older than I. He was three years older than me, and he didn't really want me around. And I, you know, I understood many years later, even when my mom was pregnant for the second time, he did not want me around. He was resentful, and so I was actually born into my normal and when I was born was not to be welcomed, and my parents weren't particularly doting or caring. They both had careers. They had a nanny or an Au Pair girl to take care of us, so there wasn't a lot of family. Feeling, but the relationship with my brother was one, as I grew older, that the only way I was going to get his attention was to be kind to him and to be generous and to be nice. So I'd give him my ice creams, I'd give him my share of dessert or whatever it was, I would find ways that I could try ingratiate him, which I discovered then became a coping system in my life, actually further on. But as that relationship developed, I I learned that I needed to be better than him in order to some, in some curious way, prove to myself that I had the right to be alive. It's as if I didn't feel that I had the right to be who I was, because I was kind of pushed down from the moment that I was conceived. So as we grew older, I became I went in pursuit of excellence. I had a career in architecture and did very well, and I had a business career. My brother was an artist and and and the musician and wasn't, wasn't able to maintain a work life or a career at all. And so I was always, in some way, seeking to be better than him, but at the same time, he was also quite ruthless with me. The first time that he was physically cruel to me. I was only one or two years old, and some of the experiences that I had were really quite horrifying and life threatening as well because of his existence. So as we continued our life and he would kept up his habit of diminishing me,

Greg Voisen 26:41
unfortunately, yeah, me trying

Speaker 1 26:43
to squeeze myself out of the box all the time. I, I, I really didn't realize how much anger I had and how much sense of competition that I have with him. It was me just trying to be nice to him, so he would be nice to meet. That was my truth. It wasn't until the later years of his life when he came to live in a house next to mine in Italy, and I was supporting him financially, and I went round one day to take him some firewood, because I knew he didn't have money and he didn't have any firewood, so I took him his firewood in my pickup truck, and I emptied it for him. And I said, I hope that'll that should help you for the next couple of weeks. And he pointed at me, and he told me, just to go away. Just get out of my life. I don't want you in my life anymore. You're not worth anything. Just get out of my life. And so I left, and I was like, you know, devastated. And self righteous and feeling like, Well, how could he, you know, I just went to help him. How could he behave like that? And it took about two to three, three years for me to understand what had happened in the past and also what was happening in that moment, and I thought that what he had done throughout my whole life, when I put it on the scales, was unforgivable, and I didn't want to forgive him. He didn't deserve my forgiveness. He wasn't repentant, he wasn't kind, he he just took advantage of me. That's the way I told that was the story I told myself. Well,

Greg Voisen 28:29
that's how you saw it. And

Speaker 1 28:33
if I was to reset that now, I would say that I unconsciously invited that because that was my pattern, that was my way of coping, to ingratiate. So, yeah, so I would encourage people to take advantage of me, but actually, the whole point of this was that I need I, I needed to forgive him I never had. And the act of withholding forgiveness, almost destroyed me. It actually kept me stuck. It kept me stuck in that rinse and repeat cycle of being nice, getting wounded, feeling bitter. Being nice, getting wounded, feeling bitter. I'd actually entrenched myself in a victim role because I withheld forgiveness from him. So that led me to conclude that forgiveness, is it really a human right to withhold forgiveness? Is that really something, you know, am I? Where do I put myself if I, if I withhold forgiveness from someone, it's like I'm the judge, or I'm a god, a deity of some kind that it's mine to give or not to give. And who am I hurting? You know, it was me that I was hurting. I was in a state of resentment. And you know, resentment means, in Latin, means to feel again. Recent either it means to feel again. So in sticking in my resentment, I'm just feeling all this bitterness, all this victimhood, time and time again because I'm withholding forgiveness.

Greg Voisen 30:12
Well, I'm glad you got to a spot with him where you were able to forgive, because I I know the feeling I've been there. I've done that. As a matter of fact, it's interesting in your country, my my brother in law is Kim Kardashians, attorney, and he's the one you saw on all the news this last week, because she forgave those nine guys that robbed her and bound her and took her jewelry. And he said it changed the whole trajectory of her life, but she forgave them. So in the court, she forgave them. Now I'm sure, from my brother in law's standpoint, because he's an attorney, it was a different situation, because I know him really well, but as I listened to the words and how he spoke to the media. It was interesting what Kim was able to finally come to but he did say it has really changed her whole life and the way she lives her life and and that brings me to this point. You talk about spiritual seekers getting stuck in what felt like this peak experience. And what practices helped you to continue evolving, rather than attaching to any particular stage of growth, because you know, to this example about your forgiveness of your brother, it's a point where you were stuck. We all get stuck. People are stuck out there and they can't forgive somebody, or they can't love somebody, or they've got an issue coming to an agreement with somebody. There's a lot of conflict. How do you tell people to get unstuck? And what is the breath work do for helping people get unstuck.

Speaker 1 32:04
These are such huge questions. Thank you. It's a brilliant question, like I said in the beginning, and I wasn't being flipped when I said it starts with one breath and giving your consciousness to that one breath, but really the magnificence of the power of the breath. And if you look in any religious document, you'll see the breath referred to as a supernatural power, if not THE POWER OF GOD itself. And no matter what your understanding might be, the God of your understanding, the breath has been considered for millennia as being of Divine Proportion and divine force. And so when we breathe in particular ways, and we allow this consciously, allow this energy, this prana, as the as the Indians would say in Sanskrit, when we allow this to enter our physical body, some extraordinary things happen, and they're actually not extraordinary. They're just extraordinary to us because we are unfamiliar with it. But the more that we make the breath our best friend, the more intimacy that we create with our breath, the more likely we are to start noticing things differently, and when we change our perspective, then everything else changes, just like you said about Kim Kardashian, and the act of forgiveness is what liberates us. Doesn't really liberate the forgiven. It liberates us as the forgive us from being bound to the victimhood that we once experienced. So these are the kinds of realizations that become not just easy, but emphatic and clear and undeniable. When we use our breath consciously, we begin to see the other side of the coin, as it were.

Greg Voisen 34:01
Well, I think that this book is a book that everybody should go out again. You want to hold that up one more time, just so we can see it. I don't have a copy of it. I have a PDF, but there it is. It's inner chaos, outer chaos. I'm sorry, inner calm. This is an introduction, I think, to Anthony, to his breath work. But it's also more it's about the stories we've just talked about, about the wisdom that you can actually receive as a result of this. And I just want to encourage my listeners, Anthony, to go to your website. There are free offerings. There's free breathwork sessions. There's breath the work fundamentals. Course, there's three ways to reduce anxiety. There's retreats, as I said, there's the breath camps, and it's got them listed all the way through August. I. And the events and certainly reach out. Sign in, sign up. Look at the blog. You can find Anthony out there on YouTube as well. It's a pretty big YouTube channel, as a matter of fact, showing him doing the breath work with people. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. It's been a pleasure spending a few minutes with you, speaking about your book, your philosophy, your wisdom. Is there anything you'd like to leave the Listen listeners with, as we kind of part this interview, and I'm looking forward to seeing you, by the way, at the end of June and first part of July here in San Diego. So I know you're coming to the SHRM conference, and I can't wait to meet you personally and sit down have a cup of tea. But what do you want to tell the listeners today, if there's any one thing as you leave here, what would you what would you inform them of?

Speaker 1 35:55
You know, the next time someone says something to you that feels unreasonable or unkind or hurtful, breath and contemplate the fact that that person who has hurt you is suffering themselves. And if you can be the one to stop and take a breath, you can stop that cycle repeating yourself.

Greg Voisen 36:22
And with that, Namaste, my friend, I appreciate you. I appreciate the book. I appreciate the work that you're doing and your dedication to helping people worldwide find a tool, and I will call it that, because there's lots of tools in the tool chest, but this tool is probably the most important one you have, because it's something you take for granted every day. But if you start noticing your breath, and you start putting your attention on it, you'll find that there'll be a major transformation in your consciousness. So if you're looking to get yourself out of a rut, go see Anthony. Go to this website. Get this book. If you're stuck, this is a great way to get unstuck. And as he explained earlier, you know, and I thought your story was great, Anthony, about the fact that the parasite so this parasite infected your body, and I want to use an analogy for my listeners here. I think many of us have a parasite, and the only way to get rid of this parasite is really to actually breathe through it, to and to heal through it. So thank you for what you're doing, and thank you so much for this new book. I really am. Just can't wait to get my own physical copy from from from Kim but, or from Kelsey, but I will, all right. You take care, Anthony.

Unknown Speaker 37:57
Great. I'm looking forward to see you in San Diego. You.