Heart of Motion
The Heart of Motion Podcast is an exploration of the heart, soul and science of movement - and what it means in our lives.
Movement connects us more deeply to ourselves, to our bodies and to the things and people that are most important to us. Beyond a fitness routine, why do you move? And what moves you? When we can look past the hamster wheel of ''fitness" - we start to realize that when we really live the lives of our bodies - life can be a whole lot more fulfilling, and a whole lot more fun!
Host Susannah Steers is your guide on a quest to understand how we can move better, feel better in our bodies and connect more deeply to our people and the world around us. Join her for some conversation, interviews with experts, and conversations with everyday people about what movement means to them. You might just find movement feels a little different on the other side...
Heart of Motion
From Outer Chaos to Inner Calm: Anthony Abbagnano's Journey Through Breathwork
Take a deep breath. Now take another. In this transformative conversation with Anthony Abbagnano, founder of Alchemy of Breath, we explore how something we do 25,000 times daily without thinking can become our most powerful tool for personal transformation.
Anthony shares the profound journey that led him to create a global breathwork community and write his new book "Outer Chaos and Inner Calm." Drawing from 71 years of life experience, he offers a compassionate framework for navigating life's challenges through conscious breathing. When we choose to take a breath during moments of overwhelm, we make our first step away from victimhood toward agency and authorship of our own stories.
The conversation weaves through the hero's journey archetype, showing how our lives follow universal patterns of departure from comfort, exploration of the unknown, discovery of inner treasure, and return with newfound wisdom. Anthony explains how breathwork allows us to participate consciously in these journeys rather than being swept along by circumstances.
Perhaps most provocatively, Anthony discusses how embracing death awareness brings more vitality to our lives. By consciously considering our mortality, we sharpen our appreciation for each moment and deepen our connections. This isn't morbid contemplation but rather a practice that grounds us in the preciousness of our limited time.
The practical core of Anthony's teaching is beautifully simple: "breathe and feel, feel and heal." By maintaining conscious breathing while fully experiencing our emotions, we develop the capacity to witness our experiences without being overwhelmed. Through this practice, what once seemed like our greatest obstacles become our greatest resources.
About Anthony Abbagnano
Anthony Abbagnano is the founder of Alchemy of Breath, a globally recognized breathwork community that has helped thousands reclaim their power through the transformative power of the breath. His personal story, shared in this book, details how he overcame profound challenges through breathwork and mindfulness, leading him to create a life of purpose and balance.
As the first to bring breathwork online, Anthony serves as curator for online breathwork on the board of the Global Professional Breathwork Alliance (GPBA), and holds a faculty position on the Shift Network. Anthony’s Breathe the World online breathwork sessions draw hundreds each week, with an extended community of 170,000 and counting.
Breathe The World Online Sessions
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Heart of Motion Podcast host Susannah Steers is a Pilates & Integrated Movement Specialist and owner of Moving Spirit Pilates in North Vancouver, BC. She is passionate about movement, about connections and about life.
Through movement teaching, speaking, and facilitating workshops, she supports people in creating movement practices that promote fitness from the inside out. She loves building community, and participating in multi-disciplinary collaborations.
Along with her friend and colleague Gillian McCormick, Susannah also co-hosts The Small Conversations for a Better World podcast – an interview based podcast dedicated to promoting the kind of conversations about health that can spark positive change in individuals, families, communities and across the globe.
Social Media Links:
Moving Spirit Pilates Instagram
Moving Spirit Pilates Facebook
Susannah Steers Instagram
Welcome to the Heart of Motion Podcast. I'm Susanna Steers and I'll be your host as we explore the heart, soul and science of movement as a pathway to more active, vibrant and connected living. Nothing happens until something moves, so let's get started.
Susannah Steers:Welcome to the Heart of Motion Podcast, where we explore the heart, soul and science of movement and what it means in our lives and at the heart of movement and really of life itself, is breath. We take it for granted, we breathe in, we breathe out. For the most part, we don't really even think about it. It just happens. And yet breath is the one thing that ties into everything we are and everything we do. Breath supports posture and motion and acts as the foundation for every system in the body. It unites the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Breath connects spirit to form.
Susannah Steers:Today, we are diving much deeper into breath with a very special guest. Anthony Abbagnano is the founder of Alchemy of Breath, a globally recognized breathwork community that has helped thousands reclaim their own power through the transformative power of the breath. His personal story, shared in his new book "Outer Chaos and Inner Calm, details how he overcame profound challenges through breathwork and mindfulness, leading him to create a life of purpose and balance. He's spoken alongside notable leaders like Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, bruce Lipton, peter Levine and others. Anthony, I am so glad to welcome you to the Heart Emotion Podcast.
Anthony Abbagnano:What an honor. Thank you, Susannah. I loved all the things you said about the breath too touching and true.
Susannah Steers:And true. Breath is so important, and it's just something we most of the time don't even think about. So I'm thrilled to dive in, and there is so much I want to talk to you about today. So why don't we jump right in to your new book, "Outer Chaos, inner Calm? I want to know what inspired you to write it, and maybe is there something in your own journey that shaped the book's message.
Anthony Abbagnano:Yeah, absolutely completely. The book is actually born from what I would call the backbone of the training that I've been giving for the last 15 years to people who want to be breathwork facilitators or to use the breath in their practice. So doctors, nurses, psychotherapists, policemen, psychiatry, you know on and on all different walks of life, and it was really done as a requisite to ensure that the quality of facilitation that my graduates would provide is of sufficient depth and gravitas that they can really sit alongside anybody, no matter how deep or bright or light their process might be. So that goes all the way to some of our facilitators who worked with the MAID program in Canada. We do work in prisons and hospitals and police forces. We deal with a lot of trauma work and we really want to accompany people in those tender and deep moments in their life and the book is really exactly that.
Anthony Abbagnano:The inner journey that I ask of my students is pretty much articulated in the book. It's a lighter version and maybe has a wider appeal, and that's the purpose of it. I found people who are coming to study breathwork with me. Some of them said it's not the breathwork I want to do, this inner journey thing I've heard about. So I thought, well, I better pull it out. Obviously, if there are more people that want to do it, I want to make it available. So the book is the beginning of that awareness, that inner journey for people, and for some, the completion as well.
Susannah Steers:Is there something in your own personal journey that brought you to working with the Breath in this way?
Anthony Abbagnano:Yeah, that's when I said everything. Everything in my life has led to this book, even though it's the fourth book I've written. Actually, I've written four books before. Excuse me, this is the last one I've written and it's the first one to be published. Okay, this book is really it is entirely from my own life perspective and the experiences that I've had, but it really talks about experiences that are universal.
Anthony Abbagnano:And I think one of the most challenging things when we're overwhelmed or troubled or super challenged, is that we somehow have this story. We tell ourselves that the whole universe is orchestrating our adversity and that everything's going pear-shaped. And I think in those times of deep distress, it's good to know that we're not alone. They're actually. That's one of the fundamental aspects of's good to know that we're not alone. They're actually. That's one of the fundamental aspects of our human journey is that every once in a while, we need to encounter that sense of deep threat in order to grow, in order to become more resilient and robust.
Anthony Abbagnano:So that's certainly been my life, and the book is really about taking those 71 years now and putting them into a message that can be really quite brief, because the principles are simple.
Anthony Abbagnano:It took me a long time of struggle to find out what they were, but they're actually quite straightforward and simple and they can be employed with ease. And it's not to say the book is an easy read. But it also asks some questions that we get to reflect on, and some of those questions are even designed not to be answered but just to be with as a way of opening to a deeper part of ourselves. But I think that the outcome and the purpose of the book is really to gain agency, so to take a brief look at our past and to understand what the constraining factors were that sculpted us to be who we are with, so we can rewrite those parts that we want to rewrite. Coming into our present moment, then we have the choice of well, what do I want the rest of my life to look like? So it's about becoming the author of your life rather than letting someone else write the book for you.
Susannah Steers:Throughout the book you refer to a hero's journey. I love looking at patterns and I love a good archetype. Can you tell me a little bit more about the hero's journey as you see it and maybe describe how people might apply it in their own healing processes?
Anthony Abbagnano:Yeah Well, there are a couple of really, really important takeaways that I think are valuable for people to know if they're not familiar with the hero's journey. But the hero's journey is born from research that Joseph Campbell did and Joseph Campbell was an anthropologist and he studied many different cultures, including tribal cultures and myth, and he understood as a result of his research that there is actually a human story that we're all living, and it might take a lifetime to live, but there are many loops of this thing happening as well. It could be an hour or a week, or a relationship or a project or anything like that, and there could be four or five of them going on at the same time, like I'm living the inner journey of my life right now, the hero's journey of my life. Right now I'm living the hero's journey of this talk we're having. I don't know what you're going to ask me next. I've left my home territory, I'm in an exploratory place and I may have to meet some of my demons and my dark sides, if you ask me the right questions, and I also will hopefully find some kind of treasure on this journey.
Anthony Abbagnano:And already this might seem familiar with many films that you've watched or many books or stories that you've read, that there is this departure from what we know and an excursion and an exploration into an unknown world, and there is treasure to be found in this journey and that, in a classic movie, might be Treasure Island and landing on the island and finding the box of treasure. And in the sense that I relate to the hero's journey, the treasure is inside each of us, and so it's really about finding ourselves. It's an internal journey that we make. And then, of course, once we find the treasure, if you're sitting on Treasure Island without a helicopter or a boat or a way out, that treasure is not really worth a lot. You can't eat it, you can't burn it, you can't trade it. If you're on your own, there's nothing you can do trade it. If you're on your own, there's nothing you can do. So that second half of the hero's journey is about how do we take that back, how do we bring it back to where we came from usefully, in such a way as it can be a teaching of some kind. This value can be conveyed to somebody else. So that's the hero's journey.
Anthony Abbagnano:What I've done with this book is I've borrowed from the hero's journey, but I've also examined the human journey and taken a lifespan. So really, in the book we're looking at the different stages of life that we will pass through and if you're 85, or if you're 25, that the only difference is you've got more past behind you and less future, or less past behind you and more future. But the thresholds that we will cross are the same and they're universal thresholds, they're archetypal thresholds. So I think, to get to the real takeaways for this, for people who don't want to spend their time reading A Hero with a Thousand Faces, I've been in my life. I now understand whenever it might happen again. There's always something else waiting to happen. But unless we're prepared to become the discoverer of what that is, we won't know what it is. So we'll stay in the rut of repeating the same things, the depression, the anxiety loops we live in, the ways we undermine ourselves, the inner judge that I'm not good enough, I don't belong, all those narratives that we've learned to repeat to ourselves as if they were mantras or affirmations and indeed they are. We then become the slave of that statement and we then unconsciously engineer ways to repeat it again.
Anthony Abbagnano:So this book is really about tearing the stickiness of the comfort zone, tearing ourselves off that sticky pad and going to a new launch pad and exploring what else that can be.
Anthony Abbagnano:What else is it that could be possible? So it's fairly intrepid, but it's guided and it's supported. One of the things that I love about the book is that it's now open on our community platform, so when you read it, you can be alongside other people that are reading it too. And I think, in all the work that I've done, the value of community has proved itself to be paramount, because it's when I feel alone with my shame or my sense of failure that it gets amplified and it gets worse. I keep listening to my own voice. That's putting me down, but when I find out there's someone else who's feeling exactly the same way, all of a sudden it changes and there's a conversation that can happen in a way. Maybe I can uplift them in a way, or they can uplift me in a way, and so, with this sense of community, we can really make this an easier navigation, this game of life that we play.
Susannah Steers:Yes, and it seems that these days, with all the connectivity that we have in this way, you know, with podcasts and the things we are connected to, there are ways in which we are really disconnected from ourselves and from each other because we're glued to the screens and glued to the ways information bombarding us. I want to ask a question, because oftentimes the theme of this podcast, it's central theme, is movement, and over the last year we've explored many ways that different kinds of breathwork can support and amplify movement and embodiment as a pathway to meaningful change. Now the science is finally catching up. There's a growing body of research showing that breath work can reduce your stress, anxiety, improve your mood and benefits that we see in your teachings. But your work takes it deeper the physiological calm that's so often measured by science and a lived, emotional, felt, sense, experience of calm.
Anthony Abbagnano:I think they're very similar. I think the more we come, first of all, to take it down to basics, the more we come closer to our breath, the more equipped we become to manipulate another system in the way that we want to, so we can excite it or calm it or anything in between. And there are lots of buttons and dials on that dashboard that the closer we come to the breath, the more we notice what they are and how to utilize them at the right moment in the right way to create a completely different outcome in our perspective and therefore that which occurs to us. If our perspective is different, we will notice differently and so, therefore, different things can can happen. So whether the nervous system is calm, naturally because I am absent of external stimuli and it's the end of my day and I'm just just exhausted and I don't want to think anymore, and I sit there and like have that exhale that we all know is like gosh, gosh, you know, is almost a well-being in that exhaustion, because it's the knowledge that I could put the list down for the day. I don't have to check my phone anymore, you know. And so we can arrive at that calm by hyperactivity and exhaustion.
Anthony Abbagnano:But I think the ability to create that sense of calm is something different, and especially if with the world as chaotic as it is. And then comes the question well, what would it look like to alchemize that chaos, to actually use it as the compost that will nourish the shoots of my own sense of inner calm, no matter what is going on out there? And then, when we get to that place, then we begin to notice that, oh, my sense of calm, my quality of presence how much I'm fully with you is actually inspiring for other people. People notice the quality of presence. We used to call it presence of mind 50 years ago, but now we understand presence means more than just presence of mind. It means presence of everything. And we know what it's like when someone who has a high quality of presence enters a room. We all feel it, we feel attracted, we feel inspired, we feel compelled. And so that calm that we attain through this process of alchemy of the outer world into the still point inside becomes a form of leadership, of inner leadership that then emanates and informs the world around us.
Anthony Abbagnano:And as to the element of movement, I think what I find most relevant is that the breath will flow within you or it will flow without you. So let us make it our business that it will flow within us, because then we are in movement. So it teaches us, the more we acquaint ourselves with it, that hanging on means non-life. It might feel safer not to leave this moment and it might feel comfortable and more known. But if we can let go and trust I think it was Elizabeth Kubler-Ross who wrote that book on death and dying, I think it was and she said are you willing to trust, as you take a step over the edge of the cliff, that your foot will actually land on something solid?
Anthony Abbagnano:I think we've seen I remember Harrison Ford did a movie when he had to jump off.
Anthony Abbagnano:It looked like this precipitous downfall into the darkness and dragons and all kinds of ugly stuff. It was a very special moment because he did step off and something happened. And so there comes a point in our lives that repeatedly perhaps, that we're offered the chance to embrace faith, that I am in harmony with life and I am in the dance with life and life will not step on my toe because I'm in the flow. That element of movement, I think, is where I make my pitch, because the flow of the breath is the flow of life and, like you said in the beginning, we forget about it our whole life. Really, if we focused on just that first and last breath and understood that we're doing that all the time, 25,000 times a day, we're living that birth and death cycle, how many opportunities does it give for creativity and how many opportunities does it give for inquiry and curiosity and wonder? And finally, how many opportunities does it give us to let go of something that we find difficult to let go of, that we're hanging on to?
Susannah Steers:Yes, because everything tends to contract when we're in that space of fear and we're not breathing, or it's very shallow and our bodies tighten up, but the world kind of gets smaller around that too, doesn't it? It is sometimes a scary thing to look at taking that step, and I feel like we're sort of addicted to living life at full throttle and in particular ways, I'm wondering if you have ways that people can access that sense of true calm when they are in that state of overwhelm. How do you get to a place where you can use that state as the birth of something deeper?
Anthony Abbagnano:Yeah, yeah and different,
Susannah Steers:Different yeah.
Anthony Abbagnano:Because I don't know, as a race, if we've ever been under such threat. I think I was hearing a speaker who I value. His name is Stephen Bartlett. He was interviewing some people just the other day and they were concluding that we have an increase of 66% in war than we've had over the last 10 or 20 years. So we now deal with proxy wars, where countries employ other countries to do their battles for them. So these things are real, even though we feel distant from them and there's no more.
Anthony Abbagnano:I don't believe there's ever been in my lifetime a more urgent moment than there is now to seek a different way of being 100% invested in that. And I think one of the pitfalls that I see happening in many of the conversations that are happening out there are that this argument that we entertain for all the way, from conspiracy at one end of the continuum to mainstream media at the other end of the continuum this is all data that's getting chucked at us all the time. It's confusing. We don't know what sense-making means anymore. We don't know what's sensible, what's not. We don't know what's true, what's not. Those things have been actually left behind as a part of our past and we're now in this swirling confusion that it's very easy to grab for footholds or handholds in this kind of a situation. And I see what's happening is that the conversations that we indulge in, the conversations that we let become the currency of our lives, are not healthy conversations. So I'm for and you're against, or she's left and he's right, and we keep dichotomizing and polarizing and casting opinions, and they get stronger and stronger and meanwhile the adrenaline, the world adrenaline levels are going higher and higher and the patient's levels are going lower and lower and health levels and immunity levels are going lower and lower and we're not in good shape right now.
Anthony Abbagnano:So to me it's about how do we actually change conversation, and that's what the book is about is about standing for a new conversation and then inquiring what that conversation might be. So how can we invite a new type of correspondence rather than this old one that you attack and I co-respond? I co-respond by attacking you back. And so how can we change the quality of correspondence to something that is kinder and more heart-centered and more amply informed, and that all starts with one breath? Just that choice, to make the time to take one breath is, I think, the greatest act that we can make, especially if we're under pressure, say how can we do this when we're under pressure in these situations? And when it comes down to breath practices, it's absolutely true to say the wrong time to try a new breath practice is when you're under pressure. The time to put it into place is when you're not under pressure, so the next time it comes up you know what to do. You have an automatic go-to.
Anthony Abbagnano:So I wouldn't expect others than some really very basic things like remembering to take a breath when you don't want to is the beginning of something different. And then it's a question of now. How do I make that moment into movement? How do I connect that moment to the next moment so I can create movement that has traction and accountability and something measurable at the end of it. And then we can feel like I am on the road to change. I as an individual am on the road to change and I can identify things that are contributing to that and things that are not, and I can choose who I hang out with and who I don't hang out with, and then we're beginning to reconstruct a new possibility of reality. I think I mentioned in the book I love that statement of you become the average of the five people you spend most of your time with. You know.
Susannah Steers:It speaks to a practice as well. I mean the other thing I find and I work in a Pilates studio times when I see people come in and they want a quick fix. They want something. You know, give me a couple of exercises and then I'm going to go away and do something else. For me, the value of any kind of movement practice is the consistency. It's the getting to know yourself, is getting to know your patterns, is getting to know your habits and seeing things from different perspectives and playing with things in different ways. My sense is it's not just, you know, putting on an app and doing a few breathing things, but really embracing a practice.
Anthony Abbagnano:Yeah, and I think the practice is to create intimacy with your breath, this thing that you mentioned at the beginning, like all those breaths we took in between, the only ones we paid attention to were the ones that were missing, you know, when we caught our breath because we were wounded or hurt. And so I think that first choice of taking a breath is the antithesis to being the victim of a situation, because when we're a victim of a situation, we lose all our attributes, we lose all our processing power and our thought mechanisms go to the amygdala, to the back of the brain, and we're reduced to those three famous things that trauma brings, which is fight, flight or freeze. So just the enactment of a choice, I think, is opening a door to a different potential outcome. I think maybe this is one of the stories I tell in the book of a friend of mine who was a psychotherapist and she went to I think it was Greece and the refugees were going there from North Africa at that time, and she had this experiment where she would say to each refugee that came off one of the boats you've made it, congratulations, I want to acknowledge you for being a survivor and what they found was that the people she welcomed, whereas the others just sort of threw them a blanket and told them to go line up over there to get their food or whatever. The ones that she welcomed had a much easier time integrating, and I think that's because we don't acknowledge ourselves for what we do. We measure what's got to be done and we're taught that the outcome is somewhere over there, somewhere beyond where I am now. I'm never happy with what I've got. I always want what I haven't got, and these things have become normal to us, and so we forget to acknowledge the ground that we've actually covered.
Anthony Abbagnano:I was sitting with a woman today, an entrepreneur, highly successful, who is, in her business life, super successful, young, early teens and unable to have functional relationships because of the fact that she needs to do her inner child. What I do, I do a lot of inner child work, and there are parts of her being that have just been isolated and abandoned and left behind because of crises that she had when she was a young girl. I was amazed when I said well, what practices do you have to create awareness in your relationship? She named like well, first of all, no matter how much work I've got, I delay it until I've completed my personal practice. And I said, well, what does that look like? She said, well, I pray and I breathe and I read, and I go for a walk and I go to nature.
Anthony Abbagnano:And I'm thinking, do you ever acknowledge yourself for that? Oh no, I never have. So I said, well, if you were to acknowledge yourself, would you feel it was quite so hopeless as you do now this situation? And she went. I never thought of that and it's so basic, it's so fundamental.
Anthony Abbagnano:But there's something about when we look. We've learned not to look at ourselves in depth unless we're criticizing or judging. We've become so self-judgmental. So you know, I think acknowledgement, as I say in the book, is a fundamental part of our human journey. That's not grandiosity, that's acknowledgement where acknowledgement is due. So I think that's important to remember and I think also that the same thing, I think every person carries a natural gift and most of the time that natural gift is wrapped in.
Anthony Abbagnano:The biggest problem that we face and this is another principle of the hero's journey too you know, in the cave you fear most lies the treasure you seek.
Anthony Abbagnano:So if we don't take the time to unwrap that, what looks disgusting to us or painful if we don't actually stop and make that act of responsibility, the ability to respond to actually unwrap, that we won't find the treasure that's underneath.
Anthony Abbagnano:There's something about all those downtimes, those depressing moments that we live, the ones that we call failures or whatever the ones that we call failures or whatever that really are asking us to put on our detective hat and our superhero cape or whatever it is, and to really get nose in there, not to wallow in it, but to find something that we hadn't found, because at the bottom of that very dark pond is a golden key. If we can make it down there and look through the silt, there's a part of ourselves that's competent, qualitative, completely able to negotiate this situation. We just can't resource it, we can't find it, so we can't treat it as a resource. And often that gift shows up as something so unbelievably normal to us because we grew up with it, but we don't give ourselves credit for it, so it doesn't count in some way.
Susannah Steers:It is amazing what we overlook so many ways. Another thing that you talk about in the book is I think you've alluded to it a little bit that embracing death actually bring us more life. Now that, I mean, it sounds fascinating and maybe scary too, and maybe that relates to what we were just talking about. Can you unpack that a little and let me know what that means to you?
Anthony Abbagnano:Yeah, I mean, I think the metaphor that you used about movement is also relevant to this, because if we don't embrace death, we're trying to stop something that wants to happen. Right, that's our tendency. But yeah, the book encourages the reader to consider death awareness as a real advantage and a real benefit. It brings a huge benefit to us. I think we all have heard stories about people who've been given terminal diagnoses and some have recovered, but others, who haven't, have still experienced a complete turnaround in the way that they see the world and a complete turnaround in their relationships, their life view, their spirituality, their sense of forgiveness or compassion and their awareness of ending. Sense of forgiveness or compassion and their awareness of ending and endings have this awfully negative connotation to us because they mean going somewhere else that we don't know what will happen. So people like Ram Dass, who say think of your death as going home, are presenting the question what if the opposite is true? What if it's the launchpad to a fantastical, wonderful experience? And why have we named it? Why have we branded it the way we have?
Anthony Abbagnano:And my experience is that by bringing death consciousness and it's difficult, I mean I remember I did this with my wife Five or six years ago, I thought I was going to get a bad. I had a test, I thought I was going to get a bad diagnosis, and so I started to say, look, I want to, I want to talk about this. If it's going to happen, I want to talk about it. And she was deeply disturbed because that's not. It's like talking about the end of our love, the end of our relationship.
Anthony Abbagnano:You know, it's like frightening, and yet the more that we did it, the more that we would sit down and make it a part of our awareness, make it a part of our day. Things didn't get morose at all. Actually. We level of appreciation shot skyrocketed. Our awareness of today and what's here right now just like exploded into a whole new thing, and the love that we felt, the tenderness that we feel for each other could really be felt, as well as the loss, the impending sense of what that loss would be. If we keep hiding from the loss, then the gain has no purpose. And so it's like trying to listen to those old AM radios of 50 years ago that were all crackle and treble and there's no bass note. You know, life without the bass note gets to be a little bit whiny, and troublesome.
Anthony Abbagnano:With the roundness of the poignance of things like loss and grief. They're the things that really push us into contemplation, and part of the paradox that I've discovered is that of everybody that's been dear to me that has died and as I get older, there are more and more it's happening more and more frequently dear to me that has died and as I get older there are more and more it's happening more and more frequently everybody has left a gift behind. In the grief that I've felt, there's been a gift that I was never able to notice when they were there, and it's almost like in their wake there's something to be discovered that we just don't notice until they're not there anymore. The weight of the last words they said is an obvious example, or any advice that they may have given us, or an expression of love that we may have had.
Anthony Abbagnano:And I've understood in my life that in that act of dying we're actually facilitating something else to happen for those that remain. There's something that can actually be in movement, even though it feels like an ending. So I know there's a bit of embrace of mysticism and paradox there, but I believe that working with the awareness that we're going to die one day is going to make us a whole lot more alive now. And what if we could choose that last breath? What if we could, like the indigenous Americans have said in the past, what if we could go pick a tree and say it's over, today's a good day to die.
Anthony Abbagnano:How would it be if we could bring that into our Western culture more, that we could be that choiceful and that present with each other,
Susannah Steers:the connections to ourselves and between people and between all of the things and everything that we relate to in the world around us. Connections fascinate me and for me it started in the body, recognizing how every part of us is connected to, is influenced by and influencing everything else, and that sort of changed my view on movement and body work and all that kind of thing. When I'm in the natural world, the sense of truth in those connections is simply amplified a thousandfold. You can just bathe in it when you're out in nature. It always makes me feel more at home in the world. I'm wondering we've talked a little bit about community. Is there anything you've learned that indicates that kind of shared breathwork play a role in fostering connection? Or maybe it's not even shared, it's individual practices coming together. I don't know.
Anthony Abbagnano:Oh, absolutely. I've got so many stories, but it's what we do every Sunday. You know, every Sunday we do a Breathe the World online twice to cover both hemispheres, and we have several hundred people breathing together. My wife, amy, said look, we've got to launch alchematescom because we're putting so many couples together, because they're in an incredibly beautiful space where they breathe together and they get to know each other deeply and they get to understand that it's safe to be vulnerable and you're allowing me to see your vulnerability and that's so precious, it's exquisite. And so we see that all the time, both in our online community and in our land community here in Italy. We see this happening all the time. Couples that breathe together stay together. People that breathe together weave together.
Anthony Abbagnano:There's something extraordinary about allowing ourselves to kind of dismantle the false architecture that we built to protect us during our childhood and our youth and the times that we got hurt or wounded, and then consciously dismantling like, okay, it's a bit like that sticks game or something where you have to remove a stick without crumbling the whole pile, you know, and but I think if we do that with care, then it does stop that midlife hit or that sudden loss, catapulting me into the tumble dryer of human dismay and despair, that I can retain my agency. And it's all about agency, because every time we're aware of the breath that we choose, we strengthen our ability to choose. You think of all the times you've been wounded or hurt, that you lost your breath. That's what happened, right, you were shocked and you were traumatized and then it went into your whole cellular structure. So maybe we can take a moment and even if it's just imagine or contemplate that every breath that we consciously take now we're actually sending back to that old me or that old you, to those times that we lost it. And there's something deeply reuniting.
Anthony Abbagnano:And when we talk about community, the community starts with me, it starts with you. It's not you and me that create it starts with you. It's not you and me that create it. So if I can bring my own being into unity and harmony with the nature, with the flow, with the movement, and then I come to you and I present myself to you, I am present, I am presenting. I'm not pasting or futuring, I'm presenting myself to you. That means that we can be real together. We don't have to absorb or listen or withstand each other's narratives. We can create a curious one ourselves, and I think that's where the new conversation comes in, that we can actually create a proper community, a proper coming into unity of external beings, and there's a journey to make with that. There are some corridors of loneliness that lead to solitude and there's trepidation and there are demons and there are traps and false starts and wild goose chases, but there are also wonderful, you know wonderful.
Anthony Abbagnano:I got asked by a student today. I said what does this calm feel like to you? And I said you know, it's a bit like being in a canoe on a river and being with no paddle and just knowing it's okay and loving the sounds and the sights and the gurgle of the water, and even not knowing that I may be about to go over Niagara Falls, and it's still okay. It's still okay. It's like it's connecting with that part of us that actually doesn't die. I think it's connecting with something eternal.
Susannah Steers:That's beautiful. I love the idea that it is connecting with that part of us that is eternal. That's pretty cool. What is one, and maybe you've given it to us already? What is one takeaway from the Outer Chaos, inner Calm book or from your work you hope our listeners can carry with them today after our conversation?
Anthony Abbagnano:Well, for those who've not done breathwork before, those who have done will know exactly what I mean. For those who've not done breathwork before, I think it's breathe and feel, feel and heal. So what do I mean by that? When you cry, you sob right and your breath is doing its own thing. You're in this convulsion and your breath is doing your own thing. But if you feel that sorrow or that sadness and you bring a measured breath to it, something completely different happens that you allow yourself to fully feel the experience, but you also stay in the witness at the same time. So you're having the benefit of the depth of emotion, but you're also watching it and therefore not over-identifying with it. You can watch it like a cloud in the sky that it will pass. It has a shelf life. And that works with the positive feelings too. If you are making love and you want to change the nature of your orgasm, if you breathe a slow, connected breath as you feel the sense of crescendo and contraction arriving, it completely changes the nature of that too. And they're both very similar. Actually, they're both very similar states of being.
Anthony Abbagnano:It's, I think, the achievement of the marriage, the re-pairing of our emotional realm with the act of breathing that creates alchemy, something magical can happen. So, instead of running away from fear or acting from fear, or running away from anxiety or trying to get rid of these things, we work in a different way. We work in a way of like let's give it permission to be here, what are you feeling in your body right now? And breathe. And if the person stops breathing and they start getting choppy, you know, come back to your breath. Come back to your breath. That's the deal here. You've got to keep breathing, then allow the feeling to come into being, give it permission to exist. Even then, begin to amplify the feeling as you're breathing.
Anthony Abbagnano:Breathing is number one. And then, all of a sudden, we look at that fear that's haunted us for 60 years, or the anxiety that has put us on meds and put us into places we didn't want to go. We begin to understand that actually, this is just energy and I can get a saddle on this. I can get a saddle and a bridle on this. I can actually ride this energy. It can help me in countless ways and my fear is actually a good thing. I just need to speak to it so it's not all pent up like someone who's been stuck in, you know, stuck in a hole and needs to explode Like our anger is. You know, if I can be in relationship with these things, then there's so much to learn and so much empowerment from learning to breathe with them. So feel and breathe, breathe and heal.
Susannah Steers:Anthony, it is such a joy to talk to you. I know that our listeners are going to want to connect with you. They're going to want to find your book. Where do we find you, oh?
Anthony Abbagnano:Thank you Well, online, alchemyofbreathcom. I don't know if you can hear the bells or not in the background, but right now I'm listening to some bells which are beautiful Alchemyofbreath. com. And then also, if you want to come visit us, initially you can still do it through Alchemy of Breath, but we are called ASHA Alchemy School of Healing Arts, so that's A-S-H-A dot global, and you can find out more. You can come closer one way or another. We're doing a whole regeneration project here in Italy. You can find out about and, if you're interested in the breath and courses and doing our Sunday, if you're interested in the breath and courses and doing our Sunday Breathe the Worlds with us then please do. It's free. It's a great opportunity to meet people and enjoy good quality community.
Susannah Steers:We'll put all of that in the show notes for the podcast so you can find the links there. Where can we find your book?
Anthony Abbagnano:My book's on Amazon and you can also, I think, buy it from the website, and it's actually yeah, our launch is right now.
Susannah Steers:Fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing of your heart and your wisdom with us and I look forward to learning more about your work and diving into some practice. Thank you for being with me today.
Anthony Abbagnano:Thank you, Susannah.
Susannah Steers:Till next time, breathe and feel, feel and breathe. See you soon.
Susannah Steers:I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Subscribe and, if you love what you heard, leave a five-star review and tell people what you enjoyed most. Join me here again in a couple of weeks For now let's get moving.
