Expert Q&A: The art of breathwork with Anthony Abbagnano

The following interview is a transcript excerpt from The Heallist Podcast episode. Listen to the full audio version or watch the video below and subscribe to get notified of new episodes.

In this enlightening conversation, Anthony Abbagnano, breathwork expert and founder of Alchemy of Breath, discusses the profound impact of breathwork on mental health, consciousness expansion, and personal transformation. He emphasizes the importance of conscious breathing, the misconceptions surrounding breathwork, and shares transformative stories from his practice.

The discussion also explores the integration of breathwork into various healing modalities and the significance of presence in facilitating healing. Anthony highlights the need for practitioners to embody the principles of breathwork and encourages a holistic approach to healing that embraces both psychological and spiritual dimensions.

One Breath’s Meaning: Life to Death

Anthony Abbagnano: It starts with a consciousness of what one breath is. If you consider the first breath of your life is how you entered consciousness on this planet, and if you consider that the last breath of your life will be how you exit consciousness on this planet, these are quite significant things. There are physiological significances that are happening to the body to prepare for life. We're having to clean out the liquid from our lungs. We're no longer using the umbilical cord as our life source, as our life force. We're now transitioning to the air. So we have to clear the remaining half or so of the liquid that is in our lungs if we came through a birth canal. If we're cesarean, we have to clear out even more uh liquid from our lungs in order to be breathed in order to breathe.
So there's a lot that's going on physiologically that gets kick-started with that first breath of life. And then if you take a breath and you just wander into it, my goodness, I'm in, this is life. This is perhaps the greatest awakening that happens to us in a lifetime that we open to flow, to feelings, to sensations, to awarenesses, to light, to dark, to all of the chaos and confusion and wonder that exists on the planet – that's half a breath.
Then we go to the other half of the breath, which is when we exhale, and there's nothing you can hang on to. Every thought, every feeling, every attachment, every material piece of wealth, every problem, everything as we are conscious of it, we will release. So perhaps we can take another breath and contemplate, “Wow, this is actually more than I considered, because I am, in a sense, rebirthing myself by that act of breathing in, and I'm pre-dying with the act of breathing out.”
Consider this is happening 25,000 times a day. And how many times of those 25,000 are you aware of your breath? There's clearly something going on that I'm not paying attention to, and it's not small. It's life force, it's that which I need most urgently in order to survive. Even a free diver can hold it for maybe 10 or even 15 minutes, but we always have to give it back. There's a bit of a paradox here that we call it our breath, but really it's not. We borrow it, and then we have to return it with each cycle of breath. 

These are things that I find very humbling, first of all, because there is argon that exists in the air that never goes away, and we all breathe it in and out. It comes in our inhale and in our exhalation. That means that we're breathing the same argon that Jesus Christ breathed, that the Buddha breathed, that Muhammad breathed, and on the other side of the scales that Hitler breathed and Stalin and some of the most unsavory characters that have existed on the planet. So as we spiritually say, we are all one, there's truth to that: scientifically, true, too, that we are actually partaking of the same, we are sipping from the same cup, if you will. 

Conscious Connected Breathing Explained

Anthony Abbagnano: A conscious connected breath is something that many practitioners and facilitators share. There are techniques with putting emphasis on the inhale and a soft release on the exhale, putting more emphasis on a stronger exhale and letting the inhale come more naturally. And there is chest breathing and belly breathing and nose breathing and mouth breathing. It always changes as I explore more, but  I generally focus a little bit more on the inhale and let the exhale be natural and not to exhale all the way, about 70%, and then pick up the inhale again. The fact that we don't pause between the top and the bottom of our breath is fundamental, but that will occur if I put more emphasis on my chest or my belly or inhale or exhale. It will still occur as long as we connect.
I think the differences that I see in breath work is that I mix it a lot with psychology and spirituality and philosophy. I come from a family of philosophers, and I've always been fascinated by a couple of things. Number one, man's or human's effort to build a ladder with psychology that can reach far enough above to touch the spirit world. And it seems like no matter how big a ladder we can build with the consciousness that we live in, it will never be long enough. I find that interesting. And I also find compelling the moment with breathwork, which is such a blessing, that people open to a level of consciousness that they didn't have before. And how that can be, how can I use that? How can I utilize these truths, these things that actually do happen to help people create the changes that they really want to change? And that is around feeling and breathing, going towards feelings rather than isolating ourselves from them, or looking for somebody else or something external that I can take in order to cope. It also means the way I work is encouraging people to become comfortable with the uncomfortable. 

We have a particular alchemy meditation that I teach and I've developed over the last 20 years, and we spent an hour inquiring into the tube, one of the tumors, she has tumors all over her body, but the biggest one is in her left lung, and we were inquiring into the relationship between the outermost cell of the tumor and the next cell that was not affected, the healthy cell next to it, and what would the conversation look like between those two cells. And that's the kind of intimacy that I want my facilitators to be able to guide people to when we're talking about this level of healing. That we don't leave a stone unturned and it's an intrepid journey, but we really get to go into the heart of the core of what's actually going on and understand how we can participate in its transformation. 

We don't just need to take medicines or hope or pray, apart from the fact that breathing consciously is to me the purest form of prayer. In this particular circumstance, instead of saying I'm gonna get rid of my, I've got to get rid of my cancer, I'm saying, let's get intimate with this cancer and really understand not just what the obvious messages are, but to really get granular about this and go into nano detail and put our attention and our focus there as we breathe, and that's the altar upon which the miracles can occur. 

So we need an absolute state of presence in order to allow these very natural things to happen, because the body wants to heal. It's that we have to get out of the way. We put in the interruption. But if we can, and this is the same with any psychological issue that I work with with people, if we can align the deepest of our subconscious, or in this nano-concentration of the physical body, identify the smallest particle that we can with our awareness. If we consciously bring our breath to it, then we're bringing in something supernatural, which is this life force that's a mystery. It's referred to as supernatural or God-given in every religious document that exists. So this might be true, and if it is true, what happens when we align our subconscious with our conscious and the superconscious? What happens if we put them in the same test tube in our laboratory? Is the alchemy that there's a natural force that will rearrange what's discordant or out of true and realign it with cosmic code or universal force or whatever you want to name it? That's really the process that's occurring. 

Miracles and Limits: What Breath Can Do

I lean more into the metaphysical than the physical. I'm from a family of philosophers, so I think the day my curiosity dies is the day I'm no longer alive. And I love science, but I think science is the ladder that can't reach the spirit. So it has its limitations and it needs to name things in order for them to be permissible. There are limits of consciousness. And one of the greatest teachers I ever studied under was an Indian man called Krishna Murti. And his thesis was how can you create new consciousness from existing consciousness? It's actually a mathematical impossibility. 

So there's something outside our consciousness. If we're going to become aware of it, what does that actual process look like? It has to include something beyond science. Because scientifically, how can you create something? One of his statements was: how can you ever expect to vote for a prime minister or president that can change things if he is operating within the consciousness that you're operating in? You can only recreate what you've already created. And I think that's demonstrable in our world. Scientifically, we're used to recreating things all the time. It's only when we can't do it anymore, like we're running out of fuel. We knew we could have created battery-operated vehicles, you know, 50 or 60 years ago. It's only when there's no fuel left that it really becomes serious enough for us to make ourselves available for other thought patterns. This is where the healing happens: when we think differently, not when we think the same way. 

There's something that needs to knock us out of our thought processes. And the breath is a really good tool for that. I don't want to put away science because there are physiological things that are happening, and they're incredible and virtually incredible. They're just credible, and they're magnificent, the mechanisms that are working in the body in order for these nonlinear things to occur. But there needs to be an embrace of the fact that we don't know what we don't know, and that I bow to the mystery in one breath in order to be able to stand for it creating quantum changes for other people.

Science, Mystery, and New Consciousness

The message that I'm wanting to share is that there's a template that exists. There's a hero's journey template that exists but there's another template that I call the Miracle Matrix that exists that we don't notice in life. It's what the shaman notices as what we strive for when we take plant medicines and meditate a lot and do a lot of breath work and this is here, existent in our world today and it's a navigable matrix. It's not like the movie where it's the blue pill or the red pill there are still choices like that to be made but it's actually a miracle matrix because some wonderful things can happen. 

I also ask you to do something whenever you're in a public forum in a group or in a class or online or wherever it may be, to do a random act of kindness, because if enough of us keep doing this it's going to make a lot of difference.