EPISODE 003 | ANTHONY ABBAGNANO - YOU ARE A LEADER

Podcast
Written By Sascha Kaus
 
 
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“I started to ask questions, I wrote down a question like, what am I doing here? And the answer started to come through my hand as I wrote. And so I ended up calling this my conversation with God. But the message that came out of it for me over a series of three nights where I woke up at four a.m. and I just couldn't sleep and I started to write. And the message was that: "You are a leader. It's time for you to accept that. And how can you do it in the most humble way possible?”

- Anthony Abbagnano

PODCAST 003 | Anthony Abbagnano - You are a leader

Anthony Abbagnano has been a pioneer throughout his life. He studied with great spiritual teachers in his early twenties, built a successful career while being a young single parent, followed his spiritual calling to India and Bali and he has faced challenges that made him the kind of leader whose words and teachings feel genuine and understandable.

For more than a decade Anthony has dedicated his life to the breath. Anthony is the founder of Alchemy of Breath and has created one of the most comprehensive systems of breathwork that you'll find today. He has introduced the breath and it's potential to address trauma, addiction, stress, anxiety and other modern-day challenges to thousands of breathers around the world.

His weekly free online breathwork sessions are attended by people from all over the world and all walks of life. Anthony aims all of his efforts at bringing the power of the breath to as many people as possible and with Alchemy of Breath he has created the most comprehensive and widely accredited breathwork training available.

Now Anthony brings all of his life experience into rebuilding an abandoned retreat-centre in Tuscany / Italy and turn it into ASHA the Alchemy School of Healing Arts and a platform for the community that he has built of the past few years.

In this episode, you will hear about Anthony's early spiritual experiences with great teachers, how he built his first retreat centre in the nineties in Italy and how his journeys brought him to India, Bali and back to Italy. Anthony speaks about he found his purpose in life, how he defines leadership and community and how we can live a meaningful life by opening up to our emotions.

Inhale, exhale, enjoy!

Retreat Affairs is recorded and hosted by Sascha Kaus.

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Breathcamp Italy 

a video by Retreat Affairs host Sascha Kaus shot on a Alchemy Of Breath - Breathcamp in Italy

As a student of Alchemy of Breath myself, I had the privilege to attend a ten-day Alchemy of Breath - Breathcamp in Italy. If you have an interest in breathwork have a look for yourself and listen to what the participants of this transformational journey have to say and maybe let the pictures give you a little glimpse of the atmosphere that was present in those days.

This video was also a journey for myself. It took me longer than I thought and hoped to finish the edit. It was a transformational process in which I was able to look at many things in my life. When I am so connected myself to something that I film, like it was with this video, the editing process can be a bit like a retreat. It’s as if I embark on a journey that doesn’t reveal from the beginning where it will lead me. It can be very tough and frustrating in the beginning, a joy-full ride after the first struggles, sometimes challenging closer to the end and then it’s wonderful to come home with the treasure that wanted to be found.

If some of my words resonate with you while watching this leave me a comment below. I am happy to hear your thoughts.

Inhale - Exhale - Enjoy

Show Notes

Links & References

People featured in this episode

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PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING LEGAL CONDITIONS:

Sascha Kaus owns the copyright in and to all content of the Retreat Affairs podcast as well as in all transcripts of the Retreat Affairs podcast, with all rights reserved, as well as his right of publicity.

No one is authorized to copy, share or multiply any part of the podcast, this transcript or any other content on this website without written permission from Sascha Kaus.

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Sascha Kaus: Anthony, welcome to the show. It's such a pleasure to have you here with me.

Anthony Abbagnano: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I said it's just great to be with you again and to serve in any way I can. What you're doing is an honour.

Anthony Abbagnano: So I'm very glad to be here. Grateful.

Sascha Kaus: Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time. Why don't we take a moment and just take a deep breath together? Because this is really what connects us and what has been connecting us so far so deeply.

Sascha Kaus: Yeah, that feels different. I have to be honest. There is still a kind of excitement every time I do an interview and it's all quite new. So I'm always feeling a little bit nervous in the beginning. And then it's so good to have that moment to connect, to breathe and be with my guests. So as you know, or as I told you, the podcast is all about retreats and people who dedicate their lives towards creating spaces where transformation can happen, where people can come together and what's connecting us is the breath and the beautiful way that you bring breath into the life of so many. But before we go into this, there's also a part of you that seems to be an adventurer in many aspects of life. There seems to be an entrepreneur within you and a man of many talents and explorations. Can you tell us a little bit more and our listeners who haven't heard of you before or haven't met you before a little bit where you're coming from and in a few words, your life story?

Anthony Abbagnano: Well, I am English. Italian. I was brought up in England, but I've lived in Italy for more time than in England and spent many years in Asia. And I think from a very young age, I was troubled by existential issues. It seemed the measure of compliance that was required from me in order to not get into some kind of trouble was daunting because it seemed like the way people wanted me to be wasn't the way it was meant to be. So there was some kind of early wisdom that I clearly brought with me from my whatever had been before and things didn't sit well. And at the same time, I was heavily conditioned. I was put into boarding school at a very young age of seven and was educated alongside ministers and future prime ministers and kings and things. But I wasn't still didn't fit in. It still didn't work for me. I was deeply disturbed and was looking to a future of my father would have wished either joining the military or becoming a banker. And that was perhaps enough to make me scuttle out of boarding school. Having taken my exams and get married as soon as I possibly could to someone from the other side of the world. So I moved to America when I was 18 and escaped. The legacy that was waiting for me and as a young parent also at the age of 19 and then a single parent at the age of 20. Survival became pretty key. How could I protect the civil one and be functional in the world? And that kind of took me out of my spiritual being for some years.

That struggle of having to contend with the nastiness of the world as I perceived it. And that eventually led me back in my mid-20s I began my spiritual search again. I had sort of abandoned it at 19 when I got separated, but very, very deep spiritual questioning that I'd had in my teens and also experimentation with psychedelics. And then in my mid-20s, I began to study with Krishnamurti and I'd go listen to him talking in Brockwell Park in England and study. It started my yoga practise quite deeply and started with a wonderful guy called Danny Paradise. And we travelled together a little bit, both internally and sometimes externally as well. And so during those years of survival, I learnt to when I said I learnt to function in this world, it meant the skills I was given in my education even I wasn't quite appreciative of them as I could have been. They did help me engage with the material world.

So my drive for survive became a drive to thrive, and it became quite successful in the business world. In my early 30s, I moved back to Italy and started to work with old buildings and architecture and restoring them and designing and we ended up with one of the largest companies that were doing this work in Italy.

And so for 15 or 20 years, I celebrated some success. And at the same time, annoying pain in my soul that this was one foot. I had one foot in this life, but my other foot wanted to be clearly in the aethereal realms and in the realms of the soul. And so I knew that this would have a lifespan. And as long as my son needed me, I kept doing it. But then after he grew up and left home, I pretty quickly moved to India. I went there for three or four years and meditated.

And then I moved to Bali, where I continued for another three or four years to meditate and didn't really engage with anything at all in the outer world. And so that period of my life was really the transition highlighted by a couple of big illnesses that had more to do with parasites but were great teachers to me. And so I came out of that period quite clear as to what my life needed to be in order to feel that I'd met my purpose in some way.

And that's really when I started to go to work to contribute to the healing of this planet. It started with a little restaurant in Bali in Ubud called Alchemy and then the alchemy actually began really in many other ways, too. So that then became Alchemy of Breath about nine years ago. And since then, I've been teaching all over the world and holding this space for people's transformation. For them to have the deepest experience that they may in order to become stronger and more resilient in a challenging world.

Sascha Kaus: While you are taking care of your son and working in the business realm, did you still have some kind of spiritual practice? Did you still have the possibility to feel or stay connected to what you've experienced before?

Anthony Abbagnano: Well, I mean, in my inner world, I was. But I think my feeling at the time was that I betrayed that I had actually stepped away from it and my perhaps fear-based motivation about wanting to protect him and to provide for him. It closed off my vision of my spiritual life. I was also around his birth and his first three years of life with the separation from his mother. There was a very deep and powerful experience I had with being inducted into a cult, and I had to escape eventually and rescue him. And that was a very challenging period of my life where I think I was I felt a sense of betrayal from my partner who had led me, who'd step we definitely co explored together.

And then she left to join this cult. And I went back I went to visit in order to see my son. And that's when I was I was then kept under lock and key for some period of time while they... It was referred to at the time as brainwashing when they induce you to join and then it becomes a very compelling process that they take you through of underfeeding you under-sleeping you, keeping your accompanied, love bombing how it was called at the time. And after that escape, I was cauterised spiritually. I had there was no way I was going to open. I was extremely closed.

So there was probably three to five year period where I was just not able to even entertain the idea of it because the wound was so deep. And that's when I started to study Krishnamurti and I began to understand things in a different way about the power of not necessarily believing and understanding the human need to believe and how willing people are, how willing we are as humans, part of us that wants to hand over our responsibility to somebody else. So it was still a useful, fertile period of reflection for me, but it also meant forsaking any idea. I'm not I don't even want to talk about my spirit. I need just to protect it. And that was by dissociation. That's how it worked in that moment.

Sascha Kaus: Tell me a little bit about those first encounters with Krishnamurti. Like, what was the set and setting? How did you experience him and what did it bring into your life?

Anthony Abbagnano: They were beautiful encounters. I'm not sure. You know, at the time, I think I was 24 when I started to read about Krishnamurti. And that was thanks to Danny, who introduced him to me. But, you know, in retrospect, it was the only way that I could. It's the only way I could be willing to re-encounter the concept of spirituality. Because it was because I was encouraged to be sceptical. And that was fundamental to me, the ability to be discerning not to suspend my critical factor. So that's what my experience is Krishnamurti was all about, was learning how to discern and learning how to really think very deeply and also understand the limits of thinking and to be able to really experientially understand that the thinking mind is such a limited tool and therefore to begin to want to explore what was between thoughts?

You know what lay underneath the thinking process and that then took me in to eventually into somatic awareness and the breath. So they were very important stepping stones for me. So I think the biggest takeaway for me from with Krishnamurti was the distrust of whatever my mind was telling me. And the ability to connect to people underneath what they're saying underneath the words. Now, I've arrived at the point where I find words are even risky at all. They're risky things to use. And it's really from our being that we are communicating all the time. And so to deconstruct those early years and to reveal the beauty of the statue that lies underneath the surface of the stone, like Michelangelo said, really allows us to reveal who we are. And that's really how we can best communicate as human beings. It's just by our own becoming, our own richest being that we can be.

Sascha Kaus: And how has this experience shaped? Your approach towards bringing spirituality in the lives of others, having this kind of experience of being somehow turned away from spirituality and then finding it again.

Anthony Abbagnano: [00:16:24] Yeah, I think it was fundamental. I mean, it was without it, I could have just stayed in the material world. And yet even though I even though during those years in in in the business world, it was always a thread. There was always a threat of disbelief in what I was doing. I think that was how I kept my sanity and that's how I was able to leave it. I remember members of my family saying: “You work so hard, you're never available, you don't see us, you don’t call, you don't come by.” And I said, well, one day it'll stop. And they said, no, it won't. You're a workaholic. You'll never stop. And how shocked they were the day I said, okay, that's it. I've had enough.

And I moved to India and I don't think I could have unless I had that experience with Krishnamurti because that business world that especially at that time, was devoid of who largely devoid of consciousness. There are very few people who are conscious entrepreneurs. It was based on that paradigm of in order for me to get something, you have to lose something which is thankfully now being increasingly abandoned by business. People are beginning to understand there's a better way that we can all survive and thrive in. And that money is an impersonal energy that actually belongs to us all. It's not that I can take it away from anybody and that I can actually contribute to other people having it as a result of my having it.

So it's a complete rewrite of the credo that there used to be in the old paradigm. And without Krishnamurti, I don't think I could have kept a thread on that. So as much as I was successful in the business world I was able to laugh at, it was like, you're right. You know, this is pretty, pretty shallow stuff. But at the same time, I need to do this right now.

Sascha Kaus: And then turning back to the spiritual world and opening up again to the spiritual world and at some point becoming someone who shares his spiritual knowledge and experience with others. How did it feel to become sort of a spiritual teacher and leader yourself after having experienced this kind of like the cult that you were talking about?

Anthony Abbagnano: I am so grateful for that experience because it informed me of all the things not to do. But that said, a cult has some things to learn from it, too. You know, the word culture, the root of the word culture is cult. So if we want to redescribe our culture, if we want to create a new culture, then we have to perhaps look at some parts of that experience and see which of them might be beneficial. But I think the biggest effect that it had on me was to always shy away from the guru figure. I'm not really, that's not my thing. My vision is for each person to find the guru inside them and not to project their need to believe onto anybody else.

And I think that was, again, the gift I got from Krishnamurti. And the other one was to discover solitude because. You know, from the age of 25, it took me until I was 55 before I was able to move into the role of teaching. And that period was a very lonely one because most other people were too ready to believe in something already. So we had Osho in those days not many friends who are involved with Osha and all the other spiritual like Guru Maharajji, and everybody, you know, other people are going to India and having gurus. And I was quite lonely in that situation. I was the only person who wasn't adhering to a belief system. I used to tell myself I don't have one until a wise woman once told me that if you don't have one, then that is your belief system. So I got to re-evaluate even that. But that sense of not being able to subscribe to someone else's thesis or theology was very lonely and solitary.

And so that transformation for me of having to feel still like the odd one out, which had always been my life experience, and here I was opting to do that again. And that enabled me to, I think, put it like this was like it's only through the corridors of loneliness that I could reach the strength of solitude and understanding that that solitude is my sovereignty and it's my home base and it's my inner guru. And then. I can bring to the work that I do. That's what I bring. That's just that's who I am. So if that works for you, then that's wonderful. And I don't really ask you to believe in me. That's not my need at all. In fact, I kind of have to deflect that a little bit with my work that people would enjoy the idea of believing in me. And then I've always, always been interested in building community. It's always been a drive of mine and I've done it three or four times in different stages of my life. And so now as I'm doing it in this iteration that we're doing right now with our community centre here in Italy.

I couldn't find the right words as to what leadership would look like. What would leadership look like in order to learn to relate with the following that we develop as leaders or spiritual teachers, whatever the word is, and not sit on the golden cushion and have incense burning around us and have people adorn us with their need to adorn us with the jewels of their own lack. Because I find that really disempowering and I find it really dangerous and I see it happening all the time. And that that bothers me. So I wanted to stand for something that was different than that.

And I remember once, about eight years ago, I got up at four o'clock in the morning and I was like very disturbed. And I had been talking about creating a community in Bali, and we'd had a couple of meetings and it was an initiative we'd begun and I started to ask questions, I wrote down a question like, what am I doing here? And the answer started to come through my hand as I wrote. And so I ended up calling this my conversation with God. But the message that came out of it for me over a series of three nights where I woke up at four a.m. and I just couldn't sleep. And I started to write. And the message was that: You are a leader. It's time for you to accept that. And how can you do it in the most humble way possible? So I thought in terms like, I don't know, benign dictatorship or, you know what, how could I describe this?

The softness of who I am as a human being deployability and the porousness that I am as a human being, a sensitive being and at the same time have the strength to stand up for who I am. And it wasn't until just a couple few years ago that her dear friends that I think what you're talking about, a servant leadership.

And then I was able to I Googled it immediately and I found a YouTube and oh, God, that feels so good. Feels so good to understand what it is that I've been trying to name and trying to describe about the way I feel. And that really is the way I feel that as leaders we establish we have a gift. And if we don't allow that gift to be contaminated by egotistical or our egoic self, then we can use that gift to catalyse and we can catalyse people in a common goal. And then it's our task to serve them in reaching that in their in a world, too. So that leadership is just a moment and then the rest of it is bowing to people's courage and spirit and will to actually make a change in their lives. And that's the way it works for me. And it feels like a wonderful regenerative cycle.

Sascha Kaus: Let me just get back to the time when you've been restoring old buildings in Italy. I mean, restoring something that's broken with probably I don't know. Have you done it on your own or have you done it with a group of people you said like one of the biggest construction company? I assume that there have been many other people involved. Did you see a seven those time slots as a sort of leader?

Anthony Abbagnano: Definitely. Yeah, definitely. Definitely a different kind of leadership, but definitely. Yeah. And there's a very similar thing, a common belief, you know, that. Because it sounds like a bit sounds a bit mundane and material. But actually, when you deal with someone who is, I don't know, saved up their money their whole lives or is inherited money from someone they loved and they want to create a new life. You're actually dealing with a dream. And so there's a great sensitivity to it.

I remember one of the first questions I would ask people when they came to look for a house is: “What what is it you'd like to feel as you sit on your terrace in the evening, looking at the sunset or dawn or whatever it is that moves you most? What is it you want to feel about it?” And so I was already in the feeling realms was. I think that's probably one of the reasons we were so successful because we met people in their emotional being and helped them, not just repair the buildings, but to bridge the gap between the life that they had in that moment and the life they really wanted to have for themselves. So that was quite a journey. I actually remember in the first this is a risky story to say on a podcast, may I say it anyway?

Sascha Kaus: You're free.

Anthony Abbagnano: I have a really good friend that I did a lot of inner work within my 20s. He came back from California in 1985, I think, and he came back with 500 capsules of ecstasy.

This was before the days of raving or anything like that. This is just when I was beginning to take on houses and show them to people. We would do deep inner work. We would take ecstasy three or four times a week and we would sit by the fire and really think about what we were creating, who we are attracting to this idyllic place in Umbria and Italy, and how did we want to protect it from the wrong kinds of influences. And that very much informed the business that time. In fact, what even once in a while we would take ecstasy and then meet the clients. And I can't imagine what they would have thought of us. But the ones that needed to come came. It was a very loving, caring experience.

So and that was really how that business began, from the heart. It really was a heartfelt creation of community. That's what the idea was. I had no idea we'd end up with 300 people working for us and 35 different construction sites. And, you know, but it was a great thing for the area to see all those buildings renewed. And yet somehow it didn't nourish the soul. It wasn't enough for me. I wanted more than that.

Sascha Kaus: I mean, listening to this story or this episode from your life. I'm totally fine like telling this on the podcast. I also have my experiences with psychoactive substances. It sounds like this has been like a kind of retreat that you've been taking for yourself. So during those days. And also how you've described it before. You grew up and left in a time that saw one of the first big waves of spiritual encounters in the West. Spiritual teachings coming to the west. So even though you have been working in this kind of business environment, was this something that you considered to be a retreat, that you've gone on retreats, taking time off to think about the deeper meaning of life or anything like this?

Anthony Abbagnano: Absolutely. I lived in, it was 10 kilometres of dirt road to my house while I was doing all of this. So I lived in retreat. Human design says that I'm a hermit role model. And just to complicate matters, I'm also Gemini. So the opposites of those two realities were one where I could go out and greet people. But then I would need to be in retreat and indeed I used the money I was making to open my first retreat centre in Italy. That would have been back in, my goodness, back in nineteen ninety, something like that. 1990. Now and oh, my goodness, what a disaster. What disaster that was?

Sascha Kaus: How did that happen? Like, what was the idea? Throwing this?

Anthony Abbagnano: Well, it was much stimulated by Danny, because Danny was teaching he used to be an Ashtanga yoga teacher. He still is today. He would travel the world and gather groups. And so he said one day, why didn't you, why don't you put two? Because I was working on this house that I lived in in the middle of nowhere and gracing my own knuckles with my son, with Damien, my firstborn son. We were doing the work together. So he said, well, I can come there and teach to such an idyllic place. He said I'll come and to do a yoga course there. So I sort of scrambled and threw it together. And we had this wonderful experience that was led by him.

And then we started to do more Ashtanga yoga retreats there. And then I had a dear friend who taught Shiatsu. So we started with Shiatsu retreats. So actually, what had happened, I had dishonoured my need for Hermitage and started bringing people to this place. So my whole world of retreat, my own personal retreat was completely sacrificed in order for four other people to come on retreat. So that was the number one lesson. If you can't take care of yourself, then don't think that you can run a retreat. You know, that's a duh moment that I manage to live.

Then the other thing that I realised is that bless all of us sweet souls as humans that we are, but as retreat centre owners, we also need to be aware that we're going to attract people that are in need. So that's a real clear reminder of how we need to be resourcing ourselves. That care for the caretaker - in order to be able to offer anything to anyone else. And that understanding of my own inner work is really the only way through which I can be of true service to the world began back then for me because I thought it was like. “Oh, I just do everything I can for people. I just want to help people.” And there are fears, some discernment necessary in that process as well. It's not that simple at all.

Sascha Kaus: I guess those retreats happen probably like before the dawn of the Internet.

Anthony Abbagnano: Yeah. All right.

Sascha Kaus: How did you get the people there? Like, how did this happen that people came together?

Anthony Abbagnano: All word of mouth. But I mean, you know, you live in Umbria, Tuscany. And our retreat centre now it's here in Tuscany. You know, we are favoured. We're very lucky. It's a bit like being in Bali. You know, everybody wants to go to Bali. So we used to work through the retreat leaders themselves who had a following. They would bring them, all the way down that driveway. They would bring them, you know, so the Internet changed all of that for sure.

Sascha Kaus: And then all the way to Bali. How did you end up in Bali? How did you go to Bali?

Anthony Abbagnano: Well, I'd been in India for about four years by then, and I was looking for a place to settle. And my partner and I, we were both looking for a place to settle on. It definitely wasn't going to be Italy because I'd had my share of that and needed to leave. So we thought we travel around the world one time to see where it was. That would appeal to us. And actually, Maui and the big island of Hawaii were the ones that were we thought would be our favourites.

So anyway, we went around to several different countries, Thailand and in Europe and in the US and South America to Costa Rica. And then we thought, well, let's go via Bali on the way home just in case. And so we just went there for 10 days. And that's where I stayed for, I think 12 years, twelve and a half years. I stayed in Bali and opened a retreat centre there too. So. Bali kind of like that. You know, it used to be like that.

Sascha Kaus: So you arrived and didn't leave for twelve years.

Anthony Abbagnano: Well, I came back to Europe once in a while because I still had my company here. So I was still coming back to motivate all my people and try and keep it all together. And I couldn't, of course, and my interests was really not in doing that. So I kind of let it slow down into full stop. But yeah, we stayed in Bali.

The thing about Bali is you understand quite quickly experience on a cellular level, that there really doesn't seem to be any reason to leave. And it's like that absence of a reason to leave becomes compelling to stay. It's an extraordinary place. It's a vortex and a very powerful place to do inner work. So super attractive for that. And the people have just delightful nature. The indigenous people are great teachers. So, yeah. Bali happened for 12 years.

Sascha Kaus: So when was the first time you came there?

Anthony Abbagnano: Oh, my goodness. That would be 2004. Something like 2004. Actually, before that, I'd visited once before. But this in the late 90s. So. So this would be about early 2000 somewhere in there.

Sascha Kaus: And so you abandoned your retreat centre in Italy and then created a new one in Bali?

Anthony Abbagnano: I didn't abandon the one initially. I have to say. I did manage to sell it very well. So that actually gave me the money to keep going.

Sascha Kaus: The place in Italy, is it's still a retreat centre, though?

Anthony Abbagnano: It's a private home now. It's a beautiful private home. And the one in Bali is still a retreat centre, although they're suffering right now. They've had to close until October.

Sascha Kaus: What is the one in Bali called?

Anthony Abbagnano: It's called the Ark, which is actually a play on the Alchemy Retreat Centre because I have the restaurant and this was down the road. But it's with a K instead. It's called the Ark.

Sascha Kaus: I've been there. I've actually been there without really knowing that you started it. I think that like a year and a half ago, because of the very amazing lady, Sarah Britton, who runs an incredible vegan blog, who I used to follow all the time for inspiration, she did a retreat there and we just bumped into each other. I told her that I'm like a big, big, big fan. And I ended up doing a little video there.

Anthony Abbagnano: Perfect. Yeah, it's a very special little place.

Sascha Kaus: Yeah, it's beautiful. I loved it a lot. When you opened that retreat centre, was it also about yourself already teaching, sharing your knowledge, or was it more about bringing in others to share and teach that?

Anthony Abbagnano: Well, actually this one honestly was driven by my now wife, who at that time was a very good friend and we were friends for, I think five years before we became a couple. And during that five years, I saw that she needed one and I just cared for her so much that the house, the two houses that we had, the property that we had then kind of grew. And I was gonna make it into a beautiful home, but I could see that she wanted to do this.

So we built the group room there and we started to enlarge the kitchen. And so it was an organic process over three or four years. And then the idea was to just host, again, host teachers. I don't think I'd fully back in those days, embraced my own form of service. I hadn't fully embraced it and I wasn't ready. So it was really deferred on to other people who could be there and be teachers. And Amy was one of them. So that's that was the purpose. Again, in whole create space for people. That's been a consistent thing in my life, is always to create spaces for people, to heal a soul.

Sascha Kaus: How did you start to explore your own ability to share wisdom and knowledge?

Anthony Abbagnano: Well, you know, I think so much of this is unconscious. There comes a point where they certainly did for me. And I encourage anybody who feels a little lacklustre or depressed or feeling a pointlessness in life. But I do believe there's a point in life where we suddenly appreciate, we've become aware of how every experience we've had, even though it appeared to be contrary to what we might have thought was right or what we wanted. How they all kind of just come together in this soup and out comes this the best meal you ever ate. You know, I don't know if you've ever experienced that when you've cooked something with what's left sometimes. Gosh, the meal is like, oh, God, I wish I hadn't remembered what I put in there because if I could do that, that would be famous, you know.

So I think for me, it was that moment and also the illnesses that I had, which were all parasite driven and reduced me to a pretty bad state, that that I understood that well with whatever time I've got left, it's actually I can harvest effortlessly everything that I've done, all the choices that I've made, all the studies that I've made. Because I've been going to workshops for 25 or 30 years and all the wisdom that I've ever read, because I was an avid reader, and I was into Jungian psychology and the study of miracles and hypnotherapy and all kinds of different traditions and practises and disciplines. And gosh, here they all were. And here am I. And people want me. I don't quite know how to describe that, but people wanted me. People would come up and ask me for advice or if I could go talk to them or: “There's a group thing happening we’re doing here, would you come and talk ?” And I was really from this surprising reflection from the outer world that I understood that, oh, there's obviously something that to me is completely indescribable because it's just who I am. And it's just normal, you know. But to other people, there's something exceptional here. So maybe I need to own that and maybe I need to own the fact that that can be of use rather than to stay in denial of that. So there was a pivotal moment thereof understanding that. The last word I would have used would be leader or teacher. Because I'm just me, really, you know, and I'm here to help. To do what I can. So I'm a little reluctant to take that role of a spiritual teacher. It's not really, you know, I'm just speaking. And if it lands, then I hope it can help.

Sascha Kaus: I find it really interesting and an interesting topic. I would just like to dive a little deeper into this. How important do you feel? What has it meant for yourself? You've talked about being a hermit, being in solitude. I heard you talking about being an outsider in many other different occasions and then also like, OK, seeing it for yourself, but allowing others to see You. Or allowing yourself to be seen. And I feel it's something that also comes up in your workshops again and again. Like, how do you relate to that?

Anthony Abbagnano: Well, now it seems very simple. In retrospect, we are seen. No matter how much we want to hide about ourselves, we're still seen. And so what if we take that as an invitation to be conscious about what's being seen rather than being unconsciously seen and witnessed? You know, it just becomes a personal choice. Does that answer your question?

Sascha Kaus: A little? So what part of your self didn't want to be seen before you actually allowed yourself to go out there?

Anthony Abbagnano: The part that didn't belong, part of me that wasn't worthy. The part of me that was an outcast. I don't know. Maybe you were there in that group or I asked how many people in the group are outcasts. And everybody puts up their hand. Then I would say, well, look at each other just for a moment. People would kind of look at each other and then they'd start laughing because we realised that we are actually in-cast. You know, we're not out-cast. We're here together. And that willingness to exist as an outcast gives us such gifts of observation and opportunity to reflect as we are not part of the conversation. We can begin to ask questions, and I think those are privileges, they end up being privileges that end up putting us in the same room where we can say we've been outcasts before, but actually, we really not just belong, but we super belong. We belong in an opportunity to help all those other people that still feel like they're outcasts. So do we stay indulgent and wallow in the sense of being an outcast, or do we awaken to the opportunity that's there to help all those other people just by showing who we are? All these other people who feel like they don't belong and that they're not worthy.

Sascha Kaus: When did you actually start to show more of that? Like what was it a pivotal point to actually go out there? Feel it for yourself that there's something special that you have to share?

Anthony Abbagnano: Well, you know, truthfully, this happened a long time ago. This was like when I was 15 or 16. This sort of thing began to happen that I was given labels that didn't feel like they fit. But I was still given labels as a great communicator. I even just two weeks ago realised as I was teaching in class, we were teaching about the birth types and how different birth types affect us, and I just realised as I spoke that I was a caesarian. One of the principal things that I teach now is, is is the importance of being able to feel. Because I was anaesthetised when I was born. So my part of my human journey is getting people to awaken to their feelings again because that's what I did. That's what I had to do.

So in many ways, this began the year dot for me, if not before, in a social contract. I don't know. I think the pivotal moment for me was, was my illness when I was bedridden and unable to move for a few months and then I realised the only thing that I could do was to breathe. I couldn't move for the pain. And so I had to breathe. Probably about seven or eight weeks just to watch my breathing.

Sascha Kaus: What kind of illness was this?

Anthony Abbagnano: It was from parasites. I was being I was invaded by parasites that I got him Bali and but acutely. And I was in the last stages. You know, it's lethal and I was close to close to leaving. And then the battle with the medical world, who wanted to call it something else. Nobody could find out what it was and so on. But those weeks of breathing were like an illumination to me. I understood that the breath was actually if all our choices are taken away from us, the breath is perhaps the only one that's left. So if it's the only one that's left, it's that fundamental to who I am, then what else does it mean?

So it began an enquiry of a redirection of purpose for me. It actually even began the enquiry of who would I be without purpose and understanding a lot about my ego and my human journey and what I'd been through as I dwell on that very uncomfortable question: “Who would I be if I had no purpose?” It all led me to the breath. And then at that point, I realised how? It changed everything. It took me several weeks, but I'm so happy to see that it takes other people maybe 45 minutes or an hour and they can have those understandings about themselves when they breathe consciously.

Sascha Kaus: How can imagine, when did you go out for the first time and then shared the breath with others as well.

Anthony Abbagnano: I'd experience breathwork a lot. Already I'd practise Pranayama in my 20s and I explored Sufi breathing and Holotropic Breathwork and Transformational Breath and Rebirthing. You know, goodness, I whenever I tried it, I was staggered by its power. But I never had any idea that this, even when in my teens I was teaching my wife how to breathe before in order to give birth. We were using the ??? system. But I never knew that this was a trail of events that actually led… There was a connexion between this to take me where I am now. But I think. Actually what happened was, I was running a writing workshop in Ubud in Bali and I met this wonderful woman who was teaching breathwork and she'd just studied it and she'd studied her level one or something. And so I said: “Well, would you like to come and do breathwork for the writing circle? Because I think it might be really interesting to see what happens with people.” So she did. And it was so powerful and so beautiful that I tumbled into love with this wonderful being. And within two weeks, we were in California and I was taking the same course that she'd taken. So I started to study it a bit more seriously and continued from that because I'd studied it, but never in a formal environment. But I used it in my hypnotherapy.

Sascha Kaus: What was that chorus?

Anthony Abbagnano: That was Clarity Breathwork. That was with two dear ladies, Dana and Ashana, Dana de Long and Ashana Solaris. I then completed their training as quickly as I could and began to practise. Then I furthered my training, my official training, formal training with Biodynamic Breathwork with Giten Tonkov.

And then I brought in all kinds of things, parts of Holotropic, parts of Sufi breathing, parts of all different kinds of philosophies that I studied. All of a sudden they all had a place to be together. That's just what I mean when I say it's just part of who you are. It's just like that was my reality. So I just brought my reality to the world and started to teach in Ubud with a weekly class at Yoga Barn. And then within a few weeks, the class was full and they couldn't give me another room because of visas and I had to stay low profile and we couldn't advertise. But every week the room was full. So people would get there. Six-thirty in the morning for the class that began at eight-thirty or something and the room was always full. And then I was like, well, gosh, what is it that wants to happen with this?

And so then I started to run the Bali Spirit Festival for Meghan. That was the first time breathwork came and she said: “Would you do the breathwork?” And I said, yeah, I'd love to, but I really want to bring in other teachers so people can get an experience of it and, you know, a full rounded experience of what breathwork can be. And she said: “No, no, I want you to do it on your own.” And I said: “No, I'm not. It doesn't work. I think I think really, if you want to serve your people, people should get a chance to try everything.” And so she eventually said yes. And then we found the breathwork got more people than any other yoga event. Everybody wanted to do breathwork. So then it was like, oh, my gosh, this is you know, we were getting on television and people coming to film us. Then all of a sudden it was understood that breathwork is now shifting into a new paradigm.

And so that was really when breathwork started to accelerate and to gain a footing. Well, which is now a worldwide movement. And then I had to leave Bali. So I was thinking, I remember Amy, my dear wife, saying to me, because I didn't want to leave, but I kept what I wanted to stay there to continue my practise because it felt so worthy. And Amy said you know what, I think if you leave by, you'll find there's a much bigger world waiting for you. True enough. We did leave Bali about five years ago for four and a half years. Go now.

Sascha Kaus: Why did you have to leave Bali?

Anthony Abbagnano: Really? Because of illness. I couldn't keep going back just to get another parasite, you know. At least I knew that's what it was, but I'd have to keep going back to New York to this one man who could find it and yet the test and then take heavy meds and I just realised I don't want to keep doing that. You know, I don't want to take that risk anymore.

Each time you get them, you get less resistance to them. So it's a compounded situation. It's actually done some damage to me. So I wanted to stop it. Again, it was a blessing. Because it meant that I had to learn how to get people to breathe without travelling without moving so much. I had a severe intestinal condition. Even being in a room with people for an hour, sometimes challenging. I to go to the bathroom 20 times, you know, in an hour. So that was super hard. I remember in Yoga Barn, just a little anecdote. You might want to edit this one, too. But I remember once I had my microphone on and so I had an assistant. I said take over and I ran to the loo and I forgot to turn off my microphone. So there were like sixty-five breathers in the room or something. Full audio report on every experience I was having. Oh my God. Did I blush? But anyway.

Sascha Kaus: That was quite an insightful session that they had.

Anthony Abbagnano: Oh my God. Yes. Far too insightful. So I did leave. And and then because of that, I started to work online and I'd actually started teaching people how to facilitate at the same time. That was actually earlier, a couple of years before I started to teach people who wanted to learn how to do this. And then I realised that people were not really. I mean, there was the part of teaching people how to become breathwork facilitator that is about the skills you need, the technical aspects and so on.

But then I realised that people were actually wanting me. Not you know, they wanted the technical aspects, but it was with Anthony that they really wanted. That really helped me understand that the message that I live is of value out there. So then it was like, you can't ignore it. And it was back to those conversations, that writing that I'd done at four o'clock in the morning, which I did. I asked about how do you create community? Is it just handing it over to people or is it just a bunch of well-meaning people coming together and going into chaos? I remember Leo Buscaglia wrote about creating community, that it goes through goodwill, into chaos and ill will and then into some kind of leadership.

And the ones that stay at the end, the fourth stage are the ones that actually can make it work. And my question, the question I was asking at 4:00 in the morning is, how am I supposed to lead this or is it by committee or whatever? And the answer came back. You are the leader. Never doubt that you are the leader. And if you if you doubt it, you're not showing up the way you can show up. It's like it's your duty. So then I understood I had to wear this label of leader. But it was also, as I said, quite reluctant. Even today, it's like the reluctant leader. And then that servant leadership thing then make total sense, of course. OK. Yeah. I can lead this, no problem. I can do it.

Sascha Kaus: And so it's sort of you had already a following in Bali and then you had to leave and you had to stay in contact with them.

Anthony Abbagnano: Yeah. Which I did with the internet. That's how Internet breathwork began. And my students learnt by the Internet, too, we'd meet every week for the training.

Sascha Kaus: It's just interesting to see, how strong you are online. Now that everybody is doing everything online. I think now that everybody knows Zoome, I got to know. Zoom through you. I think so. And this is two years ago. I guess like even before you already have all this going on online. So you had quite a sense or am now understanding that there was also a need to create this.

Anthony Abbagnano: Yeah. I was one of Zoom's first clients. Soon as I found that platform, I was on it. And it's been fantastic, a fantastic resource. In fact, you know what began as maybe two or three hundred people in Bali is now, well I think, we just topped 50000 people now that that work with us to breathe with us in one way or another. And I think every year we're breathing with all our facilitators, now, I think this year we'll have 240 people come through the academy as students. So I think even two years ago it was like sixty, sixty five people a year. So it's grown exponentially. So if you figure it out, if there's 240 facilitators, breathe 10 people a week, that's you know, that's 2400 people a week. That's a lot of people.

Sascha Kaus: So tell us a little bit more. Tell our listeners a little bit more like what do you actually do online? Like, how do you breathe with people online?

Anthony Abbagnano: Well, we see each other. First of all, I insist on that. First of all, breathwork is a potentially very powerful experience. And some people are quite happy just to breathe once in a while and have a big experience and then come back down again and continue with what they were doing before. My wish is that people understand that the breath is really our best friend and is there to help us integrate into some of the more difficult experiences that we face in our earthly life. So it informs us in a way that we never get in terms of knowledge, in terms of accumulated readings or writings. It informs us in a much more spatial, much more spiritual way.

So I always would encourage people to use the breath as a wonderful experience in itself, but also to ask how can I apply this in my life afterwards? So a lot of my teaching with breathwork on the Internet is workshops that might take us through different inner processes that are then embodied by using a breathwork session afterwards. So we're not just thinking about things or doing exercises together, but we're actually breathing them into the body and something happens when we do that. It becomes more rich, it becomes more understood on an experiential level, and it gets out of the intellect and into the body. Again, of course, that's informed by Krishnamurti. My experiences with Krishnamurti. I trust that things can happen in the mind alone. They need to be embodied as well.

So it would be a session, some sessions are really simple, like a Sunday Breathe, the Breathe the World Programme that we do every Sunday in the morning and in the evening is really just about introducing breathwork to new people as an introductory class. It's a half hour breathwork. It has a 15 minute introduction. I would still always ask a question. So I would ask a question like, for example: “What is your what is your life today reflecting to you about your inner being?” Or some kind of question that would be provocative and would invite people to really consider things on a deeper level. And then I'd give a short hint. We have a little meditation on that. And then we would then go into a breathwork. So that's an example of how our Sunday breaths work.

Now, for example, this coming weekend, I'm doing a three day event. And these are all free events that we do for the public because we want to bring them to the breath. And so we have also something called a quantum shift event, which is a three day process we go through, which has a longer breathwork, maybe 45 minutes or so, and. We take a subject like from fear to fierce grace, or this one is from being a victim to becoming a victim. We take these pathways that we can take little journeys that we can take together to help people understand how to really implement the breath in creating big shifts in their lives.

Sascha Kaus: And how is the breath actually such an integral part to get out of the mind and into the body? And why is it so important?

Anthony Abbagnano: Well, actually, what happens with a conscious, connected breath that we breathe it through the mouth. And so it sounds a bit like this.

Demonstrating the breath.

And we're going to do that for half an hour or an hour. So what actually happens is that we're raising oxygen levels in the bloodstream and we're increasing blood flow in the body. But something's also happening in the brain, which is we actually decrease the oxygen to the brain. So the frontal lobe can't quite function in its normal alpha type way that it does, and it slows down a bit, becomes a bit disorientated. We also begin to employ the other side of our brain, the right side of our brain, a bit more than we normally do. So we begin to consider things more spatially. And we have less active, entrenched neurone pathways that we're following. So it gives us an opportunity to begin to look at what might exist in the gap between thoughts. It also, because we breathe through the mouth and we don't have to, but it's my chosen way is because we learn to engage with our emotional being more.

So if you can, anybody who's listening now can explore just taking a few breaths through your mouth and notice where the constriction point is at the back of your throat. Notice where the breath has to go through in order to come into your body and notice how actually, that's a muscle you can relax. You can actually open that more. And what happens when you do open that more? Whether that brings your sense of tenderness or vulnerability. And as you breathe through that opening in the back of your throat, you begin to realise how tender that space is. How many words have been stuck there before in your life? Things you've wanted to say but held back. Think of all the No’s that you've never had the courage to say. Think of all the tears that you've swallowed in this throat. And then as we begin to breathe consciously here, we begin to understand this is actually the doorway to opening to a whole other form of intelligence inside us.

So on a psycho emotional level, there's an opportunity to unblock years of stifled emotions and suppressed emotions. And those may be everything from the strongest anger to the bliss that lies behind it. If we allow ourselves to feel it. So it's very much about giving permission for these emotions to be felt. It's very much about not being anaesthetised like I was when I was born. So, you know, it some kind of explains a little bit of my story there, too. But at the same time, we're bringing in air and air in every religious text, the breath has huge significance. In the Koran, that’s how Jesus was born by the breath on his mother's chest. When I applied that to the Catholic faith, it kind of meets the concept of immaculate conception that, you know, what is immaculate conception mean? I was trained to be Catholic before I got married at the age of 18. And I remember being fascinated by this concept of, hang on, I've got this horny body and I'm being told that this incredible human being was born without horniness. How did that happen?

And then it was when I understood from the Koran, that excerpt from the Koran. Maybe that's what they're talking about, as well as their own version of the power of breath. And I think actually in the Bible, the breath breath is referred to as a divine power 28 times or something like that and a divine force. And we use the word inspire, right. To bring in spirit. It means to bring in spirit. But we use inspire when we feel inspired. Right. We feel a sense of spirit and uplift. And of course, we also use it to say that we're breathing. You inspire and you expire. We also use the word expire to indicate that we die. Our final expiration. So something is over. Something is finishing. So in this cycle of in and out-breath. So we just kind of don't even think about. We do it as little as possible. We only realise we're doing it when we're not doing it. And yet in every one of these cycles exists a birth and death. We get to practise that. From the day we have that first inhale we get to practise it until the day we have that last exhale. We lack of everything.

So then that makes me ask questions like: “What can we let go of now? Now, that would be a great Sunday question. You know, what is it you're going gonna let go of right now with this breath? And then you think of analogies like, how much furniture can you put in your bedroom before you can't fit any furniture in there anymore? And if you look at our lives, you know, how much stuff are we going to put into our brains until we realise we can't put any more in there, that we've got 60-80000 thoughts a day happening anyway, as the Buddhists say.

So what if we use our breath to consciously clean out the clutter with that exhale and we make room for this aethereal spiritual element to arrive in our being? What would that look like? How could that change our thinking? “How could it change this impossible relationship that I'm stuck in and this crunch I've got at work” or “I'm feeling so dull and uncreative and I can't write anymore.” “My music's not coming through me” or “I just I'm just not a creative.” “I don't even award myself that label.” What could happen if we clear out those thoughts and really see what letting go of them might feel like? That gentle release with the exhale, imagining that they're dying. Imagining that that part of us can die. What can come in? So, I mean, how permanently fascinating is that? I mean, like, you know, it's it's effervescent. It has life forever, that question. And so what better study could that be than that ever? You know, it's like I remember in my fifties saying to a lady: “I'm on my journey to mastery. I'm interested in kingship.” And she said: “Well, do you know that all the mastery of life still leads to the mystery of death?” So keep it in proportion here. You know, I don't think that you can accumulate knowledge. And that changes anything other than your ability to be present. And that wonderful reality of each breath. I mean, you can't breathe in to the next moment and you can't breathe into the one that just happens, so you can only breathe into the present. So I believe my mind. I believe that that is that is our quick is ticket to presence - is to breathe conscious.

Sascha Kaus: Yeah. I really have to say that this is also sometimes how I put it. I mean, in any spiritual practise, we're always looking for this kind of moment, presence coming into the now and experiencing that. And how can we actually do this? I always say that within this human existence, in all this practise, might it be meditation, yoga and other forms of spiritual practises or even like taking psychoactive substances. There has never been anything that made it, that came so close to this feeling of being connected. Being present in there now and getting out of those thoughts, like having all those questions. I mean, I had questions that I got answers to through feeling. There was no rational answer to it. But I felt the answer through breathwork. It was just so beautiful.

And like you said, also having a release and being able to really let things go and feeling how they fall off my body, how my body is just letting go of them and they're not needed anymore. And it feels so much lighter. So, yeah, to me, it's always just amazing to have this tool and to be able to whenever I want to and whenever I have the time to connect to it and really feel that. Nothing else is needed in that moment. Being somehow like a little baby. I've had experience where I was going like from screaming and shouting to crying and laughing within a few seconds or within a few moments, I sometimes observe with a little baby and you go, like, what's going on? I mean, in the last moment it was just like crying and I was super happy. And but then going through this emotional waves, my side was like, OK, this is what's actually present and it feels so beautiful.

Anthony Abbagnano: Yeah, I do. I really feel that opening to our emotions is access to a meaningful life.

Sascha Kaus: I think you said somewhere, you said it's quite beautiful. I get to hold space for people to love themselves. Do you feel it's something that's needed at the moment?

Anthony Abbagnano: Oh, my goodness. I can't. Oh, God. Yeah. That’s, you know I've done podcasts before and the last question is: “What would your message be?” And that's what my message is: “Please don't waste time anymore. Please just uncover to love. Just uncover to love.” We know that in the last moments of our life. That's the most important element that exists. And perhaps that's why grief is such a beautiful experience. Why it has such beauty in it. Because it contains love. And yet we just keep sidelining it just like the breath. We keep sidelining it and it's in us, it's in each human being we have we share the same ocean of pure love. So please let us not waste more time. And take the next step. What would that next step be? To being with.

Sascha Kaus: How much these days now part of your journey? How it took you throughout your life to experience all these different states that you have been through and the journey that you've taken? Do you feel for yourself now there is no more time to waste?

Anthony Abbagnano: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think, you know, to go into this more dear friend of mine used this phrase that we, first of all, we need to get to unconditional love. Right? We need to get to agape. That's really what our greatest human sacrifice has been, is that we've sacrificed that. We've followed the mind into all kinds of turmoil that it's led us into. And so the process that I help people with is identical to my own. It's no different than my own in a process, which is about learning to love those parts of me that are unlovable that I feel shame about. And that is that beautiful sentence that my dear friend Rick Smith said, which is: “Unconditional love is learning to love ourselves in all our conditions.” Which is so obvious and yet and an enigma, unless it's articulated like that. We can say, unconditional love. I'm going to love anyway. But it actually literally means loving ourselves and each other in all our conditions. So not just the misery and challenge, but the brutal ugliness of humanity that we call ugliness. Needs to be loved. The people that we vilify and the people that we consider as devilish need to be loved because they all exist inside us. They couldn't exist out there unless they existed in here. So that question that I mentioned earlier on, what is your outer world reflecting to you about your inner being? You know, we know with that wonderful work that David Bohm did as a quantum physicist that suggests if not proves, that the outer world is a macrocosm of our own in a microcosm. And that means that by going inside into those realms of the self and learning to love those dark parts of our own being, that we then naturally stand up for unconditional love, that we can love that part in other people, too. So that's my guiding light in life. That's one of my principles. I mean, each time we are triggered, you know, how each time the finger is pointed at us for something we don't like about ourselves, it's an opportunity to go in there and find a way to love it.

Sascha Kaus: When you said, like those moments when you've just been with the breath. And when you suffered this illness and you had to go inside. And then also being somehow divided from the place that you loved so much, Bali and your community and going inside and now you're going back into building a community. Can you tell a little bit more about that?

Anthony Abbagnano: Yeah. I mean, that is huge. I can't. Yeah. We're building a community. It's called ASHA, which literally means Alchemy School of Healing Arts. But in Sanskrit also means hope. Our intention is to catalyse a new form of life, a virtuous circle of activities that are that and a community that feeds itself and nourishes itself. It's a big project. I mean, there are only 22 people here right now. But already you see the human condition play itself out.

Sascha Kaus: Tell us a little bit more about, like you said like 22 people are here right now. Where is here? And what are you doing?

Anthony Abbagnano: We're in southern Tuscany. We're on the southern flank of Monte Amiata, which is an extinct volcano. Seems to be a thing of my to always be living on the side of a volcano. But it's a very powerful place. It's only about 20 minutes away from where the Dalai Lama comes when he comes to Italy. It's known as as a power spot. We are on a piece of land of about 30 acres so far, but we're accumulating more as we move forward. So we're underneath a village that is actually under inhabited. It used to be a mining town. And then after they stopped mining about 25 years ago, the kids left. They kind of went off to bigger cities with bigger lives. And so it really consists of mostly old people, a few young families, but not many. And they're dying off, you know. So this town of 4000 people is down to about 750 or so. My vision is to regenerate the town and the kindest and most honour honouring way possible to the local culture and to create a local light industry for the kids. So they have a reason to come back to their town. And at the same time, to borrow a little bit from the Ubud model of Nomads. So to encourage people who've been travelling who are looking for a place to rest. Digital nomads and new blood. That new life. That was always in Ubud to invite that to happen here as well.

It all begins with the retreat centre as we have it right now, which is ASHA, a retreat centre, which is about 10 or 12 buildings on this piece of land. It's like a little village. You kind of walk down little lanes and you find another building. It's very, very pretty. Very sweet. And had been abandoned for many years. So this we've only been back here a month. We got delayed because of COVID. But now we're here and we've got these wonderful volunteers who have come to do what they can to help us put it into some kind of shape and some kind of condition so we can then use it as a community centre. There are many empty buildings. So we've got people coming to rent houses, got people coming to buy houses who want to restore them. So part of my past comes back and becomes reincarnated. So we want this to become the intention is for this community to become exemplary as an exemplary way of living, an eco-community, zero impact and replicable. We're being looked at by some fairly big backers potentially who we don't need, but who could help us create something that could be replicated in other parts of the world as a new way of living.

We're opening a foundation in about a month. I'll be starting a foundation devoted to the regeneration of the town and also into the development of a structure that is replicable. Parts of it will be culturally individual, but parts of it will also be replicable. So how could this work in India or how could it work in Peru? How could it work in New York State or, you know, in any culture? How could what is it that is modular and can be exported and taken elsewhere?

And also, how does a community of this? What happens if you only get 10 per cent of the way and it stops, and we can't travel anymore? What happens with all the potential unfolding that's happening in front of our eyes? How do we manage that kind of a situation? So those are the macro elements and the virtuous circle that I talked about as a foundation which feeds local industry and invests in the local industry and gets a return from that industry and then reinvests in more industry so it can really become a capital of a new paradigm.

And at the same time, we have our ASHA online work. You know, I know from my experience wanting to create this community for 25 years, I've been working on this concept and. With the success that we've had with Alchemy of breath, we now have a model that is usable and we want to create an ASHA online platform. We are creating now an ASHA online platform that will be about platforming people who have important messages to bring to the world. But they don't have the skill to know how to do the marketing or the back end of the business or the entrepreneurial aspects. But we do. So the idea is to share that so we can really bring out some new thought and new leadership into the world. So that will also be a social enterprise, but a profit enterprise and that will feed the foundation, which will feed the regeneration. And then ASHA online will then feed that, you know, it keeps going round. And the idea is that everybody wins.

At the same time, whatever happens on land happens. There are empty houses here waiting to be claimed. So we're putting in place some kind of code of ethics, very clear code of ethics, which includes the six code commitments, of course, of Gay and Katy Hendricks. I recommend you Google the six co-commitments and read them. So we have a filtration process in place that we want to encourage people who are absolutely willing to bring more than they take and are willing to take 100 per cent responsibility for their own lives. So it's a non-socialist system. It's not like Auroville, but it's a bit like Auroville in India and it borrows a bit from Findhorn and a bit from Damanhur and a bit from different communities that we've studied and are still studying like Tameira and other communities. But we want it to be non-isolationist. We want it to be inclusive. We want people to have their own livelihood. And we want everybody to have a healthy growth-orientated environment so but in a growth-orientated environment.

Sascha Kaus: So you're already saying that you're studying like all these other different communities and been living through different decades and there have been already a lot of communities out there and different parts of the world and some of them have seen challenges. I mean, I have been to Auroville and seeing that Auroville started somewhere end of the 60s and it was planned to be a city for fifty thousand people. And I think like currently, you can look it up. There's like two and a half thousand people living there. What do you feel? Have you learnt from other communities and what are the challenges that you see for yourself by building a community?

Anthony Abbagnano: Well, I think, first of all, I think sometimes communities suffer from like… First of all, we don't have Sri Aurobindo here or la mère, the mother, you know, like Auroville had it. This unifying force of a group. And we don't have that. We don't actually have a belief system. We have respect for individual belief systems. But that already puts us at a disadvantage. We also know that one in ten of these communities succeeds. Nine out of 10 fail. And even the ones who succeed don't usually succeed for more than 70 or 80 years. So tempting as it is, we haven't you know, sometimes I want to say this is only going to last 25 years as a 25-year experiment and then everybody goes.

That's something that we've thought about as a possibility in order to generate a sense of presence. And also as a sense of being able to let go, not getting too sticky. The thing that distinguishes us from other communities that I'm witnessing, I think the unique element of what we bring is that we're Internet-based.

Actually, this community is a representation. It's an expression of a community that already exists. It's not heavily based on projection. So it's not like we're gonna have 5000 people here. Actually, if we have 22. It's okay. And if we have 50, it's okay. And at any juncture, we could stop growing. And it's okay because growth is not our model. It's not the old paradigm model of growth. Because it's online-based and online funded and foundation fed then we have a way of being autonomous. And I think it's partly that sense of autonomy that is already attracting donations for the foundation. We already have significant donors from California, Internet money that wants to see this happen. Because we're not coming from a needy place. We actually have something that has its integrity, whatever size it goes to. So I think that's what makes it distinctive. And the fact, of course, that it's Internet-driven.

Sascha Kaus: Let me just break you there for a moment. Can you explain a little bit more like how is it Internet-driven? What is it actually?

Anthony Abbagnano: Because the Internet, the social enterprise of the Internet organisation of ASHA, the ASHA online, is is really where the community is. You know, we're looking for millions of people to be a part of that community. It follows the model of a little bit like something like the Shift network, a bit of Mind Valley, a bit of Udemy, it's a teaching platform and it's also a human exchange platform. So it has a magazine that's going to be launched shortly. It even has properties that are for sale here and for rent. It has you know, it's a whole thing. It's a community in itself. And it'll invite free expression from people. If you had a workshop you wanted to give, you'd be able to give it. The idea is to build something that is peer fed, peer-rated and then and also generates revenue by virtue of members of the community buying things that the community provides. So if Sascha has an important message to give the world that we can platform you and we take a percentage of your revenue and you earn your living and then a percentage of that percentage, then goes back into the community again.

Sascha Kaus: So maybe I might end up with my Retreat Affairs podcasts broadcasting from Umbria in the future from the ASHA platform.

Anthony Abbagnano: Yeah, exactly.

Sascha Kaus: So this is already where you can take advantage now of the strong online community that you've been building with your breathwork over the last few years?

Anthony Abbagnano: That's right. Yeah. Actually, what we intend to do is to have a formal launch over this winter that will be a symposium of different teachers. And each of those teachers will have a large following like I do. And when we combine those, that's when our Big Bang is and we then generate our own community in one go. I mean, until now it's growing organically. I have to say, until now, we haven't even told anybody the town under which we live. We haven't even announced. It's not public. And we're still having to filter quite a bit. So it's clearly an idea whose time has come. Once we have structures in place internally to be able to accommodate more inflow, then we'll release the name. But right now, we're not able to do that. As to it's too tender in its youth. It's like a tender young shoot, you know.

Sascha Kaus: What is it at the moment? Is it more like a place where people come together that present their work online and they can just exchange and work together and live together? Or is it also aimed at really opening up and bringing the online and offline together?

Anthony Abbagnano: Well, we don't know because we don't know what happens to retreat centres in this new iteration of the world. My guess is if everybody has to take a vaccine that wants to travel, that less people will travel. So we don't know to what degree that will be the case. So there's uncertainty. But what we've planned for and what this was originally going to be was going to be the ASHA school of healing arts. And that was going to be a land-based operation that would include all of the healing arts, theatre, dance, movement, comedy, breathwork, any kind of, any other kinds of practises or therapies or anything that wants to be taught.

What happened, of course, is we bought the place in January and then by February 12th, we were under lockdown. So everything got suspended. So the group of us as people who had come together, as the original board said, well, what do we do now? And I said, well, let's do it online because that's exactly what it is. It's actually Alchemy School of Healing Arts is actually a manifestation of Alchemy of Breath Academy. So so let's do it online, which we're already doing. But let's make it bigger. Let's make it more outreaching and include the other teachers in the world that need a platform. So we're basically intention is to use those that already have a platform to create a platform for those that don't. And so that physically on land, there's this studio that I'm in now that people can use but there are 22 people here pulling weeds and four of them there in the kitchen and one chap is painting, another one is recycling. So we're just a community right now in our own microcosm. And watching all the stuff that happens when there's loads of it. It's amazing.

You know, there's this theory of 12. So each time you get another 12 people that the dynamic shifts and of course, the dynamic shifts with each new person that comes in. But there are significant thresholds that happen when you hit twelve people. So we hit 22. So we've been through that whole lurch of shift when we went to 13. Now we're approaching 24, which is where we're going to keep it for now because the place can accommodate comfortably 24 people. So. But see what we can do to prepare for 36.

Sascha Kaus: You said everything is uncertain. And yeah, for sure. Nobody really knows where we're going from here throughout the crisis. But how do you see it for yourself? The first time we met was somewhere in the restaurant but then I've experienced your work. First time in Ibiza in a room with 60 people breathing. In the end, it was almost like 100 people breathing together. Then we spend time together in Italy, 10-day Breathcamp. 60 people coming together every day, having two breathing sessions, really living together for that time. This kind of idea of retreat coming together in the sense of creating a special environment, dedicating our time towards personal growth and healing, and then having also all these abilities to really look each other into the eyes, giving each other a hug and going through those difficult moments together. How do you see it for yourself? Can online work do all this? Where are we heading from here?

Anthony Abbagnano: Well, I obviously believe in online work. My experience is online work can do it. Otherwise, I wouldn't be still trying to do it. So for me, online has been extremely functional. I think it’s just a different way, and it’s on the continuum of, needing to be with someone in a room, needing to touch them, needing to penetrate them. Being in a different room next door. Being on a telephone. Being on the Internet. You know, these are all notions that we have of what it takes to be intimate. But the guiding force is a will to be intimate and the capability to disrobe of the personas that we carry, that we've had to carry in order to interface with a challenging world.

So to me, there's no difference at all. I mean, there are subtle differences, but there's no difference of quality, of possibility between the Internet and the physical form. Some people are more tactile, other people are less tactile. And so each of us has a different point of view and I observe that. I observe the full spectrum when I say that. But certainly, my experiences that, just as many people, are gonna have breakthroughs with this medium as they can in any other. It's really a question of their own willingness and readiness to commit to making that choice. So then it just becomes a question of what does it take to get someone to commit? What is it? What does it take to get someone to make that choice? And at which point the medium becomes secondary.

I love the physical. I mean, the reason I said and let me rewind a bit here, the reason I said this is a manifestation of a virtual community is because my experience of studying community and having started communities is that the human need to believe that we spoke about earlier is equalled by the human need to project. And, you know, if you're going to create a project, you need to project. So there's a certain naturalness to that. So that's not a shame in the word itself. But what we, what my experience says, is that the human need to believe often abdicates the individual. It's a self abdication from their own sense of creativity and responsibility in the world. So when that gets passed on to somebody else, when it gets projected onto somebody else, there's a disempowerment that happens to the projector. And there's potential false empowerment that happens to the projectee. Right?

Now, when we apply that to the nuts and bolts of a physical piece of land or a town, a new town or whatever it might end up being. We want to know what's going to happen in the future because that makes us feel comfortable. We want to project into the future that we're going to be safe next week and that there's going to be enough to eat and all of those fundamental, the priorities of human need. They're all projected, especially if we apply, if we want to believe in something. This is a really emotional subject. People have been stuck at home for months. They're watching the world disintegrate in front of them. They're feeling threatened by health issues, by economic issues, by political issues. You mentioned the idea that you're creating a conscious community and you're going to get a whole bunch of people coming. You know, everybody wants that. And a lot of them have not worked out their stuff. They're not ready for it. They want to believe that it can be the solution to their problems. So there's that kind of projection going on. And there's a tendency of people to project into the future of what life will be like in order to justify what they're doing today.

Now, that, to me, is one of the seeds of disintegration that gets unconsciously planted in the soil of community. And that's why I reflected on this for several years. And I began to understand that community isn't something that you can project. It's something that is. And as I was sitting in Ubud and I bought a piece of land outside Ubud and we were going to create a community there, and then I started to ask myself the question. But hang on! There is already community. There is ecstatic dance happening there. There's prayer circles happening there. This Kirtan happening there. There is yoga happening there.

You could sit in a restaurant and talk to the next person at the next table. If you tried to do that in New York or London, they'd look like you're crackers, like you a nutballs. There's such a sense of community here and it's just happening. It didn't get projected. It didn't get planned. It's just an expression of humanity and who they are. Nothing else. It's a very humble expression of what already exists. And I thought, why am I I've got this piece of land and I'm trying to get everybody from there to come here. What is this, an ego trip or something? What's the point in that? Just so we can have a crucible in a crucible. I'm not sure what you know. It didn't seem the point for.

So it was with some reluctance that I came to a piece of land here in Italy and said, OK, this is going to be a conscious community because it's really important that it's an expression of what is. And when we look at community on the outside, if we go back to David Bohm’s teachings and we understand that the outer world is a reflection of who we are within. Well, what about our inner community? What's happening to all those fragmented parts of who we are? And how are we managing them? Because if I've got bits in me that have been damaged and abandoned behind traumas in my past, and I think I can come into an outside community and be functional, there's something for me to learn. I need to go back and do my own inner work.

So this bringing into unity, this community coming into unity process is highly individual. It's got nothing to do with anybody else, actually. It's only got some to do with me and my inner world. If I'm committed to that in this moment, I am in unity. I feel a sense of oneness. I'm heading in the right direction. Right? And so it's like every moment of my life, I've got that choice. Am I unconsciously investing in separation or am I consciously investing in unity?

And. If that's my question. Then I, I can take that into the outer world and be seen. I can take that into to meet my neighbour and I can take that awareness, and if my neighbour can do that, too, we can be together. And if it goes wrong, we can reflect to each other what's going on. But it really gets kind of basic. We really need to go back to the foundation to like those baby blocks we used to play with, like you'd put the A on top of the C. And, you know, that's kind of where we're at when it comes to coming into unity and the huge human condition outside us, this fragmented world that we live in, the polarised world that's even arguing about colour and all of the things that we argue about is really a representation of the brokenness that's inside us.

So, therefore, and I'm fortunate because my work as a breathworker and as a teacher is all about this journey, is all about this in a journey? How do I bring my broken parts into oneness again? So this then becomes a natural expression of that, that this physical place that we live in with 22 people, some of whom aren't students of mine, some are. How do we keep showing up for that? And then that question I mentioned before about what is your reality reflect to you about your own and being evolves into another question, which is what is your reality reflect to you about your inner leadership? What is it showing about to you about what is it showing to you about who is broken inside you? And what inner work do you need to do in order to step into your inner leadership? And that's the point that we naturally reside in our power. Right? We don't need to control any more or manipulate or persuade. We're actually occupying our own being in our fullness because we're self-focussed and doing the work we need to repair. To come back together again to repair.

Sascha Kaus: So you're coming back to a place that you have left many years ago and repair that in a way.

Anthony Abbagnano: Exactly. This is the place I left 15, 18 years ago with some, like, goof. I never go back there again. But that's the hero's journey, right? I mean, you have to leave. You have to leave what you know, and then somehow you're going to work your way back there to bring the treasurer back, right?

Sascha Kaus: Yes. It sounds like a beautiful expression of that. You seem to have gone on kind of a retreat. And even if this retreat was many years of going to faraway places like Bali, going on your journey and going first to America, as you said, and then being in in so many different places, but then also coming back to a place that, it looks like it felt like home already quite long ago and then realising that. To me, it gives this idea that I don't really have to go out there into the world to find my belonging. But if I can go inside and look for it there, there's a good place to start to look and it's where I can ultimately find it. And then it doesn't really matter where I go and where I've seen my belonging in the outside world. But as long as I have it in the inside, I can be at home wherever I want to be. So what are what are the next steps that you're planning for ASHA?

Anthony Abbagnano: Well, of course, we have a breath-camp. We have an Alchemy of Breath Breathcamp coming up in September here, which is the first time we're attempting land-based Breathcamp since the virus came. And so we're kind of preparing for it and ready to let go of it if it's not possible for some reason. So that's our next threshold here.

Sascha Kaus: And so so what is the breath?

Anthony Abbagnano: Breathcamp is where all the people that have been studying for the last nine months for the training come together. It's a debut. So it's like they come out and they come out as facilitators. So they'll be running groups of their own and doing some of the final aspects of the training that you need to be in physical presence for, like learning how to touch the body and things of that nature.

So it's a celebration. It's the culmination of this long pregnancy, this gestation period that they’ve in. And really, when I say celebration, it's not just because they're finishing. It's because they have gone so deep into their own inner world in order to be able to be here. Sometimes excruciatingly deep in their own and a reflection in order to be able to qualify. You know, the whole principle of this work is that we may be alongside someone that is really suffering because we tend to the soul. We're kind of like soul shepherds, and there's no way we can be present with that unless we're willing to be present with all parts of our own condition. And so it's arduous, this training period they've been through. So this Brethcamp where we all come together, some of them seeing each other for the first time, too. They've become intimate friends, many of them lifelong friends. But they've never actually touched each other before. So it's this curious, you know, almost like a blind man who's just opened his eyes and this is kind of touching a face in front of him. It's a very beautiful, tender moment.

Sascha Kaus: I have to say, I experienced that myself in a way. So I've gone through the training. Also going back to what you said before, how it is possible to become so intimate online and to open up on so many really deep levels and to connect with people. It's just amazing what's possible and how we are able to hold space for each other, to heal each other, even though being together, sharing space online, but then also having the power of coming together and actually seeing those faces and bodies three dimensional and seeing even more than just the shoulders and the head. The full person for the first time walking and it's not just sitting in this little square on the screen. That's a really, really powerful and beautiful moment. So, the breath kind that you're planning now for September, will it only be for people that have gone through the course? Will it also be something that's open to the public where people can come?

Anthony Abbagnano: This one will be probably closed. It may be open, but we don't know yet, but it will probably be closed because it's a soft opening of the retreat centre. So it's not going to be perfect. But we do intend in the future to have them open. Yeah, absolutely. We'd love to.

Sascha Kaus: And right now, is there any other chance for people to get to see you? Will you be now in Italy for the next few months? Do you plan on going anywhere else? I mean, I know that sometimes you do workshops, you go to different places, travel a lot. Is this still something that's on your mind or have you decided to just be in Italy for now and focus on that?

Anthony Abbagnano: Definitely. Definitely in Italy for now. All workshop schedules have been suspended not just because of this project, but because of the virus. We just don't know. Because, you know, it might not be politic to go into a closed room and breathe a bunch of people. So, you know, we do what we can and we go forwards the best way we can.

Sascha Kaus: You said you have 22 people at the moment, 24, and you're gonna keep it at that level. But you're also told about that there is a way for people, that you're looking into renting out places. There's a lot of abandoned houses. How do you plan on handling this? Is there any way for people to get involved then if people are interested to learn more about ASHA? What would be a way.

Anthony Abbagnano: Yeah. There is indeed they can. If you go to ASHAcommunity.com, that's A-S-H-A and community as you would spell community dot com You can get a look at the countryside and the area and the place itself. And you can read about the vision and the mission. And also there’s if you want to come and volunteer, we have like a work exchange programme that will feed you and keep you here and you can partake in the lessons and things that we occasionally do a couple of times a week there is an event we do, like breathwork.

And that's one way that I will breathe people still, physically. I love doing it. And you just need to fill out the questionnaire and then you'll be getting in touch with Nic, who is running that for us. So we do have some slots opening up, I think, pre-Breathcamp. There are few slots opening up. So and then post Breathcamp on the fourth of October, there are more slots opening up, which will eventually, lead up to the olive harvest that's happening at the end of October and so on. And during the winter, there'll be more places opening up because it's cold. So you would want to enjoy the cold rather than you Ibiza folks, who are sitting there like I used to. Going, oh, my God, it's 20 degrees. Now is Christmas Day. I'd love it. I'm sitting on a beach.

Sascha Kaus: Yeah, well, I'm still stuck in Germany. I'm on my way down, back again to Ibiza. Probably at the moment this episode is aired I'm already back in Ibiza, let's see. But so what is the light like in terms of the next, let's say the next 12 months. What would be the plan for ASHA? What's coming up?

Anthony Abbagnano: Well, COVID permitting ASHA will become a community centre and a retreat centre, and it will also have a wellness spa and it will be bringing in teachers from around the world. Pretty much all the time to be able to teach their work. And the community will be opening up some local enterprises. That's part of the foundation's work, is to stimulate people who want to come here and start even the most simple businesses like bus service to the local station, which doesn't exist, a laundromat, co-working space, yoga studios, dance studios, whatever it is that wants to happen in the community. We would love to see that happen.

Sascha Kaus: If people are interested in learning more about the breathwork and connecting with you to breathe, how could they do that?

Anthony Abbagnano: Well, the best thing to do is to go to http://breathetheworldnow.com/ and then join me on a Sunday. That's the absolute best thing to do. And just check for more. They're all there on https://alchemyofbreath.com/, whatever is happening. But a good way to come close quickly is just to come to show up every Sunday on http://breathetheworldnow.com/ And you can go straight to register before we close this up.

Sascha Kaus: Now, is there anything that you would like to add? Is there anything that you need to communicate that you want to put out there in the world?

Anthony Abbagnano: You see, I already gave you that answer earlier on. So my next best is to say: “What would you say, or who would you forgive, or who would you ask forgiveness from, if you had 10 breaths left? That's a powerful question.

Sascha Kaus: Thank you, Anthony. It was such a pleasure to have you here on the show. It was beautiful connecting with you, seeing you, talking to you. And I'm really looking forward to, hopefully, some time here in the future, to give you a hug again to connect on a physical level. Good luck with everything that you're doing online and offline. Thank you again.

Anthony Abbagnano: I must be mad. Thank you. What a wonderful life we get to live. That we get to play with things like this. And we get to talk about matters of the heart and the soul. Thank you. Thank you so much, Sascha. Thank you all for listening. And lasting this long.

 
 
Sascha Kaus http://www.saschakaus.com
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EPISODE 002 | JOOLS SAMPSON - EXTRAORDINARY RETREATS