Host Leslie sits down with certified breathwork practitioner Robert Bahedry to explore the transformative power of breathwork. Rooted in ancient yoga pranayama practices, breathwork serves as a potent form of energy medicine that promotes holistic healing across physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions. Robert shares his personal journey from yoga student to instructor, emphasizing how mastering breathwork reduced his cravings for substances like alcohol, and enhanced his overall wellbeing.
Host Leslie sits down with certified breathwork practitioner Robert Bahedry to explore the transformative power of breathwork. Rooted in ancient yoga pranayama practices, breathwork serves as a potent form of energy medicine that promotes holistic healing across physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions. Robert shares his personal journey from yoga student to instructor, emphasizing how mastering breathwork reduced his cravings for substances like alcohol, and enhanced his overall wellbeing.
Leslie and Robert discuss the concept of how trauma is stored in our tissues, and how breathwork releases that trauma at the cellular level. They also address societal programming around masculinity and how it limits emotional expression. Roberts offers valuable insights into balancing masculine and feminine energies to reconcile internal conflicts and foster a more holistic self.
Links mentioned in the episode:
Show Credits:
Leslie: Welcome to The Nature of Nurture with Dr. Leslie Carr, a podcast for your mental health. I'm your host, Leslie. If you're watching this podcast right now, you can find the audio version in any podcast app. And if you're listening, you can also watch this episode on YouTube at The Nature of Nurture. You can find that link in the show notes. Today, we're here to talk about breathwork with Robert Bahedry. Robert is a certified breathwork practitioner, and he's been teaching this specific three-part dynamic breathing technique since 2010. He leads classes and one-on-one sessions here in LA, as well as online, and his pre-recorded classes and meditations have been downloaded on streaming apps like Apple Music millions of times. In addition to all of this, Robert is also my breathwork teacher, and I recently became fully certified to teach under his instruction. I love this practice, and I'm so excited to tell you all about it. Please join me in welcoming Robert Beheadry. First things first, just thank you so much for being here with me.
Robert: I am truly honored. I haven't been on TV for a long time. Yeah. But yeah, this is great.
Leslie: Yeah, we're going to have a lot of fun. So let's start nice and sort of a nice big broad question for people. But what is breathwork, Robert? Let's start there. Where do I begin?
Robert: I think one of the things that would probably describe breathwork first and foremost and more accurately is it's the power of our breath to help us heal physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. So it's medicine, it's energy medicine. Breath work In many other descriptions, it's a yoga pranayama practice, which if you practice yoga, you know that it is one of the eight limbs of yoga. Yoga is not just poses. It's a philosophy. And one of the limbs is breath or life force control, which is pranayama in Sanskrit. And by playing with our breath, we can calm the mind down. calm the stress response down, cool the body down, control blood pressure and body temperature. So it is a tool for healing and the different types of breathing techniques will allow you to do different things. At the core of it all, it's a way of managing and having some semblance of control over our emotional and our mental bodies. So it's a healing modality that triggers your body's natural ability to heal itself. not so succinct, but that's basically it.
Leslie: Yeah, I think it's nice to kind of sort of start broad and then we can narrow in because it's interesting to think that, you know, here we are ultimately to talk about a very specific type of breathing technique, you know, what we sometimes call the three-part breath. think that you're saying something that's really important which is just the idea that really breath work kind of writ large is not just about this one technique it's the tons of different techniques whether it's breath of fire and you know so you can sort of you can turn your energy up you can calm your energy down you can you know we can use the power of our breathing to do all sorts of things to regulate our nervous systems
Robert: Yeah the first time it was at a yoga class years ago in 2008 when I started doing yoga the particular instructor always started with a pranayama practice and sometimes it was alternate nostril breathing which is you know balances the left and the right hemisphere and then we would do breath of fire to clear the mind and get really focused and and and it was that journey into into Pranayama that led to wanting to become a yoga instructor. Ah, yeah. So the way the yoga practice started to affect me physically and emotionally made me go, huh. Can we do a little deeper dive?" And they offered a teacher training, so I went, sure. I was all in. And during the teacher training, the Yoga Pranayama module made me go, what? Yeah. It was totally a, we can do what by breathing this way or that way? That was it really. It was like a light bulb moment that went, I don't need to take drugs anymore. Not to say that you shouldn't, but not if you need them, but every drug that's on a shelf in a pharmacy is available at the hypothalamus. Our body has its own pharmacies. It's just how do we access that pharmacy and release the right dosage at the right time.
Leslie: Yeah, I was going to get there eventually, and we might as well pause on this since you're saying it now. It is really wild to think that once you learn how to control your breath in various ways, things like alcohol and street drugs start to become a lot less appealing because, you know, I mean, I still drink alcohol socially, but I noticed that I'm inclined to drink a lot less. And I know we've talked about this before, because it's kind of like, why do that if you can basically, you know, get high for free and not have a hangover the next day?
Robert: It would be weird to sit at one of the bars in Hollywood on a Saturday night going, you know sniffing and snorting just so you can get high while others are drinking but uh yeah I mean one of the things that struck me as I learned about the three-part breath that you and I are very familiar with was in the late 60s Stanislav Grof yeah who was the creator of holotropic breathwork was working as a research assistant in Switzerland when LSD was introduced they they received a box And they were doing a lot of work with multiple personality disorders and they thought that the LSD and the psychedelic experience could really help their patients. And as soon as they started to do the research and started to work with their people, They pulled it off the market. The FDA decided that it was a controlled drug and we have no more access to it. Having been to India, Stanislav Graf, and done a lot of deep work with one of the yogis that he worked with there, he realized that he could replicate the experience of LSD, the hallucinogenic, you know, psychedelic experience through breathwork. And so he created a version of a yoga pranayama practice that he trademarked and obviously you have to train with one, either him or one of his, one of his cohorts to be licensed to teach. holotropic breathwork but the three-part breathing technique that you and I do comes from India. It's thousands of years old and it has a similar experience and it's not trademarked and so you and I can do it whenever we want and with whomever we choose to do it. That to me made me realize that There's a correlation between, again, the drugs on the shelf and the hypothalamus, which produces everything we need in the right dosage at the right time. And it's just a matter of tapping into that part of it. So I think the birth you and I are familiar with. certainly through our experiences has done that for both of us, so yeah.
Leslie: Absolutely, and we're gonna talk about that a lot more in a minute. Sure. Before we get there, will you tell us a little bit about when you tried the sort of three-part breathing technique for the first time? When was your first experience with that? 2009. Okay.
Robert: You know, I was at the yoga studio where I took the teacher training and shortly after I got certified, I realized that was not the path. But the yoga pranayama stayed. It triggered something and it kept going. That yoga studio closed. So I had to find another yoga studio and one just opened much closer to where I was living in Los Angeles. And so, you know, you go to yoga class and one day this guy shows up and he goes, hi, my name is Brian. I do this thing on a Friday night at 8 o'clock. It's a breathwork practice. So during Shavasana today, we'll do like four or five minutes of it just to give you a taste. Ah, cool. And if it resonates with you, you can come to class on Monday. And that's exactly how it happened. So we finish up class, and instead of a regular shavasana, we do three minutes of breath work. And as you well know, the breathing technique we do begins to raise the body's physical vibration. My body started tingling, and then from tingling, it started vibrating. And I remember thinking, I need to explore a little bit further. That was it. That was really all it was. So at the end of a yoga practice, it led to going that Friday night. And that Friday night was totally cathartic. I was at a place in my life where I was struggling for my own identity, having just separated after a 22-year relationship. I was a little lost. So yoga started to help me ground and trying to find focus and find direction. And that first yoga pranayama, that first breathwork practice, blew me out of the water. I mean, it was the most incredibly powerful experience. I was ready. I was ready to crack open. Yeah. And the word cracked me open. And that was that was the first time back in 2009, May 2009. In fact, I have it written down in my calendar. Cool.
Leslie: Yeah. This this actually feels like a wonderful opportunity to maybe talk a little bit for people who have never done this. Can you say a little bit more about either what you remember about that night or just in terms of your experience sort of just working with this practice in general and doing all this breath work, can you talk a little bit about like the sensations you feel in your body and and just for people in general? Like I want to kind of give people a taste of sort of what happens internally as we start doing this work and having these experiences.
Robert: Yeah the three part breath Two inhales, one exhale, right? All done. Should we demo it for everybody? Yeah, we can do that. You want to do it together? Sure. One hand on the belly, people. One hand on the chest. All open mouth, because we take more oxygen open mouth, as you well know. And it is the oxygen in the bloodstream that activates the hypothalamus. We've mentioned that several times already. So the first inhale, relaxed jaw, relaxed throat is into the belly. Second inhale into the chest. Exhale. So that is the three-part breath. And we actually do that for 21 minutes. That is the work phase. That is the phase that generates all the energy in the body, that raises the body's physical vibration.
Leslie: Hyperoxygenates your blood.
Robert: Yeah, yeah. And once all that oxygen reaches the brain, it takes about a minute after we start. And as soon as it hits the brain, it activates the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland. We know that as the crown chakra in yoga, in medicine, that is the control center for the endocrine system. So the endocrine system and the chakra system are exactly one and the same. Yeah, isn't that incredible? Different words. So the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland come online, flooding the bloodstream with a cocktail of hormones. Hormones is a fancy name for chemicals and the increased chemical activity in the bloodstream also increases the electrical activity in the body. And all this increased energy in the body begins to raise the body's physical vibration. So we gently tingle as we start the breath. And again, as we just said, we do this for 21 minutes. After about seven or eight minutes, your whole body is buzzing, vibrating, obviously, depending very much on how committed you are to the breath or how much fear there is, because there's an element of letting go, surrendering to this energy. And if a client or a student shows up with control issues, their experience very much depends on how willing they are to let go. Assuming that you decide to really surrender and let go, the body buzzes at a very high frequency. And as a result, the physical and the emotional bodies begin to respond, you know.
Leslie: You're actually reminding me, Robert. So this happened to me the very, very first time that I ever did breathwork. And then it never happened again, actually. But the very first time that I ever did breathwork, it was 2020. You know, in the depths of the pandemic, I did something online. This was before you and I met for the first time. And the very first time that I ever did this three part breathing technique, I felt so high that I briefly thought I almost could go crazy. And it was interesting because I never like I'm saying I never felt that way again. But it was almost as if my my sort of crown chakra was so activated and the elevated feelings of euphoria were so strong, that it was like, Oh, could I I don't even know what I thought would happen, but like have a psychotic break or something like it was, I just it was the very first time. And then I never felt that way again. But it was it was very much connected to just how high I felt like I think I just had never felt that kind of high before.
Robert: Yeah. And that brings me back to Stanislav Grof and LSD. There's that sensation that LSD will trigger in the body. The difference is if the trip on LSD isn't quite going the way you want it, you just got to go the whole way. In breathwork, if something doesn't feel right, and I have yet to work with somebody in 14 years to have a psychotic experience, I think as a facilitator, your and my job, since you got certified, is to make sure that we We go to those places, those dark places, without re-triggering the trauma. We want to release and heal the trauma without re-triggering it. So that's one of the major skills that we learn doing this work. Yes. But back to, I am in control. If something doesn't feel right, or I feel like I'm out of control because I've been doing the breath so deeply and so consistently that I feel that I'm out of control, the moment I stop the breath, the energy dissipates pretty quickly, and I'm back to my natural state of awareness very, very quickly. So that's what's so powerful.
Leslie: I think that's a really important thing to point out, and you're spot on. One of the biggest differences between getting high from doing breathwork and doing a drug is that you can always just stop breathing if there's something about the experience that you're having that's really truly, you know, unpleasurable or scary or, you know, if something about it feels bad. And I'm sure, you know, I remember kind of just naturally doing that. That night I just sort of backed off of it. And then I think once I realized that I wasn't, there's no such thing as sort of going crazy from doing this, I kind of never had to worry about it again. But it is interesting to think that people, there's a variety of experiences that people can have. It can sometimes feel like it is very activating, right? In the sense that some people can really, you know, if you think about the idea of trauma being stored in your tissues, part of what we're doing is releasing stored trauma.
Robert: We're poking.
Leslie: Yeah, we're poking at it.
Robert: We're poking at the wounds that have been swept under the carpet. They're still there waiting. Yeah. You know, I was watching something the other day and someone said, and they were using grief as an example. Grief is very, very powerful. And if we don't allow ourselves to feel it, it sits and it waits.
Leslie: Yeah.
Robert: I'm here whenever you're ready. It won't go away until you and I decide to sit with it, to invite it in. And on my walk this morning, I was kind of thinking what he was talking about. And the vision of a guest came to mind. Think of the emotions that you have been resisting or have you stuffed and buried and you're not even aware of you've been doing the stuffing and the burying for so long. Think of them as a guest, a temporary guest. You invite them into your house, into your being. Sit with them. Sit with them. Have a cup of tea. Discuss. And then with grace and with love, allow them to leave. And the only way you and I can ever allow our repressed and suppressed emotions, our trauma, The only way we can release that stuff out of our body is to feel it. You know, you and I joke about how the adage of healing is feel it to heal it. It's the only way we can let go. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's the only way. It's not an intellectual exercise, letting go. So, and most of us are very uncomfortable with our feelings because of numerous reasons, you know, versus children. I mean, I know growing up as a child of a Middle Eastern upbringing from Iraq, boys don't cry was a very common, you know, repeated phrase, you know, stop whining, has nothing to cry about, don't be ridiculous, grow up, be a man, like at six and seven and eight years old. So if that becomes the programming, Emotions are not welcome here. That's the sign, right? And so, as you know and I know, emotions are simply energy in motion, and they are meant to move through us. Emotions are our teachers. And if we don't allow that to happen, as you mentioned a minute ago, we store them in the physical body at the cellular level. Yeah. So that's what gets in the way of most of us living our best life. And so, that's why this work was such a revelation. It's… It's my way of tapping into that part of me that I've hidden and not wanted to look at for eons. And inviting them in as a guest, sitting with them, having a cup of tea, the proverbial cup of tea, and releasing by feeling. And as a result, feeling that lightness of being that there's the number of people who come to Breathwork for the first time and at the end go, oh my God, I feel so much lighter. Yeah, and that's a real feeling because you are literally letting go of baggage you've been holding on to for all these years.
Leslie: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm curious about this masculinity piece that you're bringing into it because I wonder how this work has transformed your relationship with your own masculinity in the way that you're describing.
Robert: So here's the irony to all of this. I grew up most of my life, even in Iraq and Baghdad, till I was 12, surrounded by women. You know, my dad was very busy achieving and providing. So my mom was in the house, although she was working, too. But we had a maid, because that's what you did in the 60s in Iraq. You had a maid. I had my grandaunt living with us. The majority of my cousins, there were more girls and women than boys. My grandmother lived just down the street. I had a sister. Even our dog was a female. So I was surrounded by all this feminine energy. Something inside was pushing up against it. And that was the programming. Boys don't cry, grow up, be a man, all about that. So my entire life, there was this push and pull between what was innate and what the programming was. Sure. this was one of the most, breath work, that first experience, was one of the most liberating experiences because that quiet in a voice that was always there saying, yes, don't do that. That hurts people. Don't say that. That's not kind. So the battle between being a man and the heart, the heart center, which is very powerful, but very, very feminine energy, that struggle was real my entire life until that first breathwork session when I realized holy crap, I can be who that quiet inner voice inside me has always said to be and still be a man. And that first session was cathartic in that I was in a room, mostly of women, like most yoga classes. Right. You know, that breathwork session was no different. There was a woman laying next to me and a guy laying to the left of me, because we do this work laying down, as you know. And we were breathing, and people were moaning, and people were crying over there.
Leslie: Oh, yeah, we need to tell people about that, too, that when you get really activated, it's people that feel it. I just want to explain this to people because they don't know that there's a temptation to start like moaning and making noises or even shaking your body and that kind of stuff.
Robert: Yeah, because as you start raising your physical vibration, you start shaking some of that stuff loose, right? Whatever you've been holding on to at the cellular level in your physical body, all that trauma, all of the stuffing and the burying and the repressing and the suppressing, as you raise your physical vibration, it's like shaking that stuff loose again. To me, the visual is when you take out old carpets and you start banging up against them to release all the dust.
Leslie: It is a good metaphor. And it's amazing how I think that part in and of itself, for me, I think is really powerful because there's a certain amount of releasing of self-consciousness. If you're really going to lean into that part of the practice, which I think can be a really powerful part of the practice, you have to let go of the part of us that is so often kind of monitoring our own expressions or what our bodies are doing or that sound, that sound might sound weird to make or you kind of have to let go of your self-consciousness.
Robert: There's a huge element of surrender. Yeah. Right? And so one of the first things I remind people when I talk about this healing energy is to explain where that healing energy comes from, right? We talked about the chemistry and all of that, but at the core of it all, the energy that created you heals you. Yeah. Same energy. Yeah. It's created the universe. Created you. That's the same energy that you're tapping into. But I don't want to lose this thread of the masculinity piece, because I think there's so much here. So back to the experience of as you begin to breathe, as you begin to raise your physical vibration, emotions are going to start coming up for you, right? Emotions, most of the emotions we repress are anger, fear, guilt, shame. Grief. Very, very, very common is the sadness and the grief that, you know, because boys don't cry, you know? whatever happens, don't, don't cry. So that energy is shoved down. And, and, and one of the first things that started to come up for me that first session, as I started to breathe and really surrender and let go was the, the, these waves of deep, deep, deep sorrow. And of course the programming was to what What are you doing? You can't cry here in the middle of 35, mostly wimped, don't you dare. So there was that shoving and pushing and it wasn't until the gentleman next to me let out like a primal scream to release energy. And from the scream, you heard like almost a four, five, six year old start to cry. and the dam fricking broke inside of me. I just, just, because I was holding on and holding on and holding on. Oh, fuck yeah. And, and, and because the man next to me let go. Something somewhere gave me permission. Oh, it's so incredible. It was unbelievable. It was. And here's the thing, you know, 50 years of, of just stuffing and burying, well, 40 probably, you know, wave after wave after wave. And of course, with, with, with grief, there's the companion hand in hand is anger. So between the crying, like the six-year-old that, you know, you've seen a four, five, six-year-old cry that just can't… That's what it was like. I couldn't catch my breath to cry properly, but the emotion was so powerful that it just came wave after wave, and then there was anger. And I remember thinking how embarrassed and angry I was, allowing myself to cry in public. It was such a mindfuck. I mean, it was totally… But there came a point where the pain of holding on was greater than the pain of letting go. That was the tipping point. And I knew in that moment that this entire life, this entire journey of all the things I've done and all the life experiences and the places I've lived and the experience I had, had culminated in this moment doing this breath work to remind me to reconnect with my divine soul, with that inner soft, kind and gentle and very loving part of me that I had hidden for eons, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So the masculinity piece was like, now what?
Leslie: Yeah. Well, I think this, this piece is so huge because I think sadly, to the point that you were making earlier about the mostly women in the yoga studios and that kind of stuff. We live in a world where sadly, most of the people who engage in personal growth work are women. You know, it's the ladies that are going to therapy. They're the ones that are doing the yoga and doing the breath work and all of that kind of stuff. And I think that, um, You know, you think about a phrase like toxic masculinity, and it feels to me like there's just a lot in here. You know, I'm just so happy that you can speak to this piece of sort of what happens with men and boys when their emotions get repressed. And it just makes me wonder what you think about when you think about this on almost like a societal level. Like, do you have words of wisdom for the men and boys that might be listening to this right now?
Robert: So we, as a parent, we parent how we were parented.
Leslie: Yeah.
Robert: So my parents were born in the late 20s, early 30s. Their parents were born in the late 1890s. Yeah, wow. So if they were parented by parents that were born in the 19th century and nothing changed, I was parented. And if I didn't break the cycle, it meant my two daughters were being parented by, you know, ideas and methodologies and programs and beliefs from the late 19th century.
Leslie: If not earlier than that, right?
Robert: Because it didn't start with them either. Who did the work along this ancestral line? Nobody. So we are here as transitional characters, right? We're here to break the cycle. So for me, The flip side of the toxic masculinity, which is kind of a popular phrase right now, is how can I, as a male, as a man, connect to my divine masculine? How do I stand in my power and just approach life in general and my relationships from a place of self-confidence and self-worth and self-esteem that is deeply rooted in compassion and forgiveness. Self-compassion first and self-forgiveness and empathy and all of those things. And understanding that that is not a weakness. Right. That is actually extremely powerful. Yeah. Because if I am to look at, as I mentioned, I was surrounded by a lot of women growing up. My grandmother specifically was a very, very powerful figure in my life growing up because both parents worked and when they needed a babysitter, I was, you know, grandma would look after me. And I remember how soft and loving and freaking strong she was. How can I emulate that as a man? I can still be strong. I can still stand in my power. I can still you know, not take the path of toxic masculinity, but be powerful at the same time from a loving, kind, compassionate, forgiving, empathic place. That has to be taught though. You know, as a six, seven, eight year old boy being told to be a man, but not being given a manual on how to be a man, you know, so what does that mean? I start looking at the older you know, either cousins or even my dad, and emulate that behavior. Clearly, that's what it means to be a man. And dad, may he rest in peace, had demons. And he was not the most, you know, I loved him to death. But I look back, and he, his version of man was based on his father's version. So that's not, it wasn't full of compassion and empathy. It was rooted in misogyny. And, and, and my way or the highway, you know, I'm the man of the house. Do as I say, not as I do. All of that stuff, all of those cliches that we, you know. So it's been a journey. It's been a journey to understand that I can connect to the softer, more feminine side of me, the divine masculine, where the divine masculine resides, and still be able to stand in my power and, you know, be who I am at my core.
Leslie: Such a wonderful way to put it because I do think in our society one of the things that gets really twisted is there's this idea that it's almost like if men address this issue within themselves they're going to become feminized somehow and I don't think it's about you know It's not like women are the benchmark of what's right any more than men were ever the benchmark of what's right. I think thinking about it through the lens of your divine masculinity is really well put because it's almost like how do you connect with your masculinity at a soul level as opposed to an ego level, you know?
Robert: We live in a world of paradox. You can't be feminine without having a masculine. Just look at a battery. It's got a plus and a minus. It won't work if there isn't that paradox. So we both possess, we all possess, excuse me, both both of those energies. It's how do we find balance? Because too much of one and too much of the other is out of balance. It's finding the balance because there are ways to approach certain life situations from a softer place and the opposite applies where I have to be strong. But finding the balance between the feminine and the masculine energy because we all possess both. I think one of the things that struck me was a conversation, you know, my oldest daughter, who's 37, you know, she works at a gaming company, and I asked her, you know, are you able to be who you are, you know, without being frowned upon in a way, or do you find that you're having to chameleonize to outman the men, you know, to hold your own? And she said that, you know, it's an interesting question. I think at this company the culture is a little different, so I can be who I am and I'm very proud that I can over swing to the masculine side. And when I said, I said, I said, you're pretty lucky in that, you know, most, most women in the corporate world and the outside world have to outman the men to survive, which I think is, is, is a bit of a tragedy for me. And I think a lot of that is because the men aren't connected to the divine masculine. So they've swung all the way to this side and for the men or the women and it feels like they have to swing more over that way to find balance because I think if the men came back to the middle to find balance between the feminine and the masculine energy, the women wouldn't have to, I feel, go all out to prove themselves, you know?
Leslie: Yeah, we could sort of be more at peace with things being in balance, right?
Robert: Yeah. Yeah, but that's just what I think and I don't know.
Leslie: Yeah, I want to go back to something else that we were talking about a moment ago because I'm thinking about this experience that you had of doing breathwork for the very first time and you're feeling like, you know, that your windows were getting like blown off your house kind of thing, you know, having this experience of confronting all of your grief and anger and everything that was coming up. I can only imagine that many times since then you've also had the experience of just ecstasy doing this I mean I don't know about you but so often for me when I do it a lot of what I'm feeling is just like pure ecstasy and I wonder if you can kind of speak to the sort of the polarity of both of those experiences that sometimes we're purging trauma and sometimes we're just soaring through the cosmos.
Robert: Yeah I think one of the most powerful images that happened when I did my my training was my teacher said think of the healing journey Robert as an onion, right? You show up and you can only work with the outside layer. Whatever that outside is, it could be sadness, it could be grief, it could be euphoria, right? So you show up, you do your breathwork session, and that outer layer melts away only to reveal the next layer. And each of those layers has stories, has experiences, has emotions, has all sorts of things in them. And there's no telling what each breathwork session holds. So not every breathwork session is yelling and screaming and crying and, you know, releasing anger and releasing grief and pain. You know, many breathwork sessions have turned into moments of revelation. If, for example, you're struggling, you're at a crossroads in a moment in your life and you're having to make a decision between this or that and you're vacillating, you're going back and forth. I often found you know, setting an intention for clarity and some guidance. And then going in to do the breathwork session. There's no guarantee that I'll get the guidance, but quite often I do because the intention.
Leslie: So often. I get incredible downloads when I'm doing breathwork.
Robert: Right. So those are the downloads that where there's no crying, no laughing, no yelling. There's more cruising the cosmos on cloud nine with just images. If you're clairvoyant, you will see images. If you're clairsentient, you will get these physical sensations, you know, or clairaudient, you may hear, you'll get messages. So It every session is so different. Yeah. And it's not uncommon that you will get the clarity and the guidance that you've asked the universe for during a breathwork session, because you get into that altered state of consciousness. Yeah. And by raising your physical vibration, you are no longer tethered to this three dimensional physical body
Leslie: And all of its limitations. All of its limitations. Limit thinking and all of that kind of stuff.
Robert: Allowing you to access higher levels of consciousness. Yeah. By raising your physical vibration you have access to higher frequencies and whatever downloads are available at those high levels of consciousness. That's what's so incredible at this work.
Leslie: I love that.
Robert: Yeah, much.
Leslie: I have experienced a lot of that. Yeah, it's a big part of I think what makes it so addictive for me. But so I could keep talking to you about this for many, many, many more hours. But I want to be mindful of your and everybody else's time. Sure. Is there anything that we haven't talked about yet today that you feel like is really important to share? before we wrap up?
Robert: Yeah, I think what's really important is to understand as powerful as breathwork is, it may not be the thing for you. Yeah. Show up for the first time, show up open to the experience. Yeah. And if you, like you or me go, oh wow, I found the thing, right? The thing for me, um, uh, Go with that, but also trust your inner guidance. If you show up and you're not quite ready for how intense this work can be, honor that quiet inner voice inside you that says, this is awesome, but we're not quite ready for this. Let's find something else and we'll come back around. So trusting your inner guidance to whether or not to continue down this road, but know that you are working with divine energy. And no matter how uncomfortable it gets, because all healing work is uncomfortable, no harm can come to you.
Leslie: I thank you for for adding that and it's reminding me of just a piece of this conversation that feels so important to me is it's interesting to think that we can kind of get at our personal growth work through so many different angles, right? Whether it's talk therapy, whether it's psychedelics, whether it's Reiki, whatever, you know, there's so many different things.
Robert: One of the things, mushrooms, mushrooms, mushrooms, ayahuasca, all of it, all that stuff.
Leslie: But one of the things that I feel like I've learned over time that feels so important to me, especially as somebody who, you know, was trained as a talk therapist, and I do that as part of my work, in part because I had gone to therapy at a young age, and it was really positively impactful for me. It's amazing how much we cannot get to everything by talking about it. And so I hear you that it's really important for people to honor if they try this work, and it doesn't work for them, you know, no shame in the game, it's okay, you can go try something else. But it is really, to me, it feels important to point out that one of the reasons why this work is so powerful, when people experiment with it, and they like it, is because not everything is going to get accessed merely by our thinking, talking minds.
Robert: Simply because trauma is trapped energy in the physical body. Yeah. I think the two, any kind of energy work, any kind of healing work that works with your energy, as a companion to talk therapy is important. The two go hand in hand. Because talk therapy brings your awareness to what it is you need to work on. Yes. At the end of the day, you still have to do the energy work to release it from your physical body. Yeah. Because it's stuck in the body as energy. And so talk therapy brings awareness to it. Five years ago, a therapist, a trauma therapist from Santa Monica took my class and the next day I got an email saying, I have people I've been working with for 10, 12 years and they're so good at talking their way around. I'd really like for you to start working with them because your work is gonna help them actually get beyond the circular, you know. Because some people are really good at talking their way through. Absolutely. And dodging and weaving. You can't dodge and weave the energy work, but the two together I think are an absolute brilliant companion. I'm with you. They complement each other nicely.
Leslie: Yeah, very much so. But thank you so much for doing this with me, Robert.
Robert: So honored.
Leslie: It's been a lot of fun.
Robert: I know.
Leslie: You've been watching or listening to The Nature of Nurture with me, Dr. Leslie Carr, and I want to thank you for joining us. You can find Robert at breathewithrobert.com, and you can find me at lesliecarr.com. Many thanks to Robert for having this conversation with me, and to all the people who worked behind the scenes to make it happen. Full credits can be found in the show notes. If you found this conversation valuable, please let me know by leaving a review or rating, or by sharing the episode with at least one person who you think might enjoy it too. You can also like or subscribe on YouTube or in any podcast app that you can get your hands on. Thank you again for tuning in. I'll see you next time.