Patrick Obolgogiani (00:06)
Sean, I thought we would start with basic definitions. Could you help me understand how you think about bipolar disorder? What is it and what maybe it’s not?

Sean Blackwell (00:20)
Okay, well, and this would go with a wide range of disorders, including schizoaffective disorder, schizophrenia, even depression to a certain degree, is these labels are basically a group of symptoms that are coming together. And so when you go to a psychiatrist and you show a number of symptoms, then they give this disorder, right? But there is no medical basis for this in the sense that

Patrick Obolgogiani (00:42)
you

Sean Blackwell (00:48)
There is no exam, a medical exam or MRI or PET scan or blood test of any type to show evidence of schizophrenia, schizoaffective bipolar disorder or depression, anything like that. Okay, so, but when you get into the symptoms of what’s going on, you’ve kind of got two levels of bipolar disorder and one is the one most people think about, ⁓ which is bipolar two, hypomania. And that would be things like, ⁓

a lot of business ideas, nonstop talking, irritability, lack of sleep, shopping sprees, perhaps hypersexuality. the other end, depression, totally low energy, feeling like your life’s going nowhere, regretting your life decisions, ⁓ like you don’t belong, that kind of thing. So that’s the typical manic depression that people think about that usually gets diagnosed as bipolar too.

Patrick Obolgogiani (01:34)
you

Okay.

Sean Blackwell (01:46)
Bipolar one is when those manias, that hypomania, gets more intense and then goes into psychosis. And psychosis is easily defined, I think, as simply a break with reality. And more specifically, you think that you’re dreaming or that you’re in a kind of a dream world where the world responds to you as if you’re dreaming. And then from that place, you can get yourself into a lot of trouble.

Patrick Obolgogiani (02:11)
Mm.

It sounds very similar to how, in particular in Hollywood, the schizophrenia is defined by having this illusionary hallucinations about what is real. So you’re saying that bipolar one is actually quite similar to schizophrenia.

Sean Blackwell (02:31)
Looking at the history of how these things are discussed, my belief is that currently now what we’re calling bipolar one in the 1980s would have been referred to as schizophrenia. So for example, the Dr. Stan Grof, who I studied, he looked at, for example, what he described as a spiritual emergency, which was a highly spiritual kind of psychosis that you can work through quite

Patrick Obolgogiani (02:36)
Mm.

Right, makes sense.

Sean Blackwell (03:01)
easily and it’s something that I had in 1996, he compared that to schizophrenia. He didn’t refer to bipolar disorder. But now when you look at the diagnosis that people are receiving, schizophrenia now seems to be reserved for people who are dealing with a lot of paranoia. Okay, the police are after me, there’s cameras everywhere, that kind of thing. And a lot of disturbing hallucinations like I’m being chased by devils.

Patrick Obolgogiani (03:20)
All

Sean Blackwell (03:28)
and people who have no insight into what’s going on with them. Usually when people have bipolar disorder, they know. When people have schizophrenia, often, they think they’re perfectly fine. They just have somebody following them everywhere, you know.

Patrick Obolgogiani (03:29)
right. Makes sense. Well, kind of. Well, that maybe is a good segway to your book, the bipolar.

Sean Blackwell (03:43)
Yeah.

Patrick Obolgogiani (03:51)
Awakenings that you released last year. I’m curious what prompted writing a book, which I understand is a quite a big undertaking always.

Sean Blackwell (03:54)
All right, I’ve got it right here.

Right. Well, I got into this work, you know, the subtitle is the quest to heal bipolar disorder. And what happened was, you know, I had had an experience that got me put in the psychiatric hospital in 1996, which had been very, very beneficial for me. It ended seven years of on again, off again, depression. It gave me a sense of new meaning in life. ⁓ I interacted with people better. My salary tripled at work after I got out of the psychiatric hospital. Okay. And I was never medicated.

So it was a very beneficial experience and I wrote a book about that called Am I Bipolar or Waking Up? But then in 2007, when I got, I was living in Brazil and my wife’s nieces had some experience very similar to what I had. And so then I got into this research about, well what’s the difference between what happened to me which was so beneficial but misunderstood and what’s going on with them that’s being labeled with bipolar disorder and

Patrick Obolgogiani (04:45)
So, thank

So,

Sean Blackwell (05:01)
What I found was that there was actually a history of pioneering psychologists in the seventies and eighties that had looked at psychosis as

Patrick Obolgogiani (05:07)
thank you.

Sean Blackwell (05:11)
actually not an illness, but an intended reorganization of the psyche. All right. And so once I got into their work and, talked to countless people online with videos that I made called, I bipolar or waking up? I realized that there was just this huge gray area between people.

who are medicated for life and actually need the medications, people who are having genuine breakthroughs in their life that could be best defined as spiritual, and that most people are somewhere falling in between. And so I coined this term bipolar awakening to embrace that paradox because bipolar tends to be a pejorative, meds for life, you’ve got an illness, there’s no hope for you, awakening, enlightenment, blissful, all that stuff.

I just decided my website needs to be bipolar awakenings to cross that boundary, you know.

Patrick Obolgogiani (06:02)
⁓

Yeah, it does. Definitely a big motivation if you’ve felt the transformation on your side is the kind of helping others maybe see that paradigm shift for them as well, what actually is happening inside them.

Sean Blackwell (06:08)
Does that answer your question?

Yeah,

yeah, and to try and guide people who are kind of stuck in that gray area where they see the potential of their spiritual experiences like I had, but are medicated and helping some of those people sort of transition it into a breakthrough as opposed to a breakdown.

Patrick Obolgogiani (06:42)
When you say spiritual, mean, probably a lot of people, including myself, you know, raised in a kind of atheistic environment as growing up. It kind of rings like this immediate like red flag. I’m curious, like how, how do you define that? Because now as I’m getting older, you kind of, broaden your awareness of what it means and it’s maybe not going to equate to, you know, religion or something like that. So how do you think about what is spirituality and also like what it is?

mechanistically, is it like a belief system in the brain? Like, how do think about it?

Sean Blackwell (07:16)
I see human beings as having an inherent spiritual dimension like our biology. You’ve got a spiritual dimension. Your life force is part of that spiritual dimension, whether you believe in it or not. And it’s outside of religious dogma. And that’s where things get complicated because if you’re a materialist or a scientist, you know that there are things from the religions

that make no sense, they’re impossible. Jesus could not have been born of a virgin. He could not have been dead for three days and then been resurrected. I stopped being a Catholic when I was about 20 years old because I just could no longer believe in the resurrection. Then I went into a period of atheism because the orientation of religion is that God is somehow

tangible, in a measurable way. Like, just somehow need to be able to find him or see him or touch him or something like that or touch her, but they’re real, you know. ⁓ It’s somehow part of our shared reality, and that if science had the tools, science would be able to find God. That’s a religious perspective. And so from an atheistic perspective, it’s like, well, actually,

There is no scientific evidence that God exists because science is about what you can measure. If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist. And from a scientific perspective, materialist perspective, you cannot measure God. cannot exist. But you can have experiences in your life that shift that perception and open you up and make you more intuitive and kind of awaken you to a deeper intelligence that’s going on.

where you have a rational mind. You can see the way people would see things rationally, but then you’ve got these intuitive feelings that are guiding you in another direction. And the second you start to say, you know what, I’m going to follow my heart on this. I know what I’m supposed to be doing, but I’m to follow my heart on this. Reality in a sense can shift on you and it can take surprising turns. It’s a sense like sort of stepping out of the matrix to a certain degree.

Patrick Obolgogiani (09:26)
you

Sean Blackwell (09:42)
And one of the things that happens when people do that is they start to have ⁓ synchronistic experiences, things that are absolutely impossible if you really sat down and thought about the stories they’re sharing. ⁓ Things like you’re thinking about a person from halfway around the world and then they just show up and you meet them. ⁓ wow, I was just talking about you and you thought they were in Australia and they’re in Finland.

that kind of synchronicity. I had a situation once where I had a dream in October

that I saw play out in the beginning of a movie perfectly eight months into the future. I saw a silhouette of a man falling into a jungle canopy in August. And then the next March, I saw that scene in the beginning of King Kong Skull Island, a movie that had not been made yet. And I don’t want to get into the whole story about that, but when things like that happened to you, and it was a very meaningful situation.

then all of sudden you’re just like, okay, ⁓ this is not, the world is not as linear as we think and that this actual quantum dimension, this deeper dimension actually makes the Earth or our life experience look a little bit more like a realm than it does a planet, like a fixed planet. I’ll just leave it at that.

Patrick Obolgogiani (11:15)
Yeah. Just to summarize then, is spirituality is like this intuitive sense that there’s more to the reality rather than kind of the material world? Would that be a fair summary?

Sean Blackwell (11:31)
That’s a fair summary, but also I think that spirituality manifests differently in different people depending on their development and where they’re at. if you have a religion, that’s your spirituality and that needs to be respected and validated, right? If you’re atheist, paradoxically, that’s your spirituality is that you’re atheist, okay? Ken Wilber wrote that he felt that atheists were more further along.

Patrick Obolgogiani (11:38)
Hmm.

Sean Blackwell (12:00)
in the spiritual evolution process than religious people. And why did he believe that was that atheists were more open to follow their own soul and make their own choices, whereas religions would restrict people with certain dogmatic beliefs. So that blew my mind to think of an atheist person as actually being more spiritually evolved than a religious person. So yeah, that was a bit of a mindblower for me.

Patrick Obolgogiani (12:17)
Hmm.

Yeah, maybe switching gears a bit. My understanding, least looking through the book, ⁓ is that a big part of the, I want to call solution, but big part of the mentality of how you actually treat people in a therapy session is breathing exercises. Could you speak more to that and like maybe why breathing and what does it look like?

Sean Blackwell (12:51)
Okay, and there are a myriad at this point of different breathwork techniques and they really do have very different intentions. The one I’m dealing with, for example, maybe I should talk within the concept of the most famous right now, I would say is probably the Wim Hof breathing, which I’m not a, I do Wim Hof breathing, I don’t teach it, but I do it.

Patrick Obolgogiani (13:14)
Sure.

Sean Blackwell (13:19)
know, Wim Hof breathing, you’re talking about an aggressive, accelerated breathing with a specific technique. He’ll tell you belly, chest, head, you know, this. And then at a certain point, once you’re feeling energized, you hold for 30, you hold your breath as long as you can, then you exhale and then you take a deep breath in or hold for 15 seconds. And it’s very structured, all right? And the intentions are to basically to reduce inflammation, right?

And Wim Hof has gone and done scientific experiments. He’s been measured. And you can see, for example, the alkalinity of your urine will change dramatically after doing Wim Hof breathing. I’ve done those tests. I’ve peed on the litmus paper and seen the acidity of my urine go from being extremely acidic to very alkalinic, you know. So this is a scientifically measured thing.

right? And it has strong biological, a strong biological aspect. And that’s the intention. There is overlap. Wim Hof has talked about how certain people have had certain emotional breakthroughs during, during ⁓ Wim Hof breathing as well. But the focus on holotropic breath work, which is my style, which was developed by Stan Grof, is to help people heal emotional issues, ⁓ best described as trauma.

And how you would see trauma is it’s not necessarily something bad that happens to you. It’s something that is emotionally impossible to absorb. Okay. So you become traumatized by bad things because there’s an emotional pain there you’re not ready to accept. And from the Graf, he’s a founder of transpersonal psychology, okay, which sort of accepts the human spirit that the breathing is intended to release that trauma.

Right? Now, where’s the trauma? The trauma is in what he would call bio-energetic blockages in our soul system. You could call it our chakra system or our Kundalini system. And there is no scientific way to measure that system, but you can feel it. Because for example, what put me in the psychiatric hospital, a huge, what felt like explosion of energy at the heart chakra.

which brought up trauma related to a scuba diving accident. So you can have these somatic experiences that are actually rooted in what I would call our Kundalini, okay? This Kundalini energy system, right? Now, when you do breath work, you’re breathing your holotropic breath work, you’re using your own style of breathing, but you’re breathing yourself into a non-ordinary state, which takes about 20 minutes. And in that way, it’s…

parallels psychedelic therapy to a certain degree. when you take them, they break down the ego functioning. When you over breathe for about 20 minutes, that also breaks down your ego functioning. And then you’re more in touch with the unconscious, whatever needs to heal will start to surface. And sometimes it’s very clearly related to specific traumas. Like I worked, I supported a guy in a session.

who had bipolar disorder, who had been shot in the face here in Brazil. He had a scar from a bullet wound that went right through his face. Once that was healed, he never had to go back to psychiatric medications again. He was a medical doctor, by the way, that should also add. ⁓ And so once you get it, the idea is that once you heal enough of this trauma that you can heal bipolar disorder and other disorders, but that everybody is traumatized to some degree.

Patrick Obolgogiani (16:48)
you

Sean Blackwell (17:05)
and that everybody is in a sense on this planet to heal. Even the atheists are here to heal. They just really don’t have that orientation that they’re in a different place, you know? Does that make sense?

Patrick Obolgogiani (17:20)
⁓ So basically like breathing for 20 plus minutes starts dissolving the kind of sense of self in the brain. And that then unlocks these traumas that are held kind of in the body and different muscles, for example. But basically not probably possible to, as far as we know, possible to detect kind of these blockages with the current methods we have. Makes sense. And then basically

When it comes to the actual kind of therapy then within is it, is there like guidance in between or do you kind of almost like allow the inner whatever needs to happen happens and you’re kind of there as a guide to support in the beginning at the end. I’m curious like about what it looks like. Cause I believe in a lot of the holotropic work that other people do, one of the conditions when they say like, we’re not going to treat you or we’re not going to do this with you is a bipolar disorder. So it’s quite interesting how like actually

What you’re saying is like it is actually very possible, but you need to maybe adjust a little bit. Can you talk to that?

Sean Blackwell (18:25)
Yeah, yeah. I’m a certified holotropic breathwork facilitator with a company called Grof Transpersonal Training, which was originally founded by Grof. They’ve had some political separations, but that’s who I was certified with. And bipolar disorder was contraindicated to work with holotropic breathwork because it’s typically done in a group setting for a limited timeframe. But my mission was to help people with bipolar disorder and I could see that the technique had potential.

So I said to myself, why don’t I create a retreat process so that they get private attention in an almost unlimited timeframe so I stay with people in private retreats for up to 10 days. 10 days seems to be the maximum amount of time that they can be with me, okay? And then in that frame, the typical holotropic breathwork frame ⁓ or structure is a three hour session played with powerful music.

Patrick Obolgogiani (18:55)
Hmm.

Sean Blackwell (19:24)
You’ve got trained facilitators there and they don’t guide your process at all. And that’s one of the unique things about the holotropic principles is that it’s completely unguided, but the facilitators are trained to support you and protect you, give you body work when needed, if you ask, also give you affection if asked too, in a non-sexual way.

to really bring their presence so that the facilitator is actually there and prepared to love you if you request. But the whole thing is, there’s no manipulation to the whole thing at all. But it’s a three hour structure. And so with my retreats, what I was doing was I would tell clients, following all the principles, but I would say, you could stop breathing whatever you want. So if they wanted to stop after 30 minutes, they could.

Patrick Obolgogiani (20:00)
Mm. Yep.

Sean Blackwell (20:23)
If anything got too much for them, we could stop and we would also resume whenever they want. So instead of ⁓ having, for example, on a grov training module during a week long session, I would personally be doing holotropic breath work for myself in two, three hour sessions in one week. Okay. On my retreats, we allowing clients to do what they wanted. We were breathing every day of a 10 day retreat.

but usually for shorter periods between 30 minutes and an hour. And when I told the holotropic breathwork facilitators that I was working with people who had a history of psychosis, taking them into non-ordinary states 10 times in 10 days, their jaws would just hit the floor because there was always the risk that the more breathwork you do, the more risk of psychosis could come up because you’re spending more time in the non-ordinary state. But that’s not the case. What happens is the breathwork grounds you, you know.

Patrick Obolgogiani (20:52)
Okay.

Sean Blackwell (21:21)
And the more grounded you become, the less likely you are to go into psychosis.

Patrick Obolgogiani (21:27)
Yeah. It seems like in last few years, there’s been this surge of interest in these kind of let’s call them alternative pathways to therapy. As you mentioned, psychedelics has been like recently much more studied in the US, UK and elsewhere. ⁓ But it seems like when it comes to breath work, it’s pretty nascent. And I’m curious based on everything you’ve done ⁓ on your practical experience.

How would you think about the design study to where to, you know, together, it’s like, you know, fund in the future, something where we look into how does breathing and particularly this type of breath work could be an intervention for a subset, at least of people that have a bipolar disorder. How would you think about designing the study to provide maybe evidence that, you know, for the mainstream community and scientific community and also psychiatrists that it is both safe and effective?

Sean Blackwell (22:23)
Yeah, and it’s very challenging because, you know, the hard science is you’ve got to have things that are measurable. We’re talking about how people feel, and that’s not measurable. know, you can make subjective studies and tick some boxes about how a person feels, but that’s about it. And also the healing process can be a little bit unpredictable. So, for example, when people work with me in their first retreat,

Patrick Obolgogiani (22:30)
Yes.

Hmm.

Sean Blackwell (22:53)
their actual processes tend to be quite mild. There’s not a lot of movement when, because typically in holotropic breathwork sessions, people aggressively breathe and then they work it out physically on a mat with this powerful music. There’s a lot of moving around. There’s a lot of vocalization. There’s a lot of powerful emotions. When I work with people with bipolar disorder, actually in the first retreat, they’re very quiet. And part of it is they’re inexperienced with the technique.

Patrick Obolgogiani (23:01)
Mm-hmm.

Sean Blackwell (23:23)
Part of it is that their bio-energetic system seems to be rebuilding itself or being reconnected, mending those blockages to a certain degree. Then in the second retreat we do, they get a lot more emotional. So in the bigger picture, mean, you could be looking at, ⁓ a person able to reduce their psychiatric medication after two years?

Patrick Obolgogiani (23:31)
Thanks.

Sean Blackwell (23:53)
I think that would be a, if you gave them unlimited access to the breath work, and that’s important because everybody has different processes, but boy, if you could give them unlimited access to a similar technique to holotropic breath work for two years and then see where they were at. ⁓ on, for example, various wellness scales, you know, and there are a number of wellness scales in.

Patrick Obolgogiani (24:03)
Hmm.

Sean Blackwell (24:21)
You you feel connected to the world. You feel like your life has meaning. You’re how do you feel about wanting to kill yourself? Do you feel more alive? People with bipolar disorder, for example, tend to have addictions for coffee and energy drinks, you know, because they feel dead inside, you know, ⁓ and can have comorbidity with, for example, marijuana, which is a big trigger.

Patrick Obolgogiani (24:39)
Hmm.

Sean Blackwell (24:50)
Why are they so prone to drug addiction? Well, sometimes they just feel dead inside and the roots of that can go right back into the birth process. So there are ways to test, but the challenge will be it won’t be that much more scientifically valid than any other ⁓ psychological therapy. They’re hard to measure. They’re just difficult to measure from a scientific perspective because it’s subjective.

Patrick Obolgogiani (25:16)
Yeah, I’ve heard,

I guess, you know, one of the most evidence-based methodologies like, you know, CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, but even there, as you mentioned, it’s like mostly a subjective measurement of improvement in those markers of wellbeing when it comes to depression, anxiety. Not that I’m an expert there, I wonder like in depression, I remember reading somewhere that there are some neurological… Yeah, please.

Sean Blackwell (25:38)
Well, and if

I could just say something before you go on, and the paradox, the irony is that CBT isn’t particularly effective. People talk about their issues, but it doesn’t move the needle that much. But because it fits into that kind of medical box, you know, it’s okay, this is the thing that works, you know. And because it ticks a lot of the scientific boxes, people think it’s effective, it’s not that effective. I’ve talked to people over the years, you know.

Colotropic Brethren is much more effective than CBT and there’s no comparison. Absolutely no comparison. But go ahead. Yeah.

Patrick Obolgogiani (26:15)
I think it’s also

one of the most studied methodologies, as you mentioned, because it fits the box. You can study fairly rigorously and get some kind meta-analysis across number of people. You can get a pretty statistically significant result. But I guess with holotropic it’s pretty hard to do like a placebo-controlled, randomness-controlled ⁓ study on it. But exactly, you can’t do it.

Sean Blackwell (26:19)
Yeah.

There’s no placebo. there you can’t,

you can’t have it. Yeah. And as a facilitator, you need to be emotionally invested in the success of your client. Right. You have to be there for them.

Patrick Obolgogiani (26:45)
Yeah, but I the same is true for

the psychedelics, right? There is no placebo, but they still manage to look at some of the impact of that objectively. maybe there’s hope there. Maybe switching gears a bit, you mentioned the…

Sean Blackwell (26:53)
Right. Yeah. Yeah, you would probably measure holotropic. You’d probably

do a holotropic study similar to psychedelic study, I would think.

Patrick Obolgogiani (27:04)
Exactly. Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. Yeah, switching gears a little bit, mentioned the emotion, emotionality, emotionality, being, I remember reading in your work about kind of the suppression of emotions being one of the, you know, difficult things when it comes to trying to kind of reenergize and find yourself. And I would imagine like, if you think about the corporate side, ⁓ we almost by default suppress emotions. ⁓ And many people

probably listening as well come from that side of the world, like where they, the workplace. And I’m just curious to hear what have you learned about kind of emotional work ⁓ in the corporate side, in the workplace, like any advice you have for leaders or just people in the workplace of how to best deal with their emotional side.

Sean Blackwell (27:58)
Right, good question. And I started out, you know, I’m 59 now. And when I was in my 20s, I was in advertising. And part of being professional meant you just kept your emotions in check, you know? Your boss tells you to do something, you say, okay, and you’d be professional and that’s it. And you do need appropriate emotional expression for sure, for sure. One of the jokes I had with… ⁓

when I went for my holotropic breath work training is you never asked one of these people, how are you? Who are people are getting trained. You never said, how are you? Unless you were prepared for a good 15 minute answer. Because if you’re at work and someone says, how are you? What do you say? You say, I’m good, thanks. You your house could be on fire. Your kids could be, you know, kidnapped, but at work you’re good, right?

Patrick Obolgogiani (28:40)
Let’s do.

Sean Blackwell (28:54)
Transpersonal psychologists, I woke up this morning, I had this dream about my mother and I had the sense of abandonment and ⁓ these people are connoisseurs of emotions. Their world

is very emotional. And I think it’s untenable in a business world to be that in touch with your emotion. Well, not to be that in touch, but to be that expressive, right? But I do think that

There are, there is an overlap with creativity and even it can create better relationships at work. If people did a little bit more ⁓ emotional work on themselves, got a little more cognizant of their own issues, you know, so that you could have meetings where I could come into your room and say, you know, I’ll confess Patrick, when you said that I’m not going to be part of that meeting, I felt like shit.

instead of me saying to you, ⁓ no, it’s fine, it’s fine. See what I mean? And one of the things they’ve learned about, this was a study on people who had a spiritual but non-religious orientation. In business interactions, people with a spiritual non-religious orientation don’t see the interaction, the conversation, the meeting, or between a student and a teacher, for example.

Patrick Obolgogiani (30:00)
Yeah.

Sean Blackwell (30:25)
as transactional. They see it as relational. people will, if they have a spiritual orientation, they will spend more time and be more emotionally invested in the conversation than a person with more of a business perspective where you can really feel like you’re being rushed out of the room. know, ⁓ time is money. What do you got? You know, I’ve had a lot of meetings with my bosses. You go into their office, you sit down, they say, what do you got for me? That’s,

even before hello is what do you got for me? And then you give him your 10 minutes. Thanks. Goodbye. Out the door. You go, you know, that was Las Vegas. That was about as tough an environment you could get. That’s when I worked in advertising, but you know, it can really be tough in a business environment. And I think the more humanity we can bring into a business world, the better off we’re going to

Patrick Obolgogiani (31:17)
Hmm. Maybe. Before we start closing, we’d love to move a little more esoteric realm, ⁓ which I know you’ve worked on. And I think in the book as well, you mentioned this interesting framework around ⁓ having like the modalities and contributions that they have. I think you had like the psychiatry was the, ⁓ around kind of physiological contribution. And then you had the, ⁓ psychology as intellectual peer support, you know, from your friends, family as.

Sean Blackwell (31:41)
Right.

Patrick Obolgogiani (31:47)
emotional and then the last one was shamanic was like the spiritual contributor. I think the word shamanic, we have this image of like an Indian shaman or something where they’re ⁓ speaking to spirits and trying to get rain to fall down. What is the modern version of that and how do you even define that like the shamanism in the current state of the world and what’s the contribution towards ⁓ the work you do?

Sean Blackwell (31:47)
promotional.

Right.

You

Yeah. Well, I guess in a very simple way, I would just describe shamanism as an intimate relationship with spirit. I would put it like that. So that you don’t need to go through a priest, for example, or you don’t need to follow a particular dogma. You’ve got your own relationship with that non-ordinary state. But it can be interpreted in what I think of as three major or very different ways. Okay.

And I talk about it in one of my chapters of my book. And it depends on your level of development. So for example, in tribes, the shamans are actually very materialistic in a particular way. Their work is to make it rain. It’s to bring a good birth. It’s to win a battle. It’s to eliminate a sickness. It’s not about personal development. And it’s very superstitious in a sense. For example, if… ⁓

Patrick Obolgogiani (32:48)
⁓

Sean Blackwell (33:15)
Twins are born in some tribes. The association, and this is tribes in the Amazon and in other parts of the world as well. Often twins are killed because they believe that only an animal can give multiple births. Okay. So they’ll kill them. And how they’ll kill them in one particular tribe in the Amazon is they will bury the child, children alive under the ground so that their spirits do not come back and haunt the tribe. Okay.

So this is a very supernatural orientation that sometimes has deadly consequences. Extremely ritualistic, but it’s not our place to judge because these tribes have survived for thousands of years. And so there’s something about what they’re doing that is helping them stay intact. And that kind of orientation is found all around the world. It’s pervasive.

How we come back to shamanism in what I would call a postmodern orientation is from more of a diversity aspect. So I would call this the postmodern shamanism. We go back to these tribes, early civilizations. We find parts that are kind of interesting to us, and we kind of adopt them, but only bringing up what we think of as sort of positive or beneficial.

and for our personal development. So the whole New Age movement is often centered around what I would call a postmodern shamanism, right? But there’s a lot of culture that’s borrowed from native peoples around the world. You’ll see people doing sweat lodges, they’ve got their feathers, they’ve got their special songs. These are all remnants of tribal cultures, know, songs, music, clothes, and sometimes taboos about

what you can’t do and what you can do, this sort of thing. So that would be ⁓ postmodern shamanism. And then what I would call a stage eight ⁓ advanced quantum shamanism is when you realize that, look, this shamanic aspect, it’s almost like humans have an internet connection that we haven’t realized yet. And all you need to do to connect with spirit authentically is get your yoga mat and lay down, you know, put your…

put your sweatpants pants on, get your yoga mat out and get to work. And once you’ve had enough experience, you don’t need a particular technique. You don’t need a music. You don’t need anything. You, you know what you’re looking for. It’s, it becomes almost as easy as clicking on the internet on your computer, you know, in the eighties, we wouldn’t know what you’re talking about, but now it’s just a way of life. don’t even think about it. Right. So, I see that sort of.

quantum shamanic aspect as something that we’ve all got. We just haven’t all been able to activate yet. And part of what that means as well is that we can take on the healing or we can take on the unconscious pain and unconscious energies of other people. ⁓ Only by being empathetic, there can be no ego involved, but the healing field like this

higher intelligence that really is the healing agent in holotropic breath work can share that information with other people that are in the room or even not in the room because I do this work at a distance at this point. And how you’ll know is that there will be psychic information that’s conveyed. From a scientific perspective, some people think that psychic experiences simply do not exist, that they’re all a figment of your imagination. But psychic information is something that comes to me

frequently. So just to give one simple example of how it can come ⁓ with a client I worked with a few weeks ago, I had a dream that I was, I had a, ⁓ my wife on, sitting on my lap, nibbling on my earlobe. And I had a girlfriend watching and, ⁓ who was hurt by what I was doing.

Now, think about it, this makes no sense. If I’m gonna have somebody who’s gonna be hurt, it’s gonna be my wife and it’s gonna be a girlfriend that’s nibbling on my earlobe. This was the opposite. This tells me this is not my material, because this makes no sense to my life or anything like that, right? I called the woman, I said what happened. It turned out that she had had a lover while she was married who loved having his earlobes nibbled. And that’s what that whole dream was all about.

So immediately she grasped the synchronicity of the whole thing and knew that I was working on her material. Okay. So I’ll just leave it at that. And I could go on with these kinds of stories for a 10 hour podcast.

Patrick Obolgogiani (38:03)
Hmm.

Yeah.

I guess it might be worth mentioning you do have a podcast so people can check it out. probably is more material they can ⁓ review. Yeah, I think just to be fully transparent, there’s a part of me that is open to the idea that there’s a lot that we don’t know and that we should be open to at least investigating, but also like

Sean Blackwell (38:16)
Yeah, I do. I do.

Patrick Obolgogiani (38:33)
that we should be grounded in, like there is a reality out there and that it can be investigated. There’s like, you know, questions that can be answered. We just might not have the tools yet. And I believe in like, as you mentioned, the, ⁓ like having, you know, telepathy and so forth, there, you know, more and more of this discussion, like in the popular culture with telepathy tapes and otherwise, not where people like, you know, serious scientists are actually looking into it. I don’t think we have any answers yet on like, could be, ⁓ how could it be explained? Cause the probabilities there around like,

A, this is just a fluke or the, ⁓ like, you know, it’s randomness, for example, as an explanation, it’s statistically is very unlikely, at least in some of those scenarios. But again, I’m just open to the fact that A definitely might not be the case or B, that there was just a lot of things we don’t know as humanity yet.

Sean Blackwell (39:22)
Right, and I think that like when I was an atheist, what brought me out of atheism was first of all, I was deeply unhappy. ⁓ I was in a depression at that point. And I finally made a few moves that were just coming from the heart and not rational at all. I quit my job and I moved to Vancouver. I had no money. I had…

no contacts in Vancouver, and I just decided I’m leaving. And the minute I made that decision, my depression ended, my life got a lot easier, and I had just an unbelievable sequence of synchronicities that ended up, it was one of the most pivotal moves I ever made. So I would say if you are thinking about these things out there and you do see yourself as having an atheistic perspective, you might want to just…

Patrick Obolgogiani (40:01)
So welcome to the state’s experiences.

Sean Blackwell (40:18)
put your rational thinking aside for the weekend or for a few days. It’s gonna be there and you’re gonna come back to it. But to sort of give the other part, to give your intuitive life a chance, you’re gonna kind of have to override the rational thinking for a while. But then once you’re comfortable with that intuitive side, then your rational can come back a little bit more. So you never lose it entirely.

Patrick Obolgogiani (40:31)
Yeah.

Yeah, that makes sense.

There’s a exactly you made you might know this book by Ian McGill Christ, Master and his emissary, which speaks to the different hemispheres of the brain. And he goes in quite a deep, partly philosophical kind of tirade around how we’re so set around the rational side of our brain, like the language oriented and so forth that we’re almost forgotten that actually it’s the other side of the brain, which not maybe it should is the strong word, but like

tends to be the master. And the culture that we live in is actually made us the opposite in that the contextual and the wise part of the brain is usually downgraded. if it’s not like, if you can’t break it apart into parts, then it becomes not meaningful. So I’m definitely like, ⁓ I respect that perspective that there is this, as you mentioned, ⁓ part of us that is

often wiser and understands the contextual parts of different things. I just don’t see how, like, why, even though that is, you might not be able to put language on it because language is a very limited tool as is, why could it not be based in reality? Right? So that’s like maybe a slight separation there. If that makes sense. Maybe as a…

Sean Blackwell (41:57)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Why,

why, what can’t be part of reality? The intuitive side? Is that what you said?

Patrick Obolgogiani (42:12)
No,

no. So that’s what I’m saying is like, it felt like when you were describing the, ⁓ kind of the decision to move, for example, it was based on the wisdom of your intuition, right? Like you had this feeling like you need to override your rationality. ⁓ like let’s, let’s say the rational part of the brain, which is like, no, no, there’s no, it doesn’t make any sense. And you just felt like that was the right thing to do. And I completely get that as I mentioned, I think I buy the idea that there’s this intuitive sense, which is posing like.

the, the, it’s processing much more information, much faster than the kind of more cognitive, you know, prefrontal cortex is able to. Um, and yet what I’m not seeing is how that needs to be separate from the reality we live in. Right. So in like the material world that can be still explained and even, even like, you know, know, reviewed and diagnosed, you know, with tools we have in our disposal, uh, with like electricity.

Sean Blackwell (42:48)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Patrick Obolgogiani (43:11)
in the brain. You know what I mean?

Sean Blackwell (43:14)
Sure. Well, there is one sort of funny part to the whole thing, which is another reason there isn’t a whole lot of good research on this kind of work is that once you’re really into this sort of paradigm, it’s a different worldview. Most people with this paradigm, they lose interest in scientific research. They’re like, well, from their perspective, it’s like, it doesn’t matter, it works for me.

Patrick Obolgogiani (43:23)
Hmm.

works.

Sean Blackwell (43:42)
You know, try it. Does it work for you? Oh, if it works for you. And you’re the judge. And this is a big difference between rational atheistic thinking and spiritual non-religious or transpersonal thinking, I would call it, is that there is an emphasis in atheism on objective truth, facts, right? With the spiritual non-religious or transpersonal orientation, there is also a recognition

Patrick Obolgogiani (43:42)
Yeah, that makes sense.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Sean Blackwell (44:12)
of subjective truth, that what I’m feeling is also true. It’s not the same as objective truth, but it’s true for me. Most people get that stuff mixed up one way or the other. You could think your objective truth is subjective or vice versa, but most people don’t have a good grasp on the difference between the two. with this transpersonal, there’s definitely an emphasis on subjective truth. And there, it doesn’t matter what the research says. It’s just if it works for me, it’s good.

Patrick Obolgogiani (44:19)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Sean Blackwell (44:42)
You know?

Patrick Obolgogiani (44:43)
Yeah,

it’s beautiful insights. ⁓ If it works, then who cares? mean, especially when it comes to in mind, you if it works there, I guess if you like you I don’t know, a physiological thing, which is like a disease or something, what works doesn’t is ultimately a question of whether you actually that physiological part is healing or not. That’s like a

Sean Blackwell (44:49)
Yeah.

Patrick Obolgogiani (45:10)
There’s a statement of truth, right? Where there’s like, either it’s getting better or it’s not. If it’s not getting better, no matter how you feel about it, it might kill you still, right? It might still end up being lethal. ⁓ No matter how you’re going to feel about it, there’s like an objectivity there. But when it comes to mind, in a way, like as we discussed in the very early on, if you feel better, it is almost by definition than working to some extent.

Sean Blackwell (45:35)
Yeah, to a certain degree in the, I would say in the long, excuse me, in the long term, in the long term, because even going back to Freud, you can go through parts of healing that are extremely painful. So, you know, if you catch me on a day where I’ve got infantile trauma surfacing, well, how are you feeling? Awful. I wanna, you know, I’m just in a hell. well then it’s not working. Well, things have come up, you know, so it gets complicated.

Patrick Obolgogiani (45:41)
Mm.

Right.

Sean Blackwell (46:04)
It’s really hard, I think, to the idea of healing into the materialist paradigm. And I’ve had psychiatrists who’ve said, well, this is how we see things. And so if you can change your language to go into how we see things, it could be easier. But the way you see things is based on certain principles, certain fundamental assumptions.

Patrick Obolgogiani (46:17)
So.

Sean Blackwell (46:34)
And my work questions those very assumptions, you know? And that’s what’s tough. So for a psychiatrist, if you can get a person back to work within two weeks with the medications,

that’s a huge success. Out of the psychiatric hospital and into the workforce in two weeks with a few medications is a miracle. And that’s great. Sometimes it’s needed, often it’s needed, but…

If the underlying issues are just still sitting there and you’ve got this person going to work and they’re just a robot and they’re going through the motions of their life and they’re never going to reach their full potential, was it really a success? I’d rather have the person stay with me, go through a fucking hell for two months and then get them into a whole new career. That to me would be a great success. Assuming that their career wasn’t really what they wanted to be in.

Patrick Obolgogiani (47:28)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you, Sean. ⁓ Maybe to finish off, I’m curious, you’ve still doing retreats, had the podcast, the book now. What’s next? What are your most excited, passionate about right now?

Sean Blackwell (47:42)
Well, funny enough, ⁓ interesting you’re asking me that question. You know, it’s been 18 years, my book, you know, Bipolar Awakenings, The Quest to Heal Bipolar Disorder, documents 18 years of doing this work. And all the time I was thinking about, well, I gotta make a career out of this somehow, because it’s been a big financial sacrifice. But really the work has been about research and development, you know. And now everything’s.

Like I’ve done the research to a certain degree and I just keep going with the work, but my focus is now more getting the word out. So what’s next for me is more podcasts. I’m feeling good about doing more podcasts, speaking to audiences of 10 or audiences of 10,000. It doesn’t matter to me. If I can get in front of people, that’s what I want to be doing right now. And it feels good. It feels like a new phase for me.

which is really nice because I’m not gonna change the world doing 15 retreats a year. That’s only one person, that’s 15 people, that’s not enough. I’m looking for total cultural change. And so I think that more interviews is a way to do that.

Patrick Obolgogiani (48:39)
Mm.

Yeah, appreciate it. The reason we call this the art and science of breathing is it feels like I do believe that this scientific method is the right way to understand the reality and investigate it and ultimately form our beliefs about what is true and what to recommend to people. But ultimately, on the art side,

You can come up with ideas of what to even test. It’s kind of this intuition. And also there’s like thousands of years of wisdom and practice has passed down from generations that has not been ⁓ investigated at all. So it’s like this combination of two worlds, the art and the science of, in this case, breathing that we’re trying to turn to capture. I think, ⁓ yeah, although I think we did cover some of the science as well underneath what you’re working on. We definitely were a lot on the art side. And then I think it’s

The is, as you mentioned, if we want to educate the audience and the mainstream public, how do we move that in the language and the methods of science so that it becomes a serious methodology that psychiatrists could actually consider for people that are struggling and it can be helpful for them.

Sean Blackwell (49:49)
Yeah.

Sure, and I think that part of that means we don’t abandon science, but we understand the limits of science, and that science doesn’t have much access to our interior subjective realm. That’s a big part of it. But, for example, on my retreats, I don’t bring any ⁓ religious culture of any kind. And what does that do? Does it make me atheistic? No. It makes it a space for…

Patrick Obolgogiani (50:19)
Hmm.

Sean Blackwell (50:40)
I’m able to help people with a background of any religion, Muslim, Jewish, atheistic. I’ve worked with people from all religious faiths, but the only reason I can do that is because I don’t bring any religious culture or atheistic culture into the work. I just bring the functional aspect, know. Bring the yoga mat, the sweatpants. You’re not allowed to wear any jewelry. This is good example.

You don’t wear jewelry. Why don’t you wear jewelry? Is it a religious thing? Is it a spirit? Do the gods not want you to wear jewelry? No, no. It’s because if you’re moving around, you can hurt yourself. You could cut yourself if you’re wearing sharp jewelry or zippers and that kind of thing. So it’s all very functional. And I think that once we have a deep understanding of our spiritual dimension, it becomes a functional issue more than anything else. Does this work? Is this helping? Can we do it? These are the questions we want to be answering.

Patrick Obolgogiani (51:40)
Well, Sean, thank you for having this conversation. It’s been definitely, you know, eye opening in many ways. And also for the work you do, I think I’m sure there’s many people ⁓ that have been diagnosed, as you mentioned, with this, you know, incurable disease that maybe can almost like rethink what they have and could it be actually in some ways, at least a positive thing or somehow helpful. So thank you for the work you do. Thank you for being here.

And for everyone listening, thank you for tuning in today.

Sean Blackwell (52:11)
Yeah, and I would also just, before we go, and thank you, but I would say to people that if you, they’ve heard me, they’ve heard me speaking about this, not to abandon your medication. And when I work with people on retreats or any kind of work I do with them, I ask them to remain on their medication until we felt a shift. And we could talk about that another day, but you should remain on your medication until deep healing has happened. Okay, because you can get into trouble.

Patrick Obolgogiani (52:15)
Peace.

Yeah, good points.

We’re not giving medical advice here on these things. So it’s a very important point.

Sean Blackwell (52:41)
No, nobody wants to end up back in the

hospital, right? Yeah. Okay, man. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Patrick Obolgogiani (52:46)
Thank you, Sean. Take care.