December 19, 2023 • 13 mins
Send me a text message! Let me know your thoughts about the episode.
Mary O'Dwyer shares the transformative power of breath work in stress management. Our conversation takes a deep and personal turn with Mary O'Dwyer, who candidly recounts her evolution from a skeptic to a passionate advocate for spirituality and alternative healing. Mary's remarkable narrative is not just about embracing practices like Reiki and breath work but about the power these tools have to usher in extraordinary personal transformations and a profound sense of calm amidst life's storms.
Wrapping up the year, I'm filled with heartfelt thanks for the support from you, the listeners, and I'm thrilled to offer a special gift as a token of my appreciation—just follow the link in this episode to claim it. As we bid adieu to 2023, I wish everyone a season brimming with joy, peace, and love in abundance.
May this year-end special be a catalyst for reflection and anticipation for even brighter days to come!
Learn More about Mary O'Dwyer
Cancer and Breathwork
My gift to you!
Thank you for your time and interest in this podcast! I invite you to leave a heartfelt review on whichever podcast platform you listen to. It does so much to bring exposure to the podcast and helps lift others up!
Connect with me!
Website: In the Rising Podcast Website
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Email: Bettina@intherising.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello and welcome to In the Rising a health and
wellness podcast for those goingthrough and those supporting
those going through cancer.
My name is Bettina Brown andI'm board certified in physical
therapy, wound care andlymphedema.
And you know, for me cancer isvery personal.
It's affected my friends, myimmediate and my not so
(00:24):
immediate family, and thereforeI created this podcast and fit
after breastcancercom to addressthe multiple dimensions of our
lives during and after recovery.
As long as you are breathing,there is more right with you
than wrong with you, no matterwhat is wrong.
(00:46):
And that quote is from JohnKabat-Zinn and it's about the
importance of breathing andknowing that breathing is life
and actually breathing has moreto do than just inhaling,
exhaling.
There is a thing called breathwork that combines with
meditation to reduce stress.
(01:06):
And who has stress?
Pretty much all of us.
Pretty much all of us do havestress.
But there are such importantevents in life that the stress
level, the feeling of being outof control, is just at a
completely different elevatedlevel.
And when you're first diagnosedwith cancer, everything
switched upside down,everything's going left to right
(01:28):
.
Is this even about you?
Is this even possible?
That's a very stressful event.
And what about if it's not you?
What about if these are wordsfor your loved one and you're
not sure how to plan the nextsteps of your life, because
nothing about this, nothingabout this was planned.
And so reconnecting to yourselfand using breath work as a way
(01:52):
to manage that stress is superimportant.
And my guest today is MaryO'Dwyer, who is from Ireland,
and I loved hearing her voice.
I just loved hearing her accent.
Maybe I'm the one with theaccent and she doesn't, I don't
know, but it was really neat tohear her talk and I'm excited
for you to hear her talk aboutbreath work.
I am really enthralled withyour story, mary, because you
(02:17):
said you yourself werestruggling a little bit and a
friend of yours said that youmay be having a disconnect, and
you were kind of confused likeno, I'm not disconnected, but
that you may be spirituallydisconnected, and that resonated
with me, that many things werein place but still not in place.
(02:39):
How did you respond when yourfriend looked you in the eye and
said, mary, it sounds to melike you're spiritually
disconnected.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Oh I thought she was cuckoo.
I mean, to this Irish Catholicgirl it was like, okay, where's
this crazy coming from?
But Spirit always has a planright.
There was a part of me thatresonated with this.
I really trusted this friend.
She lived like three doors downfrom me and she was so sweet.
That afternoon she dropped upsome books to my doorstep like
(03:12):
mindfulness for beginners andmeditation for dummies kind of
books, very basic, and I creditthat conversation with opening
the doors because I began toread those books and I grew up
in Ireland, so it was very muchyou're in your Catholic safe box
and anything outside of that isa cult.
I'm exaggerating a little bit,but that was kind of anything
(03:35):
outside of that, too far outsideof that, was going to be very
scary for me.
But I allowed myself to getcurious and get open and the
universe always responds.
When that awareness really gotto me and I started to see the
disconnect, I started to seethat I was wrote, that I was
going through the motions, goingto church every Sunday, saying
(03:58):
night time prayers, saying gracebefore meals, but there was the
passion, the intensity justwasn't there.
I was literally just tickingthe boxes and I was introduced
shortly afterwards to somebodywho did Reiki.
And again, spirit makes nomistakes, because this lady
(04:19):
actually grew up as an ItalianCatholic and so she completely
got where I was coming from.
And when I went to her place ofbusiness to get my first Reiki
session, I saw the Virgin Mary.
She had a statue of the VirginMary outside her front door, so
it just created safety.
It was like, oh, I can trusther, I can trust that this is
okay, because I needed that atthat time.
(04:39):
And then I discovered manyother wonderful tools energy
work, essential oils and, ofcourse, the breath work, which
for me was just a life changingexperience.
My first session, just you know, it was the two by four over
the head that I needed.
Sometimes we needed two by four.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Sometimes I think I needed a 10 by 20 or something
Just really knock it in.
And I'd like to just pauseright there because you said,
like the intensity was not there.
Now you were going throughmotions, you're doing the right
things, the way you were broughtup, but the intensity was not
there.
You know, I think sometimes wecan do everything, but if that
(05:21):
intensity, that passion is notthere, it leads to emptiness.
How did you feel that yourintensity changed as you were
going through this process?
Like, but intensity only?
How do you feel that haschanged for you?
Speaker 2 (05:36):
It changed 150% because no longer was I choosing
to engage with spirituality,because it was something I had
to do and if I didn't do it, godwouldn't love me and I could
end up in hell.
Suddenly there was arelationship, because in my
first transformational bratsession I encountered what I
would describe as the love ofGod, the love of the angels, the
(05:59):
love of Jesus, and after thatexperience I no longer believed
in a higher power.
I knew beyond a shadow of adoubt that there was something
way more powerful, and itdoesn't matter what we call it
you know whether it's you know,the Buddha, christ, jesus, god
(06:19):
Source, the universe, allah.
it's that same energy ofunconditional love, source of
love, light, wisdom, and whenyou encounter that, it just
changes everything, because nowI could have a conversation with
Jesus and, like Jesus, I reallydon't feel like going to church
today.
I got nothing out of it lastweek, you know.
(06:41):
So this is, this is where I'mat and instead I'm going to do
this.
And I just started to developmy own spiritual practice.
And because I now had a realrelationship and what I believe
is a direct connection, it wassafe for me to be able to do
(07:02):
that and trust that my processwas right for me where I'm at,
and it's completely differentmaybe from your process, from
your listeners' processes, andthat's it's all okay, because
each of us needs to engage inour spiritual practice.
That is both most going to feedour soul where we are now.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
I think that resonates, and we say resonates
right.
Resonate is a vibration, it isan energy.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
We use our language.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
but I was raised up in Germany Protestant we kind of
hang out like Catholics and wewere also very strict.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
I'm setting myself on a path.
It was kind of like I wasscared that I was going on a
slippery slope like that I'mgoing to descend and lose all of
my morality.
And there was definitely a timewhen I stepped away from it all
.
And I can remember, before myfirst transformational breath
session, I remember having awindow where I wasn't sure, like
, is there really a God?
(08:08):
Does it matter?
And I think I had to go throughthat so that I could come back
and have the experience I hadand then change and then just
over time, developing that trust, that trust in myself, that
trust in spirit, that trust thatGod loves us all, no matter
what.
And so you have now created.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
You had something before, but you have now created
something where you usetransformational breath, and I'd
like to pause there and reallyhave you explain what that is.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
So transformational breath is a very specific type
of breathwork.
It's an integrative breathwork,which means what that means is
to integrate us, to make whole,because there's parts of us that
we have maybe left behind,those parts of us that we don't
like, those things that we havesuppressed.
Right, you know that part ofyou that sometimes, that part of
(09:03):
you that maybe is a scaredy cat, that part of you that's
insecure, and so we put on ourmasks and we try and just hide
and even ignore and pretend thatthose other aspects of us don't
exist.
However, anything that we havesuppressed, any emotions, any
aspects of ourselves, they arestuck in our body, just like we
(09:26):
store stress in our neck and ourback.
We store everything.
So transformational breath is anintegrative breathwork where we
breathe in a very specific way,which is a circular, connected
breath through the mouth.
This allows us to access ourdiaphragm, so we're taking
really deep belly breaths, we'reraising our vibration, which
(09:48):
means we're bringing in thatlife force, that she, that Holy
Spirit.
Breathing is respiration,respiration.
So this raises the energy ofour body and when we do that,
the laws of physics say ifthere's something of a high
vibration, that encountersomething of a low vibration in
the same plane.
So we're breathing.
(10:09):
So where our body is, the plane, the breath that we're bringing
in in a conscious, connectedway is the high vibration, and
that lower vibration is all ofthose things that we have
suppressed and repressed and sothey can't coexist on the same
plane.
So something called entrainmenthappens, where these old
suppressions and suppressions,whichever ones, are ready to
(10:29):
heal during that session come upto the surface.
So we get to, either throughfelt sensation or possibly an
emotional experience or possiblya memory, get to revisit
something from our past that'sready to heal.
And then I work with you toconsciously breathe through that
, because our survivalmechanisms in life is when we
(10:52):
come across something that wedon't want to feel, we hold our
breath because that stops theflow of that emotion, so that we
can manage it, repress it, putit somewhere out of our sight
where we don't have to look atit or think about it or talk
about it.
And so in the session we'reencouraged to breathe through it
, maybe move it with our voice,whatever way we need to move it.
And then when we let go of someof these things, because these,
(11:16):
these are just energies, theseold emotions are just an energy,
and energy can't be created ordestroyed, but it can be
transformed.
So as we breathe through maybe,that old anger, we might
transition through the anger andit might come to a place of
acceptance or peace, and thentowards the end of the session
(11:37):
we get to connect deeply withourselves.
There's an opportunity for usto have a spiritual encounter,
because when we've let go ofsome of this stuff we feel
lighter, much in the same way asyou feel lighter after you had
a really big cry.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
So if you're interested in learning more
about breathwork or breathworkand cancer connection, how can
you receive support through theuse of breathwork and meditation
?
Please see the description boxbelow.
If you're really interested inlearning more about Mary,
because she's actually prettycool, I have her website below.
(12:19):
It has changed since the timethat we recorded and so I did a
few alterations.
I am also very grateful foryour time, because it's the one
thing we don't get back, and soif you feel that this podcast or
this podcast episode issomething that would resonate
and would invigorate someonethat you know, I invite you to
(12:39):
share it.
I also invite you to leave afive star review, because it
does so much to put this podcastin the hands and ears of those
that it makes a difference for.
And I also have a special gift.
This is the last podcastepisode of 2023.
So I have a little gift for you, and it is in the box below.
Click on in.
(13:00):
Thank you all.
I wish you a happy holiday,however you celebrate it or if
you are not celebrating it.
I wish you just all the peaceand love, because that is
something we can all use.
Until next time, let's keepbuilding one another up.
Hello and welcome to In the Rising a health and
wellness podcast for those goingthrough and those supporting
those going through cancer.
My name is Bettina Brown andI'm board certified in physical
therapy, wound care andlymphedema.
And you know, for me cancer isvery personal.
It's affected my friends, myimmediate and my not so
(00:24):
immediate family, and thereforeI created this podcast and fit
after breastcancercom to addressthe multiple dimensions of our
lives during and after recovery.
As long as you are breathing,there is more right with you
than wrong with you, no matterwhat is wrong.
(00:46):
And that quote is from JohnKabat-Zinn and it's about the
importance of breathing andknowing that breathing is life
and actually breathing has moreto do than just inhaling,
exhaling.
There is a thing called breathwork that combines with
meditation to reduce stress.
(01:06):
And who has stress?
Pretty much all of us.
Pretty much all of us do havestress.
But there are such importantevents in life that the stress
level, the feeling of being outof control, is just at a
completely different elevatedlevel.
And when you're first diagnosedwith cancer, everything
switched upside down,everything's going left to right
(01:28):
.
Is this even about you?
Is this even possible?
That's a very stressful event.
And what about if it's not you?
What about if these are wordsfor your loved one and you're
not sure how to plan the nextsteps of your life, because
nothing about this, nothingabout this was planned.
And so reconnecting to yourselfand using breath work as a way
(01:52):
to manage that stress is superimportant.
And my guest today is MaryO'Dwyer, who is from Ireland,
and I loved hearing her voice.
I just loved hearing her accent.
Maybe I'm the one with theaccent and she doesn't, I don't
know, but it was really neat tohear her talk and I'm excited
for you to hear her talk aboutbreath work.
I am really enthralled withyour story, mary, because you
(02:17):
said you yourself werestruggling a little bit and a
friend of yours said that youmay be having a disconnect, and
you were kind of confused likeno, I'm not disconnected, but
that you may be spirituallydisconnected, and that resonated
with me, that many things werein place but still not in place.
(02:39):
How did you respond when yourfriend looked you in the eye and
said, mary, it sounds to melike you're spiritually
disconnected.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Oh I thought she was cuckoo.
I mean, to this Irish Catholicgirl it was like, okay, where's
this crazy coming from?
But Spirit always has a planright.
There was a part of me thatresonated with this.
I really trusted this friend.
She lived like three doors downfrom me and she was so sweet.
That afternoon she dropped upsome books to my doorstep like
(03:12):
mindfulness for beginners andmeditation for dummies kind of
books, very basic, and I creditthat conversation with opening
the doors because I began toread those books and I grew up
in Ireland, so it was very muchyou're in your Catholic safe box
and anything outside of that isa cult.
I'm exaggerating a little bit,but that was kind of anything
(03:35):
outside of that, too far outsideof that, was going to be very
scary for me.
But I allowed myself to getcurious and get open and the
universe always responds.
When that awareness really gotto me and I started to see the
disconnect, I started to seethat I was wrote, that I was
going through the motions, goingto church every Sunday, saying
(03:58):
night time prayers, saying gracebefore meals, but there was the
passion, the intensity justwasn't there.
I was literally just tickingthe boxes and I was introduced
shortly afterwards to somebodywho did Reiki.
And again, spirit makes nomistakes, because this lady
(04:19):
actually grew up as an ItalianCatholic and so she completely
got where I was coming from.
And when I went to her place ofbusiness to get my first Reiki
session, I saw the Virgin Mary.
She had a statue of the VirginMary outside her front door, so
it just created safety.
It was like, oh, I can trusther, I can trust that this is
okay, because I needed that atthat time.
(04:39):
And then I discovered manyother wonderful tools energy
work, essential oils and, ofcourse, the breath work, which
for me was just a life changingexperience.
My first session, just you know, it was the two by four over
the head that I needed.
Sometimes we needed two by four.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Sometimes I think I needed a 10 by 20 or something
Just really knock it in.
And I'd like to just pauseright there because you said,
like the intensity was not there.
Now you were going throughmotions, you're doing the right
things, the way you were broughtup, but the intensity was not
there.
You know, I think sometimes wecan do everything, but if that
(05:21):
intensity, that passion is notthere, it leads to emptiness.
How did you feel that yourintensity changed as you were
going through this process?
Like, but intensity only?
How do you feel that haschanged for you?
Speaker 2 (05:36):
It changed 150% because no longer was I choosing
to engage with spirituality,because it was something I had
to do and if I didn't do it, godwouldn't love me and I could
end up in hell.
Suddenly there was arelationship, because in my
first transformational bratsession I encountered what I
would describe as the love ofGod, the love of the angels, the
(05:59):
love of Jesus, and after thatexperience I no longer believed
in a higher power.
I knew beyond a shadow of adoubt that there was something
way more powerful, and itdoesn't matter what we call it
you know whether it's you know,the Buddha, christ, jesus, god
(06:19):
Source, the universe, allah.
it's that same energy ofunconditional love, source of
love, light, wisdom, and whenyou encounter that, it just
changes everything, because nowI could have a conversation with
Jesus and, like Jesus, I reallydon't feel like going to church
today.
I got nothing out of it lastweek, you know.
(06:41):
So this is, this is where I'mat and instead I'm going to do
this.
And I just started to developmy own spiritual practice.
And because I now had a realrelationship and what I believe
is a direct connection, it wassafe for me to be able to do
(07:02):
that and trust that my processwas right for me where I'm at,
and it's completely differentmaybe from your process, from
your listeners' processes, andthat's it's all okay, because
each of us needs to engage inour spiritual practice.
That is both most going to feedour soul where we are now.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
I think that resonates, and we say resonates
right.
Resonate is a vibration, it isan energy.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
We use our language.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
but I was raised up in Germany Protestant we kind of
hang out like Catholics and wewere also very strict.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
I'm setting myself on a path.
It was kind of like I wasscared that I was going on a
slippery slope like that I'mgoing to descend and lose all of
my morality.
And there was definitely a timewhen I stepped away from it all
.
And I can remember, before myfirst transformational breath
session, I remember having awindow where I wasn't sure, like
, is there really a God?
(08:08):
Does it matter?
And I think I had to go throughthat so that I could come back
and have the experience I hadand then change and then just
over time, developing that trust, that trust in myself, that
trust in spirit, that trust thatGod loves us all, no matter
what.
And so you have now created.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
You had something before, but you have now created
something where you usetransformational breath, and I'd
like to pause there and reallyhave you explain what that is.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
So transformational breath is a very specific type
of breathwork.
It's an integrative breathwork,which means what that means is
to integrate us, to make whole,because there's parts of us that
we have maybe left behind,those parts of us that we don't
like, those things that we havesuppressed.
Right, you know that part ofyou that sometimes, that part of
(09:03):
you that maybe is a scaredy cat, that part of you that's
insecure, and so we put on ourmasks and we try and just hide
and even ignore and pretend thatthose other aspects of us don't
exist.
However, anything that we havesuppressed, any emotions, any
aspects of ourselves, they arestuck in our body, just like we
(09:26):
store stress in our neck and ourback.
We store everything.
So transformational breath is anintegrative breathwork where we
breathe in a very specific way,which is a circular, connected
breath through the mouth.
This allows us to access ourdiaphragm, so we're taking
really deep belly breaths, we'reraising our vibration, which
(09:48):
means we're bringing in thatlife force, that she, that Holy
Spirit.
Breathing is respiration,respiration.
So this raises the energy ofour body and when we do that,
the laws of physics say ifthere's something of a high
vibration, that encountersomething of a low vibration in
the same plane.
So we're breathing.
(10:09):
So where our body is, the plane, the breath that we're bringing
in in a conscious, connectedway is the high vibration, and
that lower vibration is all ofthose things that we have
suppressed and repressed and sothey can't coexist on the same
plane.
So something called entrainmenthappens, where these old
suppressions and suppressions,whichever ones, are ready to
(10:29):
heal during that session come upto the surface.
So we get to, either throughfelt sensation or possibly an
emotional experience or possiblya memory, get to revisit
something from our past that'sready to heal.
And then I work with you toconsciously breathe through that
, because our survivalmechanisms in life is when we
(10:52):
come across something that wedon't want to feel, we hold our
breath because that stops theflow of that emotion, so that we
can manage it, repress it, putit somewhere out of our sight
where we don't have to look atit or think about it or talk
about it.
And so in the session we'reencouraged to breathe through it
, maybe move it with our voice,whatever way we need to move it.
And then when we let go of someof these things, because these,
(11:16):
these are just energies, theseold emotions are just an energy,
and energy can't be created ordestroyed, but it can be
transformed.
So as we breathe through maybe,that old anger, we might
transition through the anger andit might come to a place of
acceptance or peace, and thentowards the end of the session
(11:37):
we get to connect deeply withourselves.
There's an opportunity for usto have a spiritual encounter,
because when we've let go ofsome of this stuff we feel
lighter, much in the same way asyou feel lighter after you had
a really big cry.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
So if you're interested in learning more
about breathwork or breathworkand cancer connection, how can
you receive support through theuse of breathwork and meditation
?
Please see the description boxbelow.
If you're really interested inlearning more about Mary,
because she's actually prettycool, I have her website below.
(12:19):
It has changed since the timethat we recorded and so I did a
few alterations.
I am also very grateful foryour time, because it's the one
thing we don't get back, and soif you feel that this podcast or
this podcast episode issomething that would resonate
and would invigorate someonethat you know, I invite you to
(12:39):
share it.
I also invite you to leave afive star review, because it
does so much to put this podcastin the hands and ears of those
that it makes a difference for.
And I also have a special gift.
This is the last podcastepisode of 2023.
So I have a little gift for you, and it is in the box below.
Click on in.
(13:00):
Thank you all.
I wish you a happy holiday,however you celebrate it or if
you are not celebrating it.
I wish you just all the peaceand love, because that is
something we can all use.
Until next time, let's keepbuilding one another up.
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