Expanding Consciousness

Megan's Website:
https://unitybreathwork.com/

In this episode of Expanding Consciousness, we sit down with Megan Ashton, founder of Unity Breathwork, to explore the transformative potential—and the responsibilities—of conscious connected breathwork.
Megan shares her deeply personal journey from addiction, disordered eating, and years of searching for healing modalities to discovering breathwork and experiencing a profound shift in her relationship with herself. We explore what actually happens during a conscious connected breathwork session, including emotional releases, altered states of consciousness, physical sensations, insights, and experiences of deep peace and clarity.

A major focus of the conversation is trauma-informed breathwork. Megan explains why agency, empowerment, nervous-system awareness, preparation, grounding, and integration are essential when working with people in highly vulnerable states. We discuss why facilitators should create space for catharsis without chasing it, how to recognize the edges of someone’s window of tolerance, and why the facilitator’s own nervous system matters.

We also dive into the role of touch, group dynamics, music, intuition, and even elements of IFS in breathwork—and question how much direction a facilitator should provide when the body’s own wisdom may know what is needed.

Timestamps
00:00 – Grounding with Conscious Breathing
03:56 – Megan’s Journey: Addiction, Disordered Eating & Searching for Healing
06:18 – Discovering Conscious Connected Breathwork
08:47 – What Is Conscious Connected Breathwork?
09:57 – Conscious Connected Breathwork vs. Wim Hof
11:46 – Why the First 15 Minutes Can Feel Difficult
13:31 – What Happens During a Breathwork Session?
15:38 – Emotional Release, Visions, Insights & Non-Ordinary States
17:14 – Why Repetition Matters for Nervous System Change
18:26 – The “Stress Bucket” & Processing Trauma Through the Body
21:14 – Do You Need to Relive Trauma to Heal It?
22:58 – Catharsis: Holding Space Without Chasing It
24:03 – Microdose vs. Macrodose Breathwork
25:23 – The Window of Tolerance & Avoiding Overwhelm
25:45 – What Actually Makes an Experience Traumatizing?
26:59 – Agency, Empowerment & Safety in Breathwork
27:33 – What Does Trauma-Informed Breathwork Look Like?
28:02 – Preparing People for Tetany & Intense Experiences
29:45 – The Importance of Grounding & Integration
30:18 – The Facilitator’s Nervous System & Creating a Safe Container
31:19 – Is Bluetooth Affected by Breathwork?
32:14 – Music, Touch, IFS & Other Breathwork Approaches
33:14 – Why Megan Prefers Live, Intuitive Facilitation
35:16 – The Power of the Group Container
36:45 – Touch, Safety & Co-Regulation
38:06 – Relational Trauma & the Role of the Facilitator
39:14 – Two Points of Consent & Reading the Body
41:13 – Why Trauma-Informed Training Matters
42:44 – Adverse Experiences in Breathwork
43:10 – Seizures, Hypoxic Blackouts & Breath-Holding
45:32 – The Risk of Combining Wim Hof Techniques with Long Breathwork Sessions
48:01 – The Bohr Effect & What Happens During Prolonged Breathwork
48:50 – Why Safety Conversations Matter
49:44 – Megan’s 450-Hour Breathwork Facilitator Training
51:07 – Professional Standards & the Wild West of Breathwork
51:51 – Red Flags When Choosing a Breathwork Facilitator
53:23 – Final Thoughts: The Power and Responsibility of Breathwork

You can do years of inner work, but if your nervous system is still organized around threat, the body keeps paying the price through stress, inflammation, and chronic pain. In this episode, trauma therapist Shari B. Kaplan (LCSW) joins Nikolas and Michael to explore how trauma lives in the body, why the nervous system holds the key to lasting healing, and what it really takes to move from surviving to thriving.

With over 30 years of clinical experience, Shari weaves together somatic awareness, Internal Family Systems, Jungian depth work, and integrative approaches to mental health. We get into the link between trauma, chronic pain, and inflammation, how to work with the nervous system instead of against it, practical tools for regulation and breathwork, and why raising the bar on what we accept as good mental health treatment matters more than ever.

Guest: Shari B. Kaplan, LCSW, Founder of Cannectd Wellness

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:45 Welcome & Shari's Work
5:22 Personal Journey and the Influence of Family
9:58 Plant Medicine & Integrative Healing
14:31 Integrating Cannabis and Ketamine in Treatment
19:02 Therapeutic Techniques and the Client Relationship
25:38 Empowering Clients Through Breathwork
28:20 Techniques for Calming the Nervous System
31:29 Navigating Resistance to Emotional Expression
34:58 Understanding Anger and Its Release
39:17 Holistic Approaches to Therapy
42:44 Reorganizing Identity and Beliefs
48:31 Integrating Therapy and Coaching

Coming from opposite directions — Nikolas from a hard-science skepticism of anything "woo," Michael from a spiritual high horse that looked down on psychology — the two meet in the middle to ask a deceptively simple question: are spirituality and psychology compatible, complementary, or fundamentally at odds?
The conversation moves from spiritual bypassing and hitting plateaus on the meditation cushion, to how psychology's "third wave" (mindfulness, DBT, ACT) quietly absorbed Eastern practice, to the existential terrain — death, meaning, and the fear of the void — where they argue psychology alone may run out of road. From there they get into the harder questions: the risks of untrained spiritual and psychedelic facilitation, safety and trauma-informed containers, the clinicalization of plant medicine, and a genuinely contested back-and-forth on cultural appropriation, decolonization, and what (if anything) gets lost when an indigenous practice becomes a Western framework.
A wide-ranging, exploratory dialogue for anyone interested in the meeting point of inner work, psychedelics, mental health, and the existential questions that neither science nor spirituality answers cleanly on its own.

Timestamps
00:00 Intro
00:41 Are spirituality and psychology compatible?
01:40 Two opposite starting points & plant medicine opening the lid
02:57 From engineering to spirituality and back to psychology
04:10 Carl Rogers, unconditional positive regard & Ram Dass
05:08 The third wave: CBT, mindfulness, DBT & Eastern roots
07:05 12-step programs, surrender & shedding the ego
08:25 Where psychology hits its limits: existential questions
09:49 Death through a Western lens vs. a spiritual lens
13:21 Is death just the end? Consciousness, matter & the void
14:45 "Die before you die" & the West's troubled relationship with death
16:57 Plant medicine, joy, and the patterns it revealed
18:50 What psychology brings: precision, containment & safety
21:42 Safety in spiritual ceremony & the trauma-informed gap
24:47 Liberty vs. risk: psychosis, cannabis & applying caution
27:11 Clinicalization of plant medicine — losing the sacred?
28:41 Appropriation, decolonization & "letting it change you"
31:19 Strains, spirits, the entourage effect & synthesized compounds
33:47 Does context make it the same experience? Set, setting & safety
36:22 Clinical rooms vs. cozy containers & the MAPS tension
40:46 Mindfulness, John Kabat-Zinn & where appropriation begins
42:54 You can't monopolize spirituality
44:29 Suffering as the doorway to both paths
45:48 Michael Singer's "Wisdom Untethered" & closing thoughts

In this episode, Nikolas and Michael unpack Focusing, the therapeutic method developed by philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin out of his research with Carl Rogers' client-centered therapy. What began as an attempt to isolate why some therapy sessions succeed and others fail became a powerful practice that has sold half a million copies and helped bridge the gap between the talk-therapy era and today's somatic approaches.
At the heart of the conversation is the "felt sense" — that nebulous, hard-to-pin-down space between sensation and emotion where we actually make meaning. The two explore how to get in touch with it, why we resist uncomfortable experiences and store them in the body, and how meaning follows experience rather than leading it. Along the way they walk through the six steps of Focusing, compare it to EMDR and Somatic Experiencing, and dig into a bigger question: what does it actually mean to be wounded, and what does it mean to heal?
A thoughtful, exploratory conversation for anyone interested in somatic psychology, trauma processing, and the body's natural capacity to unwind itself — no re-traumatization required.

Peter Levine clip mentioned in the episode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdUnCj05RMs

Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
00:41 What is Focusing & its origins with Carl Rogers
03:05 The felt sense explained — between sensation and emotion
06:35 Walking through an example of the felt sense
08:23 The felt shift & why you don't compartmentalize the experience
10:58 Meaning follows experience (not the other way around)
13:12 Body awareness, somatic unfolding & the body's wisdom
15:53 How experiences get stored: overwhelm, dissociation & programming
17:49 Why we reject experiences & store them in the body
20:20 Overload, childhood & falling back to primitive responses
21:48 Re-experiencing the "residue" without reliving the story
23:38 Why resistance exists: aversion to discomfort & habit
25:29 The six steps of Focusing (creating space, felt sense, handle, resonate, ask)
30:48 Comparing Focusing to EMDR & Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing
34:43 Is trauma processing the same across modalities?
36:16 What does it mean to be wounded and to heal?
40:37 Updating a 1970s framework for modern somatic psychology
42:44 Habits as identity & the disorientation of change
45:02 Attitude, intrinsic motivation & creating your own suffering
47:31 Closing thoughts

The 5 C's:
https://instituteofspiritualhealing.com/5c/

Sufism Foundations Course:
https://instituteofspiritualhealing.com/foundations-sh/

Salima Adelstein is a Sufi spiritual guide and emotional healer with 35 years of experience accessing the deeper layers of the heart. After 25 years on a different spiritual path that included meditation and time in India, an unexpected encounter with a Sufi master in New Mexico shifted everything for her. In this conversation she walks us through the core of Sufism: the heart-mind connection, the three inner voices (the ego/nafs, the negative outside voice, and the voice of the divine), the practice of remembrance (dhikr), forgiveness and mercy, ego annihilation, and surrender. We talk about how Sufism strips away the hidden "pictures in the heart" we carry from childhood and ancestry, why peace has to start in your own heart before it can radiate outward, and what a daily practice actually looks like. A grounded conversation for anyone curious about how a heart-centered tradition meets ordinary life.

0:00 Intro
0:41 Introduction to Sufism and Salima's Journey
8:12 The Heart-Mind Connection in Sufism
13:43 Navigating Inner Voices and Discernment
18:55 The Role of Forgiveness and Mercy
26:24 Annihilation of the Ego and Surrender
34:22 Living from an Open Heart
37:29 Practical Steps in Sufism