[00:00:00] Mark: So for me, what I grew up through, the trauma I experienced, and the sports I competed in. You couldn't show any vulnerability. You couldn't show any weakness. After the martial arts phase of my life, I got heavily into CrossFit, which you don't even have time to think to be weak. You just have to go. It's like, there's no time to think. There's no time for feelings. It's like 1 million percent full speed. So I spent a lot of years competing in that. And the idea or the thought of going to a medicine circle and back then me, it was very hippie in my mind. And It wasn't something that strong men do in my mind.
[00:00:45] Aneta: We often hear people wishing us a long, happy, and healthy life, but what if the length isn't what matters most? What if instead, it's the breadth depth, and purpose of each day that matters most? Welcome to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. My name is Aneta Ardelian Kuzma and join me weekly as I interview guests who made changes in their own lives to live more fully with intention. Gratitude and joy. Be prepared to be inspired by their stories of how they shifted their mindset, took courageous action, and designed the life that they always wanted to live.
Welcome back to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. My guest this week is Mark Toner and he is a breathwork coach certified by awaken breathwork. He holds transformative spaces in person and online to support his clients to access blocked emotions, heal, and stand in their true authentic power.
Mark and I met through a friend of ours. And we just really connected. I had a breathwork session with him and knew immediately I wanted to have him on my podcast. We talked about so many things. It was one of the most amazing and impactful ones that I've had. We talked a lot about his healing journey. And how he's leveraged plant medicine through, especially ayahuasca and psilocybin to help him on his healing journey.
He talks a lot about his transformation about some of the chaos and trauma within Northern Ireland, where he is from. We also talk about just the balance of masculine and feminine energy within each of us and how it is a choice daily to work on finding that balance for ourselves. Enjoyed our conversation. We went deep on a lot of topics and I enjoyed our time together. I think you will as well. Take a listen.
Mark, welcome to The Live the Width of Your Life podcast. I was so excited for our conversation today.
[00:02:39] Mark: Me too. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to the chat.
[00:02:45] Aneta: Yeah, me too. It's it's so interesting for those listening that we met last Thursday because of our mutual friend Caroline and those who listen know that I visited Caroline in Northern Ireland a couple of months ago. And she said you have to do a breathwork session with my friend, Mark. His sessions are transformational and Caroline's amazing.
So I was like, okay, I'm going to do this. And I think we scheduled it. I had a schedule in advance and it was like 4:30, my time, which is when I get up and I'm like, this is perfect. It's a great way to start the day. And it was over two hours. The entire journey. And it was unlike anything I've ever experienced.
And it was so amazing and so much has happened even since that session. So I just want to thank you for doing what you do, because I can't believe it was only less than a week ago, then I had that experience.
[00:03:41] Mark: Thank you very much. I'm delighted that you're going soon to see my crew, which is the Owaken team and you get to experience it in another transformational way. So massive love, and massive respect for jumping in and going after.
[00:03:57] Aneta: Yeah. I kind of do that. And you mentioned that you did your breathwork facilitation program with Owaken Breathwork, and you just said, they happen to do events in the States all the time. You should look into it. And of course, I did. And there's one coming up July 6th in Miami, Florida.
And I was like, well, this is a great way to book a beach vacation with my husband and go breathe for like six hours on the Saturday with probably hundreds of strangers and to kind of go into those experiences. And you and I, both as breathwork facilitators know the power of breathwork, but how did you find your way into breathwork?
[00:04:35] Mark: I kind of see this from two places. One I didn't realize, so I grew up in the north of Ireland, which is an interesting and kind of complex place to be from. We've experienced so much pain and hurt and trauma and chaos in our country and amongst our people to this day. The ceasefire was really in 1994, which was the kind of end of the civil war.
Then again in 97, because the first one was quite short. So I grew up in amongst that and I grew up in a lot of fear. There was violence pretty much throughout my life. It was violent to live in my world in a lot of ways. And deeply loving in other ways. But when I moved to Brisbane in Australia, when I was 23, I had been training in mixed martial arts for quite a few years and I'd done like other martial arts as a kid.
And I got an opportunity, I was getting ready to fight in mixed martial arts or in the states that would be more familiar, known as the UFCI that's sport, I wasn't getting ready to fight in the UFC, but I was a practitioner of that sport and I got an opportunity one day to fight in Muay Thai, which is the traditional sport of Thailand, part of it is within MMA.
And it was in that process that I started to become aware of my breath. I became aware that I could control my emotions with my breath if I stayed focused on it. But I had to fast forward like another 10 years, till COVID.
And when COVID happened, I just had enough. I'd gone through this rollercoaster of depression, alcohol, and ecstasy was kind of like my main drug of choice for many years. Partied and kind of lived for the weekend. And I'd been through this particularly rough five-year period of owning a business, building the business, but having all of these internal demons inside.
I didn't know how to manage these demons, but whenever COVID happened, I just had enough. I was like, screw this. I can't do this anymore. I'd listened for years to the Joe Rogan podcast and connected with a lot of what he talked about, but there were always these particular guests who spoke about plant medicine, and I suppose at the time, being maybe a little more naive, I believed that this would never be available in Ireland.
This is something that happened in South America and possibly somewhere in the States, but this wouldn't be an option available for me. Maybe quite narrow-minded in my view of that. COVID happened and the universe told me about a friend of a friend who did something about a four-hour drive away in Southern Ireland.
So that medicine was a cactus, known as San Pedro, I think traditional terms, it's maybe known as Wachuma. It's a kind of 10 to 12-hour experience.
About two weeks prior, because I was so nervous about having this medicine in the group, I got some psilocybin from the internet and took some psilocybin, as my wife kind of watched me, I had a little bit of a meltdown at home, I was going through different rooms of the house being like, I don't know where to sit when the visions come on.
Like I had no idea, just all the stuff that I'd read. And she went and said to me, just go to bed and lie down. Like, stop going around the house, exploring all these different things. So I had a nice, like relaxing experience. I didn't take too much, but it was just like a relaxing experience.
And then two weeks later, I went to the Wachuma or San Pedro Circle, and at the end of that medical experience, I'd been through a life-altering event. And there was this tall dude, he was like well over six foot tall and he's trying to have a conversation with me while my tattoos on my hands are like spinning still.
And I'm like, I'm towards the end of the medicine, but I'm like, this has not stopped. And he was telling me about Breathwork and I remember in my head vividly thinking, please leave me alone. Like I've just,
[00:09:02] Aneta: He was part of the circle with you.
[00:09:04] Mark: Yeah, it turns out his name is Ronan O'Brien and he owns Breathwave Ireland, which at that time was much smaller, but now it's an online community that has like over 200 members, but he said, if you want to jump on on Wednesday nights, I do breathwork on zoom.
So we had, we were at the medicine ceremony on Saturday and we were leaving on Sunday and he said, jump on on Wednesday night. So I jumped on to his Zoom call and I had an experience that was as powerful as the plant medicine that we'd had on the previous Saturday. And, it was during COVID times and it was on Wednesday nights. I think I did something like 72 Wednesdays without missing one of them. And my whole,
The week became about Wednesday night. We at that time decided to keep our CrossFit gym closed. So we ended up being closed for over a year. And a lot of that was down to me finally putting myself first and deciding that my healing was the priority.
And that was kind of how my breathwork journey began. And a lot now connects back. I was chatting to somebody about this recently like the Steve Jobs quote, whenever you look back you can connect the dots, but you can't see it at the time.
I believe that spending that time doing Muay Thai and participating in that taught me a way to stay centered in chaos, which then as a facilitator has been impactful. Caroline's a good example because she would say to me sometimes like, while I'm levitating on the floor, what are you feeling like?
Are you not panicking? This was more in her early days. And I was like, my job, Caroline, or not my job, but my world is just to be like, to try and like, not be unconscious. So as you're in the Muay Thai space. So as you're doing that on the floor, I'm in this beautiful place of just trusting that the experience that you're having at that time is the correct experience.
[00:11:04] Aneta: It's so amazing. I love that Steve Jobs quote as well, because we try so hard to control things in our life and we try so hard to maneuver and to make things happen the way we think they're supposed to. And yet when you look back, And you see how you ended up where you are, there's no way, no way that we could have planned it exactly the way it worked out.
And I do believe we live in a benevolent universe that is working out for us and it's not against us. And so even the hard experiences that we go through sometimes are exactly the nudges that we need. To shift even just a little bit. And so for you, it was, moving you into that direction to be able to have that guy in that circle that you didn't know until that moment. Say, Hey, maybe you should do this breathwork thing. I mean, how cool is that?
[00:12:03] Mark: It deepens even further because there was another guy in the circle who has become my main, he doesn't like to be called this, but I call him it. He's like my main shaman and he also was there and he has a direct connection to the Huni Quin people who live in the Amazon. So in the craziest of ways, I was able to sit in ayahuasca circles with a direct member of the Huni Quin who had left the rainforest and came to Ireland.
And it's something I reflect on. I'm recently just back from an ayahuasca circle, three weeks ago, and sometimes when I just sit down in the evening and think about this, I'm like, the universe, God, Great Spirit, whatever the name is for the thing that we can't describe, it had to be guiding this whole process, because we could have went to any plant medicine circles that first time.
And interestingly, when we went that time in particular, I think it was 12 people and 11 of them were men. And even the facilitator at the time was like, it's so interesting. Like this never happens. And the fact that two of those people I still sit in a circle with to this day, I'm doing a fascia release course with Ronan and Belfast and with Caroline also in like two weeks or three weeks.
You couldn't have picked a better experience or, a group of like soul family to come together in a time when the world was in some kind of way falling apart a little.
[00:13:44] Aneta: Yeah. Did you do psilocybin from the internet, which I think is funny because you wanted to prepare yourself for the other medicine ceremony? what was the thought process there? Like do I need to experience this at home first just to kind of as a level of control? Like what was that?
that
[00:14:02] Mark: One hundred percent my fear of being vulnerable in a group. My fear of losing control. Men in our culture, in Western culture, feel that the world has to happen individually and that they can't lean on other men for healing, support, love, or connection. I feel it's part of the reason why the world is in the situation that it's in currently at this time, with two wars happening.
And, just, they're general, chaos that the modern kind of man lives within in his mind every day. It's because he can't ask for help. He's been told from the earliest of ages that he has to compete, and the organism that we are as humans, can't operate in that way. We need support. We need, for lack of a better term, we need a shoulder to cry on sometimes.
So for me, I grew up through the trauma that I experienced and the sports that I competed in. You couldn't show any vulnerability. You couldn't show any weakness. After the martial arts phase of my life, I got heavily into CrossFit, which you don't even have time to think to be weak.
You just have to go. It's like, there's no time to think. There's no time for feelings. It's like 1 million percent full speed. So I spent a lot of years competing in that. And the idea or the thought of going to a medicine circle and back then me, it was very hippie in my mind.
And It wasn't something that strong men do in my mind. What I've come to learn is it's the strongest men who go through these experiences because to are vulnerable in this culture there are very few examples of it. There are very few role models in this, in that space to look up to, I suppose.
[00:16:03] Aneta: How did you, in your mind, say earlier that you used to do ecstasy I know listening to your podcast, you used to love to do that, listening to music. So you were in a crowd situation by having your own experience on a mind-altering drug. So what was the difference in your mind? Did you feel like this was going to be somehow different because of the ceremony associated with it?
[00:16:28] Mark: It was the fact that in comparison to rave culture, which was my other escape. There was something about it that was quite masculine. We went to Ibiza for many summers and it was dancing and the thing I loved about it was the communal love feeling. I didn't realize this till in recent years that I was doing MDMA-assisted therapy on myself. Without ever having the language to understand what it was, but we very much in, as we got, it used to go with alcohol.
So you would like to go to clubs, but you would be quite drunk and then you would have your ecstasy and it would take weeks to get over but as we became more, I suppose, astute in our approach, a small group of my friends would meet and have like very little alcohol and would have MDMA.
And we were very into the music that we listened to. And we followed DJs and we'd travel all around Europe to see certain DJs and go to different events. But as we got older, we then we'd go back from the raves and not go to after parties. When we go back we just sit together and we talk and we talk about life.
Now we wouldn't get super deep, but we'd probably get deeper than if you were just drinking alcohol, for example. And it was only in recent years that it just twinged with me. And I was like, right, this was like a therapy session that I didn't have language for, now as it's becoming I think a few states have legalized it as a therapy, a tool. It now makes sense that we were doing that before it was ever therapeutic.
[00:18:03] Aneta: Yeah Yes, So it sounds like you were seeking community and also maybe this brotherhood that you talked about is just really not wanting to feel separate, but feeling this connection, which we all know that we are connected, there is no separation. How have the plant medicine and the ceremonies and this journey that you've been on, how has it changed your relationships either to yourself, your wife, your family, to your friends? Like what has changed?
[00:18:31] Mark: Most definitely a softening. So my relationship, for example, with Leah, I knew that I didn't want to model any relationships that I'd seen. I wanted to be in a relationship where we were best friends and not a version of anything that was in the past. Not a version of my parent’s relationships, not a version of my grandparent’s relationships, not a competition between ourselves that involved, like, I'd been in relationships in the past and I'd maybe taken on some kind of like, it's interesting I have it behind me, but some kind of like dominance hierarchy where I was trying to be the powerful man. And I remember very early on with Leah just being like, I want this to be friendship. I want to be best friends and I don't want to have a relationship where we bicker just constantly because that's pretty much a stereotypical Irish relationship, or maybe further afield. But, so I kind of got into that a little bit before plant medicines.
And then with plant medicines, there had been, I suppose, an awakening or a remembering of my feminine energy within. Something I knew nothing about. I worked with quite a lot of coaches and healers to even understand this and I took baby steps because it terrified me to go into that kind of space. And. I suppose the remembering was that I am both of those.
I can be deeply masculine when I need to and I can be my feminine and the freedom is in the choice. Whereas before plant medicines, there wasn't a choice. It was supposed, toxic masculine in ways. I wouldn't have ever described myself as like I was never evil or manipulative or any of that kind of version of it.
But I was just locked in this. Don't touch me. Don't speak to me. I'm just in my own space. I'm in my world, and I'm gonna suffer my way to my grave.
[00:20:40] Aneta: You and I talked about this cause this is something I constantly do. I'm aware of and work on every day too, is the balance of the masculine and the feminine. And it's interesting because I don't remember as a child before the conditioning, like where I played. I don't remember if I was naturally more masculine or feminine, but I do know that over time, especially going into the corporate world and working in banking, a very male-dominated field, we start to model our behavior based on what we think is going to make us successful, or that will give us the acceptance of the people in authority or what will give us whatever it is that we're seeking.
And when I left, it's just been this unwinding and remembering and releasing, like every day choosing to release and go, wait, okay, you can soften, you can be more playful. You can invite in more joy and invite in more fun. And it doesn't mean you're lazy or not motivated or whatever stereotypes that we sometimes think about.
And, I'm a woman and still, it's like really hard to find that balance within the feminine. And it's funny, I don't know if Caroline told you this, but when I came to Ireland, she said every day, she was like, you look a little softer. Your jaw is not so tight. Like she would just tell me, and I was like, did I look really like so stressed out?
She goes, yes, you did. And it was, sometimes we just need people in our lives to kind of encourage and notice those things. So as you were starting to play around with being a little bit more in your feminine energy in the flow, in the creative space and the place of rest and connecting, did people around you notice that something was happening, and were they supportive or were they kind of confused by what was going on?
[00:22:33] Mark: We're talking about Caroline a lot, but she's a great example because she told me in hindsight that she was watching my Instagram as I was going through this process. So up to a point we had the gym and the gym was open and it was super busy It was like a real thriving business. COVID happened and then we had opportunities to reopen the business because they lifted the restrictions.
But I decided to stay closed because I was on my healing journey. And she said to me in like more recent times after she said, I thought you'd lost your mind. And I was speaking to like your family members about how we could get like psychological help for you. And I have noticed even some people can't look me in the eye anymore because I suppose we've become mirrors.
So if you've awakened that within yourself, then it becomes harder for people to see you because they feel your identity is the past you, but you have transformed and the only way that they can connect is if they're open to potentially transforming too and awakening that feminine within. So it's been super interesting as a CrossFit affiliate owner to see this and to be this like we run breathwork events at the gym and most of the people who come to the events are not gym members.
Which is interesting. That was a learning and that was I suppose, a process because I think everybody goes through it in their own time. But I think as the world continues to go through some kind of shift we're experiencing at this time. It's a shift that I feel will ultimately be for the best, but I feel like as part of that it will continue to intensify. And it's a matter of how fast you cross the bridge from living in fear to opening your heart and living in love.
In such a unique time where we have social media and we have the volume or the sea of, Ayahuasca was showing this to me a couple of weeks ago, like we have this sea of information constantly coming into our minds. If you're vibrating or if you're seeking the vibration of love and you've crossed that bridge, then we get to meet and in a week we can have heart-opening podcasts and breathwork experiences.
You can be in that space or you can be back in the old, maybe in the banking world or the old CrossFit world for me. And I can't imagine how intense that would be right now. It was five years ago before COVID. In 2024, like sometimes, particularly in Ireland, I feel like, I'm like, let's go guys come across this bridge.
There's so much more, you just have to let your barriers down a bit. But ultimately I know that will only happen as each soul is ready. And if it's in this lifetime, who knows? It may not be.
[00:25:31] Aneta: Yeah. I love that. You said that. I've experienced that too, where people expect to know who you are based on a previous identity or role that you are playing. And some can meet you where you are now and will reveal more of themselves and their journey. I think a lot of people are on their own personal growth and spiritual journey, but it's almost like you don't know who You can say what to like, there's certain language that you can use with certain people and then with others, you're like, okay, how do I say this in a way that doesn't seem quite as, whatever the word is, crazy, scary. Yeah. And so how you decided to open the gym back up? And so how are you doing things differently from this new place that you're in right now, Mark?
Because CrossFit is still intense. A lot is happening there. And so how are you doing things differently where you're able to honor what it means to be in CrossFit, but also do it from a place that with love and maybe intention and a more heart-centered approach?
[00:26:46] Mark: It's still a work in progress. It's something I suppose maybe in the first instance I went in a little too heavy with the hippie. and was a bit too open maybe for what people were prepared to receive or open to. So I'm still finding the balance in that. I would say that I tailored the programming a little bit more to, I suppose balance maybe and a little less intensity.
It's still intense though. It is what it is. For me because I've had to sit with, what are these people coming to me for? As we know, being on this spiritual or healing path, it's not all light and love. It's a deep dive into the depths of your being. And it's uncovering stuff that you didn't want to look at, that maybe definitely in my instance, dictated many years, most of my life.
So, Bringing more awareness into that, I had to realize that, okay, people are coming to me for a certain thing, and I can tailor that thing, but I can't, as an empath, I fall into fixer mode quite fast, and I came to realize that, I can't fix everybody's world, or I can't make them put the four years of investment and crying into my pillow and there was a time in 2021 I'd committed to go all in on the healing path. I went from a breathwork event to a medicine ceremony to the online course.
And the next year in 2022, my wife Leah kind of mirrored it back to me. And she said, because she had kind of been dabbling, but not jumped fully across the bridge, I suppose. And she said to me, I need to approach my healing like a full-time job.
like you did last year. I witnessed what you did and one of the examples was for a while I would be eating my dinner in the evenings and a memory from my childhood or my past would trigger in my mind and I could be eating my dinner and crying into my dinner and on occasions like snot coming out of my nose and I'm just having like a complete trauma release and then there was another time when Leah, she had just got into a pattern of standing up and coming over and hugging me like mid-dinner and there was another time where I was actually, I kind of choked but it was, I was choking because I was laughing and she came over to hug me and I'm laughing.
And then she steps back and she starts laughing and she's like last year I didn't know what was happening. One minute I'm sitting having dinner, and next thing you're crying snot into your dinner and you're talking about something happened that when you were 10. So to be aware of that experience and to go through that both together and then for Leah the next year to frame it as this is a full-time process.
You can't dabble in this work if you want to commit to it. You got to go all in. You got to work with mentors. You have to tap into people who are vibrating on a different frequency than you, and you're trying to level up your vibration. So, reopening the gym and being aware of this, I feel like my job now is to provide a safe love and space program that is holistic in ways, but it's not my job to go in and fix everybody's childhood traumas.
That's very much. yeah. And I have an offering. I have a breathwork offering. If that's what people want to come in and connect like we did last week on the call that's my most passionate area, but not everybody's ready to jump in there or to experience that, and Ireland, you had an experience here.
I think you were here for a while. So we often say here, we're maybe 10 years behind the States in a lot of ways. And I believe with this work, that's true. It's very grassroots. We had a festival in Belfast two years ago. It's on again very soon for the third time and it was called Happy Fest I had Ciara Daly, the girl who owns it on my podcast recently and we were laughing saying like, can you believe that there's a billboard in Belfast that says Happy Fest?
30 years ago there would be gunshot wounds or holes in the billboards. So we're very grassroots and it's beautiful because it is changing and it's a nice time to be part of the change, but I feel so many people are watching, but the next step, or what I'm encouraging them to do, is to lean in a little bit further.
[00:31:40] Aneta: It's interesting because you talk about the trauma in Northern Ireland. You talk about the violence that people experience and there are the people who directly experience it. And then some generations came after, but who still have in their DNA, the generational trauma, even if they didn't experience it? And so I feel like every generation, if we could just do a little bit better like we could start to make the shift in the change.
So you say you feel like it's 10 years behind maybe, but it makes sense. But there are people like you, there are other people within your communities who are making a difference, who are lovingly showing folks, that there are ways that we can heal things.
And with breath work, I was just having this thought where I feel like breath work for me, especially when we go long and go deep, with our session, I remembered stuff that I'd forgotten, or I discovered something that was like really impacting me.
I wasn't aware of it. And it's like cleaning out your refrigerator and then you find something at the back that has gotten so bad or like rotted, and you're like, I forgot that this was here. And yet it impacts the entire state of the refrigerator. You got to clean the whole thing out now, right?
And I find that with breathwork, there's always something that comes up and I was like, I didn't realize that was still there, or, I didn't realize that was there. And it's never-ending. I think I put in a video last week afterward like you're just peeling back a layer and going, okay, now I got to do it again.
And there's more and there's more. Like, I don't know that you ever get to a point where you're done until maybe we expend our last breath and we carry on and go back to the source. But, do you find that the more you do the work it's a little bit easier, but then there's still more to discover? There's still more to heal from.
[00:33:37] Mark: I feel the healing never stops. And Yeah, and you go through seasons and cycles because sometimes I feel like I should be done with something and it's still a little like it's impacted me but having the tools and the practices and implementing them daily is like, if we can be present or for in the present moment, then the past isn't there and the future doesn't exist yet.
So we're just now. And that is a beautiful space to be just in this blissfulness, but obviously, the goal is to stay there and how much we can stay there. But I would say out of all of the work that I've done. The strength in doing it is the ability to be aware when I'm in a stress response, fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, and even though they can still play out they can still have bad days.
Somewhere, and much faster now, the awareness and whether that's okay, I need to ground. I need to put my feet on the earth. I need to cold water. And then when I have, what's been joyful is having Reva. She's seven months old today.
[00:35:05] Aneta: Oh, exciting.
[00:35:06] Mark: She came in an ayahuasca vision and it sounds crazy if you're not in this work and this world, but we knew from the start she was a girl. And it's so interesting. It feels like she's been here before, like, we take her for walks and she sits in the front of the carrier and she smiles at people and we'll hear every time we go on a walk, five people will be like, that kid is so happy. And sometimes I'm like, to Leah like, it feels like she's supposed to be here, she came for some experience and that'll unfold obviously in the rest of her life. Like this morning I'm sitting with her in my arms just singing random You're familiar with Shaggy they're like a rapper dude that kind of had like, it wasn't me and all that kind of stuff. It's a joke in our house at the moment that these random songs keep coming to me and Leah, and we're just kind of singing them because we need sometimes to soothe her in certain ways.
[00:36:00] Aneta: Yeah.
[00:36:01] Mark: And that has been the most beautiful connection to one, being present and then two remembering of where I was before all this work, and the fact that I can sit and spend an hour singing two lines of a song on repeat. While I'm comforting her. Like in the past, I couldn't sit still.
I was caffeinated. I was intense. I would have been thinking millions of thoughts. Whereas today, it was one of those moments, I know you have kids who you'll resonate with, where your whole day changed in 10 seconds. Like I need to sleep. And I was like, okay, I'll take her. And my plans of going to the gym and stuff just evaporated on the spot.
[00:36:45] Aneta: Sure.
[00:36:46] Mark: And. I'm sitting and I'm singing the, like, what was I singing? You're my angel. You're my darling angel for like 30 minutes on repeat and in those moments while I'm being present and laughing, I'm thinking like, who's this guy? When did this guy appear? But knowing that that was always there.
[00:37:08] Aneta: It's so beautiful. Like I think becoming a parent, it's such a lesson in unconditional love, and I remember saying to my parents, after I had my oldest daughter, I said, did you love me as much as I love her? I couldn't possibly believe that they felt that way. About, my parents are great of course but it was like this unbelievable feeling of like I would do anything for my children.
And as you said, your plans, your selfish desires, or not even selfish desires, they just evaporate because they don't matter. All that matters is that you are so present for this child that you've been entrusted to guide them on their journey.
I mean, it's such a miracle, isn't it? I don't know. I think that it's just one of those times where I felt so connected to God in a whole new way and so connected to purpose. And even it's often to me with my parents and just like, I released all judgment because I was like, everyone's just doing the best that they can. So yeah. How has that changed you at all? Like, I guess with your relationship with God, with your own family or parents, or just even the way you experienced, yourself as a human.
[00:38:28] Mark: So we're seven months in I say that there's a transition and some of that transition, I wrestled with for a while. I'm 37, so, and Leah will be 40 this year. So we kind of had Reva a little bit on the latter side. I think we discussed this on our call last week, but we weren't ever intending to have kids in hindsight, probably trauma-related.
We didn't want the access that part of ourselves and for both of us it was through plant medicine that we got opened into receiving Reva. Leah had a profound experience also with ayahuasca after the ceremony, she said the medicine was preparing me for being a mum. And that was very difficult to witness also a very difficult ayahuasca experience.
It was fully on. It looked like at times she was being electrocuted. But it was all preparation for what we have today. But it makes me view my parents in like you said, everyone was doing the best that they could. With the skills that they had.
It also makes me realize how disconnected humanity has been for such a long time like, at this time, I suppose, that we're more openly talking about love and our emotions and things that weren't offered in my family home growing up. One of the significant events in my life when I was 13 on the 20th of January, 2001, and the next day, my granddad on my mom's side drowned himself in a river.
He'd suffered with his mind predominantly which was years of alcohol abuse. And it's kind of looking back on all this now. It's probably what inspires me to get on and talk and do my podcast and share the breathwork. And I'm still challenged by it at times as well, a man opening up.
And being vulnerable and talking about love and having connections and going to circles and making eye contact or hosting circles and making eye contact with other people. And sometimes I just feel like that maybe stems from like my conditioning when I was so young because everything was repressed and shut down within the home environment but also within the culture here.
So to see all this through the lens of now Riva, every time we meet her or greet her or see her, we try and make her smile or be the energy of something that's smiling. And it's only really been the last couple of weeks that we've been out in public and people have been mirroring it back to us.
We walked past a particular young girl the other day and I heard her say to her friend, that baby is so happy. and that's the way it should be. That's the way all of our parents and their parents should have experienced life. So it causes you to reflect in many ways.
The other thing is. It's the thought of how the world can be if we continue on this path and continue to open our hearts and live from this place. And I don't fully know how that goes with so much chaos at the same time, but we can trust that it's all supposed to be. I think that answers the question.
[00:42:04] Aneta: Yeah. I mean, we could talk at length about all this stuff and we never really have the end of the question answered, right? There's so much there. No, I love that you guys are just showering her with so much love and great energy and, people can receive that back.
And I think that's a lesson for all of us. We have to do the work every day to be where we need to be for ourselves so that we can go and share that with others as well. And it does require a little bit of vulnerability to put yourself out there and to greet people openly with an open heart.
But every time I've done that, I've just received it back 10 folds, a hundredfold. It just is so amazing. Because then you meet people that are also on their path and you continue to grow and to learn and connect in new ways. So one of the ways that I know you share is through podcasting.
And do you have like three different podcasts? Because I found the very old Mark Toner podcast on Spotify. And that was interesting for me just to see you in the myths, it felt like you were in the middle of your journey, like the start and maybe in the journey and sharing so much, which I think I just want to commend you for being so open and vulnerable because I think it was just a great way for me to get to know you better without us having live conversations.
And then I found. Another one, which was kind of the higher state one. And then I think there might be another. So how many podcasts do you have, he takes a sip of water. How many podcasts do you have and why?
[00:43:47] Mark: So this would be a representation at times of how my mind has been in the past. One thing that I recommend as a podcaster, as you are podcasting and psychedelics don't go well. Well, my initial podcast started in 2019. In 2018, I had picked a spot on the pull-up station in the gym where I intended to hang myself.
I was in a dark, deep place of started to abuse alcohol. Like so many of my ancestors have done, have lost so many family members to drink. I got this described by the Huni Quin when they were here and they spoke about how the spirit, which is also named the spirit of alcohol, is something that's sweeping through humanity at this time and it won't be forever.
It's a process and anybody who doesn't drink, like I don't know, is aware that it's not a good thing. It can suck in so many people and you can be two people. You can be kind of like my mom who doesn't really, like get sucked into it, and then there are other family members that it pulls them much more than that, my granddad being the kind of extreme example of that, and others.
But I took a massive step in 2019 and I invited my auntie Deirdre, who also works in mind wellness space. It would have been her dad who killed himself. And I asked her to come on and we'd do a podcast. And she didn't know what a podcast was, and that initial podcast ended up being over three days and I think it was somewhere around seven hours. And we told,
[00:45:39] Aneta: I listened to all of those.
[00:45:40] Mark: Okay. I was very new to podcasting back then, but there was part of me that was so tired of the pain that my family was in, that I wanted to tell our story about what we had experienced. And that opened up so much for so many people that I could never have understood by the conclusion of that podcast, which I'll get to in a moment I think it had over 200, 000 downloads, and a few interesting things happened towards the end.
I would go to events here in Northern Ireland and people would recognize me from the podcast and they'd come up and they'd say stuff and I had a little bit of imposter syndrome. And I've always been quite introverted, like it's kind of my number one thing like at home with my family is my favorite place to be.
So I had internal programs running, like who are you to receive this kind of notoriety or whatever. And then I started to question what I spoke about because I said, I'm so open about all of this now in hindsight going back, but I had a grey period in there. I told stories about being circumcised as a kid and all these things that came up that I was telling about in some kind of therapy process for me.
But mixing the psychedelics and the unstable ground that I felt I was on. There was a time when I went, this has to end. I needed to stop it. And I would have come to learn that you can delete the account, but the podcast stays on Spotify. So then I had a quiet period where I didn't podcast. And then I wanted to come back on the podcast, but I decided I was just going to do them on my own.
And then I find that process quite depressing. I would go on rambles. Leah is my greatest supporter and advisor. And she'd be like, I couldn't listen to that. Like you were talking shit. So I had a long break and then I had a friend, a member of the gym. He's very marketing savvy.
And she said, a lot of people listen to your podcast, a lot of members. And because I talk about things that people here don't often talk about, not many people tell me that they listen, but friends of friends. So she said, you know how powerful that was from a marketing perspective. So earlier this year I decided to bring it back and bring it back as number one as a father.
So I'm a little more savvy about the avenues that I kind of go down to an extent. I did, I recorded one yesterday. That was a bit wild also because it was kind of like just having crazy conversations. But, this to me, feels from this perspective, no one, or maybe, I don't wanna say I'm through my healing journey, because as you know, it can come up and bite you at any time.
But I feel much more grounded in who I am. What I'm talking about and kind of the message that I'm putting out into the world but I regret deleting the first one. I had a hundred and fifty podcasts and the true story is I came back from an ayahuasca ceremony and I had a conversation with a friend who was also at that ceremony and we spoke a little too deeply about the experience and the experience in Ireland.
Now we kept it very about our experiences, but in hindsight, it wasn't as smart as it could have been. So that kind of led me to stop it and take some time away to reflect on, whether am I in a place to be talking about this. Because I felt like my healing was very live as you may have heard in those days, so.
[00:49:23] Aneta: But that's what resonated. I mean, there's so much stuff that you shared and people have to be vulnerable for others to be able to also go to some spaces themselves. And so I loved listening to those episodes. I'm glad they're still on Spotify. But what is the name of your latest podcast?
[00:49:42] Mark: I originally wanted to call my first one the Mark Toner Experience as a kind of nod to Joe Rogan, who is the Joe Rogan Experience. And I never did it the first time around, and I always regretted it. I always thought if Joe Rogan could have the Joe Rogan Experience, this could be the Mark Toner Experience.
And I didn't do it, and I'm a massive Joe Rogan fan. So a few months ago, I Invested in a graphic designer and we went back and forth and we created a logo and it's the Mark Toner experience. And I got the perfect logo that I wanted that kind of there's a flying saucer in it and kind of leads towards where some of the conversations may go.
So currently I'm only. four podcasts in. And I intend to do them maybe once a month, some months I might do two. Essentially, often we get members who pop into the gym from different places. I have a cousin who facilitates breath work in Australia and her partner has spent some time in Peru in a community kind of thing. So I imagine that they'll be back in the future and I'm like, okay, we can do that on the podcast.
So we still wanted the platform, but I don't have any pressure on when they happen or if I don't have one out for six weeks, I'm cool with it, but I'm still, I'm not going to delete it this time.
[00:51:02] Aneta: Okay.
[00:51:04] Mark: So if you're
[00:51:04] Aneta: Well, I'll have to check
[00:51:05] Mark: we can do it.
[00:51:08] Aneta: I love that. So you've talked about the Huni Quin people and I'd not heard of this community of people before. And I know that they're very special to you. So what can you share about them, about their mission, about them being called right now to come out into the world and outside of their home and what's their message to us?
[00:51:31] Mark: I like to keep their vibration on me, at all times.
[00:51:35] Aneta: That's beautiful.
[00:51:37] Mark: With their beads and their arts. I always felt as a child, grown-up that I've seen the world from a different vantage point than my schoolmates and the world, and a lot of this was influenced by Granddad's death at the time and in the way he killed himself up till I was 14, I was, Like, I played sports constantly.
I was always the captain of the teams or one of the more athletic ones on the teams. And then whenever he died, my life changed into escapism. That is where kind of ecstasy came in at that stage. And it became more about getting to Saturday night and having those experiences. So whenever I moved back into the realm of plant medicines, there was apprehension because I knew that my world, I got into CrossFit and part of that was trying to get out of the rave scene and live a more healthy life.
So when plant medicines came on my radar, there was a little part of me that didn't trust myself and a lack of a better term, drugs. What I've become aware of now is plant medicines or consciousness, expanding experiences.
But I always had this feeling that I was a little bit of like an age runner who kind of always wanted to explore or see or seek. And sometimes it's like, be careful what you wish for. So through a friend of a friend, I heard that there was a medicine circle happening in Ireland with the Huni Quin and I didn't know what to expect, to be honest. And we arrived at the place and, the guys had the feathers on their head, like proper members of the Huni Quin.
And that was the start of a journey that kind of led to maybe 7 or 8 Madison Circles with these particular members of the Huni Quin. And what they spoke about was the most truth that I had ever heard in life. How humans are supposed to live in harmony with nature. And that we're not a species that is made to compete because that kills the earth. We're a species that are meant to live in a community and exist in a community with open hearts.
The expression in Portuguese, so Alegria, which means only joy. And they sing and they shout that often in their ayahuasca circles. So, living in that space of only joy, and this is what wearing the beads and connecting back to that often means for me, is if we can, this is what we're trying to do with Riva.
If we can be in that vibration, now, that doesn't mean that sad things can't happen in life. But if we can hold our bar at only joy. And when the sad things in life unfold and chaos can happen and tragedies can happen, we're always trying to return to the only joy.
They also spoke about how within their community, they wanted to keep their traditions internal, because what the West had done to their people was essentially a genocide, to take parts of the rainforest and to farm it to make money in a capitalist world. So for a long time, they kept their medicines their traditions, and their culture within, and then Gaia, the Earth's Great Spirit, at a time told them that it was time for the younger members to start leaving the rainforest and go out.
And part of this is in response to what the Western world is doing to the earth today. So one of the more powerful experiences was a weekend when we had a Q& A with them after and it was sometimes literally like even to this day. I'm like, did this happen? Like, how am I? There are only 16, 000 of these guys.
What is this random cross-fitter from somewhere in Ireland like? How does this happen? But they spoke about that.
[00:56:03] Aneta: Not random.
[00:56:04] Mark: Yeah, no, it's not. But just when you have those funny thoughts in your mind, you're like, Whoa, this is crazy. And sometimes I feel like I'm now, well, I am, that was part of the Q&A. So we were able to ask them any question we wanted and some of them were comical and some of them were very serious and they said that they had left the rain forest to come out and help. This is something that has only really dropped for me in the last 6 months, even though these experiences were happening in 2021, 2022, and 2023, but they said they left the rainforest to teach people what true people are.
It translates into true people. Huni Quin translates into true people. So I had this period where I felt drawn to go into the Amazon. And then, we decided that we were going to become parents. I still feel a little drawn to it at some time in the future, but not in the immediate future.
And some of my friends, one very close particular friend actually, a few of them have been in, some of them multiple times, into where they live and it's a real adventure. There's no hospitals, like, you're deep in the forest. So I felt for a while like, okay, I'm supposed to, I serve ayahuasca, or I'm supposed to go and understand these plants deeper.
And then the Awaken Breathwork Facilitator training came up and I stepped into that and I took the healing from that and understood what breathwork is. And over time realized that my role isn't to facilitate ayahuasca, it's to continue what the Huni Quin are talking about. But to be that the vibration of only joy in these experiences and that understanding has been profound because now I can see and in my recent ayahuasca ceremony, this became clear once again that they have come out to teach us.
I have been taught now I must teach and that's ultimately what the planet and plant were showing them. Because when they come over. They come over in the summer. Now, Ireland is not tropical in any sense, even in the peak of summer, but they're very particular about when they come. And they come and they have incredible experiences here.
And then they have to go home. It's where their families are. It's where their kids are. It's where their tradition is. It's probably where they feel safest. So why they came had been the part that I couldn't really make peace with or understand and haven't now been certified by Awaken and taken people through breathwork experiences. It has never been clearer to me what my mission as part of being connected to that is.
[00:58:59] Aneta: Yeah. When you were talking about that, it made me think of the change you want to see. It's work on yourself, do the work, and then show up and help others to do the same. That's so amazing that the earth, the medicine told them it's time to go because as you said, they could be distrustful of the Westerners.
They could be distrustful of people who may have been capitalizing on their land and making all these changes, but it's so selfless to think that they're like, hey, we have a message. And for those that are able and willing to receive this right now, we're going to share it and then now you do your part.
[00:59:41] Mark: I got goosebumps just thinking like Jhonny Twinn, who's kind of the leader of the group. You'll be sitting because they're there for the medical experience, but you get to be in their energy for the weekend. And like, they're sitting beside you and you have this real profound, like, wonder what your world is like because you're lit, you're here in my world right now.
And on Irish land, but it gives you a different perspective, the example is I could be at this at the weekend and then maybe be coaching on Wednesday in my CrossFit gym. It feels like I'm like so far away from Amazon, but internally, a lot of me has changed. A quote that I love, I heard around the time I lived in Brisbane Australia was a mind that is open to new dimensions and can never return to its old ways. And to have those experiences, like truly I feel so blessed at 37 years old to have committed, when the world was melting down in a lot of ways during COVID, to like fully commit to this stuff.
And by trusting the internal guidance, you end up with the true people. The people on earth who aren't conditioned or westernized, live in their villages in the same way that their ancestors have lived for thousands of years. I'm like there are some things they do have now. They've taken on board some stuff like they do have solar power, which makes sense.
So they've taken some of the West, but they're very conscious of not taking in too much because they're aware of what it can do to them and what can happen. But the younger generation, like some of these lads, are all in their twenties and they feel like their expression is they're the guardians of the forest.
So they're aware that what we're doing is having a massive impact on how they're living. There are a lot of floods happening within their region at this time, like today. And how beautiful is it in a way that the younger ones are saying, okay, what can we do for our community? We can go out and try and help the outside world change and hopefully in time, it may not happen in my lifetime, but hopefully, Riva can live in that vibration, and that vibration will be passed on to her world and what she creates. In time, there will be much more harmony, if we don't all become robots in the gap in between.
[01:02:17] Aneta: Mark, I could talk to you for hours. If folks want to work with you what's the best way that they can find you and at least connect to you through maybe the podcast or some of the beautiful things that you put out into the world?
[01:02:31] Mark: Instagram, marktoner55 is kind of my main connection point. You can get me occasionally on the Mark Toner Experience podcast as well, just sharing more views and visions of this world.
[01:02:46] Aneta: I love it. Is it okay to also tell people they can find some of your older podcasts through Spotify if they want to go a little bit deeper and are open to hearing more of your experience? I enjoyed listening to it. Not because it was easy and I could see where you were in your process, but just because I felt like your vulnerability and sharing were healing for me.
[01:03:09] Mark: Thank you. I appreciate you sister. Yes. So some of the ones I'd love to direct people towards, and I haven't thought about the old podcast in a long time until you brought it up. I didn't even know it was available. My auntie Deirdre has been there for that experience and times I would come back from medicine and I'd book in a podcast with her and she would help me kind of decipher what happened in the experience and she doesn't have, she has a little bit plant medicine experience, but not loads, but we would bounce ideas back and forth.
So some of those could be interesting just to help people, on their journey, there's also a lot about, in it what the modern human struggles with in regards to like substance abuse and things along those lines.
[01:04:00] Aneta: Yeah, definitely important topics and I just appreciate you so much and I'm so grateful that our paths have crossed and that you're a part of my continued healing journey. And, there's a question I ask all of my guests, which is tied to the title of this podcast, which is what does it mean to you to live the width of your life?
[01:04:24] Mark: I just saw Live the Width recently on something you shared with me and I thought it was beautiful. I think to seek opportunities in your day, and in your week, so that you can be present in this whole experience. I believe that today, a lot of our lives are about whenever we get, whenever we achieve, whenever we are, and whenever we're always moving to the next thing. And reflecting on something I witnessed was Jana Twin, one of the guys from the Huni Quin.
They sell their art at the experience, the bracelets, and stuff. And sometimes the weekends are a Friday night and a Saturday night. The arts sit on the floor, just on the corner on a mat. And they all got moved and scattered because people were trying on different things. And I just watched him reposition them one day.
And it profoundly changed how I do a lot of things, like washing up, for example, at home. He was so present in what he was doing, and there was so much I could see love in his repositioning of the arts. And they were for sale, but they weren't all his. And as I reflected on and I thought about it, I was like, this guy's in his late twenties, he's on the other side of the world serving his culture and his medicine to people that he doesn't know, that he doesn't understand, linguistically, culturally.
And yet he's able to be in that experience, present and trusting. He has a family, and kids all deep in the place that you can't get back to in 24 hours. It's a process to get there. There are many internal flights and boat rides. And yet I could feel from what he was doing that, the only thing in his mind at that time was repositioning his bands. And to live the width, doesn't necessarily have to be anything more than being present in what you're doing. And if you can be present in what you're doing, you're living it because you're alive in this experience. And. I want to try and take as much of that to my last breath as possible.
[01:07:01] Aneta: That is so beautiful. Thank you, Mark, for being you. Thank you for sharing so generously with us today and also in the world and all your gifts. We'll include all the links in the show notes and I hope that you come back on again in the future. And yeah, thank you so much for joining me today.
[01:07:22] Mark: Thank you very much. I love that we get to meet and have these experiences and it's such a joy to be in this world and connecting with like-minded people. So thank you very much for having me. Big love.
[01:07:37] Aneta: Thank you for listening to today's episode. If today's conversation inspired you to dream again, break out of your comfort zones, or reflect on what it means to you to live more fully, then please follow this podcast because every week you'll hear more stories from people just like you who took imperfect action towards their goals, created more joy and are living the life that they always dreamt of living.