TRANSKRYPCJA 🔗
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Hello and welcome back to the Balanced and Blissful Energies podcast. Today I am so happy to have my guest Colleen Quinn with me today on our virtual studio. And Colleen is a psychologist, a PhD, and she has done quite a bit of ⁓ research, but today I think she's here to talk to us about her NDE. and Ease, two of them, and her book that she just published just came out last month? No, this month. This month, we're still in April. Essence Merging, which I invite everyone to pick up a copy of and we'll have a link in the description. But without further ado, Colleen, would you like to share a little bit more about yourself just as an intro into the book?
Colleen Quinn: Right? Yep. Thank you, Elizabeth. ⁓ I guess I would say that I've always known that I am a spiritual being having a human experience as are we all. From the time I was a young age, I would say to my parents, I am going up to church. I would walk myself across a four lane highway just to sit there and feel the energy. It's not that I even really was into the doctrine. just surfed the energy in the building. And when I was 12, I was very, very close with my grandmother. I lived with my grandparents until I was nine. And my grandmother said she was going to go on this vacation without me. I would go to visit her every weekend after my mom remarried because she really was my foundation. There was such love there. And I could My grandmother wasn't even sick and I couldn't believe she was going to go without me. And in front of my whole family, I said, you're going to go there and you're going to die and you're never going to see me again. That's exactly what happened. I believe it was the strength of that love that fostered that intuition. So I've had these abilities all the way through, but my view of God was
Elizabeth Hechavarria: ⁓ wow.
Colleen Quinn: very steeped in the culture that I was raised in. So God was a patriarchal figure outside of me. And I would pray, which was really my list of demands of how things should go. I did devote myself to psychology. In the Greek, that means study of the soul. And I really love that because it is a path of wellness. And there's so many paths up the mountain to get to that thriving and wellness in all facets of our life. But for me, it was a head study of the topic and you know, there's lots of skills they teach and managed care really wants to put band-aids on symptoms and not very many people want to really be well. They just want to get their symptoms a little bit better. And I was really a walking head at the time. So love never stops knocking on our hearts. That's the beauty of it. And we get these love squeezes that get tighter and tighter and tighter until we get to the very, very end of our strength. We have no strength left. And that's when we're surrendered finally and our hearts break open and love can come in. love never stops knocking on our hearts. That's the beauty of it. And we get these love squeezes that
Load full transcript
get tighter and tighter and tighter until we get to the very, very end of our strength. We have no strength left. And that's when we're surrendered finally and our hearts break open and love can come in. And so... ⁓ I can see that I needed those two near-death experiences. They both taught me different things about what this relationship to this unseen mystical genius love intelligence is. yeah, so that's really, my book starts at the second near-death experience because that's when everything really radically changed.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Hmm. I had never heard of this term of love squeezes, but it sounds very sweet, for life is beating you up until you realize that you need to surrender, ⁓ which is, yeah, it's kind of what you're describing, but ⁓ tell me. Yeah.
Colleen Quinn: Can I say a word about that? So, energy ⁓ is one of the most powerful energies in realm. ⁓ I follow all of the religions, but biblically, said, let there be light, and there was light. ⁓ So, words are very powerful creation energy. So, we call these experiences pain, we're going to bring a very different energy to it. energy ⁓ is one of the most powerful energies in realm. ⁓ I follow all of the religions, but biblically, said, let there be light, and there was light. ⁓ So, words are very powerful creation energy. So, we call these experiences pain, we're going to bring a very different energy to it. than if we call it a challenge or if we call it a love squeeze. than if we call it a challenge or if we call it a love squeeze. ⁓ so I, know, none of us got here to this realm without the initial squeezes through the birth canal. ⁓ It's inherent in this realm and we all blossomed into these new beings from through that. Growth can only happen from an uncomfortable place. We're either gonna let it grow us or we're gonna harden our hearts and then the squeezes will get tighter because love is never gonna give up. But being aware of the energy that we wrap around the experiences of our lives really changes everything.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Yeah, thank you for that. For the energy of words, absolutely. And so can you just give us like a brief, I know the book starts with the second NDE, but do you want to maybe just give us a brief intro to what happened with the first NDE that wasn't enough?
Colleen Quinn: Sure. So that story actually started actually much earlier, if it's okay if I go into the backdrop, Elizabeth. So when I was 27, I was a mother of two young children and my brother was 12 years younger than me. We shared a bipolar mother. So I was really a mother figure for him. He called me every single day.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Sure. Yeah.
Colleen Quinn: only person that's called me every day, quite a close connection. And so we talked one day when he was 15 and the next day he died in a car accident. That to this day is the hardest thing that I've ever ⁓ experienced. And as I said, I had this patriarchal view of God and I
Elizabeth Hechavarria: ⁓ good.
Colleen Quinn: In
my mind, my young and mature faith, this, God made a mistake. A bipolar mother should not have to endure this. She couldn't handle it and we should all get a bi because she couldn't handle it. And so I was very angry at God and you can imagine how my life went. It was a great crucible on me. And I carried it for three years. I was so angry at God. I didn't talk to God for three years. And I, you know, in this delusional, excuse me, delusional way, I felt like I was honoring my brother, but he wouldn't have wanted that. He was loving and selfless and funny. He would not have wanted any of that, but our egos gave us these twisted messages to protect us.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm.
Colleen Quinn: Well, after three years, I pulled over into a parking lot of a church late one night and all I could say was, I'm so angry, but could you just take this hardness off my heart? Now that's the kind of prayer that always gets heard when we are at the very end of our strength. And it was a prodigal son moment for me because my brother always wanted us to have a house for his nephews. Money dropped in our laps. My heart thought I came back into life for the most part. I still kind of reserve this part of me that died when my brother died. So fast forward 20 years later, I'm in a car accident head on in my lane. Broke 17 bones. I was in intensive care for weeks. had five surgeries.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm.
Colleen Quinn: But initially my heart stopped. I was in the tunnel with the light, subsumed by light. And Elizabeth, that's a feeling that is beyond words. That peace, it's just luscious. don't have words for it. But the light speaks in ideas. So the light said, we would like you to go back, but it's your choice. Well, when love asks you to do anything, of course I'm like, yes, of course, yes, I should go back. That's it. The beauty of that is in coming back. And when I came back, as I said, I was very injured. My blood pressure was 60 over 30, which was adaptive because my body was in total shock. But I chose to be here. It was the first... since I was 27 that I actively chose to be here. And that was really powerful for me. And I could see that every day that we wake up, we're all choosing to be here. Yet thoughts are just as powerful as words. When we have these thoughts that, life is happening to me, We're in the delusion that is out of congruence with the truth. We have chosen to be here, but a lot of us live, I certainly did, like I was a victim and life was just happening to me. So that changed my life in a dramatic way. Fast forward the story after my second near death experience when I learned about the power of breath work and I wait to get trained to be a breath worker in the Netherlands. The trainer didn't know my history. I just mentioned the car accident and she said, wow, Colleen, you really surrounded yourself with a death energy to bring that car accident to you. Yeah, that sounds controversial, yet it totally resonated with me. There was a knowing that everything is love. There is nothing out of alignment with love. We get what we need. I did magnetize that to me because of the part of me that I was like walking with a dead arm for 27 years. It was the part of me that was dead. It drew it to me so I could come more fully into life. So it was many lessons all the way through, ⁓ but a very powerful teacher.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Yeah, those who ⁓ go through this experience, do. mean, it seems to be a universal experience. This, the near death experience of coming back with incredible love and ⁓ gratitude and just no fear, almost. ⁓ You agree with that, that sense of no fear?
Colleen Quinn: Well, I don't think I had it initially. I did a lot of work to work through the traumas of my life. That car accident was a big trauma, even though there was so many blessings in it. So I actually went back to my shaman years later, and he facilitated a ⁓ trip with Sassafras, which is ⁓ MDMA. and peyote, they're both heart openers. ⁓ And I asked for a total nervous system reset. you know, be careful what you ask for, right? It was powerful. I was lying on a cot on top of a bearskin. I could feel my ⁓ shaman's energy coming through that bearskin, but my body was hurled around the cot. like I was in Fight Club. I had carried this stuck, stagnant energy for 50 years. I was in my 50s by the time I did this. And I went back into every trauma of my life, including traumas I experienced in the womb. My mother was hospitalized twice during her pregnancy with me for my safety.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: you
Colleen Quinn: I vividly experienced them and whether they were physical ⁓ insults or psychological insults, they were all stored in my body the same way as kicks and punches. And my body was hurling around to get that energy out. Well, at the end of that experience, I saw that in my life I have walked through the valley of the shadow of death. there literally is nothing to fear. I've never been alone. We always think we're alone in these dark moments, but when you have a visceral experience of knowing that you were not alone, it doesn't matter when anybody says it changes everything. There's ⁓ an ancient Hebrew saying that says, what's truer than truth. Do you know the answer?
Elizabeth Hechavarria: I haven't heard that saying.
Colleen Quinn: It's experience.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Hmm.
Colleen Quinn: This whole ride is about collecting experiences and allowing them to shape and mold us to become more like rarefied love. When I experience something on a cellular level with visual images and auditory downloads, it becomes unrefutable in my being. So yes, I have walked through the valley of the shadow of death. I viscerally know
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm.
Colleen Quinn: that my consciousness lives on independent of whether I have this body or not. That's very powerful. Einstein said correctly, energy cannot be created nor destroyed. Quantum physics has supported that. We have energy inside these bodies. It
might leave the body. And it is interesting in ⁓ India, Their term for what happens at the end of your life is different than most of the rest of the world. Most of the world calls it death. In India, that term translates to dropping your body. And that's far more accurate because the energy lives on. So what do I have to fear? Nothing. None of us do.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Yeah, only we're not, ⁓ most of us, at least in the Western society, we don't have that so ingrained in us ⁓ as a cultural belief as we're growing up. And so there's this really intense fear of death in our society that drives a lot of the ability to manipulate us actually. ⁓ Yeah.
Colleen Quinn: For sure. so much of our culture wires us in ways to serve the culture and not us. One of the most fascinating things about the research around plant medicines, specifically with psilocybin, that is the most used for people in end of life grief. The effect sizes are off the charts over 1.0. for that use because people have a visual experience of their consciousness moving on. It's just like being born into this realm. know, that consciousness comes from another realm into this realm. You're born into another realm yet again and it goes on and on for infinity if you follow the laws of nature. It's all throughout nature, right?
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right? Yeah, I always think of that birth process as actually we're being born into this realm, physical realm, but we're also dying in a way to another way of living. And yeah, know, babies, I'm a pediatrician, right? I was at a lot of deliveries during my training and just... the eyes, the sparkle in the baby's eyes. It's like this, just this, you get this entire feeling in your body in that room during the delivery. And there's just an incredible presence, right? That is just coming through and it's, ugh, I'm getting chills just thinking about it. By the way, my father's an obstetrician, so like it runs in the family. To be at that, yeah. But this...
Colleen Quinn: Beautiful.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: It is this transition of how we're experiencing, right? Like we're experiencing in some other way that maybe you had a taste of during that near death experience, but now we're here. And then there comes another transition where we drop our body. And it's not just to the ⁓ Indian tradition. think, you know, there's esoteric Christian ⁓ tradition as well that talks about the same process. It's just not really ingrained in the culture.
Colleen Quinn: Right, and this is where the unconscious needs to become conscious. We have to be aware of everything we're inundated with and shed what does not serve us. Our nervous systems are really like the software for our bodies. So it's questioning everything, bringing the unconscious into consciousness, and then rewiring for more adaptive outcomes.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm-hmm.
Colleen Quinn: letting go of that very narrow belief that it all ends with death. And since you're a pediatrician,
Elizabeth, I wanna share maybe if it's okay, when I went back into ⁓ the womb to really fully experience those traumas, I learned a lot. ⁓ So I... I went back initially in a rebirthing experience in the retreat where I learned breath work. Very powerful, but most healing is not a one and done. I went back again many times with the psychedelics, but then after that one trip, I did somatic experiencing therapy for a year to integrate it into the software of this nervous system. Well, what I learned is that
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm-hmm.
Colleen Quinn: Babies of womb trauma have one of three types of mothers. Either their mother has a mental illness, their mother has some kind of addiction, or the mother has extreme hormonal imbalance. And those babies, because they're between realms, they leave their body more frequently to go back to the energy field, to the collective energy field we call God.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm-hmm.
Colleen Quinn: So when they're born, they're usually gifted either spiritually or analytically or both. I don't have a lot of gifts, but I have both of those. And I realized that if that was the price I had to pay to always know myself as a full energy being, fully God having a human experience as we all are, then it was well worth it. And it was revealed to me in breath work, know, babies have these soft spots that get us through the birth canal. That's great. But those soft spots are where the energy leaves our bodies. And it's fascinating to me that those soft spots stay open for up to two years. And you'll see it when you hold a newborn baby, they're looking around the room because they can see.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Yes.
Colleen Quinn: see the energies. They are pure essence and they have not left that remembering yet. Those experiences are available through integrated breath work when you're deep into that process of your own soul and your soul loosens from your body and you're in that state of remembering. They're all there, but it's all of the ego and the culture that
Elizabeth Hechavarria: you
Colleen Quinn: it up those blissful balanced energies.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Yeah, yeah. And I wanted to, you you touched on somatic experiencing and that was it. was a specific question that I had about that because and again, you mentioned this is all kind of tying and you mentioned everything is stored in the body, right? Like all of the experiences that we've had and and you've you've yeah, you experienced also the trauma. this accident, ⁓ which may have, in addition to new trauma encoding into your body, also ⁓ been points where you had trauma. Like, does that make sense? Anyway, tell me more about your experience with somatic experiencing, your understanding about how that helps somebody, anybody to process the... difficult experiences that they've had in their life that may be interfering with their ability to be their full embodied self.
Colleen Quinn: Yeah, I'd love to. So first let me say that somatic experiencing uses breath work. You have to onboard your parasympathetic nervous system, which happens with the slow integrative breath work, ⁓ to get into that out of your head and allow yourself to drop into your body. And for most of us, These are bodies are shouting out these signals, pain, listen to me. And we override it and they shout louder and louder. It's very interesting when you become still how much you can hear. Now the definition of trauma is when the demands of a situation exceed your ability to cope.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm-hmm.
Colleen Quinn: Well, under that definition, we've all had drama to varying degrees. We've all been in that experience of overwhelm. Whatever you have experienced that has been overwhelming for you, your ego doesn't want you to feel it. It was overwhelming. It doesn't want you to feel it. It wants to shut it off and it gets pushed down very deep in your psyche. But these are the things that come out sideways for us.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm-hmm.
Colleen Quinn: that get us to be reactive and we're like, how did I lose my job again? Why am I in this situation again? It's all up, 95 % of what we do comes from our subconscious brain. It's all under the radar. This is where breath work brings the subconscious into consciousness. But what happens in somatic experiencing therapy? There's very little talking. You're using your breath, you're talking about the sensations that are coming up in your body and your therapist will guide you into those sensations and essentially getting you to allow them to do what they needed to do to get as big as they need to get to finally complete the actions that could not get completed at the time. That's when you rewrite your nervous system. So there's two aspects. You're gonna go in and finally feel it, but the great mercy there is you're feeling it from the place of your soul. So you're kind of hovering over it through the eyes of love, looking down at your body. So there's a distance and yet you feel it. Both are truets. I would call that a non-dual truth. So you have to finally feel it and then you have to finally complete.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm-hmm.
Colleen Quinn: what did not get completed at the time. And in that way, yes, we never shed an experience, but we integrate it. And that way we make peace with it and it can be harmonized into our systems. Being in dis-ease produces disease. When we harmonize and we have coherence, we have thriving in abundance.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: And just because I want to see how ⁓ also the psychedelics connect with, because you mentioned it was during a very powerful psychedelic experience that you're You didn't say your body, said part of you was thrown up and you were just kind of like rolling around and getting thrown around and you were feeling it. Is that right?
Colleen Quinn: ⁓ for sure. I was very grateful that my shaman and his assistant knew I was in the process and they held the space and trusted. It was beautiful, yeah.
Elizabeth
Hechavarria: Yeah, because I had also an experience in Peru with it was a was it was a thing, what you want and my body was just shaking uncontrollably. I've you know, there was in one level. Yes, I felt like a heart opening. But most of the time it was this somatic experiencing. you know, you can't think. There was no processing. It was just all somatic and just breathing through it and trying to keep my focus on the fire. it was really, really intense. Is that necessary for everyone to go through such a visceral experience? is this somatic experiencing maybe gentler? Because I would not characterize my experience as gentle. And it took me a while to integrate it. It took me a few months to integrate it.
Colleen Quinn: Yeah, for sure. That is a great question, Elizabeth. And here's what I would say. As a psychologist, I can only really speak from my experience. I had done so much work, so many descent trips. Now a lot of them were with breath work and breath work healed lots of, I had buried shame so deeply within my system for so many years that even when I worked in residential treatment and these kids would be spilling their shame all over the place, inwardly I'd be like, that's just a feeling I never feel.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm-hmm.
Colleen Quinn: And it didn't dawn on me that I didn't feel it because my ego buried it so deeply and was trying to protect me from it. Well, through breast work alone, I worked through the greatest shame of my life and many other shames to get myself to finally love myself and see my own worth. So it doesn't have to be as severe as psychedelics. I do love that you said that you couldn't think that's the beauty of psychedelic breath work and meditation. They are just going to pause and take a segue here. We have a default mode network that shows up on functional MRIs. It's a well-grooved network of about nine pathways and it maps directly onto Freud's construct of the ego.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm-hmm.
Colleen Quinn: self-referencing, gets us to take the shortcuts to sleepwalk through life. That shuts down with all three of those practices and it drops us into our midbrain, which is our feeling brain. It is the seat of our soul. That is why these experiences become so powerful, so unrefutable, so somatic. Now, I will say that for me, I did many descent trips leading up to the psychedelics and even after. However, I'm a big fan of Joe Dispenza. I don't know if you've heard of him.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Yeah, I've been to several of his retreats.
Colleen Quinn: So have I, maybe we'll see each other there sometime. You know, what he says is that you don't need to do the descent work, that if you continually do the ascent work, which are the bliss trips, and I can physiologically go into what's happening there and energetically, but if you do those bliss trips enough, and I do them every morning, you're going to re-, wire your nervous system, your brain, and all the way down to the cellular level. So it's a question that I don't know that I'll ever know. Joe Dispenza says you don't need to do the descent trips. I don't know, I did them. So that was my journey.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Right, yeah. I've done both. I've done both and ⁓ you get different things out of it, that's what I can say. ⁓ And there's something to be said about going, know, descending, taking that, yeah, that ⁓ trip of Inanna going into the underworld, right? And then the...
Colleen Quinn: Yeah.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: coming back up where there's a quality that changes in you that allows you to just experience, see, feel, understand, know things from a different perspective and with completely, like there's no... ⁓ Can I say value attached to it anymore? Like there's no, you know, you're not, there's no judgment, that's the right word, of others and even of yourself, of like you said, being able to love yourself again, to allow it to come in, because you realize that we've all been through all of this trauma here on earth, you know, of experiencing things that were not. weren't capable of at the moment to process. And so, yeah, we have our psyches that try to protect us and keep us alive. And the process is in both ways, whether you do the decent or the ascent, the process is to get beyond that survival mechanism. ⁓ Yeah. And I can't say that one is better than the other. It's just... They both serve.
Colleen Quinn: They both serve. One thing that you said, Elizabeth, I was so spot on that I want to piggyback off of it, which is that when we do these decent trips, we realize that we are much more powerful than we ever thought that we were, that we truly are God. We are limitless. And when you have that experience, you get in touch with your power. That is a great gift. And universally what I've seen in myself and the clients that I've worked with is that the story we wrapped around the experience gets flipped like a penny. So the story initially is usually I was a victim, I was alone, where was God? God was wrong, God abandoned me.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm.
Colleen Quinn: always gets flipped. And what you rightly said was that there's forgiveness is inbred in these experiences. So when I had the psychedelic trip and I experienced the physical blows of when my birth father was beating my mother when I was in utero, they got divorced before I was born. ⁓
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm-hmm.
Colleen Quinn: There was that and then the psychological blows of the ⁓ abuse from my stepfather. At the end of that, I realized that they are gonna have karma. They're gonna have to work this out. It's in their energy field. They're gonna have karma. And I had such compassion for them because hurt people hurt people. That's just how it goes. anything bad about them. And so I sent them all of the love that I could possibly muster and so much forgiveness because they're gonna need it for what they're gonna have to go through. And there's a liberation in that. When I can totally let them go and wish
them well, there's a great liberation for me and them. It cuts any karmic cord. That's powerful stuff.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm.
Colleen Quinn: That happens from the experience. And there are some universals you can expect when you allow yourself that freedom to go in through the eyes of love.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Yeah. I want to get now before we run out of time, because this is moving along. It's a wonderful conversation ⁓ about your second experience and the experiences that you describe in your book, in your very powerful book.
Colleen Quinn: So the second experience I had pneumonia. It was a very common bacteria that should have been healed in three weeks. I was sick for 10 months, coughing up massive quantities of blood, ⁓ fighting to get a breath. They had to quarterize my lungs. I was hospitalized for weeks and They said, there's nothing unusual about this bacteria. It must be something about you. So we're gonna test you for every autoimmune disease. Now it takes two weeks to grow these things in the Petri dishes. So I was home by now. I'm in the dark room waiting for the call. My husband's in the kitchen, braced ⁓ for the verdict. And the doctor said, you don't have any autoimmune disease. So you've been on these. IV antibiotics for weeks, you have to stay on them for 40 more days. That's a lot for a body to go through, but you will get well. Well, Elizabeth, that was the first time I really took stock in my life. I had helped a lot of people, but where were the love bonds? Where were the deep connections? Who would show up to my funeral? And I felt like I fell woefully short. Again, sobbing, I felt prostate on the floor, realizing I'm on gifted time, second time around. And I said, let me be loved in every moment. Well, the great playwright writes such fabulous stories because the fact that I was fighting to find a breath. led me to ⁓ my acupuncturist said, I don't tell a lot of people about this, but there's a shaman in Costa Rica who runs, who's part of, he'll be part of this greater retreat. You'll either love it or you'll hate it. So what do you have to lose? Well, that was all I needed. Like that was my call. But it was a radical change to my marriage contract for me to come home and say, hey, I wouldn't traipse around to the other side of the world without you. And my husband's like, yeah, go for it. Which was fabulous. So I brought my friend and that's where I met a Penamon who is the greatest embodiment of love that I've ever known. And he, we did a lot of somatic experiences, but he taught us breath work. And I think he trusted in the fact that once we started that conversation with our souls, which is a listening conversation, that we would be in the hands of love. Of course, a pantomime took me under his wing until he dropped his body and we became very close. But he did ask me, was a major synchronicity happened while we were there. I'm in Costa Rica on the other side of the world and there was someone else at the retreat
who lived on the other side of the lake from me. Like that's pretty amazing.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm. No.
Colleen Quinn: And a pen-a-man said, would you two be breathing breathwork partners for each other because you're so close to the capital of the United States, which has a very low energy, you could raise the energy in the area, it would be very powerful. Well, of course we said we would. And the book really starts there at the illness, the retreat, and then explores this.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm-hmm.
Colleen Quinn: relationship with my breathwork partner who after years of breathing together we ended up we would sit across from each other eyes open which is the lowest level of tantra and it's like soul connection and after years of this the term dropped in my lap twin flame I had a vision before that which I didn't know what it meant and then I was like, ⁓ my God, I think he is my twin flame. I showed him the list that was a spiritually based list, not a codependency based list. And he was like, yeah, that's how it feels for me too. And so the book really is a primer of what you could expect in turning your life over to love, but it's interwoven in this very unconventional love story. I mean, I'm in a thriving, vibrant marriage and it's all been honorable, but it is perhaps the greatest love of my life. This sacred healing love and he knows me, I know him better than anyone. It's been quite healing. But love begets love and I live with a man who's safe enough and secure enough to realize that
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Hmm.
Colleen Quinn: so that love gets spilled out everywhere.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: That's beautiful. Yeah. Do you want to share a little bit about the breathwork that you mentioned so much? What can people do at home? You know, because you talked about working with a shaman or maybe with a therapist, but is there anything that we can do safely at home?
Colleen Quinn: Yeah.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: that you would recommend to start with.
Colleen Quinn: That's a great question. you know, that's not a universal answer. So I think it depends on the health and well-being of your own inner landscape. If you are really living life in your head and these voices, which are really a conglomeration of all your wounded children from your past, if they're... ⁓
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Hmm.
Colleen Quinn: critical and judgmental and demeaning, you might need a guide. Because surrendering is going to be hard for you. You have to surrender in order to be able to go in and get into your soul. And when they're really active, they don't want to let go. They don't know the higher self and they're terrified to let go. So that's where I would recommend a guide. ⁓
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Hmm. Mm-hmm.
Colleen Quinn: If that is not the case for you and you've experienced some stillness and you have surrendered in other aspects of your life, ⁓ then I think you can safely do it on your own. And I do have ⁓ three videos on YouTube on how to do breath work.
One is a five minute step-by-step video. There are different types of breath work. The type that I do is slow. integrative breath work and that is powerful because you're in your parasympathetic, you start with a delta brainwave pattern which is slow, restorative, but as you are in the surrender and that soul experience takes over, what naturally happens is your energy body will release from your physical body and it comes out. That's when You go into a gamma brainwave pattern and on a PET scan, the whole thing's lit up. It's incredible. And that's when you're having those visuals, auditory, sensate experiences. Your subtle body naturally magnetizes to this magnetic collective energy that runs through everything in this realm. You feel the sense of wholeness. And when you're in that
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm-hmm.
Colleen Quinn: knowingness of wholeness, you feel bliss and we call it love. But what it really is, is the union. It's that union. That's the emptiness in all of our spiritual DNA that we're looking for. We wanna be in that state of union. And this might be graphic, but I think your audience can handle it. We, most of us, if we're lucky, know the difference between having sex and making love.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm.
Colleen Quinn: Making love is full union. There's no you, there's no me, there's just one. That's what happens when we've surrendered and our energy body goes back. We remember ourselves as a unique manifestation of the one where we're all together before the big bang. That is the full wholeness that we're all looking for. And when that happens, physiologically what's happening is our pineal glands release dormant DMT. We all think, most of us think that DMT is solely in these enlightened plant mushrooms and plants that are psychedelic. We have it in our bodies. When you release that DMT down,
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm. Mm-hmm.
Colleen Quinn: into your cells, what you get is a message of well-being, but you get an increase of interstitial fluid in your cells so that they can amplify at a higher frequency. Well, this is just a perfect example of how our physical choices affect our spiritual well-being and the spiritual upgrades then affect our physical body.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Hmm.
Colleen Quinn: It's incredibly powerful. But along with the deep, slow breathing, you're pulling that energy up. There's crystals in your spinal fluid that compress and massage that pineal gland to release the DMT. And it's the very same ⁓ thing that they call the rising of Kundalini. That's the physiological of what's happening.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm-hmm. Thank Yeah.
Colleen Quinn: Well, I want to say to your listeners, like, is such a delicious state. Why wouldn't we start there every day?
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Right.
Colleen Quinn: I do. My days are dramatically different than the days that I have chosen not to. So I'm like, yeah, I'd much rather be impolite. Go figure.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Yeah. Hmm. Go figure, yeah. Yeah, and another practical question. these slow, deep, integrative breathing, how long does it take of, like how much time do you need to budget, I guess, if you're gonna have like a session at home? How much time do you need before like you say, okay, this isn't working or is it like something that you build up to? Like, you just, yeah, describe the mechanics a little bit more there?
Colleen Quinn: Sure, I think when you're first starting, it's good to probably budget a very minimum of a half an hour, but probably 45 minutes. I would feel sad if I left saying this isn't working. And my big tip for anybody, because it doesn't have to be that way, is lose yourself in the act.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm. Mmm.
Colleen Quinn: Totally concentrate. I like to start ⁓ breathing in from the very base of my spine, seeing that energy go through each chakra center, pulling it up, up, up, up, up to my pineal gland. Most of us think we're at the top of our breath when we get to about our heart center. used to breathing from half of our lungs. There's a lot more you can take in and you're breathing in so you cannot take in another drop of oxygen. And then you just let it fall out. If you push that oxygen out, you're gonna get tetany, which is a cramping of your hands. It would be very painful. That's where the surrender comes. You're just letting it fall out. And so that exhale, is naturally even longer than the inhale. There's no gaps between the inhale and the exhale all through the nose, but it's a long inhale and even longer falling out on the exhale. And you're working that energy, pulling it up on the inhale, just letting it, I envision the DMT coming into my cells. But when I'm losing myself in the act, I'm not in my head at all. I'm just in the breath.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm.
Colleen Quinn: feeling the movement of the breath. That's the gateway to surrender, in my opinion. Just lose yourself in the act and the surrender will come. So I would say in the beginning, minimum of a half an hour, probably 45 minutes, because once you get there, you don't want to rush out. It's like, I'm on bliss. And time bends. You're not even thinking about time.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Yeah. Yeah.
Colleen Quinn: I mean, hours have gone by or five minutes. Once you've reliably found the pathway there, I find I can get there quicker. Again, I still don't want to rush to leave because I'm connected, I'm home, I'm surrounded by love. Like, that's not a place I want to rush out of.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm-hmm. Mm. No, neither would I. Just, you know, sometimes there's life that you have to get back to. Going to work and taking care of the kids and that sort of thing. ⁓ And would you do this or do you do this lying down or sitting up? Like as a starter, would you do it lying down? Just lying down. Yeah.
Colleen Quinn: Yeah, yeah, yeah. All Lying down, I would do it lying down. And I would say I do have the videos, but Dr. Joe has videos called the body electric. That's probably more of an advanced technique. But when you're lying down, at one point it's a different breath work. It's a inhale, exhale, and it's in through the nose out through the mouth, but it's more of a faster pace with your legs raised about. six inches and your feet pointed towards your head. And in doing that, it forces that ⁓ cerebral spinal fluid crystals up to the brain. You're more likely to get that DMT release. So they're probably on YouTube as well. They're called the Body Electric. That's lying down. It's kind of like a hack. Yeah, you will get there if you fully surrender.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Okay. Mm-hmm.
Colleen Quinn: just with this low integrated breath, but there's options.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Yeah, yeah. Well, it's good to know. Good to have options because not everybody, yeah, everybody has their different style and their different preferences. And so it's always good to know that there's multiple pathways to the same end. Yeah.
Colleen Quinn: For sure.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Wonderful. ⁓ is there anything else that you want to share with our audience before we close?
Colleen Quinn: I guess the only other thing I would say is ⁓ on my website I do offer a free download of nine simple steps to awakening and one thing we didn't talk about today we talked a lot about breath work and those journeys to our own soul but while we're walking around breath is the only function in our bodies that can be done involuntarily or voluntarily. It's not random. All the ancient religions knew it. Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit onto his disciples. The Hebrew word for kiss is neshaka, which means to breathe together. Choosing to be in our conscious breath is the gateway to presence.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm-hmm.
Colleen Quinn: So when you're walking around, if you notice any kind of monologue in your head, if you notice that you can't feel your feet on the floor, you're not in your breath. Come back, come back, come back. All life happens here. Come back to your breath and let's meet here. It elevates virtually every experience and every experience becomes
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Hmm.
Colleen Quinn: a conversation with the face of God in sacred. So it's well worth it. Come back.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Mm. Beautiful wisdom. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your experience with us, Colleen, and ⁓ so much love emanating from you and your, ⁓ Thank you.
Colleen Quinn: You as well. Thank you for holding such a gentle welcoming space, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Hechavarria: Thank to the audience for staying with us. ⁓ As mentioned, Colleen has lot of treasures on her website. The link is in the description below. Also, don't forget to like and subscribe. That helps me and the Balanced Implicit energies reach a greater audience through the YouTube algorithm. Thank you all.