ANTHONY ABBAGNANO
A NOTE FROM ANTHONY
I'd like to come closer.
For years I've shared myself in large groups, and it often feels one-way. I reveal who I am and offer what I've been asked to share, yet I rarely hear back from you. At this stage of my life, that's no longer enough for me.
So I'd like to be a person you can actually reach, rather than a teacher on a stage: someone to walk the land with at ASHA, to share a tea with when I'm travelling, to sit with, one to one.
This is self-remembering, not self-help.
A life, in a few breaths.
Every life is a hero's journey: an ordinary world, a call, a descent, a return. Here is some of mine.
LINEAGE, NOT PEDESTAL
A rebel philosopher, not a guru.
I'm the nephew of Nicola Abbagnano, one of Italy's great existentialist philosophers, and the questions he asked have always been in my blood: what does it mean to live truthfully, freely, as yourself?
But I have no interest in being put on a pedestal. I've done my own long work through shadow, depression and self-hatred, and come back. That's what lets me sit with another person in their hardest places without flinching, and bring back some context they couldn't see from inside it.
People have compared me to Gandalf more than once. I'll take that over guru any day: someone who walks alongside you, not above you.
A few true things about me.
Not a CV. Just some of what's actually here.
I'm a fast man who teaches slowness.
I move quickly, think quickly, build quickly. And yet the thing I'm told I do best is help people drop into a slower, truer awareness. I'm still learning to take my own medicine.
I've been down in the dark.
Boarding school wounds, depression, self-hatred, a near-death illness that left me with little but my breath. I don't romanticise any of it. But I came back, and that's what lets me sit with you in yours.
I'm happiest one to one.
For all the stages and the global community, the place I most get to be myself, playful, present, unhurried, is sitting across from a single person. It restores me as much as them.
I was an architect first.
I restored old stone buildings in Italy before I ever restored a person. I still think like one: breath, to me, is the architecture of the human experience.
I'd rather be Gandalf than a guru.
People have called me both wise and cheeky, and I'll happily own the cheeky. No pedestals. I walk alongside people, not above them.
I live by the sea, and rarely swim in it.
For me, it's really more about it being available than needing to be in it. That's a clue as to how I hold most of life.