"Plant medicine and breath were the mandate to bring Rythmia into existence."\n- Christian Minson\nHello everyone and welcome back to ONKEN Radio (previously NION Radio)! I am so excited to have you all here with me today, and we have a great episode in store for you today. You all know that my main goal with this podcast is to heighten your creativity, business, and life to the highest level possible, so it comes as no surprise that today\u2019s guest possesses unique tools to help all of you creative entrepreneurs out there do just that.\xa0\n\nIf you tune in regularly to the podcast, you may remember my previous episode, #164, in which I discussed my journey with breathwork and how it has helped me improve my creative flow as well as the immense healing potential it has. Going back even further to episode #161, I told you all about my first experience at Rythmia. In the following episode, I sat down with founder Gerard Powell and had a great conversation all about his story and how he founded Rythmia.\xa0\n\nToday, however, we have the director of breathwork at Rythmia, Mr. Christian Minson, here to talk about all the wonderful things this practice can do for not only your creativity but your life in general. So, without further delay, let\u2019s jump into today\u2019s episode.\nWho Is Christian Minson?\nChristian has been a breathwork facilitator for the past 12 years and is a senior trainer with the Transformational Breathwork Foundation. He has traveled to the far reaches of the world giving seminars and meeting with individuals privately, giving them this breathwork technique for the healing of physical ailments, emotional balancing, spiritual connection, greater connectivity, and connection to their intuition. 10 years before all of this, however, Christian lived as a monk.\n\nChristian said he likes to include this fact about himself because as a monk, the meditation techniques that he practiced were really just modified breathing techniques, which he further simplifies as \u201cmanipulating the breath to send the energy up and down the spine so that we could let go of body consciousness and attain higher states of awareness.\u201d Including his time spent as a monk, Christian credits himself with 22 years of working with the breath in some way. For the past two years, Christian has been the director of breathwork at Rythmia, and he says he is loving the program there.\xa0\nChristian\u2019s Story\nWhen I asked him how he found himself pursuing the life of a monk, Christian had this to say:\n\u201c[After taking psychedelic medicine in my senior year of high school,] \u2026 I just felt this communication happening. There were no words, there was no message. It was just this understanding that God, if you will, and I were in communion. And from there, that really kickstarted my desire to seek deeper into what the true meaning of life was and the true purpose of my life in particular. And through that seeking, I basically came upon a book called Autobiography of a Yogi by a spiritual master called Paramahansa Yogananda. And he basically laid it out and said the purpose of life is our own self-realization, our own evolution towards embracing our own divinity and realizing that in body, mind, and soul, and the way to do that \u2014 his primary way \u2014 was through meditation.\u201d\n- Christian Minson\nChristian went on to join the self-realization fellowship called The Yoon Organization, which was actually headquartered in Los Angeles and lived there as a monk for 10 years. If you\u2019re like me, you may be wondering how you can live as a monk in downtown Los Angeles. Christian said that they resided on top of a hill called Mount Washington with a beautiful view that stretched out over the pacific. Even though they were a mere 7 minutes from downtown, Christian says he felt so removed from everything that it hardly felt like you were in the city at all.\xa0\n\nAfter a full decade of living as a monk, I wondered what made Christian decide to leave the monastery and integrate back into soc...