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In this heart felt personal chat, Alexx discovers Billabong Retreat founder Paul Von Bergen’s deeply personal motivations for creating a retreat as well as the rather big learning curves he experienced along his way to a ‘less ego and stuff’ driven life. Paul, now a meditation and yoga teacher, was once an ad exec attracting children towards smoking. Paul shares beautiful wisdom to help us all, as he calls it, sprinkle meditation throughout our day along with his favourite breathing exercise to generate true calm (it happens to be Alexx’s favourite too!)

Now, on with the show!

Paul designed and built the retreat centre and is director of all the retreat programs.

After a fifteen year stint in corporate world promoting fizzy drinks, toys, cigarettes and alcohol, Paul experienced a business failure and found himself sitting on a Thai island licking his wounds and pondering what life was all about. By fate, there was a health retreat one hundred metres down the beach and Paul found himself absorbed within its energy, ideas and people, particularly with regard to yoga. Paul’s teachings at Billabong Retreat combine ancient wisdom with modern scientific thinking. They are not affiliated with any particular organisation or religion but instead a summary of the experiences and knowledge that Paul has acquired in his varied life. They explore how changes such as language, the agricultural and industrial revolutions and the very recent informational and technological mega-revolutions are reshaping modern human experience like never before.

Here’s a little snapshot of the goodies in today’s episode…

The trick to life, is not to love living ‘in the know’, but to love living in the mystery
‘Sprinkle’ moments of mindfulness and meditation throughout our day
Start each day with some kind of meditative practice, which will be different for different people, but will bring you calm and peace.

THIS WEEK’S LIVE HAPPIER, HEALTHIER CHALLENGE: Try a simple backward counting practice – link your breath to counting backwards. Inhale on one count, and exhale on the next count. Start at 50, and count backwards to 1. Do this once or a few times a day, it can have a huge impact on re-centering you, stopping the stress build up and can be done nearly anywhere! Give it a go!

Billabong Retreat BLOG

Billabong Retreat Website

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Enjoy the show and thanks again for taking the time to rate and review the show – it’s like tipping the bartender and it means the world. (To do this from your phone, you can’t be ‘in the show list’ – go to the podcast search function and type low tox life, and then click on the show and click ‘review’. Annoyingly tricky but hey. I figured I may as well help you out if you’re going to want to take the time to leave a review!)

Low Tox. Happy us. Happy planet