The Art of Intentions With Allison Bagg, Sound, Breathwork & Energy Practitioner
Allison Bagg has built her practice around sound, breathwork, and energy, but at the heart of it all is a simple mantra: follow your curiosity. A self-described “retired people pleaser,” she’s turned her own journey of healing into an invitation for others to slow down, tune in, and reclaim their enoughness. Blending ancient practices with modern artistry, Allison creates portals through sound, ritual, and visual storytelling that help people remember who they really are.
What intention first guided you into the world of sound, breathwork, and healing?
It’s certainly been a slow, meandering path, but in hindsight I might say it’s this phrase: follow your curiosity. I’ve always been a seeker, drawn to the esoteric and magical. Yoga was my gateway to sound, breathwork and other energy practices. I remember hearing a singing bowl in shavasana when I was 18 and immediately transporting to the astral plane. Time stood still! The sound silenced the spiraling, endless thoughts, to-do list and chatter in my mind, and felt like a deep psychological sigh. From that moment on I knew I had to learn more about this profound instrument. And the funny thing about crystal bowls is that once you get one, they tend to magically replicate. Breathwork came a few years later. I attended a soundbath with holotropic breathwork, and was so terrified and thrilled by the psychedelic power of the breath, that I continued attending the class every Sunday for 2 years straight! It gave me an opportunity to release - I cried and cried each session, shedding so many layers of grief and tension, (some of it not even mine), that I had been carrying for who knows how long. Both of these modalities found me at the exact time I needed them, and I made it my mission to also spread the gospel of these tools for others.
You call yourself a “retired people pleaser.” What was the moment you finally decided to hang up that title?
It’s tricky to pinpoint an exact moment. People-pleasing has a way of slowly killing you, so for some their wake-up call comes in the form of something earth-shattering, like a diagnosis or accident. For others, and incidentally for me, the wear and tear of abandoning yourself over and over again becomes too overt to ignore. It’s like a light switch goes off and you suddenly realize you’ve become a shell of yourself. Every moment spent attuning to someone else and their needs creates a fracture in the fabric of your being, and those lost bits eventually start knocking at your door. That being said, I do think a huge catalyst in taking my power back (which, by the way, is still an ongoing journey! Is life not just a process of forgetting and remembering?!) happened in Egypt. I traveled there for the first time on a sound retreat with my mentor and was so overwhelmed by the pyramids, the temples and the land, that I developed some kind of energetic flu. I felt as if I had floated out of my body and couldn’t get back in! On my journey back home, after flying from Cairo to Rome, then Rome to New York, I collapsed on the floor of JFK. I felt awful. I knew there was no way I could get on another flight back to Los Angeles. I couldn't be away from the Earth. I needed to ground. I somehow changed my flight, crawled my way to an airport hotel, and proceeded to sleep for 12 hours. When I finally arrived back in LA, I was sick for over a year. I knew this was a wake-up call: it was time I strengthened my nervous system, started saying NO to the push and pull of others, and YES to myself.
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