• What is Holotropic Breathwork?
• What happens in a Breathwork session?
• What others have written about Stan Grof's work

Stanislav Grof, M.D., after many years of clinical work in his native Czechoslovakia and at the Maryland Psychiatric Institute in Baltimore, developed Holotropic Breathwork with his wife Christina. It is used in conjunction with more introspective methods of self-exploration like psychoanalysis, yoga and meditation and is particularly effective when employed as an adjunct to an on-going therapy or spiritual practice.

The word Holotropic is derived from the Greek words 'holos' and 'trepein', and means 'moving toward wholeness.'

Holotropic Breathwork is a contemporary method of deliberately allowing onself access to non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOSC) by means of slightly accelerating and deepening the process of breathing consciously in a safe and supportive setting; into this environment the astonishing hidden depths of the psyche can finally emerge.

Breathing, our first act as an individual, has been practiced consciously by many ancient mystical traditions; Tantric yoga, Taoist meditation and the Indian practice of Pranayama have all valued its unique ability to subtly alter the body chemistry and lift the veil of perception.

Supervised by certified facilitators and accompanied by evocative, non-verbal music, Holotropic Breathwork participants are actively encouraged to permit a falling away of ordinary consciousness; awareness of our true Self then arises in NOSC.

This may involve insights and deep emotions related to an individual¹s biography, experiences of the four stages of birth from conception to emergence as well as transpersonal experiences, including memories from the collective unconscious, encounters with the world of mythology and spirit, and mystical, numinous experiences.

As with dreams, the NOSC with which we are most familiar, the psyche delivers from the sub-conscious exactly that which most urgently needs to emerge into our ordinary awareness. The significant difference between these occurrences during sleep and during Breathwork, however, is that during Breathwork one is awake, and capable of experiencing and remembering them at the very moment of their emergence. The images and sensations, whether tumultuous or tranquil, are immediately experienced in such a way that they become a part of one's consciousness.

By taking our experience to the deeper level of NOSC, aspects of the Self beyond ego, previously unknown, can activate profound healing.

Once the subconscious material is consciously experienced in a benevolent and welcoming environment, previously held ideas, self-limiting definitions and self-destructive impulses can cease to hold with the same power. Thus we become freer to define ourselves more by our possibilities and less by our limitations.

Holotropic Breathwork is a process of allowing, of giving permission to, of saying yes to a part of ourselves which we have denied, the true Self, and it sets no limits upon the boundless potential of consciousness.

Breathwork can touch a wellspring of memories and emotions, the subtle effects of which may continue after the individual has returned to ordinary consciousness. Mandala drawing, re-introduced as a tool of integration by Carl Gustav Jung, is used after each Breathwork session as a way to anchor the experience in the visible, tactile and material world.

Using these mandalas as a way of remembering each session for themselves and as a way of communicating the content to others, each breather is invited to share their experiences with the facilitators and other members of the group, bringing each session to closure.

'But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds
and there was a new voice
which you slowly recognised as your own,
that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world,
determined to do the only thing you could do;
determined to save the only life you could save.'

-Mary Oliver

What happens in a Breathwork session?

The following description of the standard one-day/two-session workshop to be offered by this project is taken from the handbook "The Breathwork Experience", by Kylea Taylor (Hanford Mead, 1994: pp. 23-25).

"The workshop begins with introductions of the group members. Participants work in pairs, one breathing and one sitting in each of the two sessions, and each participant selects a partner.

"The first breathing session begins with one partner (the breather) in each pair lying on a mattress, on his/her back with eyes closed, the other partner (the sitter) alongside. The two have discussed the breather's needs; the sitter knows to provide help only when asked but otherwise not to interfere with the breather's experience.

"The facilitators lead a guided relaxation, at the end of which the breathers are instructed to breathe a little deeper and faster than usual."

Another writer, John Freeman, M.D., continues:

"At the conclusion of the relaxation, rhythmic and evocative music begins. As the breathers continue the conscious breathing, they begin, at their own pace, to enter a non-ordinary state of consciousness, a trance-like state which alters the usual relationship between the conscious and subconscious, allowing into conscious experience the subjective memories of childhood, memory experience which seems to be pre-verbal and pre-understanding; impulses to physical movement or modes of physical expression which, while they often do not seem to make sense at first in any logical way have a powerful heuristic and / or empirical value to the psychic process of people who allow them. People often experience, in a cathartic purge, long suppressed emotional responses to situations from the past, re-experiencing threats to their physical well being and releasing long held negative emotional residue; perceiving and experiencing archetypal imagery and emotions which can very rapidly alter one's concepts of the self and the world, and of the entire human experience."

It is through such powerful experiences that participants may literally redefine themselves. This redefinition often brings whole new levels of understanding into the decision-making criteria of the individual, which can result in significant behavioral changes.

The session continues for up to three hours or until each breather has reached a satisfactory conclusion. Participants are then asked to draw a 'mandala', a representation of their experience.

Kylea Taylor's description continues:

"When breathers are finished, there is a break for a meal before the second session in which the partners reverse roles; the breather becomes the sitter end the sitter becomes the breather. After this session, and another meal break, there is a group sharing. Using the mandalas as illustration if they wish, participants describe those aspects of their Breathwork experience they wish to share with the group."

The workshop is then brought to closure.

What others have written about Stan Grof's work

Stan Grof's work has been cited by numerous authors. One of the earliest was Joseph Campbell who, in 'MYTHS TO LIVE BY' (Viking Penguin, 1972), wrote:

"Some weeks ago I recieved in the mail from the psychiatrist directing research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Baltimore, Dr. Stanislav Grof, the manuscript of an impressive work interpreting the results of his practice during the past fourteen years... and I have found so much of my thinking about mythic forms freshly illuminated by the findings here reported, that I am going to try... to render a suggestion of the types and depths of consciousness that Dr. Grof has fathomed in his searching of our inward sea. He has found, (and I find this extremely interesting) that the differing imageries of the various world religions tend to appear and support his clients throughout the sucessive stages of their sessions."

Joseph Campbell and Stan Grof found great commonality in each other's work, resulting in many years of friendship and fruitful professional exchange.

Houston Smith is one of the worlds most respected and beloved authorities on world religions. In his 1976 book "Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition" he added an Appendix to summarize Grof's work. This was reprinted in his book "CLEANSING THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION", published in 2000, as the chapter "Contemporary Evidence: Psychiatry and the Work of Stanislav Grof." A passage from this chapter follows:

"Up to this point I have summarized Grof's empirical findings and pointed to how they can be explained by the traditional model of the human self as readily as by his psychiatric model. It remains to note how the findings of his seventeen years of research (in Prague and at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore) affected his own thinking.

Engaged as he was in "the first mapping of completely unknown territories, " he could not have foreseen where his inquiry would lead. What he found was that in "the most fascinating intellectual and spiritual adventure of my life, it opened up new fantastic areas and forced me to break with the old systems and frameworks."

The first change in his thinking has already been noted: the psycholytic sequences showed the birth trauma to have more dynamic consequences than Grof and his strictly Freudian associates had supposed. This change psychoanalysis could accommodate, but not the one that followed… basically, what proved to be untenable was "the present gloomy image of man, which is to a great extent influenced by psychoanalysis."

This picture of man, "that of a social animal basically governed by blind and irrational instinctual forces… appears…superficial and limited. Most of the instinctual tendencies described by psychoanalysis… can be transcended, whereupon we are confronted with an image of man that is diametrically opposed to the previous one. Man in his innermost nature appears then as a being that is fundamentally in harmony with his environment and is governed by intrinsically high and universal values."

This change in anthropology has been the solid effect of entheogenic evidence on Grof's thinking. In psychoanalytic terms, Freud discovered the importance of infantile experience on ontogenetic development, (Otto) Rank the importance of the experience of birth itself, and Grof's discoveries carry this search for ever earlier etiologies - in psychoanalytic terms earlier means stronger - to its logical limit: his optimistic view of man derives from discovering the influence and latent power of early-gestation memories of the way things were when the womb was still uncongested and all was well.

Beyond this revised anthropology, however, Grof has toyed with a changed ontology as well. Endowments that supplement his psychiatric competences have helped him here: he has a "musical ear," so to speak, for metaphysics, and an abiding interest in the subject. These caused him to listen attentively from the start to his subjects' reports on the nature of reality, and… he gives these reports full rein. Laying aside for the interval his role as research psychiatrist, which required his seeing his patients' experiences as shaped by (if not projected from) early formative experiences, (here)…Grof turns phenomenologist and allows their reports to stand in their own right…

In the early years of psychoanalysis, when hostility was shown to its theories on account of their astonishing novelty and they were dismissed as products of their authors perverted imaginations, Freud used to hold up against this objection the argument that no human brain could have invented such facts and connections had they not been persistently forced upon it by a series of converging and interlocking observations. Grof might argue in the same way: to wit, that the cosmology and ontology his patients came up with is as uninventable as Freud's own system. Actually, however, he does not do so. In the manner of a good phenomenologist, he lets the evidence speak for itself, neither undermining it by referencing it back to causes which (in purporting to explain it) would explain it away, nor arguing that it is true. As phenomenologists themselves would say, he "brackets" his own judgment regarding the truth question and contents himself with summarizing what his patients said."

In 'THE TURNING POINT', (Bantam, 1982), Fritjof Capra devotes the chapter 'Journeys Beyond Space and Time' to examining the transpersonal perspective and considering its incompatability with the prevailing Newtonian-Cartesian worldview.

"On the basis of many years of observations. . .[Stan] Grof has constructed what he calls a cartography of the unconscious, a map of mental phenomena, which shows great similarity with [Ken] Wilber's spectrum of consciousness. Grof's cartography encompasses three major domains: the domain of psychodynamic experiences, associated with events in a person's past and present life; the domain of perinatal experiences, related to the biological phenomena involved in the process of birth; and the domain of transpersonal experiences which go beyond individual boundaries."

Richard Tarnas, in the section entitled 'Knowledge and the Unconscious' from the Epilogue of his book 'THE PASSION OF THE WESTERN MIND', (Ballantine, 1991), writes:

"The most epistemologically significant development in the recent history of depth psychology, and indeed the most important advance in the field as a whole since Freud and Jung themselves, has been the work of Stanislav Grof, which over the past three decades has not only revolutionized psychodynamic theory but also brought forth major implications for other fields, including philosophy. I lived for over ten years at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where I was the director of programs, and in the course of those years virtually every form of therapy and personal transformation, great and small, came through Esalen. In terms of therapeutic effectiveness, Grof's (Holotropic Breathwork) was by far the most powerful; there was no comparison."

Christopher M. Bache is Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University. He is the author of 'Lifecycles; Reincarnation and the Web of Life.' In the Preface to his most recent book, 'DARK NIGHT, EARLY DAWN', he acknowledges the influence Stanislav Grof has had upon his thinking:

"Shortly after beginning my teaching career, however, I encountered the work of Stanislav Grof. In 'The Realms of the Human Unconscious' Grof convinced me that the entire intellectual tradition I had absorbed was based upon a superficial experience of the human psyche. Through my earlier reading of Jung, I had already become convinced that depth psychology held the key to the modern mind's quest to know itself, and here was a deeper and more comprehensive psychology than any I had seen before. More importantly, Grof outlined a methodology through which one could actually extend one's experience of one's mind and come to have firsthand knowledge of these domains. I could not turn down the invitation."

And in the Acknowledgents section:

"What I owe Stanislav Grof is more than can be put into words. His powerful synthesis of clinical and spiritual psychology has defined the framework of much of my professional and personal life. I would not have had the courage to enter some of these interior regions had he not entered before me and survived. He gave me the means to see the hidden splendor of the universe from a unique perspective at a critical time in human history, and I am eternally grateful."

Stan Grof's book 'THE HOLOTROPIC MIND: The Three Levels of Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives', with Hal Zina Bennett (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), is a comprehensive overview of the transpersonal field and an introduction to the theory and practice of Holotropic Breathwork. His most recent work is 'PSYCHOLOGY OF THE FUTURE: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research' (SUNY Press, 2000); the other titles of Dr. Grof's considerable biblography are detailed in this book.

'A man or woman with outward courage dares to die;
A man or woman with inward courage dares to live.'

-Lao Tsu