Holotropic Breathwork

[Mona]

Hello Laura,

I was just wondering if you have heard of Holotropic Breathwork developed by Stanislav Grof. I have read a few books written by Dr. Grof in which he describes the technique that allows one to enter the deep psyche without the use of LSD. Well, you cannot imagine how thrilled I was to find out that this workshop was also offered here in Calgary. I was even more thrilled when this workshop was offered a few weeks later; which meant that I did not have to wait too long to explore my subconscious mind which has been pushing me to do some deep digging for quite some time.

I went into the workshop with an open mind, expecting nothing out of ordinary. Having experienced a few workshops developed by the New Age mainstream quite a few years ago, and being disappointed by all of them, I thought that my experience would be of a similar liking. I don’t know what I was thinking but I just wanted to do something different for a change, even if it involved disappointment. I was aware that the technique involved deep breathing which was incorporated with a musical soundscape that was supposed to help the individual enter a deep trance. It sounded to me simple enough.

At the beginning of the workshop we were explained what to expect and were given a demonstration to how to effectively breath. It truly sounded quite simple. So, as we settled in onto our mats, covered out bodies with blankets and surrounded ourselves with lots of comfortable pillows (this was supposed to be a 2.5 to 3 hour long session), had a box of tissue handy and a plastic bag just in case our bodies decided to do a little of throwing up, the music started. Followed by very deep, quick breaths, in and out, in and out, with the music blasting….. To my surprise (I was not told that shaking/trembling would be one of the side effects) within 10 minutes I started shaking, trembling, aching all over, crying and twitching. This went on for over an hour. I was immediately transported into my past life (I think it was my past life as it did feel quite real) in Germany, I am not sure which city. I found myself inside a building, that felt very comforting and familiar, where my partner was making dinner for me. I found myself approaching a table where my partner placed the plate containing the meal that he prepared (potatoes, vegetables and meat). I was a female with long brown hair, and I felt that I was an English speaking individual who was a spy working on some kind of a project in Germany. Britain came to my mind as the original country that I came from. My partner was also English speaking, was a spy and understood as well as spoke well in German. I did not.

When I approached the table to check on the food that my partner prepared for me I became very agitated and decided to walk outside the building for a smoke without my partner knowing; he was busy in the kitchen. I knew it was a bad idea to walk outside as the city was under a curfew, and everyone was expected to stay inside within certain hours of the day. I went outside, sat on the curb and started to enjoy my cigarette, the street was dark and a few street lamps were on. In the mean time my partner got out of the building and ordered me to get inside immediately. I refused. Then the scene changed and all of a sudden there was a nazi that approached us immediately and started shouting in German. I did not understand what he was saying as I did not understand the German language at all. I could hear the nazi speaking in German while in trance. My partner started talking to the nazi in German in a calm manner, I guess he was trying to explain to him the reason why we were outside. The nazi was screaming at him the whole time, not paying attention to what my partner was saying. Then all of a sudden the nazi started shooting my partner in the neck area numerous times (it felt like he was being decapitated). I just remember just standing there in total shock, feeling as if being suspended during the whole scene, thinking of nothing, just being numb to the core of my body. During the whole episode that I was witnessing while I was laying on the mat, I was trembling/shaking the whole time. I could no longer breath deeply as was expected of me, as it was extremely painful to do so.

Then all of a sudden my body, in flesh and blood, decided to go pee, and I instructed the facilitator immediately to help me find the washroom, as I was not able to do so on my own. I sat down on the toilet still trembling thinking to myself what the hell I was doing. Eventually I made it back onto the mat totally exhausted. When I got back to the room and lied down onto the mat my body stopped shaking and at times I even stopped breathing for quite some time, not needing oxygen, not like I would need it in an ordinary state. I also noticed that my body temperature went up and I had tingling all over. I was no longer in Germany.

I am not joking but this seriously was just the most potent experience I have ever had, and it all happened without the use of any drugs. After the session I developed a migraine that lasted for two days. Also, when I got home after the session I went into an eating frenzy and ate so much as if I had not eaten for days. I went to sleep at 9 that night and got up at 11 the next morning. I should also mention that I was the only one with such an extreme experience out of a group of 5.

Laura, I would like to know what is your opinion on the holotropic breathwork technique. I really would like to know and understand what happened to me.

 

[Laura]

I have read about holotropic breathwork in the past, but your question prompted me to do a little research. (Did you do this before you tried it?) There are many criticisms of the technique even from what one would consider to be very open-minded people. My guess is that it can change body chemistry and induce any number of effects depending on the individual.

There should have been facilitators to help you to understand your experience which may have been a past life memory (assuming that there ARE past lives and memories of same which we give high probability) or it could have been a psychological drama created within your mind that represents core issues you need to deal with.

My general observation is that the drama exemplifies an individual who is childishly narcissistic and this narcissism is the background for careless and stubborn independence that can cause harm to the self and others.

 

[thevenusian]

I have some personal experience with this. I have done a couple breathwork sessions, and am familiar with the work of Stan Grof. I have a couple friends who went through the breathwork training who have shared details. These are events which took place 15 or so years ago.

The breathwork techniques can be very effective at provoking peak type experiences and unlocking a flood from the deep subconscious mind. They are very powerful. For those unfamiliar with this, it is basically forced hyper-ventilation rapid breathing sustained for a period of time, combined with loud, emotionally evocative music. You have a 'sitter' minding you who keeps you breathing in this way until things begin to happen, and who is supposed to be looking out for your safety and providing some 'guidance'.

There is no doubt about the intensity of the experiences. However, there is a HUGE degree of subjectivity involved with the individual practitioners of these sessions. If you can afford the training, you can become a practioner, basically. It should also be a matter of record that Stan Grof has been a regular participant at the Esalen Institute for many years, home of the New Age and human potential movements. There is a wealth of information about these movements on this forum.

This technique gives the ability to force open the doors of one's unknown subconscious content without any safety measures being in place, and without any real guidance for making sense or use out of it. IMO, it is reckless and potentially dangerous to offer as a 'growth' experience available in a weekend 'workshop', and makes the 'peak experience' an end in itself.

 

[chachazoom]

This reminds me of an incident that happened while doing (for the first and last time) a Kundalini yoga class. The fast pace automatically made me breathe quickly and all the while I was increasingly becoming more and more irritated. Even the smell of the carpet seemed intensified, making me want to gag. At the end, we had to lie still while a LOUD gonging sound was played repeatedly, starting small then increasing to a volume that jangled my last nerve. I felt like throwing up and felt alot of anger. Although I'd never do it, I had fantasies of jumping up and bashing the stereo with a baseball bat (to get me through til the hellish session was over) I always wondered about that. I had no prior clue what Kundalini yoga was about, and just assumed it was a regular slow paced yoga, so I was never sure whether or not my anger stemmed from having engaged in something I didn't expect (although the anger seemed disproportionate with this scenario) or if the session triggered something.

 

[Mona]

Hello All,

Thanks to all who have replied to my question. I really appreciate your opinions. I just wanted to say that before I decided to attend the holotropic breathwork workshop I did quite a lot of reading on Dr. Stanislav Grof's work and got immediately fascinated by his research. What really appealed to me was that there was no drug involved in the process undergoing this type of hypnosis and the end result was similar to what one would experience when under the influence of LSD. Now, Dr. Grof does claim that he has collected a lot of data to support his findings and he does present those findings to the public, and that I must say was the reason why I was interested in trying his technique. His preaching could be verified with his collection of data.

The other reason why I was willing to undergo this experiment was because I have always wanted to know about my past lives and I had no fear in whatever I was to encounter. Before letting myself experience the session I was open to anything that came up during the session, meaning that whatever past life presented itself, I was open to view it without any judgement, even if I was shown as myself running around the jungle as a monkey. If, for instance, the holotropic breathwork hypnosis is a type of a trance that the mind creates, then my question is, what is truly real. If we cannot trust our own subconscious then what is the point in trusting any experience in life at all that we encounter. This has been my struggle my whole life, that no matter where I wish for my mind to go, whether trying to figure out the answers to some unordinary questions, which I have a handful of, and being open to any answers that may present themselves, there are always obstacles in the way that make sure the answers are no longer there. That it is just all just an illusion. Is there any way possible to get to the truth? If I believe that the truth is more important than anything else in my life, then how is it possible to know the truth is truly the truth, when in fact all in the universe is the truth, lie and illusion at the same time.

But what is the truth anyway and what is the purpose in anything at all? I have asked myself that numerous times what the purpose of my being here on planet Earth is. As many of you have. But in a way, I think that I have finally figured it out. The following is only meant for my illusory consciousness, and is not meant to describe anybody else’s purpose on earth. To me it is obvious that my purpose is to be a food source for the consciousness that feeds on me like a parasite feeds on its prey. My purpose is to recycle like some trash in the universal recycle bin; I die and then I am reborn then I die again and am once again reborn and on and on. My purpose is to make enough illusory money that will pay for the food that will keep me going like an energizer bunny so that the consciousness, whether being in the form of a society or 4 density creatures can use my energy to its full potential. My purpose is to try to figure out this reality only to be shown that it is only an illusion, it has always been and always will be just an illusion. My purpose is to go though hell then come out of it temporarily with an illusory smile. My purpose is to exist like a leftover of consciousness that did not know what to do with itself because leftovers are meant to live like wanderers, floating in the universe bumping into things not realizing that it can actually avoid the bumpy road just by imagining that it is always a straight road. My purpose is to be……….hmm…..something that thinks it is more than it is.

What is an illusory, ordinary person like me to do? When it is on a pathway to need to know more than those who dedicate their lives to fun times like reading books on romance or watching every hockey game on TV. I wish I could be like that more than anything sometimes, but my stupid illusory mind pushes me to something else. To be honest with you I am a no body and am not very smart, and I am not ashamed to say that. I know that for a fact. I don’t have the answers to anything, even though I crave to have at least a few. I have read a lot of books and I have asked way too many stupid questions and I am still no where to satisfy my illusory and juvenile soul. Maybe the soul is stuck in the habit of asking too many silly questions that will probably be never answered. I am not able communicate with great spirits/thought forms like the Cassiopaeans, I am only able to communicate with the illusory mind/brain that is residing within a head that belongs to someone named Monika. But even that I cannot trust because that is part of the illusion as well.

At this point in my life I feel that life on planet Earth is not going to end in peace, but that could be part of my illusion too, because to be frank with you my mind is not wise, it only judges the world though the illusory eyes that only sees what it wants to see. Maybe the chaos in the world, the lies that come out of the mouths of politicians and the comets hitting the Earth all over could be just another form of illusion that we can not detect. Maybe the human illusory mind will someday invent an instrument that will detect things in the universe that are part of the illusion. Maybe there truly is peace on Earth, and there are no people suffering anywhere in the world, and there is truly no sight of apocalypse in sight. Maybe there never was a Holocaust or the genocide in Rwanda, or any atrocities at all that were part of humanity. Maybe our consciousness just made it all up to keep us entertained. Hey, I know what it is, we are simply watching the wrong movie, all I have to do is to change the channel. So hang in there, here goes a different tune part of the same illusion. Now, what do you prefer? I am not sure about you but I prefer a little bit of illusory love. Finally, I feel like I am in heaven. Sorry, I meant to say illusory heaven.

Maybe I am just babbling here and am not sure what the hell I am talking about. My English is a second language so maybe I like to practice it right here, communicating my thoughts on a blank screen on a computer. Maybe I am just participating in this silly game that will help me get to level 2 . Level 2 sounds good, level 3 is what I would prefer, but it does not really matter because both levels are part of the illusion, so why take the game seriously at all.

Ok, maybe there is still one serious question that is bugging me at the core of my illusory soul. That I treat with more respect than any other questions that I have had to deal with. And that is what are the rules to the game played in fifth density? Are there tricks up there or down there, where ever fifth density is, as well that I should know about. Because I sure would like to know what to do with myself when I trick myself into coming back into this density. I am not sure about you, but this place seems a bit more boring and tedious. Is ‘excitement of a different kind’ on the menu? What I am trying to say is. Is it possible to buy a one way ticket to heaven? When the game in third density cannot be won or lost, is it possible to win or lose the game in the fifth density?

 

[Laura]

Mona, I don't know if you have read the Wave Series and the Adventures series. Those are my attempts to deal with the issues you outline. You aren't alone.

The fact is, the world (cosmos, universe, reality) is enormous, protean and volatile. Before the industrial and scientific revolutions, society - mainly Western ones under the influence of Judaism and Christianity - tended to see man as half-angel, half-beast. Perhaps there was an earlier civilization (which I suspect) that was more at peace with itself and better understood both the lower self and the higher self. That is a topic I have covered in "The Secret History of the World," but you can get a very good idea of it from what is available online, free.

Western civilization has created a strange, demanding, dualistic vision of the beast-angel conflict and the pain and protractedness of our inner struggle with this dichotomy. In 1609, Fulke Greville wrote in "Mustapha":

Oh wearisome condition of Humanity!
Borne under one Law, to another bound
Vainely begot, yet forbidden vanity,
Created sicke, commended to be sound:
What meaneth Nature by these diverse Lawes?
Passion and Reason, selfe-division cause:
Is it the marke, or Majesty of Power
To make offences that it may forgive?
Nature herselfe doth her owne selfe defloure,
To hate those errors she her selfe doth give.

So, you see, it is the plight of humanity...

The dualistic vision of man being half-angel and half-beast did, at least, give some sort of answer to this problem. It was a painful answer because it meant that we must constantly strive against our "base nature" and in favor of our angelic nature. At least humans understood WHY they suffered... they were a battle-ground for forces outside (and at the same time, inside) themselves.

The usefulness of such a vision was that, at least the lower aspects of our nature were not denied. The devil had a recognized place in our lives and if we found him in our hearts, we were not to be surprised because, after all, we had been warned!

However, with the coming of the modern world, god and the devil lost their place and were replaced by empiricism and materialism. The result was that we were all part of the same system: Nature, and here by virtue of mindless evolution to boot. Humans - and everything else - are all part of one single system and subject to neutral laws and nothing can have any higher standing than the material evidence for its existence. Depending on publicly available evidence meant that all higher authority, all absoluteness, all sacredness, was eliminated from the world-view.

This view was codified by the thinkers of the European eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with David Hume leading the way. His "Treatise on Human Nature made man continuous with nature. For Hume, abstract thought and morality were definitely part of THIS world. Thinking was nothing more than a sort of "aftertaste" of sensations received via the body organs of sense. Morality was just a matter of taste and feeling which served collective convenience.

In short, man was not "created in God's image" with a holy "breath of life." He was a stimulus/response machine. Man was a "bundle of perceptions." Philosopher/sociologist Ernest Gellner calls him "Bundleman."

So, things had been sorted out, man was now completely at home in his world and should be at peace with his place in life. The lusts of his heart, the guilts of his errors, should be easily evident to him. If you are a machine, it shouldn't be too hard to sort yourself out under any circumstances! Empiricist psychology saw man's behavior as a set of responses to given stimuli and the task of the psychologist was to identify the links between the stimuli and the responses. Psychology was little more than a search for the right algorithm. Man was freed from the dualistic doctrine and the endless inner battle between the Beast and the Angel. Man was not born in "original sin," he was just simply natural...

The only problem is, as Gellner rightly points out: "Anyone who has the least sense of what it is like to be a human being knows perfectly well, and without any shadow of doubt, that the Hume account of man bears no relation whatsoever to the facts." If we are bundles of stimulus/response, why do we suffer so?

Well, let me say here that perhaps, for a large segment of the population, and perhaps for Hume himself, this view of reality IS accurate? As I have suggested a number of times, the obvious solution to this two radically different versions of reality is that they are both true? There are humans with souls, and humans that are simply reaction machines, emulators, animals, so to say?

But, I digress. What happens when the official doctrine (the empiricism of the Humean view) says one thing, and a LARGE number (half or more?) of human beings instinctively know that the truth is otherwise?

The French have a phrase for this: the pays legal and pays reel.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment had wanted to get rid of the overt lunacy of religion (which was obviously bad) and it was thought that the only way to exclude the supernatural from our understanding was to insist that all knowledge came through the senses and in no other way. That became the pays legal.

But what is the pays reel?

We can look to Nietzsche for some clues.

1. Our real satisfactions and needs are linked to basic instinctual drives. Our contentment and our distress is not simply a matter of adding up a positive balance of little pleasures and subtracting mild reactions to distress.

2. Satisfaction is situational, not "atomized." (divided into little inputs that can be added) What makes us happy or unhappy is not adding up the little pleasures and pains, it is persistent, three-dimensional, and relates to an overall situation.

3. The type of situation that makes us happy or sad in primarily related to our relations with other people with whom we have persistent, intimate, and emotionally charged relations. What seems to matter most are relationships of power and dominance.

4. Our perception of our "situations" do NOT follow an "accounting principle" of adding up or subtracting positive or negative stimuli. Perception and formation of permanent pictures of reality and attitude generally is by trauma, brutal blows to our innards, and is overwhelmingly traumatic. Single, crucial events can deeply modify our vision and valuation of reality whether or not the event is seen to be important by objective (outside) standards.

5. The manner in which these crystallizations of our reality view, our attitudes, our behaviors, occurs in a way that is not generally conscious or accessible to consciousness, or control.

6. Many, perhaps all, of the crucial crystallizing events occur very early in life.

7. The "logic" of these events of inner reactions and how they affect us does not seem to relate to our conscious principles of logic, perspective, space, time, and so on. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to what is measured as important or insignificant by this process. The empirically known laws of causation do not seem to apply. Logically incompatible convictions can exist side by side, impossibilities are ignored, there is no time, or space.

8. Inner reactions, while not following any outward, empirical logic, do not seem to be just random. The DO follow some sort of logic that we have yet to understand (despite the claims of this or that school of psychology). Such reactions and inner constructions do seem to be functional, and to work in the service of our instinctual drives and are linked to the objects/people which our individual instinctual drives have selected through trauma. In short, the activities of the inner mechanism are extraordinarily cunning while, at the same time, appearing to conscious standards as extraordinarily stupid because of their lack of relation to facts and logic and "all good, common sense."

9. These attributes - cunning, camouflage, and inaccessibility to consciousness, enslavement to instinctual needs, stupidity in the face of reality, apply not only to the Beast part of us, but also to the activities that were formerly considered to be our Angel part: our conscience, reason, ideals, and so on. What is best and worst about us both seem to be working in the service of this cunning and are just disguises worn by the agents of instinct. Further, the "higher" parts of our inner workings are often more twisted, dishonest and linked to weakness. They are also often more harmful.

10. The deceitful, hidden and instinct-linked phenomena are often linked to disease by being the causes of symptoms which medicine (and common sense) attribute to physiological causes.

It's not a very pretty picture, is it? It is definitely a picture that contradicts the image of our gentle, natural, Bundleman, the child of Nature who much resembles the hippies of the 60s and 70s, and very often, the New Age groupies.

The likelihood is, too, that it is mostly true even if Nietzsche was dark and gloomy about it. Heck, who wouldn't have been dark and gloomy seeing all that?

So, the conclusion is that the Humanistic and humanitarian view of man is totally incompatible with the true nature of our being, our true way of choosing our satisfactions, beliefs, standards of excellence and realistic possibilities of a happy life.

What I'm saying is that what most people suffer from nowadays is the traumatic disconnect between the pays reel of the mind and the pays legal of our society. And certainly, there is no shortage of psychological cults out there waiting to take your money and time, and sell you their solution. In short, we got rid of one kind of dualism only to find ourselves in another, worse one! "Borne under one Law, to another bound..." But, that's another essay.