Life & Breath Reflections: An open letter to the Cosmos
Dear friends,
When encountering the petroglyph pictured below over a decade ago while staving off a spiritual emergency, I immediately felt a sense of wonder, awe, and power. With deep sincerity and clarity, I experienced this ancient carving as connoting a shamanic trance — an exceptional, holotropic experience. I felt a deep sense of trust that can be described as universal belonging, eternal security: Universe as Organism.
Petroglyph, unknown origin, Moab, UT, June 2013 (personal photo).
While I could not sustain that feeling nor express this understanding in words at the time, this encounter helped me welcome the experience of letting go, of feeling through, rather than trying to conquer, stop, fix, stave off, get rid of or get past emerging pain. And so, I began experiencing events inexplicably understood by conventional attention to material and mechanical explanations.
I was effectively deemed unwell — psychopathologized, professionally ridiculed, and nearly socially abandoned, including by people I loved. It wasn’t until I encountered the Dreamshadow® community that I could really begin understanding what seemed to evince elements of various exceptional intensities, including a shamanic initiatory illness and crisis, and John Weir Perry’s Renewal through the Center (e.g., Grof & Grof, 1989; Grof & Grof, 1990).
The practice of holotropic breathwork (e.g., Grof, 2012; Grof & Grof, 2010; Grof & Grof 2023) is a simple technique with five basic elements: (1) intensified breathing, (2) evocative music, (3) group context and process, (4) focused bodywork (optional), and (5) expressive drawing. Through this application, participants can experience a deepening connection with themselves, discovering novel potential and purpose while amplifying awareness of their personal relationship with the cosmos.
There’s nothing sensational or newsworthy about this practice-linked philosophy. Even its description as a modern shamanic practice betrays its simplicity by alluding to fascinating ethereal phenomena. Fundamentally, holotropic breathwork is nothing more than a boring technique, and yet, if one can summon the courage to feel an invitation to open beyond what one thinks they know about themself and existing, profound shifts in clarity, trust, agency, and awareness emerge. While anyone could feasibly do this technique, its power is occasioned by attitudinal openness to feel the immediate moment as intensely as possible.
While the technique per se isn’t anything to write home about, the felt activity, the practice of holotropic breathwork can occasion wisdom beyond any database within the libraries of Ancient Rome, Athens, Constantinople, and Alexandria — never mind the Library of Congress. As the saying within many holotropic breathwork communities goes, breathe until you’re surprised. And, our perpetually becoming Universe is replete with surprise.
Stan Grof, MD, acknowledged Victor Turner’s, PhD, The Ritual Process (1969) in several of his texts (e.g., Grof, 2006; Grof, 2019; Grof & Grof, 2010; Grof & Grof 2023) — an anthropological study of the Ndembu people of Zambia, with specific attention to how ceremony has long been practiced during times of personal as well as communal crises. These substance-free rites of passage occasioned an experiential intensity commensurate with psychedelic substances. By suffering through tragedy together, a felt sense of familiarity and belonging, known anthropologically as communitas, amplified in intensity. In the extreme, communitas connotes feeling the Universe as Organism, what mystics call Oneness, Transcendence, Enlightenment, Putting on the Mind of Christ, etc. By my understanding, this felt sense is the psychedelic experience.
While becoming aware of the emotionally and somatically felt resonance between seemingly discrete and disparate events — whether they be ordinarily or exceptionally intense — is important to understanding the felt scope of emerging, of becoming, what continues to evoke tears of gratitude, as well as trust and assurance to surrender and feel my life all the way through my eventual dying isn’t an imaginal, archetypal fascination with meaning-making. What continues to lure me back to workshops as well as deeper within the eternal well from which I’m emerging, what invites me to feel and express the activity of existing in personally meaningful ways is the sense of belonging, the sense of communitas occasioned by vulnerably breathing my guts out while attended and beheld by peers.
Even though Dreamshadow® is a 501(c)(3) start-up, our co-founders, Elizabeth Gibson, MS, and Lenny Gibson, PhD, have been cultivating community through workshops for over 30 years and have been furthering Stan’s legacy through academic study and philosophical inquiry for over half a century. They are experts.
I know this by direct experience — most readily by their paradoxical modeling of humility. They invoke the fool who walks off the cliff with nothing left to lose — no presumptions of their participants’ needs and desires. They expertly offer and teach this run-of-the-mill technique because they lead with the core principle of Stan’s holotropic model: each person is the expert of their own experience.
Having participated within this egalitarian communitas for nearing a decade now, and having been fortunate enough to be invited into a leadership role as the Executive Director for the last three and a half years, my holotropic breathwork practice has allowed me to celebrate the eternal and infinite beauty within the miraculous mundane.
I am deeply grateful for this Dreamshadow community, for my teachers and mentors, and for having participated in the filming of Life & Breath. Its Emmy award-winning director Mustapha Khan and friend Jethro Waters offer a felt understanding of practicing this seemingly simplistic technique, and do so with integrity. This offering was made possible by their soulful responsibility and holistic care, as well as by their courageous willingness to breathe their guts out with us, to practice opening with us. Mustapha and Jethro harmonized with the intensity expressed throughout each session, synergizing with the possibilities luring us further into becoming. They didn’t film us; they bore witness with inviting sincerity.
Personally, I feel indebted to Mustapha and Jethro. By their compassionate professionalism, they invited me to open, to surrender even while enduring personal and familial crises throughout the course of filming and the premier circuit — a sudden decline and the death of my mother and a terminal diagnosis and ensuing medical journey for my life partner’s mother. By participating in the filming sessions and having experienced the final version of the documentary a number of times now, it has supported my continued growth as a facilitator by helping me become more personally aware of “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” (Stevens, 1990, p.54) required of temple attendants.
The serendipitous surrender integral to accepting my mother’s eventual and event-full transition as well as my mother-in-love’s ominously sacred journey, emerged through participating in the filming sessions as well as beholding my experience on screen. By my Dreamshadow training and practice — of which I personally include participating in this documentary process — the requisite conditions for welcoming attitudinal mysticism erupted deep from within me as I bore witness: a gift I can only repay through serving others, by facilitating.
And, if I am able to facilitate well enough, like a trustworthy film director, you won’t even know that I’m there. Thank you, Mustapha and Jethro, for helping me discover more of myself while summoning the courage to open through felt Nothingness.
May this sneak peak of Life & Breath support your process of becoming more of who you think you already are, and may it lure your personal relationship with the Cosmos even further from within the wombed cave of possibility.
With care and gratitude,
Jace Langone, PsyD
Executive Director, Dreamshadow® Group, Inc.
References
Grof, S. The ultimate journey: Consciousness and the mystery of death (2nd ed.). Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 2006.
Grof, S. Healing our deepest wounds: The holotropic paradigm shift. Stream of Experience Productions, 2012.
Grof, S. The way of the psychonaut: Encyclopedia for inner journeys (Vol. 2). Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 2019.
Grof, C. & Grof, S. The stormy search for the self. A Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam Book, 1992.
Grof, S. & Grof, C. Holotropic Breathwork: A new approach to self-exploration and therapy. State University of New York Press Albany, 2010.
Grof, S. & Grof, C. Holotropic Breathwork: A new approach to self-exploration and therapy (2nd ed.). State University of New York Press Albany, 2023.
Perry, J.W. (1989). Spiritual Emergency: When personal transformation becomes a crisis. S. Grof & C. Grof (Eds.). Los Angeles, CA: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc.
Stevens, W. (1990) The palm at the end of the mind: Selected poems and a play by Wallace Stevens. H. Stevens (Ed.). New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Turner, V. The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine Publishing Company, 1969.
