‘Breathwork’ is a term that is often used very loosely. Few acknowledge that the term was created by Stanislav and Christina Grof for their Holotropic Breathwork™ (HB) practice. The practice is much more than a breathing technique. It is a practice for transcending the fragmented day-to-day world by discovering yourself organically integrated with the cosmos. Holotropic breathing is not a specialized way of breathing. Simply intensifying normal breathing is enough.

Each Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork® (TPB) workshop engages the core activities of HB:

• Group Process
• Intensified breathing
• Evocative music
• Focused bodywork
• Expressive drawing

You know yourself deeply better than any expert can. Beware of anyone who says they will tell you more about yourself than you feel. You are the expert in yourself! Facilitators simply make a safe place to discover yourself through empathic sharing in a self-creating supportive community. This is the foundation of cathartic healing that has helped our ancestors survive since earliest time. It is crucial to ground us in our chaotic age of social, political, and technological change.

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The Practice

A Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork® workshop begins with participants sitting in a circle. Each is asked to say a little about what brings them to the workshop, plus as much or as little about their history and current situation as they wish. Then there is some basic presentation of guidelines for practicing the technique and some broad discussion of possible things that may arise in the course of a breathwork session. Participants choose a partner. One of the pair, the “breather,” lies on a mat, the other, the “sitter,” sits by. Later they change roles.

The breathers, with their eyes closed or masked, are instructed to begin breathing more and more intensely. Evocative recorded music plays. Most people, within a half hour, begin to experience deepened feelings and experiences, which may come from their unconscious, past history, or liminal states. They are encouraged simply to go with their experiences during the music, which continues for two and a half to three hours. If any breathers develop bodily sensations, a facilitator may offer focused bodywork, particularly toward the end of a session. After their sessions end, breathers are encouraged to draw or create with materials that are provided. Finally, participants gather again in a circle and share what they have discovered their experiences.

The Principles

Grof understands that intensified breathing in a carefully established safe setting can lead to exceptional experiences, such as come from psychedelic intensity or shamanic ritual. These

“seem to function as relatively unspecific amplifiers that increase the cathexis (energetic charge) associated with the deep unconscious contents of the psyche and make them available for conscious processing.” (Grof S., 2009, p. xxv).

The central concept of holotropic breathwork is that each participant is uniquely expert in themselves, connected with their own experience—not as psychologists or psychiatrists or other ‘experts’ making a diagnosis, but by authentically sharing their feelings of how they are affected by events from their real past history.

Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork® incorporates and extends Grof’s work. It uses the Process Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead as a cosmological foundation to emphasize community as the essential correlation to self-understanding. Most people, before they come to their first Dreamshadow workshop, do not understand this idea, because they have been educated and treated in hierarchical, expert-dominated contexts, beginning from their birth, followed by parenting that has not always fostered their autonomy, reinforced by constraints during schooling, and magnified by numerous other circumstances of social and cultural experience. All these factors create inhibitions and self-limiting habits.

Dreamshadow is self-discovery in a safe community setting without ‘expert’ authority.

The Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm that dominates modern Western culture and psychology is top-down and mechanistic. It models humans as machines driven by external forces. The most problematic aspect of this model is that machines do not grow. The model establishes a psychology of normalcy, rather than aspiration, of unquestioned subordination to authority.

But humans, of course, do grow. A model based instead on growth recognizes that humans are organisms in a cosmic ecology, lured by hopes, rather than driven by needs. The Newtonian- Cartesian paradigm implies that a person’s only contact with the past is through memory, which is exclusively a cognitive function, not a felt experience.

For the Dreamshadow Organic-Process model the past as real, not something that ceased to exist once the present moment is gone. In Dreamshadow’s safe space, difficult experiences can be reexperienced and softened by catharsis and met with a helpful, transformed attitude. We can cathartically re-experience events from our past when we engage in methods that deepen our feelings, like breathwork, meditation, or psychedelics. Breathwork

is the easiest and safest way for people to get in touch with events from their own past and ultimately even the events of cosmic history, which arise from what Plato three thousand years ago called the Receptacle—the foster mother of all that becomes.

Reference

Grof, S. (2009). LSD Doorway to the Numinous. Rochester, Vermont, USA: Park Street Press.