Chapter Four: Experiences and Theory: The Grof Maps of Consciousness (excerpts)

The four kinds of experiences

Stanislav Grof's Maps of Consciousness, or the cartography of the non-ordinary state experience, is very helpful. Our minds need some way of collecting and sorting information. Of course we need to remember that a map is not the territory, and that we eat the meal, not the menu. Such a map only points to the experience but should not be confused with the experience. Still, this particular map is a carefully observed and traveled one. It is useful because it increases understanding and allows us to give ourselves permission to express and experience whatever is necessary for us. We can use it to chart our progress and to reassure ourselves that others have successfully traveled through this territory and these stages before us.

In the Grof Maps of Consciousness, there are four categories of non-ordinary states of consciousness: experience: (1) Sensory experiences and motor manifestations, (2) Biographical experiences of events that have happened to us from birth to the present time, (3) Perinatal experiences from the fetal experiences during gestation and pregnancy, through the birth process, to the experiences immediately after birth, and (4) Transpersonal experiences which can take us beyond our bodies and our own personal (ego) identities. Breathwork is therapeutic but not therapy

In Holotropic Breathwork there is no external therapist in the traditional sense. There is no agenda for a session. There is no way to predict that a particular breathwork session will bring up some specific thing from our biographical histories. Even if it does, there is no way to determine what particular part of that issue will come up or what needs to happen for the issue to resolve itself.

For example, I would not come into a breathwork session wanting to "work on my relationship with my mother (or father)." In fact, to do so would be to cheat myself of the chance to surrender and receive whatever my own inner healer has in store for me. Rather than finding some issue in therapy that we want to "work on" in breathwork, it is better to allow and welcome whatever experience emerges in breathwork and then, at a later time, to work further with this material in the traditional therapeutic setting.

The advantage of a breathwork session is that this inner healer (rather than the conscious mind) selects what is appropriate for us to experience at any given time. The inner wisdom (or the unconscious) seems to have an advantage over the conscious mind or someone outside ourselves in knowing what we are ready to deal with and how far we can go with it just now.

Perinatal experiences

Modern psychiatry has greatly underestimated the effect of birth trauma in shaping later life. Traditional Western medicine holds that the brain cortex of the fetus is not yet myelinized and, therefore, can retain no memory of the birth trauma. However, experiments with single-celled organisms have shown that memory (conditioned response) does not require a brain or complex nervous system. Because these studies show that a single cell can retain memory, our human cellular memory is at least a theoretical possibility. For those of us who have seen thousands of breathwork sessions, it is not only possible, but simply true. Here a 39-year-old woman in her first breathwork session describes a related group (or COEX) of memories that pertain to pain in her thigh. The earliest memory was post-natal:

I started to feel pain in my right thigh from an old injury. The handle of a hand truck came down on me, creating a mark that is still there. I was wondering what I was still holding on to around that injury, when I felt myself a newly born infant, and the doctor's hand was on my thigh. His hand hurt, and I was screaming. He was taking me away from my mom. Then I saw myself as an infant in an incubator, strapped down and crying.

This woman wrote to me a week or so after the session to tell me that she had difficulty believing her breathwork birth "memory." She therefore telephoned her mother and talked to her about her birth for the first time. Her mother told her that she had indeed been taken from her, placed in an incubator, and transferred to a different hospital.

Transpersonal experiences

Transpersonal means beyond the personal. This category of experiences includes any that take us beyond our limited personal identity in present space and time. Alan Watts calls personal identity skin-encapsulated ego. The transpersonal category covers any experience that is not included in the other three: sensory, biographical, or perinatal.

One type of such an experience has to do with experiencing archetypes. We may communicate with an archetypal figure or have an experience of becoming one with the archetype. Any figure that symbolizes or embodies some principle of the universal life energy or some facet of human experience is an archetypal figure. Archetypes confer some special wisdom or understanding from which we benefit. Saints, Hitler, Kennedy, power animals, angels, or traditional gods or goddesses of many religions are examples of some archetypal figures. There are many other archetypal images that communicate a certain truth, in much the same way as a poem uses metaphor to portray more than the sum total of the literal meaning of its words. This 53-year-old woman experienced herself as an archetype of healing and life-giving energy:

Others were screaming and suffering and I felt much compassion. I tried to send the energy out to heal them, too. Most of it stayed around my body though. I felt like a healer goddess, but not sure how to transmit the energy. After I went to the bathroom, the energy changed. Now, when people cried out, I felt I was giving birth to them, pushing them through into life. It was like labor, but not painful.

This man experienced seeing, without actually becoming, an archetype of freedom:

This eagle was soaring high above me, right directly above me. It was really symbolic of being free and unique.

Jesus is a frequent archetypal figure in transpersonal sessions. The personal relationship and communications with Jesus as an archetype often have a profound healing effect. This is a 43-year-old woman's experience in her second breathwork session:

Jesus appeared, first hugging me close. There was some sexual confusion when he did this which he was aware of so he safely just held my hands, then held my hands up to his heart. He cried for my confusion. I then held his hand while we traveled the world about ten feet in the air so I could see the world's suffering. I remembered an orthodontist who made a sexual advance that forced me to put all male authority figures at a distance, including Jesus. I felt after this realization a tremendous connectedness to God. I felt tremendous bliss and ecstasy as I experienced God's love. The sadness was the realization that I don't feel worthy so I block that feeling of wonderful joy. When I cried, I felt more open to the world and could experience it even more intensely. I felt a "calling" at this time to be even more active in being of service to God.

(Note: Breathwork experiences can include sensory, biographical, perinatal (birth) and transpersonal experiences. Trauma recovery (biographical reliving of traumatic experience) is only one of the kinds of healing experiences which can occur using breathwork, but for many participants it has been an important part of their breathwork. There are three chapters on trauma recovery in The Breathwork Experience. One concerns Post-Traumatic Stress, another is about Childhood Sexual Abuse Recovery. The third is on Addiction Recovery which is excerpted on this site