Kylea Taylor talks about Exploring Holotropic Breathwork

"Preface" to Exploring Holotropic Breathwork

At the time of this publication tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of people have experienced life-changing experiences in the context of Holotropic Breathwork™. Since 1988, 827 people from 36 different countries of the world have completed the Grof Transpersonal Training’s extensive, structured, experiential training and are certified to Facilitate Holotropic Breathwork. A significant percentage of certified practitioners are now Facilitating regular group or individual sessions of Holotropic Breathwork.

Holotropic Breathwork is a powerful process for inner exploration, which was wisely designed for simplicity and safety by Christina and Stanislav Grof, M.D. The technique’s format and the trained skills of its Facilitators support participants’ willingness to explore unknown parts of the psyche. The technique and trained Facilitation together provide participants security enough to experience both internal and external freedom of expression. In this atmosphere of trust conjoined with permission, a participant often experiences reconnection to parts of self, others, and spirit in a way that is healing, enlivening, and expansive to sense of self and relationship. Martin Boroson writes eloquently about this in his article, "Radar to the Infinite" (page 29), which serves in this volume as a fine introduction to Holotropic Breathwork.

During this decade and a half (since 1988), practitioners trained by Stanislav and Christina Grof were returning to their far flung communities around the globe and beginning to provide Holotropic Breathwork workshops to local participants. Facilitators originally wrote many of the articles that are included in this book for the newsletter, The Inner Door.(1) They wrote in the spirit of sharing their thoughts about and their experiences of the practice of Holotropic Breathwork. In this way, the accumulating professional experience was disseminated to the growing, worldwide Holotropic Breathwork community. Practitioners who were geographically isolated (and most were) felt connected to their professional peers through reading The Inner Door. Exploring Holotropic Breathwork collects this body of literature so that those who are interested in the theory, practice, and history of Holotropic Breathwork, and in non-ordinary states in general, now can have easy access to it. A few of the articles have been updated at the request of their authors, but most remain substantially in their original form.

In assembling these articles and working with them during one concentrated period of time, I was impressed anew by the range of subjects covered in the articles and also by their authors’ diverse and knowledgeable backgrounds. The broad ranges of both are congruent with the vast scope of the Grof cartography of the psyche and with the wide spectrum of possible experiences that can occur in Holotropic Breathwork.

For the most part, these articles are written by people whose “day job” is not the practice of Holotropic Breathwork. The biographies of the authors in this book are notable for the breadth and depth of their experience and service in the world. Eighty-five different authors have contributed a total of 144 articles and poems, five informed consent forms, and three research questionnaires to this book. The authors include medical doctors, psychiatrists, nurses, researchers, ecology activists, psychotherapists, philosophers, astrologers, bodywork practitioners, writers, artists, ministers, publishers, shamanic practitioners, university professors teaching in several disciplines in several countries, poets, salespersons, meditation teachers, students, specialists in recovery from chemical dependency or trauma, organizational consultants, directors of non-profit organizations, hypnotherapists, psychiatric social workers, professional and amateur musicians, an astronomer, a priest, a lawyer, a playwright, a radiologic technician, an acupuncturist, a cartographer, a stock trader, and a television producer. These authors all bring their unique educations, their own languages and cultures, their particular vocational expertise, and their life experiences to the tasks of describing their own and others’ Breathwork experiences and the effects of those experiences. They aim their own lenses to view the interface between Holotropic Breathwork and other psychological models and spiritual systems. Some of the authors are trained in other breathwork schools as well, such as Integrative Breathwork, Hendricks Body-Centered Transformation, and rebirthing. The authors’ native countries include: Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Russia, South Africa, and the United States. I want to thank all of these authors for their willingness to share these articles again with us and for their generous donation of the author’s royalty for this book to the Association for Holotropic Breathwork International. See Table of Contents for more detail.

I included in this book only articles which had appeared in The Inner Door, with one partial exception. I was delighted that Stanislav Grof offered an article on his research and observations of the physical manifestations of emotional disorders and their resolution in non-ordinary states of consciousness and the psychophysiology of hyperventilation. The article, previously unpublished in its entirety (although a section of it had been published in The Inner Door), is a wonderful addition to this book and to his other published writings.

Kylea Taylor, Editor