What is your professional opinion of Grof’s breathwork?
I recall the Findhorn scandals, and I know a few folks who are very longtime practitioners of Steiner’s breathwork, being touted everywhere as Mindfulness Meditation. Watching the lives of the Steinerites over 20 years or so, I don’t see much of either an upside or a downside for the practitioners. They do, however, charge a lot for workshops in the method.
“What is your professional opinion of Grof’s breath work?”
Well, I’m tempted to say, “Don’t get me started!” I’ll try to just hit the highlights.
Holotropic Breathwork is OK, IMO, for someone who doesn’t want to take psychedelics, but it really has much less transformative potential. It is, however, safer, psychologically.
I enjoyed the opportunity to learn it and use it, although ultimately I got tired of running workshops using it because it simply turned into yet another quasi-cult-like New Age scene of the most narcissistically-tinged sort. I really don’t like that sort of thing at all.
I did enjoy the education and the people and the venues where we trained in it - great times. The sustained hyperventilation actives the mind-body energy in a manner suggestive of - but only remotely on a par with - psychedelics. The use of evocative music and focused body work to move the “trip” and the energy along was great to learn as well.
During my dozen years of heavy-duty altered states work/research, I quickly gravitated to the major leagues: high dose acid/shrooms/peyote (with or without adjuncts such as harmaline, datura, tobacco) as well as ayahuasca, and ibogaine a few times. Solo or guided journeys were interspersed with traditional ritual group use with some of these. Guiding, and learning to do that well, was also a great education.
It surprised me that the primary things psychedelics ended up teaching me on deep levels were the fundamental importance of conservative values, family, friendship, classical virtues and moral philosophy. They were also really good - some more than others, though - at actually teaching me how to use them better. But at some point they stopped teaching anything more: I had got the message, and I hung up the phone.
My gravitation to Eastern religions actually started before I’d ever used psychedelics. Over the years, this push led me to the Highest Yoga Tantra practices that come down to us through Tibetan Buddhism. The energies and blessings flowing through these practices make psychedelics look like a blunt instrument by comparison. In the Tibetan practices, not only does one learn to generate these energies and states on one’s own, but to do so reproducibly, and in a manner easier to work with. And, most importantly, the use of these energies and states are not just narcissistically cultivated, but done so with the expressed purpose of using the wisdom gained to alleviate the suffering of others.
I’ll stop here. That should be enough.