Dr. Nicola Crowley - Holotropic Breathwork Healing through a non-ordinary state of consciousness, medyczne- ...
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‘Holotropic Breathwork
TM
- healing through a non-ordinary state
of consciousness’
Dr. Nicola Crowley
Introduction
The concepts of ‘healing’, and the ‘therapeutic power of altered states’ of
consciousness are not mainstream concepts in psychiatry, but are increasingly
being considered as valid and necessary subjects to consider in our expanding
understanding of brain, mind and consciousness.
This is challenging to doctors who are grounded in the biomechanical
model and the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm within which it is structured.
Experiential data derived from work with non-ordinary states of consciousness
challenges these basic tenets.
Defining the ground
Definitions form an important basic frame of reference as we start to
explore a field that
is essentially experiential, about experiences that can be
beyond words.
Healing
The concept of healing is different to curing. The word ‘heal’ traces its
roots back to the Anglo-Saxon word
hal
, which means ‘whole’. Curing on the
other hand, implies that someone is trying to eliminate a disease, symptom or
crisis. In psychiatry, medication is our curing tool. Suppressing symptoms to buy
time, containment, and comfort and to gain balance and perspective are all
possible. But the healing process is one of not suppressing symptoms but
actually moving into them as a way of reaching wholeness.
Sometimes our attempts at cures can deny the possibility of healing rather
than facilitate it. Curing as an attempt to control our experiences can interfere
with our ability to move into the unsolicited experiences we need to restructure
our lives
1
.
In his essay ‘The Spirit in Health and Disease’ psychiatrist Laurence
Bendit
2
spoke of healing as rebuilding one’s life anew from chaos and disorder:
‘Healing is basically the result of putting right our wrong relationship to the
body, to other people and…to our own complicated minds, with their
emotions and instincts at war with one another and not properly
understood by what we call ‘I’ or ‘me’. The process is one of re-
organisation, reintegration of things which have come apart’.
1
Consciousness
No objective, scientific definition seems able to capture the essence of
consciousness.
Medical science has usefully defined conscious states in physical
terms using the
Glasgow Coma Scale which equates the unconscious to a
comatose or un-rousable physical condition, moving up the scale to being fully
physically awake.
Psychiatry has described levels of conscious impairment involving brain
function, such as brain injury, delirium and dementia of various aetiologies.
Psychologically speaking, consciousness can be defined in terms of a
characteristic psychological role that all conscious states play, for example, by
influencing our decisions and behaviour.
Psychotherapy seeks to understand this by cultivating an awareness of
what drives us, taking into consideration our biographical history. Psychoanalytic
models of the mind, initially described by Sigmund Freud have been usefully
evolved over the last century. Freud’s work focussed around the infant within the
primal family, Melanie Klein considered the suckling infant at the breast and
Donald Winnicott focussed on the early post natal period. Carl Jung spelt out the
primary importance of the mother-baby relationship, but was very much focussed
on the second half of life, developing the concept of individuation and
archetypes. Stanislav Grof, as I shall be showing, embraces all this and moves it
further.
Despite their differences, a common thread running through the
psychotherapies involves working on the edge of our conscious and
unconscious. The boundary of consciousness is the frontier of unconsciousness
3
and that is certainly the boundary that holotropic breathwork experiences
moves across.
What is consciousness and where is it? Briefly there are two ways to look
at it. The ‘productive theory’ proposes that consciousness is a product (or an
epiphenomenon) of neural process that cannot persist independently of brain.
The ‘transmissive theory’ posits that consciousness is inherent the cosmos and is
independent of our physical senses although it is mediated by them in everyday
life. So the brain and psyche can act as a lens through which consciousness is
experienced.
The mainstream scientific view on consciousness, including that of
medicine, psychiatry and much of mainstream psychotherapy, is limited to the
productive theory. Jung was probably the western pioneer of the transmissive
theory, with his ideas on collective unconscious and archetypes. Grof has taken
the work further and central to his work is that the mind extends way beyond the
skin encapsulated ego.
Non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOSC)
The majority of psychotherapies and psychoanalysis do not work explicitly
with altered states of consciousness. Holotropic Breathwork does set out to
engender a state of ‘altered’ consciousness or, as some prefer to say,
‘alternative’. Stan Grof uses the word ‘non-ordinary’. As with hypnosis, the word
‘trance’ has also been used interchangeably to describe the state.
2
Experiencing a non-ordinary state of consciousness can lead to insight,
integration and transformation into a more wholesome equilibrium which is
healing. I shall term this state a ‘healing consciousness’. Examples of these
include:
•
intense experiences during spiritual practice
•
experiences encountered with shamanic work
•
experiential psychotherapy
•
near-death experiences
•
entheogens
•
intense spontaneous experiences in everyday situations for which the
term ‘spiritual emergency’
4
or spiritual emergence has been coined.
•
non-ordinary state of consciousness attained via holotropic
breathwork.
What is Holotropic Breathwork
TM
?
Holotropic Breathwork
TM
is an innovative form of experiential
psychotherapy, a powerful but gentle method of self-exploration and healing
developed by psychiatrist Stanislav and Christina Grof. This work is derived from
modern consciousness research, depth psychology and shamanic and spiritual
practices, to support natural healing and growth through the direct experience of
non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOSC).
It involves accelerated breathing combined with evocative music and
focused bodywork which allows access to deeper levels of awareness and
insight, using mandala drawing as a method of integration. This technique can
gently bypass our usual defense mechanisms helping to recognize and embrace
elements of ourselves that have become disconnected or blocked. Many people
experience a new strength in their connection with an inner spiritual source.
The Development of the Method
Stanislav Grof is a former Professor of Psychiatry at John Hopkins
University, a former Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric
Institute, and was a scholar in residence for 14 years at the Esalen Institute, Big
Sur, California. He has written many books including
Beyond the Brain
and
Psychology of the Future
5
, publishing over 140 articles in professional journals,
while his books have been translated into 15 languages.
Grof’s initial exposure to NOSC was through his work in Prague with LSD.
At the time this was a new substance being investigated by the pharmaceutical
company Sandos and as a research psychiatrist Dr Grof was invited to take part
in the research.
Grof’s own experiences and the qualitative data that he gathered from
thousands of others’ experiences revealed a picture of the human psyche that
was both broader and deeper than Freud’s medical model. As someone who had
been in three times weekly Freudian psychoanalysis for seven years, Grof said
3
he entered a conceptual crisis. He knew of no way at the time to integrate into
mainstream psychoanalysis the transpersonal and death-rebirth experiences
that were emerging.
Grof continued to work with LSD for several years after his move to
America but later explored non-drug ways of evoking NOSC, developing
Holotropic Breathwork with his wife Christina. He currently heads the Grof
Transpersonal Training Program in Holotropic Breathwork, which the author of
this article is currently enrolled in.
New Concepts
The word holotropic derives from the Greek ‘holos’ meaning
whole
and
‘trapein’ meaning
moving forward
, implying moving into wholeness. The method
offers access into unexplored regions of the personal and collective unconscious,
including perinatal experiences and the transpersonal domains they open.
The acknowledgement and exploration of this domain has been neglected
by modern psychiatry, but has great relevance for its advancement. Traditional
academic psychiatry and psychology use models of the psyche that are limited to
either biology, postnatal biography or principally to the Freudian individual
unconscious. Through clinical observation of data derived from experiencing
NOSC, the cartography of the psyche has been explored and developed to
include two additional domains:
perinatal
and
transpersonal.
The perinatal domain and perinatal matrices
During initial experimentation with NOSC, people experienced moving
beyond the level of memories from childhood and infancy to encountering
emotions and physical sensations of extreme intensity which held a strange
mixture of themes of birth and death.
Because of the close connection between this domain of experience and
biological birth, Grof named this the perinatal domain, and described four basic
perinatal matrices, which are illustrated below:
BPM I BPM II BPM III
BPM IV
4
The
first perinatal matrix (BPM 1)
represents a baby prior to the birth
process itself, conceived and growing. The related non ordinary experience is
either an oceanic type of ecstasy or sense of cosmic unity (‘good womb’
experience) or, where the womb function is failing, its terrifying opposite.
The second matrix (BPM 2)
is where the womb starts to contract, the
cervix has yet to open, the baby is starting to be expelled from the womb, but
there is no where yet to go. Experiencing this domain in the non-ordinary state
relates to very bleak material, such as the sense of cosmic engulfment, which
maybe cognitively recalled from trauma in this life, or emotionally or physically
identified with birth trauma, where no conscious memory obtains.
The third matrix (BPM 3)
is where the stuckness ends but the journey
begins, contractions intensify and the cervix opens, a perilous journey towards
the outside world fraught with hazard. In terms of sense perception it is mixed
phase; something like wild adventure mixed with danger, a stage that is on the
edge, pain mixed with pleasure, death-rebirth.
The fourth matrix (BPM 4)
is
the birth of the baby, the emergence into a
new world, and the beginning of the recovery phase for mother and baby. The
perceptions here are that of triumph, fortuitous escape from danger, enormous
decompression and expansion of space, radiant light and beautiful colours.
Because of their experiential nature, these matrices are best illustrated by
the mandala art work which follows the session. This kind of work is of an
extraordinary quality and features in Stan Grof’s books, some of which are
referenced at the end of this paper.
The transpersonal domain
The second major domain experienced in the holotropic state is what has
been termed the transpersonal. This literally means ‘reaching beyond the
personal’ or ‘transcending the personal’. The experiences that originate on this
level involve both transcendence of our usual boundaries (the body and ego) and
the limitations of three-dimensional space and linear time.
These transpersonal phenomena and concepts have strange
characteristics that shatter the most fundamental assumptions of the materialistic
world view. They are to biomechanical medicine and psychiatry what quantum
physics has been to the Newtonian paradigm. Accepting these phenomena as
valid can be very challenging to doctors. It means being open to the
consideration that the psyche is far more than our current teaching would
suggest and that there is an extension beyond the brain/mind beyond our current
Newtonian-Cartesian model.
5
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