The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration

Stanislav Grof, having researched the human psyche for 20 years with various psychedelic substances has now for the past 30 years been using Holotropic Breathing to bring about the same experiences in his patients. Grof uses these experiences to create his model of the human psyche. This model also deals with space/time and the paranormal showing that Grof is by far, the world's premier inner explorer. Holotropic Breathwork, which is more or less Hyperventilating while listening to certain music in a safe environment, brings the subconscious to such a place where it will bring up the issues you need to deal with, even if you never knew they existed, without any outside help. This book not only explains Grof's model of the Human Psyche, but also shows the reader what goes on in and how to go about Holotropic Breathing. For those of you on a Holistic Journey or someone interested in the human Psyche, then this is definitely a must read book.

Stanislav Grof was chief of psychiatric research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. After more than thirty years of studying nonordinary states of consciousness, Grof has concluded that the avenues of exploration available to our psyches via holographic interconnectedness are more than vast; they are virtuallly endless.Initially, Grof investigated the clinical uses of the hallucinogen LSD at the Psychiatric Research Institute in his native Prague, Czechoslovakia. It quickly became clear that serial LSD sessions were able to expedite the psychothereapeutic process and shorten the time necessary for the treatment of many disorders.But LSD opened up much more than just issues involving their illnesses and included experiences of reliving what it was like to be in the womb, explore what it was like ot be other living things and even other objects, able to tap into the consciousness of their relatives and ancestors, accessing racial and collective memories in past history, and occassionally related uncannily accurate precognitive information. In an even stranger vein, they sometimes encountered nonhuman intelligences, traveled to what appeared to be other universes and other levels of reality.Perhaps Grof's most remarkable discovery is that the same phenomena reported by individuals who have taken LSD can also be experienced without resorting to drugs of any kind. Grof and his wife, Christina, developed a simple, nondrug technique for inducing these nonordinary states of consciousness. They call their technique "holotropic therapy" and use only rapid and controlled breathing, evocative music, and massage and body work, to induce altered states of consciousness. Grof describes his current work and gives a detailed account of his methods in this book.

I have to respond to Zosimos review below. The therapeutic technique Grof has been using since the 70's, is not original to him. It is derived from the tradition of Kundalini yoga, and his observations from research conducted both at the Prague Psychiatric Research Center, and Spring Grove Hospital, in Spring Grove, MD. His sessions with "holotropic breathwork" is very similar to "gestalt psychotherapy", involving elements of Reichian body work, combined witht he Kundalini technique of rapid breathing. The theoretical aspects of his research, conducted in the 60's with the hallucinogen LSD, was a reasonable attempt to model a framework to account for the clinical observations that he and his staff has made during their extensive research. This theoretical framework has been "born out" in his clinical work with "holotropic breathwork" involving, at this point, over 35,000 participants.Only the most ignorant of commentators could describe any aspect of his work as "bad". His work is not ideological, or even philosophical, in nature. It is existential. He instructs in the use of a technique, and does not even suggest much theory, to participants. My impression is that Zosimos has had very little exposure to the material associated with LSD Psychotherapy, and has virtually no experience with holotropic breathwork. If this is true, then he can only derive the authority of his opinion from reading, and listening to lecturers. He is the classic case of a paradigm bound individual making no effort whatsoever to wrestle with information and facts that cannot be accounted for by his model of reality. Its sad, really. Grof offers some of the most exciting insights to be found anywhere--but you have to be willing to keep an open mind if you have no experience with either LSD in a therapeutic context, or holotropic breathwork, or a close encounter with death.

In THE ADVENTURE OF SELF-DISCOVERY, Stanislav Grof, M.D., tells how group hyperventilation is a "powerful and effective method of stress reduction and leads to emotional and psychosomatic healing" (p. 176). The typical hyperventilation session begins with physical and emotional tensions surfacing. Continued fast, deep breathing brings intensification of physical and emotional pain until the suffering reaches a climax, followed by sudden release, with subsequent deep relaxation and even bliss. During the termination phase, any residual tensions can be released by massage of the painful area. In addition, when a breather seems helpless and vulnerable, and is clearly regressed to early childhood--perhaps even curled into a fetal position--then supportive mother-like physical contact such as rocking and cuddling can have "truly remarkable" (p. 226) therapeutic results, especially in persons with an emotionally deprived childhood. In early breathing sessions, most people dramatically relive their birth. Later sessions bring transpersonal experiences such as reliving fetal traumas, and feeling healing streams of Kundalini-like energy flowing through one's body; in everyday life, synchronicities often become more common. There is a definite trend over many breathing sessions from difficult, negative episodes to more positive, healing experiences. Besides describing the technique of group hyperventilation therapy in detail, the book outlines the healing mechanisms involved. The therapeutic value of reliving childhood traumas, of the death-rebirth process, and of transpersonal experiences, are all explained. The excerpts from breathwork sessions bring the text to life. For example, one woman's experience: "I stayed with my fear and my tantrum....I resumed the deep breathing....I pushed and strained and yelled. Images of struggling to get out of the womb, out of the crib, out of my confining life situation came to me. After maybe twenty minutes, I was quiet again....I...thanked them for helping me find God again....I had never felt so connected, after feeling so alone in my life" (p. 215). The two dozen or so illustrations from breathing sessions also round out the picture of what this form of therapy is actually like. For example, one painting is of a person lying staked to the ground while overhead a beautiful swanlike bird takes flight, with the sun shining on the horizon in the background; the caption reads, " a powerful death-rebirth eperience". For those who wish to try hyperventilation on their own, I recommend patience and persistence; I succeeded only after a couple of dozen tries over a period of several weeks (I simply had not been breathing fast and deep enough). One way I can tell when it's working is I get a buzzing/vibrating sensation in my head after I've been hyperventilating for a couple of minutes. Pursing one's lips into a tiny opening, as if whistling, may be more effective at moving a large volume of air i

Stanislav Grof is the foremost researcher in this field. His book is a gem of fact and detail. In the Preface, Dr Grof states, "I live mostly inside my head which explains why I'm always behind in the rent." This is true for most of us and this book explains why this is so. I particularly enjoyed the chapter titled 'Who Am I, Who Are You and Why Is My Short-Term Memory So Lousy?' This is not a book for the amateur... it is scientifically sound but at times esoteric. Nonetheless, it is enlightening and compulsive.