Holotropic Breathwork and Me

being an account of the time my Holy Guardian Angel said 'hey'

Stan Grof by Alex Grey

The mention of Holotropic Breathwork in the latest episode of The Nonsense Bazaar brought back some memories and testing the waters on Twitter told me that I needed to tell the story.

I had a weirder childhood than most people. For a very long time my mom was severely depressed and my dad commuted to Boston while we lived out in the burbs. So, for most of my childhood I was on my own, learning to make do where my mother would not. She just couldn’t, and my dad did his damnedest to pick up the slack when he was around. I don’t want this to sound like a hit-piece about my parents, though. I assure you, there’s a recovery arc coming up, but this all sets the table for the weird turn that my earliest years of adulthood took.

I never knew for sure, but I suspected that somewhere in my teen years my dad had enough and laid out an ultimatum for my mom: Fix this or I’m out. And if that’s the case, I couldn’t have blamed him. Things got real dark for a while there, and I have a vast toolkit of survivor skills to thank for it. But here’s the thing: She did fix it. My mom got into therapy and took care of business across many years and things improved a lot. She fell in with a therapist who I would eventually come to know many years later and the tenor of her recovery suddenly made sense having met this woman. On top of the usual talking therapy, her therapist encouraged her to explore the stranger corners of consciousness study and new-age forms of therapy that were emerging from the 80’s and 90’s by way of music and art therapy. And this totally jived with the personality that depression had done its best to bury beneath a mountain of anhedonia and apathy. My mom was the person who introduced me to the very concept of the paranormal. She told me about the haunted house they lived in before I was born. She had Jane Roberts’ books about Seth on the shelves. She told me about ESP experiments that the Army was engaging in. For all the shitty parts of my personality that resulted from living with a parent plagued by mental illness, the seeds of Pera were planted by those same hands and I’m glad for it. On her road to recovery, my mom came to recognize the damage that she’d done over the years and, in her own way, did her best to rectify. Eventually this meant trying some things out on me or bringing me along to workshops and on this particular occasion, she asked me if I wanted to give Stan Grof’s Holotropic Breathwork a try.

I still had a long way to go before I’d dive head first into just about every flavor of strange out there but I was still up for adventure and while her explanation of what it was didn’t really click with me, I said what the fuck and went along, anyway. An important detail is that just before I took part in this experiment, I had also encountered a shaman who did some other therapeutic work on me and turned up some information about me that would set the course for the rest of my life. I talk a bit about it on Euphomet and I encourage you to listen to it.

To be brief, Stanislav Grof was one of the original LSD researchers in the 60’s, similar to Timothy Leary, but where Leary’s experiences kinda/sorta turned him into a cult leader, Grof kept his feet firmly planted in the research world and when LSD ended up on the FBI shit-list, he shifted away from it and looked into alternative forms of consciousness-shifting that wouldn’t land him in the hoosegow. Naturally, the breathwork of Tantric Yoga and various schools of Buddhism caught his attention. Tripping balls gave way to something akin to hyperventilating your way to enlightenment and thus, Holotropic Breathwork took flight.

The event in question was a two-day workshop held at some new age center in Brookline, Massachusetts, and upon entering I could see that the 90’s new age scene had found and sunk its teeth into the first glimmer of what social media would eventually hammer home: middle-aged women nostalgic for 1970. I was an 18-year old punk rock kid in a room full of essential-oil enthusiasts and one big bear of a man who turned out to be an omen of my future middle-age period. We were all paired up and were then told how this was going to go down. On day one, one of each pair would do the breathwork journey while the other was more or less a trip sitter. On day two, we’d switch roles. I was set to do mine on day two and was a little disappointed that I had to wait but being the sitter had its benefits. The room went fucking insane and all I could do was sit there and take it in.

The technique is super simple. You breath in and out very quickly, in short breaths, and kind of focus your attention on a hypnotic rhythmic music that plays. I don’t understand how it works, but it works. On day one I sat there while my partner, a woman significantly older than me with a Stevie Nicks thing going on, twisted and writhed on the floor into weird positions. It made teenage me feel real funny at the sacral chakra. A woman at the far end of the room sobbed intensely for the duration. The big bear of a man roared with laughter. It was fucking Bedlam, man. And when it was over, we all sat in a circle and the participants held up these drawings they had made when they were finished and explained what happened to them. My partner explained that as her trip progressed she turned into an Ur-human lizard-woman. The sobbing woman explained that she was moving away from the home where she had spent most of her life and in her trip she became the house and felt its unbearable despair at her leaving. The laughing man explained that a man who was also sometimes a monkey led him on a chase through a forest and told him jokes. My expectations were sky-fucking-high.

Day two came and it was my time to go in. So I laid down, went through the relaxation exercise and as the music began, so did my breathing and then nothing happened. For a very long time I lay there, breathing like a maniac, wondering when the party was going to start but nothing came. And then my hand started to move, completely on its own, without me consciously directing it. It was like someone was holding it and manipulating it, which was an unpleasant and somewhat troubling feeling. I’m glad that I just stayed with it and let it ride, though. The motion, at first, was simply tracing a circle on the floor next to me. Over and over. And then the image grew in detail, getting more and more complicated as time passed. Over and over I drew this symbol on the floor and it took shape in my mind. After a time, I realized that I was only going through the motions and consciously drawing the shape, so I stopped, took a minute to collect myself and then went over to the crayon station and drew the shape on the sheet. At the end, I held it up to present to the room and the collective group of women ooh’d and aah’d at the symbol, remarking that I must be shaman. This was not the first time I’d been told this, but the word evoked images of drums, feathers, and crystals and I just didn’t connect with that mode at all. I still don’t. I had a long way to go before I’d discover ceremonial magic.

I still sort of remember what the symbol looked like but have since lost the drawing when I left it in a box at my parents’ house after I moved out. It resembled a crop circle, with a central circle and several arms extending off of it with arms extending off of those. Inside the circle was a sigil that looks like the ones drawn from the Rose Cross pattern but it would be years before I came to that revelation. At the time it just looked like an angular squiggle inside a circle. As I came into magical practice, proper, I would recognize that shape as a sigil and realized way too late that the Man-In-The-Cave leitmotif in my life, the spirit that I have come to recognize as my Holy Guardian Angel, was formally reaching out to me and telling me its name. Had I kept better track of that drawing I probably could have laid it over the Rose and worked out its name, proper. But this vital information has since been lost to time because the secret wisdom of the ages was left in the hands of a horny teenager, distracted by the pastel-colored Stevie Nicks lady.

I’d had some weirdness happen to me prior to this, refer to that episode of Euphomet for details, but the true scope of most of it was lost on me at that point and it would be literal decades before I began to reflect on these occasions in a meaningful way. But even at that time in my life, that brief union with the HGA was like sticking a knife in an electrical socket. Something else took control of me for a few minutes and made itself known and despite being totally oblivious to the outer reaches of conscious experience, being touched by something perfect left an impression on me. Throughout my life I would go to great lengths to get close to it. Huge doses of psychedelic drugs were a shortcut that, while fun and took me to some weird places, didn’t work the way I thought they would. The only thing that worked was routine magical practice and it kills me that it took this long for me to figure it out. I’m at a point in my life when I’m starting to notice the clock ticking and not feeling any closer to the goal.

I suspect that telling this story is a means for me to make a new plan and get back on the path since I’ve definitely lapsed in the last couple months. If you’re at all interested in Holotropic Breathwork, I definitely encourage you to look into it. But do yourself a favor and get with people qualified to teach the program. Don’t go trying to figure it out through Youtube or whatever. That way lies Saint Germain.