Ecstatic Breathwork Systems
This is not really a Blog but an “outline” for a chapter on a book I am writing. It is sketchy but may be of use to some of my students, so I am posting it here, in rough form so there is a sense of the similarities, influences and differences from Grof Holotropic Breathwork ™. By ‘ecstatic breathwork systems’ I am referring to archaic techniques of ecstasy, used in contemporary context, for purposes of healing, transformation, deep self-exploration. These techniques evoke a non ordinary state [NOSC], are accompanied by connected breathing, and evocative music, while inwardly following the breath, music, and emerging process. I begin with a list of precursors and influences on Grof, myself, and the ecstatic breathwork systems of Jacqueling Small and Linda Star Wolf.

List of Major Precursurors & Influences
These are amongst the major influences on contemporary ecstatic breathwork systems.
Shamanic Rites involve trance dance with percussion and chant.
Entheogenistic shamanism
Kundalini Yoga breathwork (Muktananda)
Bhakti Yoga, with Shabd yoga, Nada Yoga
Sufi Dervish Dancing
!Kung Bushmen tribal journeying and shamanic healing through trance-dancing.
LSD psychotherapy and systematic self-exploration: C. Leuner, T. Leary, Ram Dass, S. Grof, RD Laing
Leonard Orr Rebirthing
Wilhelm Reich & bioenergetics
Janov: Primal Therapy
Frtiz Perls and Gestalt Therapy / Gestalt sequences: organism moving towards closure.
Otto Rank: Birth of the Hero
CG Jung: Cartography of the psyche, and his method of active imagination and suggestion of dance, along with music and mandala painting.
Core Shamanism: shamanic journeying, SR/E
Indigenous Medicine Systems
Gendlin’s Focusing on a felt-sense with implicit life-forward direction(precursor to Mikkal’s sacred breathwork and dance system).

Contemporary Ecstatic Breathwork Systems
Grof: Holotropic Breath Work: ™— Holonomic Integration (Grof TT)
Jacquelyn Small: Integral Breathwork ™ –(Eupsychia, INC)
Linda Star Wolf: Shamanic Breathwork ™
Mikkal: Sacred Breathwork & Dance ™ (Crows Nest Center for Shamanic Studies)

Grof while at Esalen, observed many cutting edge therapists and spiritual teachers, and sought a nondrug way to continue his research into healing and deep self-exploration through NOSCs. Leonard Orr, Swami Muktananda and his own LSD research and discovery of BPMs became paired with the Grof’s technical innovation of lying down with connected breathing while listening to evocative music. All the ecstatic breathwork systems mentioned here are indebted to Grof, originating there, and then departing in unique ways, in line with predilections and the individuals supporting cartography and experience. Grof is the Father of modern ecstatic breathwork systems. There are also a large number of non-ecstatic or ‘enstatic’ breathwork systems, some involving bodily movement (Tai Chi, Taoist and Zen breathwork, Vipassana, Kripaulu yoga-dance, Core Energetics, Radiance Breathwork, Breatherapy, etc).

For my supporting cartography I draw from Jung, like Grof, and from 30 years of practice of Jungian psychology and breathwork with individuals, therapy groups, and in the past several years, in workshops and Crows Nest communities in USA, Belgium, France, and training/supervision in S. Africa with Lyn del a Mott and her community, Eva Morales and her work in Switzerland. My cartography is significantly influenced by my own experiential explorations of a variety of entheogens, and decades of shamanic journey-based practiced. The heart-psychology which I developed offers an experience-near and fairly simple cartography that supports sacred breathwork, offering a heart path with practices before and after sacred breath sessions. It also offers community context, and the emergence of ongoing partnerships as a measure of safety and building in of deep human connection, witnessing, and care for deep human experiences.

Grof is one of the most gifted psychotherapists and psycho-spiritual innovators on the planet. His influence on me is substantial, but does not govern the theory or the practice details. I do think our Cartographies help guide and shape our experiential practices, so it is important to note my own. I draw more from Grof’s technique, and his prenatal theory (BPMs) than his Bohmian physics and holonomic metphysics. The major influences in my Cartography are Jung and Hillman, Whitehead, Heidegger, and Gendlin (Felt-sense and his ontological philosophy of implicit entry), whereas Grof’s is more centered in the transpersonal psychology field, with its own terminology and scheme, in which he was a major shaping influence, and significant influence from Jung (collective unconscious, archetypal realities, and holotropic principle).

My modifications in technique are substantially rooted in my background with Robert L. Moore on ritual process and leadership. This component interfaces with all other Crows Nest teachings and ceremonies, and determines music sequencing and session structure. The observation repeated of the transformative results of sacred dance, within sacred breathwork sessions, in my workshops in USA and Europa has also induced, another modification in technique, allowing dance to become a form of inward journeying and deep transformation equal to the lying down method. This is especially so when the dancer has a body felt-sense of the arising impulses are followed through felt-movement and inward felt-sensing, whether accompanied by visual imagery or simply intuitive insight felt in the dance itself. The “5 Rhythms” of dance discovered by Gabrielle Roth are essential archetypes of dance that may come up in a session. I have seen various forms of death and rebirth processes occur, and witnessed individuals drop fear-based patterns, reclaiming their freedom and expressivity simply through the sacred dance process. When this is expressed in mandalic art and then discussed in group process afterwards, it can be seen that the transformative effects and insights derived from this technique are of great power.

Thus, where space permits, I make room for sacred dance as a form of journeying and self-transformation. In Europe the larger retreat halls allow for development for full dancing expression, and I have seen tremendous healing and transformations come through people who used the sacred but spontaneous dancing movements as their preferred technique.

For a supporting set of practices to prepare for and integrate breathwork content, I offer a psychology of the heart, completely with a psycho-spiritual path. The major influences out of which I crafted this system of practices is indebt to Jung, Gendlin, Whitehead, and Quechua Iachak and Nahua- Toltec indigenous healing systems. Sacred breathwork is viewed as one ceremony amongst several heart-path ceremonies, best practiced in a group or community context, and in the context of other sacred ceremonies. This presently is a fairly distinctive feature.

While making medical and psychiatric assessment of possible exclusions from trauma- relieving and abreactive breathwork, many such individuals can participate in the ceremony as allies, as meditators and worshipers, as dancers or co-facilitators (when they have had sufficient experience). The effect is that while not everyone should abreact traumatic events, virtually everyone can participate on some level. Working this limited-basis way I have had successful participation of individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizo-affective disorder, major depression, moderate blood pressure problems and mild seizure disorders. Prescribed medications must be continued during the breath workshop for such individuals.

I share with Grof the holotropic principle, but prefer Jung’s term “spiritus rector,” and I also like Whitehead’s “Divine Lure of Becoming”, and Teilhard’s “Omega Point” as contrasting images. In guided journeys that I use in preparing new people for sacred breathwork sessions, I often use “Meet your Inner Shaman” so that each individual may have a direct experience of this inner healer, holotropic principle, or inner shaman, or Spiritus Rector, or Lure of Becoming that is within us all, before an actual sacred breathwork session.

I also share the primacy of safety grounded in ritual process and leadership (Moore).

I also draw on Whitehead’s insight that it isn’t just wholeness, but the experience of beauty that is aimed at, a harmony and intensity of feelings that is richly complex and integrated. I find this congruent with the meaning of Toltec as an ‘artist of the spirit.’ As such our aim is at creating beauty in the world, for ourselves, for others, for human and nonhuman worlds.

I am working toward more numinous architectural environments in Europe, and soon in Michigan, using Rudolf Otto’s writings on sacred architecture, on the use of dim light and shadow, numinous glowing stars on ceilings, etc… Sudhir Kakar was a mentor at the University of Chicago. His cross cultural studies of healing systems convinced me of the power of the physical space in which communally supported and witnessed healing rites take place.

Technically I like to begin with a preparatory talk, a guided shamanic journey, and the NGS/DIGS method, so an experiential basis for what happens in S/BW is laid, and so that the technique can be seen as a ceremony that is supported by the shamanic heart-open and earth-honoring path.

For myself, as for Grof and Tarnas, estatic breathwork systems are needed to address the current global crisis (symbolized by 2012), because we need powerful and rapid methods for transforming a critical mass of humans into “better humans.” To change from a greedy materialistic and polluting system of life, we need the inner transformation to a heart-open and earth-honoring way of living on a global level. The change can only begin inside each of us. Science and technology will not save the planet, they come from the consciousness that created the problem in the first place.

Why Cartography?

We need better Cartographies to understand and support experiences that are anomalous to the old Newtownian-Cartesian-Baconian materialistic-deterministic paradigm. My book, PSYCHOTHERAPY AND THE SACRED, challenged this old paradigm cartography and offered a supporting cartography of psyche and the sacred based in phenomenology and process thought, and Jungian psychology. IN JUNG AND SHAMANISM IN DIALOGUE, I subtitled my theme of “Retrieving Soul / Retrieving the Sacred. These wordings reflect the paradigm and Cartography changes I was working for in those books. Sacred Breathwork as I practice it and teach it worldwide, is grounded in the theoretical structure of those two books.

In ecstatic breathwork systems we need a Cartography sufficiently large and rich to support the broad range of experiences that can arise, and make the work safe, and to offer a framework of meaning or sense of purposiveness for experiences that transcend our abilities to fully understand.

Elsewhere I have sketched a Jung-Grof based cartography. There are a number of emerging cartographies, all rich and complex, and all challenging the Newtonian-Cartesian rationalism and materialism: beginning with Jung, Grof, Wilber, Washburn. Because Wilber’s beautiful model of development is more or less linear, stage-structural and hierarchical, based in verbal—biographical development and experience, it is less useful for breathwork phenomena that can not find a place in it (e.g., BPMS). Jung-Grof-Washburn offer spiral or circumambulatory models, mine is one of them.

There are several simple cartographies, one based on chakra systems, and another based on the three storied “shaman’s cosmos” of Upperworld, Middleworld, and Underworld. I will correlate my cartography under these headings to show the cross-cultural or core shamanic point of view on rather Jungian based cartography. The classifications are only suggestive, as we cannot be linear and faithful to the circular, intricately interconnected and multileveled phenomena, and the spiral complexities of experience.

Here is a simple model that covers a vast range of anomalous (to the old paradigm) experiences. But cruxing it down to the essentials helps learning and communication.

SHAMANIC UPPERWORLD
TELOS OF BEING: The FERTILE VOID: The highest level of Self is formless I-Amness. It is also the Source from which we and the world of form arises, as well as the aim, all, and end towards which we move. It is an immensely creative realm. Whitehead called it “sheer creativity,” the Buddhists call it Shunyata, Eckart, the Godhead.

IMAGINAL-ARCHETYPAL HEIGHTS: Spiritual Archetypal beings, high gods/goddesses, Bodhisattvas, Angels, etc.

SYNCRHONISTIC: includes synchronistic, psychic, and nature-mystical experience. This dimension typically pops open with spiritual awakening or spiritual emergencies and life crises, or experimentation with drugs and entheogens.

SHAMANIC MIDDLE WORLD
EGO-PERSONA IDENTITY FIELD (The smaller ‘self’ to which we attach and with which we misidentify). This also includes the capacity to think, reason, plan–we all need a good head on our shoulders. But it is insufficent to move us towards transformation, healing, and wholeness. For that we need something more than intellect.

PERSONAL SHADOW (can include material from biographical development, as well as archetypal material and COEX/complexes emerging further down, or prior to biological birth.

SHAMANIC UNDERWORLD

COLLECTIVE SHADOW & BPM PORTALS (to archetypal and other realms)

IMAGINAL-ARCHETYPAL DEPTHS: Including the ancestral and prehumen layers of the collective unconscious.

GROUND OF BEING (the fertile formless emptiness) from Which we depart into the world of form, lose ourself, awaken, and towards which we return.

High & Low Expression of Archetypes
I follow Washburn, and contra Wilber, that archetypes have pre-personal and transpersonal expressions. For example, the Mother archetype can express itself in the biological birth and maternal nurturing of a human child, or in a Mother Theresa bringing love to the ‘poorest of the poor’ or in a Divine Mother guiding us towards wholeness and and earth honoring ways (Pachamama).