Stanislav Grof Interview

Summary

Stanislav Grof describes how psychedelic research led him to study non-ordinary states of consciousness and develop an expanded map of the psyche. He discusses birth experiences, transpersonal dimensions, the limits of conventional psychiatry, and the therapeutic potential of carefully supported altered states.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can psychedelic experiences be used for psychological healing?
• What can altered states of consciousness reveal about the unconscious mind?
• Can people relive or access experiences connected with birth and early development?
• How are personal psychological patterns related to collective or archetypal experiences?
• What is the difference between irrational thinking and trans-rational spiritual experience?

Key takeaways

• LSD became a powerful investigative tool for studying the psyche, not merely a chemical with predictable effects.
• The content of psychedelic experiences varies widely between people and across repeated sessions.
• Grof's expanded map includes postnatal, perinatal, and transpersonal levels of experience.
• Reliving birth-related experiences may help resolve deep emotional and psychosomatic patterns.
• Mystical experience can be trans-rational without being irrational or incompatible with ordinary functioning.
• Psychiatry may overlook important psychological material by suppressing unusual states instead of studying them.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer, and I’m really honored to have as my guest for this interview, Stan Grof. Many of us owe our existence at this conference to the work that he pioneered in the ’50s and ’60s without really even knowing that we do. He’s such a pioneer in the research and the healing and transformative potential of non-ordinary states of consciousness. His groundbreaking theories influenced the integration of Western science with his brilliant mapping of the transpersonal dimension. He’s one of the founders and chief theoreticians of transpersonal psychology and received an honorary award for major contributions to the field of transpersonal psychology. So, really, thank you for doing this, Stan.

Stan: Thank you for having me.

Rick: You wouldn’t believe that this guy is 85 years old. I was eating and talking and carrying on with him last night, and he is clear as a bell, absolutely interested in all the stuff that’s going on around him. Fire dancers last night—he was getting there, taking pictures of the fire dancers. Boy, if I am half as clear as you are when I’m 85…

Stan: I’m 84.

Rick: Oh, 84. No wonder. [Applause]

Anyway, whatever you’ve been doing, it’s had a good effect on you, obviously. So let’s hear about what you’ve been doing and how you got started doing it.

Discovering psychiatry and LSD

Stan: Initially, I had no idea that I would go into psychiatry. I was very interested in painting and drawing. I wanted to work in animated movies. Just before I made the commitment to work in the film studios in Prague, a friend of mine handed me introductory lectures to psychoanalysis by Freud. I started reading it in the evening, and I couldn’t put it down. I read through the night, and within two days I decided it wasn’t going to be animated movies—I was going to be a psychoanalyst.

In Czechoslovakia and most other countries, you have to have a medical degree or a psychological degree. So I had to enroll in medical school, and then I started working as a student volunteer when I was in my fourth year. This was the time when LSD came to the psychiatric clinic where I was working.

This came from Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company with a big box full of ampoules of LSD-25. There was a letter that said, “This is a very interesting investigative experimental substance which was discovered practically by accident in the laboratories of Sandoz by Dr. Albert Hofmann, who actually intoxicated himself when he was producing it.” He told the whole story.

Albert Hofmann synthesized it in 1938 as part of a study of ergot alkaloids. He took lysergic acid and was adding different side chains, and LSD was the 25th derivative. There were three major—or there were, at the time, three major—indications. One was gynecological bleeding, through contraction of the uterus. The second was opening the arteries in the brain for the geriatric population. The third was migraine headaches.

Rick: You mean he was hoping to treat all these things with LSD?

Stan: No, this was ergot alkaloids, okay? He was trying to create another derivative that would be more effective and have fewer side effects. So LSD was number 25.

He synthesized it in ’38 and sent it for pharmacological studies, and it came back as not a particularly interesting substance. Research was discontinued. Those of us who knew Albert heard the story again and again. He said he continued adding some other side groups, but he couldn’t get rid of this LSD-25. He said they must have overlooked something.

He had this inner drive, and after five years it was so strong that he decided to make another sample and send it back for better examination. Of course, they wouldn’t have found anything in rabbits and rats, but he just happened to intoxicate himself when he was making it.

He started feeling strange. There were waves of emotions, seeing colors, distorted shapes, and he thought he was going crazy. Then, when he came down and had maybe two and a half hours to reflect, he felt there had to be some better explanation. So he decided to test it.

Two days later, he took it. He said, “Being a very conservative person, I took just a minuscule, just an infinitesimal dose, or what I thought was a minuscule dose.” The dose was 25 percent of the dosage of other ergot alkaloids. This was 250 micrograms.

I don’t know how many of you can relate to the dose, but when we were working with LSD, this was a high dose. You had to prepare people, usually men and women sitting together, and keep people overnight.

Anyway, he took it and prepared his work for the day. He thought maybe every half an hour he would close his eyes and see if anything was happening. Of course, in 45 minutes his state came with a vengeance. He couldn’t work, so he asked his assistant to take him home.

This was 1943. It was wartime, so there were restrictions on using cars. People were using bicycles in Basel. There’s this great description of Albert bicycling through the streets of Basel on 250 micrograms.

He came home and felt terrible. He felt he was dying. His neighbor was a witch and was hexing him, so he asked the assistant to call the doctor. When the doctor came, he was not dying anymore. He was now going through an experience of birth.

He came home and felt terrible. He felt he was dying. His neighbor was a witch and was hexing him, so he asked the assistant to call the doctor. When the doctor came, he was not dying anymore. He was now going through an experience of birth. He was a newborn with wonderful feelings, feeling that a lot of his problems had been washed away.

This was the beginning of another phase in his life. He sent this report to his boss, and the boss happened to have a son who was a psychiatrist in Zurich. So he did a pilot study and published it, and this became an overnight sensation.

Now Sandoz was sending it to different research institutes, universities, and even individual therapists. They were saying, “Would you work with this? We feel it could have some relevance for psychiatry and psychology.” They actually gave two tips in this letter.

They said, “We feel that this could be used as experimental psychosis.” You would give it to “normal people,” do all kinds of tests before, during, and after, and see what was happening in the body when the psyche was so profoundly affected. It’s always great to have a model in science.

But then there was a second tip that became my karma or destiny. It said it could also possibly be used as a kind of unconventional training tool—that psychiatrists and psychologists could take it and spend six hours in a world that seemed to have some similarity with the world of their patients.

I was, at that time, sort of disenchanted with psychoanalysis, of course. I became one of the early volunteers, and I had a session that just changed my life professionally and personally in a few hours.

Rick: The strobes? Is that the one where you had LSD?

Stan: I described it a little in my talk. This was combined with a stroboscopic light. It was an enormous cosmic, mystical experience. When I came down, I was so impressed that I stuck with psychiatry. This was by far the most interesting thing you could do as a psychiatrist.

I was one person when I walked into the room in the morning, and then somebody else walked out of that room.

I had some experience with psychoanalysis, and there was no comparison, even retrospectively. I spent seven years in psychoanalysis, and I loved every minute of it—playing with my dreams and finding deep meaning in each slip of my tongue, and so on.

But if you ask me, “Did it change you?” I would say, “Well, I changed, but seven years is a long time. It changed anyway.” There was no convincing evidence for me, no connection between what I was doing on the couch and any kind of changes.

If you ask me, “Did this first LSD session change me?” I would say, “Well, I was one person when I walked into the room in the morning, and then somebody else walked out of that room.” There was no question what had done it.

That was the beginning. I would say it was my passion, my profession, and my vocation. For 60 years, I have done very little professionally that was not related in one way or another to non-ordinary states.

🛤️ From psychedelic experience to therapeutic research

Rick: A friend of mine who lives in an ashram in the Himalayas wrote me about a year ago and said I should interview you. There’s one little sentence that jumps out at me here. He said, “The more you expose yourself to his writings, the broader his intellectual universe reveals itself to you.”

I have that feeling with you—that you’re this kind of vast reservoir of possible points of discussion. I want to make sure that we extract from it the most salient, interesting, and important points that we can possibly talk about in 45 minutes or so, points that would have the greatest benefit and impact on our audience.

So guide me along as we do this, so I don’t ask irrelevant questions that waste your time. With that in mind, keep telling us the story of your progression, but let’s sort of have as our goal taking away points that people listening can use to transform their own lives. Okay? So that’s not really a question.

Stan: But what’s the question?

Rick: Yeah, I guess. Well, I mean, I took LSD first in 1967, and it was a real eye-opener for me. The main realization was that the world is dependent upon how we perceive it. It’s not like everybody perceives it the same way.

Having been up all night tripping, I went into a doughnut shop in the morning and was just astounded to see that the doughnut-selling ladies were seeing a very different world than I was. I thought, “That’s it. You have to change your consciousness. You don’t just change the world; you have to change your perspective.”

And yet, within the course of a year, I had been arrested twice, dropped out of high school, and my life was a mess. I realized that if I continued that way, I was going to destroy it.

Consequently, even then, LSD was illegal, and all other drugs were illegal. Probably you would say that it’s too bad there’s this blanket prohibition of them, because if they were used responsibly—which I hadn’t been doing, really—they could be of tremendous therapeutic value. So talk about that.

Stan: In an ideal world, if you were writing the laws and designing therapeutic approaches using LSD—and we’ll also talk later about holotropic breathwork—how would you see therapy using those tools being practiced, and what outcomes would you see from it?

Well, you talk about the experience of the donut, which means that you did it with your eyes open, at least when this happened with the donut. So, it’s very interesting for artists, the changes in the environment. I have, in my new book, Understanding the Modern Consciousness, Understanding of Art, some examples of how it can change your perception of the external world. But there you get a mixture of what you see out there and what you are projecting.

The real journey starts when you keep your eyes closed. In other words, when we do it therapeutically, you do it with eye shades and headphones, with music, and then you just get messages—pure messages—from your unconscious. Then it becomes an extremely important investigative tool. I compared it in my early writings to a microscope, to a telescope. I mean, you can study certain processes that you cannot study unless you work with people whose unconscious opens up spontaneously. But psychiatrists don’t do it. We put people on tranquilizers rather than study what’s coming out of these spontaneous episodes.

So, anyway, we had something like a telescope or a microscope. Initially, I think for about two years, we were doing laboratory studies: What happens in the body? We would bother people in these LSD sessions, drawing samples of blood, having them urinate every hour, giving them psychological tests, and so on. We were doing it to ourselves as well. Those are very different kinds of experiences.

Then I noticed something really amazing, which was incredible inter-individual and intra-individual variability. If 50 people take LSD with the same dosage under the same circumstances, everybody would have a completely different session. And if you take it repeatedly, each session will be different.

Stan: We were studying the psyche with a powerful catalyst.

I realized at that point that we were not doing pharmacology. We would not have pharmacology if substances responded like LSD. You have to know somehow what you want to achieve. You want to have people throw up? You give them apomorphine, and a significant number of them have to throw up as a result. Or you give them sleeping pills. You have to have some sense of what’s going to happen. With LSD, you had no idea what was going to happen. Anything could happen, but nothing had to happen.

At that point, I realized we were studying the psyche. We were studying the psyche with a powerful catalyst. I took it back to the clinical work and started doing it there. We could give a whole series of sessions, usually with medium dosages. One of my clients called this “onion peeling of the psyche”—going layer after layer.

You could get a sense of the content of the different layers, how things are interconnected, and how the unconscious content relates to symptoms, at which point you start moving the symptoms. They intensify, or they disappear, and so on.

Birth, trauma, and the expanded psyche

I brought my medical study and my psychoanalysis into this work. According to Freud, the newborn is a tabula rasa. There is not supposed to be anything that precedes birth. The psychological history starts after you’re born.

That proved to be a very poor tool for this kind of work because nobody I worked with would stay in the playground defined by Freudian analysis. They started moving into really scary areas, feeling they were trapped, that they were dying and going crazy, and that they would never come back. Then they got insights that the only logical explanation was that they must have gone back to their biological birth.

I had this tremendous challenge of accepting the fact that there is a record of birth because, according to my teachers, this couldn’t be the case. The brain of the newborn was supposedly not mature enough. It was not what is called myelinated.

This meant making observations that were in serious conflict with what these authorities were saying. If you are a medical student or a freshly trained psychiatrist, you have a lot of respect for authorities. Those people have written books and so on. So I would start questioning my sanity and my observations.

It took quite a while, including my own experiences, before I said, “No, it’s there. I mean, it’s up to the neurophysiologist to find where it’s recorded. There is a highly organized organ, the brain of the newborn. Maybe it’s in the subcortex. Maybe it’s in the spinal cord. Maybe it’s in every cell of the body.” We also knew from biology that there is something like protoplasmic memory, and so on.

I became comfortable with this and able to say to people, “Oh, I’m dying.” I would say, “Let yourself die. This is not real dying. This is going to be part of a rebirth process. Let’s go. Let’s do it.” I was doing this myself as I was working with people.

But then, just as I got comfortable with birth, it started going beyond that. We started seeing past lives, archetypal experiences, people going into the collective unconscious, and so on.

I realized, “Okay, I have this new tool. If you have a new tool, it opens up new areas of study. So I’m going to map this.” I started mapping where people were going. It took about three years to put together this extended cartography, until I felt comfortable that, although not specifically, each major category of experience was on that map.

This was a new map for psychiatry, but it was not a new map at all. It was actually a very old map because there were elements of it that were part of shamanic geography. A lot of it overlapped with the great spiritual philosophies of the East—Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and so on.

I realized this was a rediscovery of some very ancient maps of consciousness that we had somehow rejected and even ridiculed during the Industrial Revolution.

What happened 300 years ago is that major discoveries were made through reason and science. They turned into technological advances and started to change the world. There was tremendous excitement about what reason could do. I don’t know how many of you know that Notre Dame, for a number of years, was renamed the Temple of Reason.

Suddenly, reason was the most powerful tool that we had, and everything that was not rational was labeled irrational—a kind of embarrassing leftover from the Dark Ages, from the childhood of humanity. Now we are supposedly rational beings with a scientific worldview, and so on.

Stan: Mystics are not irrational; they are trans-rational.

The error that was made is to confuse what is not rational with what is irrational. Mystics are not irrational; they are trans-rational. The mystic, if they have completed their transformation process, does not have problems crossing the street, getting dinner, and so on. They can function rationally, but they have experienced certain dimensions that other people have not experienced.

If you discover a new realm, you have to somehow expand your cartography. When, in the 15th century, Columbus discovered the New World, people had to expand their worldview. When we started doing astronomical explorations, our understanding of the world expanded. We had to add that new knowledge.

Rick: So you said it took you about three years to map out the thing reasonably well. Can you describe that map to us a little bit?

Stan: The what?

Rick: The cartography of the psyche and of transpersonal states.

Stan: Yes. The new cartography shared with traditional psychology and psychiatry the biographical, postnatal, recollective level—what happens to you after you’re born.

But there were two major realms that had to be added. One is what I call the perinatal. Peri means “around” in Greek, and natalis means pertaining to birth. So there is a record of experiences that happened to us before birth, during birth, and immediately following birth.

I actually found four experiential matrices when people were regressing into birth. They were very distinct kinds of constellations of experiences, characterized by specific emotions and physical feelings. Each of them also represented a selective opening into the next level, which was transpersonal, or the collective unconscious.

Let’s say you would experience yourself as a fetus in what I call the second matrix: stuck in the womb, with the uterus contracting and the cervix not open. You lose linear time. It feels like this will never end.

You can also be tapping into collective unconscious experiences of people being in dungeons, concentration camps, torture chambers during the Inquisition, or in a war where they are victimized and have no way of fighting the enemy.

When you get to what I call the third matrix, the cervix is open and you’re moving through it. The images would be, for example, images of revolution: “Enough of the oppression. Now we are going to mobilize ourselves, defeat the tyrant and the oppressor, and all breathe freely again.”

If you come out, if you are reborn, then the images from the collective unconscious would be the end of war and victory in revolutions.

Rick: So I’m not sure that I completely understand, and maybe some people listening won’t either, so let me throw in a question here. Are you saying that, through perhaps LSD use under research conditions, people remembered the birth process, and that these various experiences of torture, revolution, and so on were accompanied by memories at various stages of the process of being born? Is that what you were saying?

Stan: It’s like you’re tuned into a whole field that has a certain archetypal quality, if you think about it archetypally. Within that field, you can get some sample of experiences from your childhood, from your infancy, and then a specific perinatal matrix.

Let’s say if it’s an archetype of a victim, it will take you to the second matrix, when you’re stuck in the womb. If it’s the third matrix, then it’s the movement out. You also get elements of mythology.

For example, when you have the second matrix, you might get images from the Greek underworld.

Rick: These images are images people are getting as they’re on LSD, having these memories of the birth process. They’re getting images of the Greek underworld and so on.

Stan: I wouldn’t even call them memories because it’s actually reliving. You’re reliving it. You’re back there. Maybe an even better way is that you’re transcending time rather than tapping some kind of memory that’s from the brain.

Rick: So what is the significance of the fact that these archetypal images are associated with various stages of the birth process? Why is that? I mean…

Stan: You have to ask…

Rick: Ask God.

Stan: You have to ask somebody else. Science can much better answer the question how rather than why. So we have described a lot of the mechanism—how it happens, which things go together, and so on.

Then also the fact that the matrices seem to be a major source of psychopathology. This is a reservoir of very difficult emotions, very difficult sensations, physical sensations, pain, choking, and so on. In connection with postnatal experiences, it can sort of feed various emotional and psychosomatic problems. And if you reverse it, if you go back and now relive it, there’s a major, major therapeutic effect.

So things like claustrophobia, things like depression, feeling in a no-exit, hopeless situation. There’s a pocket of violence, which is the response to the choking and to the encroachment of the uterus, and so on. So working with those perinatal energies has a major, major therapeutic impact.

And also, I believe now that the reason we have the world we have—if you look at what’s happening in the Middle East, the Holocaust, Stalin’s archipelago, what the Chinese did to the Tibetans, and so on—those don’t come from problems with nursing or toilet training or seeing your parents having intercourse in the bedroom. This is heavy-duty, intense emotional and physical energy.

So the sources of that kind of violence seem to be from birth, from the hours that we spent in the birth canal. And then, further beyond it, I haven’t yet mentioned that there’s a vast domain that we call transpersonal now, which is the collective unconscious, both historical and archetypal. So there are archetypal sources of that kind of violence. There is the archetype of apocalypse, or the twilight of the gods—the Ragnarök of the Nordic tradition.

So what we see manifested in the world does not come from our childhood, from infancy. The war or violent movement that sweeps the whole nation—those are forces that you cannot explain by psychoanalysis.

Transforming collective violence

Rick: So you’re saying that world events such as wars and Armageddon—I mean, the Holocaust and what’s happening in Syria—

Stan: That happens when you mobilize these deeper levels in the psyche that psychiatry does not recognize.

Rick: So these are representations of archetypes in the collective consciousness, is that what we’re saying? Sort of like a boil on the skin is a representation of some impurity in the blood or something. So we realize that. How would we purify the blood, so to speak? How would we purify collective consciousness so as not to have these symptoms cropping up?

Stan: Well, fortunately, we have ways of dealing with these contents in the unconscious, but it will not be talking on the couch. You will not talk out your birth. You would have to move to experiential therapies. Psychedelics would be a tool par excellence. You can access those energies and process them, and you can do it with breathwork. Some of the shamanic techniques can get you there.

Rick: Because it would have to be done on a mass scale, would it not, to effect some significant change in the whole world?

Stan: That’s the problem. I have seen it happening in many, many people individually. Now, whether this could be done on a large scale, and whether we have enough time to do that, I don’t know. But I think it’s probably the only hope that we have to somehow transform humanity.

The history of humanity is all violence and greed. Now we have incredibly powerful weapons, and we still have a mentality of the Stone Age.

The history of humanity is all violence and greed. Now we have incredibly powerful weapons, and we still have a mentality of the Stone Age. We’re not doing it with sticks; now we’re doing it with nuclear weapons. So unless we find ways of identifying the problem and tools to change it, we’re not going to make it as a species, and we’ll take a few species with us.

If you look at things like what happened in the Gulf—the Gulf of Mexico—the oil spill, or in Japan or Chernobyl, it’s not even war. It’s just accidents arising from how we live in that area.

Rick: One hundred fifty to two hundred species go extinct every day. So eventually, I guess you got stymied by legalities in your use of psychedelics as a therapeutic tool, and you came up with holotropic breathwork as an alternative. Is that a fair snapshot, a summary of what ended up happening?

The emergence of holotropic breathwork

Stan: Yes. We got to a situation where we didn’t have the— I went to a place called Esalen Institute to write a book, and I was doing workshops, trading them for a place to stay, a room, and board. People were not happy with Christina and me; we were doing it together. They said, “Well, it’s great to hear about all these fantastic experiences, but can’t we do something? Don’t you have something on the side?”

And I said, “Well, Esalen people would not be happy. I would be doing things that are illegal.” And then we started thinking, “What can we do?”

I had some memories from the psychedelic work that became very relevant. Initially, when we were doing psychedelic sessions, we had no idea how the session would end. Sometimes it ended like it did with Albert. People sort of felt reborn, and this was the beginning of a new phase in their life. Sometimes it wasn’t so great. Sometimes it opened up a new area and didn’t complete in that session.

So the initial strategy was that you had to wait ten days because there is a certain biochemical tolerance. If you take LSD the next day, you don’t get the same kind of reaction. So you wait ten days, and we ran another session and prayed and hoped that it was going to end up better.

Then a couple of things happened. I remember the first patient was coming down. He was extremely angry. The drug was wearing off, and he was really very furious. He had pain in his shoulder, and he said, “Could you go and do something with my shoulder? If I could get through that, I would feel better.”

I said, “Well, we’re trying.” So I went and pushed him, and he said, “Not enough. Okay, not enough.” My thumb was like this. And then, finally, he started sort of growling. He started coughing, screaming, moving, and shaking. We did it for a while, and he relaxed and was fine.

Then, the next time, it was nausea—a female patient coming down with terrible nausea. I said, “Where is it?” I sort of pushed a little, and projectile vomiting would come. Within minutes, she was in a great place.

So I realized that we could do something to actually help the integration of the session, and I started doing it routinely. We do it now in the breathwork sessions.

As I was doing it, several patients started breathing fast. It’s called saccadic breathing, and it’s actually used in some spiritual practices, like bhastrika and Siddha Yoga.

Rick: It happens spontaneously, too. It happens to me almost every day when I meditate. The breathing starts.

Stan: About 10 to 15 percent of people have spontaneous episodes of hyperventilation. It brings a lot of symptoms. There’s a book by Fried called Hyperventilation Syndrome, showing all the diagnoses that people get as a result of faster breathing.

Because it’s not the breathing itself. It starts bringing up things from your history, your psychosomatic history. So when the patient started doing the saccadic breathing, they told me that the breathing brought them back into the session. The drug was wearing off, but the breathing suddenly intensified. It started bringing things from the unconscious.

So I knew there was some connection between faster breathing and bringing up things from the unconscious. This is what we started experimenting with at Esalen. We had people lie down and do faster breathing. We played some music, and we found out that people could have powerful experiences.

Then there was one session where we had 46 people. People came to Esalen from all over the world—South America, Australia, Europe, and so on. I was working in the garden and threw out my back. There was just no way I could imagine going to work with people. We had a big king-size bed, and Christina moved to one side. I was just like, “This is a dagger. What are we going to do? Forty-six people. We can’t send them home.”

So we said, “Well, we’ll let them do it together. We’ll just walk around and be supervisors. We’re going to tell them what to do.” And the session was such a success that we never did it differently. Not only did just about everybody in the room have powerful sessions, but the sitters told us how much they enjoyed it, what an incredible privilege it was to be there in such an intimate process with another person, and how much they learned.

So this was really the beginning. We haven’t done it differently since that time.

Christina’s father was a musician, so she became the one who developed the initial concept of music. We started going to anthropological archives, where native cultures had developed sound technologies—chanting, drumming, rattling, and so on—that were designed to induce an unordinary state, to get people into a trance.

I was thinking about it when we were dancing around that fire, how many people were already sort of almost in process. These cultures used this technology not to entertain people, as our artists do, but they were looking for what worked. So they empirically developed drumming rhythms that could change the synchronization and desynchronization in the brain. This has been tested in laboratories. Michael Harner did it in the laboratory.

Rick: Mickey Hart wrote a book called Drumming at the Edge of Madness. He was the drummer for the Grateful Dead.

Stan: And so we then combined the breathing and this kind of evocative music. When the breathing itself does not complete, then we go to the bodywork. We ask people what is happening in their body, and then we do something to intensify all the tension there. We ask people to express emotions or let their body do whatever it wants to do. And then we do it until there is a closure to that process.

Rick: I’ve heard criticisms of holotropic breathwork that it’s just hyperventilation, but I’ve read so many accounts of profound, dramatic experiences that people had—transformations and everything. So we won’t even spend any time talking about those criticisms. Obviously, from what you’ve just described, it’s more than just breathing. It’s also associated with music and some kind of physical intervention and manipulation.

Stan: And then we do sharing in groups and mandala drawings. People draw, also.

Rick: So what kind of outcomes do you see?

Stan: A powerful non-drug technique.

Rick: Yes. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. What kind of results have you seen? Just some cases in point.

Stan: You see, I have not had a chance to do this in a clinical setting. All my psychedelic work was done in a clinical setting. We had studies where you have the—actually, at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, the condition of the National Institute of Mental Health was that we would have a group of people evaluate the results who had never taken LSD. The idea was that when you take LSD, your judgment is no longer reliable.

Rick: You’re biased, yeah.

Stan: So we had one group that saw the patients, put them through questionnaires and so forth. Then they passed the patient to us. All of us had taken psychedelics. We felt that unless you take psychedelics, you have no idea what you’re working with. And so this was a condition. It was part of the training.

But then we saw the patient after the session a couple of times. The follow-up evaluation was done again by the group with these virginal minds. And the results were quite amazing.

Rick: Yeah.

Stan: With the breathwork, we see major healing and major changes. There are some people whom we trained who have the possibility of working in a clinical setting. We never mixed it with therapy. We don’t use diagnoses or anything. We just have a group of people who get together and agree that they will go through self-exploration. We simply work with whatever comes up.

People have cleared asthma. I’ve seen 15 cases in which renal disease disappeared. There are circulation problems, circulation in the fingertips and so on. Sometimes you even have skin eruptions happening because there’s cellular circulation. Behind it is a bioenergetic blockage that opens up, and the circulation opens.

Psychosomatic pains can be cleared through a combination of breathing, bodywork, and expressing the emotions that are behind them. You can clear chronic pains. Sometimes you can do a lot of work even on pain that was originally due to trauma. Even if it is already healed structurally, you can still have pain in that area. Part of it is withheld energy, so part of it can be handled again by breathing and bodywork. You can release chronic pains.

Rick: Both with psychedelics and with holotropic breathwork, when I think about it and hear you talk about it, I think about the fact that we have a subtle physiology, not just our gross physiology that we can examine through autopsies or something. There is this whole system of nadis and Sushumna and chakras and all this business, and I’m sure that there’s a lot going on with all that.

Have you tried to define what these practices do in terms of that? Have you tried to sort of map that against the knowledge of Kundalini Vidya, for instance, with the whole subtle physiology?

Stan: This is very real. This is not a Hindu or Chinese fantasy. I mean, meridians and chakras—in an unordinary state, you can experience that subtle energy body.

When I talked about renal disease, when people have renal disease and they breathe, they develop tetany. If you continue to breathe, then it resolves, and suddenly the energy comes through. You get an energy field that you can touch. It’s like playing with a ball of energy. You can experience that your energy field is way beyond the surface of your skin.

You see these maps of nadis, for example. The yogis talk about 72,000 nadis. I don’t know how they counted them. But they have the three major ones: you have the Sushumna, the Ida, and the Pingala. You can experience your chakras. This is not some kind of fantasy that somebody has. Sometimes you can experience the energy flowing in the chakras, through the chakras and nadis. Sometimes you can experience the meridians.

Rick: I think I know the answer to this question, but if LSD were legal now, would you still use it in conjunction with holotropic breathwork? Or do you feel like holotropic breathwork has proven so effective that you wouldn’t even need to use it?

Stan: Well, if you have LSD, I wouldn’t use it in combination with the breathwork.

Rick: But as another modality.

Stan: As I mentioned, historically, I would use breathwork if the LSD session is not properly closed. I would not give people LSD and then have them breathe. If you want a bigger reaction, you just increase the dosage.

Rick: No, I just mean it’s another tool in your toolbox.

Stan: But it’s a great tool. The breathing is a great tool to close the session properly and to reach good integration.

I would love to have, you see, if I had the legal situation, a center where all these things would be available. You would have Qigong or yoga meditation in the morning. You could have Gestalt there. You could have holotropic sessions there. You could have MDMA, mushrooms, psilocybin, and LSD. Then you could choose. People could experiment and see what’s best for them.

There are people who would do holotropic breathwork, but they wouldn’t approach psychedelics with a 30-foot pole. Sometimes, when they do some inner work with the breathwork, they become ready. They already feel comfortable with the unordinary state, and they lose that fear.

Experience, state, and lasting change

Rick: With spiritual practice—meditation, yoga, and so forth—usually the hope is that with enough of it there will be a permanent transformation, such as awakening or enlightenment. Something that is not just intermittent or that will wear off after an hour or two.

In your mapping of transpersonal states and all, do you include something akin to enlightenment? In terms of your own life, you’ve been going at this for 60 years or something. How would you describe your day-to-day experience? Do you feel that there’s been a permanent shift that’s the basis of how you operate 24/7? In other words, a higher state of consciousness that has been stabilized?

Stan: Well, you know, there’s a difference between an experience and a state.

Rick: Stages and states.

Stan: You can have powerful spiritual experiences, psychedelic experiences, or breathwork in meditation, and it will be very, very vivid when you are in that state. But then it starts subsiding.

Once you get this alternative understanding of reality—philosophically and scientifically—you can never go back to what Fritjof Capra called the Cartesian-Newtonian view.

In my own experience, what never changes is that once you get this alternative understanding of reality—philosophically and scientifically—you can never go back to what Fritjof Capra called the Cartesian-Newtonian view. I have experienced and seen too much to believe that this is what the world is like.

Now, remaining in that perception in which you received this information, staying there, is a whole other problem. We live in a culture that makes it very, very difficult to maintain that kind of consciousness because of all the temptations that come, not the least of which is digital technology.

It simulates almost like spirituality. You would have to be very advanced to be able to see what’s happening on the other side of the world. Here, you can look at your iPhone and talk to people in Australia and so on. There are all kinds of cars and movies and temptations.

So you understand why people go to a cave or to an ashram. Actually, people who came from India or Tibet who were very highly developed didn’t do that well when they came into our culture, where there was sex and money and power and so on. There were quite a few scandals.

Rick: Let me ask a question of the audience, though. Here we have maybe 75 people in the room or something, many of, if not most of, whom have been doing some form of spiritual practice, perhaps for many, many years.

How many of you feel that, as a result of that, you walk around all day long with a very different state of consciousness, or a very different perspective or quality of awareness, than you would have had if you had not been doing all that practice? And it doesn’t just come and go. It’s there all the time. How many?

Okay. Look at that. Yeah, so that was the gist of my question: How do you make it stick? I’m sure it does. I know people who have done holotropic breathwork and LSD, for that matter, who feel like it not only transformed their intellectual understanding of what’s possible, but made them a different person irreversibly.

Stan: Well, it is not easy to maintain that state, but it becomes increasingly easy to get into the state.

If I would meditate—my mother took me to a group with a man called Paul Brunton. You know Brunton? He was someone who spent some time in Arunachala with Shri Ramana Maharshi. He was writing popularizing books, including about Egypt. My mother was in a group of his followers, and he would come and meditate with them and give a kind of lecture, a kind of darshan situation.

She took me there when I was 13 years old, and I got fascinated. They had Thakur, Aurobindo, and Maharishi there, along with all the literature. But then we were meditating, and I would sit there thinking, “Oh, wow, boring. There are so many interesting things I could be doing instead of sitting on my ass here.”

But now it’s a very, very natural state for me. I sit down, and in a very short time I can get into a pretty deep state, which I never could have done without psychedelics.

Rick: I bet you, as a result of everything you’ve done, when you’re eating lunch or sitting on the toilet or whatever else you’re doing, you’re in a different state. You don’t have to try to be in that state. It sticks; it’s ingrained.

Stan: But you can also do something like meditation in action. You can say, “Now I’m going to wash dishes with another consciousness,” or “I’m going to eat with another consciousness.”

Jack Kornfield was a great friend and a Vipassana teacher. We’ve done about 37-day retreats together, combining Vipassana and this holotropic breathwork. He does eating meditation. You take a raisin, and then you look at it and think, “Where did it come from? What was growing it? Who were the people involved? What about the sun?” Then you see what it looks like, slowly put it into your mouth, take the first bite, and go through the whole process.

You can do anything in meditation. But normally our life is so demanding that it’s really challenging to stay in that state.

Resources and closing thoughts

Rick: Well, I think we’ll have to leave it on that note. I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface. There are so many things. We could probably have a whole conference just with you, asking you questions and having you say things. But this will have to be a taste for people.

You have a website, stanislavgrof.com, which people can go to, I’m sure, to learn much more. Is there any other website that you would like to announce?

Stan: There’s one called holotropic.com, which is the one for holotropic breathwork.

Rick: And that’s spelled H-O-L-O-T-R-O-P-I-C dot com.

Stan: There you would get all the information. The training that we do consists of six-day modules, as we call them. Each of them has a certain theoretical focus, and there’s always a lot of individual work. People breathe and sit for each other, and then learn how to work with the group.

You don’t have to commit to the training. You can do one, and if you like it, you take another one, or you decide to go all the way. You can take it in any country. We have it now in many places. We just had a trip with five countries in South America to teach the training. Australia has the training. We have it in Russia, Slovenia, Croatia, Spain, and a number of other places.

If you decide that you would like to experience holotropic breathwork with Russians, we may be able to arrange that. We were in China, which was amazing. We had two large breathwork sessions in China. It’s very interesting to do this with people from other countries.

Now, do we have time for a sentence?

Rick: A sentence, please. Yes, go ahead.

Stan: The bonding that happens in a very short time is unbelievable.

We did this very frequently before large international transpersonal conferences. It’s amazing what it does with people, how boundaries melt down—countries that have grudges against each other, Jews and Germans, Americans and Germans, Americans and Russians, and so on. We all have a really heavy history.

When people look honestly at their own problems, they move and become sort of helpers. The bonding that happens in a very short time is unbelievable.

Rick: That’s great. Beautiful. Well, thank you.

[Applause]

Stan: Thank you very much.

Rick: Thank you.