Holotropic Breathwork: Stanislav Grof and the Map of the Inner Universe
In the 1950s and early 1960s, before the cultural and political wars over psychedelic drugs made rigorous research virtually impossible, a Czech psychiatrist at the Prague Psychiatric Research Institute was systematically mapping a territory that no Western psychology had yet charted. Stanislav Grof (born 1931) began his work as a conventional researcher — studying the therapeutic potential of LSD in a clinical psychiatric context. What he found there expanded his understanding of the human mind far beyond anything his training had prepared him for, and eventually gave birth to one of the most sophisticated cartographies of inner experience ever developed. When LSD research was shut down in the early 1970s, Grof and his wife Christina faced a remarkable challenge: they had been using altered states of consciousness to access dimensions of psychic experience that, in their clinical observation, had genuinely transformative therapeutic effects. Could these dimensions be reached withou...