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Reflections on Breathwork and Alien Encounter Experiences: Stan Grof's Recollections
by Stanislav Grof, M.D.
Excerpted from The Inner Door, vol. 15, no. 3, August 2003. The full length article (not available here) includes statements from John E. Mack, M.D. and Elizabeth Gibson, in addition to the recollections of Stan Grof, M.D.
John and I met in 1987 at a meeting in the Big House of the
Esalen Institute, a beautiful mansion perched on a cypress-covered cliff
overlooking the Pacific Ocean on the Big Sur Coast. This small working
conference was organized by the Soviet-American Friendship program,
initiated by Michael and Dulce Murphy as a channel for “grassroot
diplomacy.” It involved four prominent Soviet scientists and representatives of
foremost American academic and research institutions, including John
Mack, Candace Pert, and Dean Ornish.
Michael Murphy invited me to join the group and give a talk on
transpersonal psychology and the challenges it presents for the current
scientific worldview. During my talk, I mentioned the work Christina and I had
been doing with holotropic breathwork. This generated great interest
among participants and they all wanted to have a personal experience of
this technique. The group decided to forgo the afternoon program on
the next day and have a holotropic breathwork session instead.
Holotropic breathwork was very popular at Esalen and it was easy to
find enough people who volunteered to be sitters for this special group.
As could be expected, bringing a powerful experiential element into the
meeting completely changed the nature of this international encounter,
which up to that point had been strictly intellectual. By the end of
the afternoon, the Russians were in a close emotional and even physical
contact with their American sitters, and we felt an atmosphere of genuine
friendship.
The sharing group was very powerful and moving. The experiences
involved regression into childhood and infancy, birth experiences and, in
several instances, transpersonal and spiritual elements. One of the
Russians had a profound experience of union with God and, to the surprise of
everybody present, was willing to talk about it. “Of course, I remain a
Communist,” he concluded his sharing, “but I understand now what people
mean by God.” Dr. Belkin, the leader of the group was so touched by the
experience, that he later arranged for Christina and myself an official
invitation from the Soviet Ministry of Health to come to Moscow and
give lectures and workshops.
John was very surprised and impressed by the depth of his own
experience that included a convincing episode of a past life in Russia. As he
told the group, this session took him deeper into his unconscious than he
was able to reach during the years of his training psychoanalysis. He
was interested in further exploration of Holotropic Breathwork and asked
me what would be the best way to do it. I told him about a training
group for facilitators that we were about to launch in the near future and
he decided to enroll. The first meeting of this group took place in the
beautiful setting of Hollyhock Farm, Cortez Island, British
Columbia.
At the time we met, John was very deeply involved in the peace and
antinuclear movement, but professionally, he was very “mainstream” – a
brilliant academician, critical and skeptical, and committed to the
traditional scientific worldview and to Freudian psychoanalysis. I will
never forget seeing John on the first day of the Hollyhock training on
the deck overlooking the ocean, having breakfast and reading a mainstream
newspaper; I believe it was the New York Times. Since the training
took place in an isolated and remote location, he was concerned that
for twelve days he would lose connection with the world; to prevent it,
he arranged the newspaper to be delivered to him daily at the Hollyhock
Farm.
However, unlike many mainstream scientists, who are closed to any new
information that threatens their worldview and hold on to their beliefs
with the tenacity of religious fundamentalists, John showed an
extraordinary open-mindedness and intellectual honesty. He embraced the new
experiences and observations with deep interest and intellectual
enthusiasm, as a genuine scientist should, whether these were his own inner
journeys or those of the other group members.
It turned out that during our initial discussion about the Breathwork training, John and I had somehow failed to communicate about the format of the program. Coming to Pocket Ranch, John thought that this twelve-day meeting was the entire training, rather than what it was - the first module of a comprehensive three-year training program. But by the time he discovered his error, he was so fascinated by the phenomena he was witnessing that that he decided to continue and became a very respected and well-loved member of the group.
During the training another group member brought
to John’s attention the phenomenon of alien abduction experience and
mediated his contact with Budd Hopkins, one of the foremost researchers in
the field. I also gave him a copy of an article by Keith Thompson about
UFO abduction experience as a trigger of spiritual emergency.
Fascinated by the phenomenon, John again reacted as a genuine and open-minded
scientist should: he decided to conduct his own extensive research. And
it certainly is a further tribute to his intellectual honesty that he
was willing to publicize his findings, even if it meant jeopardizing his
tenure at Harvard.
After many years of knowing John and having witnessed his
transformation from a brilliant traditional scientist to an avant-garde researcher
spearheading the paradigm-breaking study of “anomalous phenomena,” I
feel deep admiration for his intellectual courage and integrity. He
represents for me a model of what a scientist should be – an individual
embracing challenging and potentially revolutionary observations, feeling
excited about them, and pursuing them with great determination, even when
it means facing ridicule and ostracism from the rest of the academic
community.
Stanislav Grof, M.D. is a psychiatrist with more than forty-five years of experience in research of non-ordinary states of consciousness. Grof conducts professional training programs in holotropic breathwork and transpersonal psychology, and gives lectures and seminars worldwide. He is one of the founders and chief theoreticians of transpersonal psychology and the founding president of the International Transpersonal Association.
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