Will You Choose to Expand or to Contract? A few months back, I pulled a small book off my shelf that I hadn’t opened in thirty years. The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment by Thaddeus Golas — published in 1971, barely more than a hundred pages. I remembered enjoying it the first time. Reading it … Read more
When you are healing from trauma, there is a very important skill to have in your toolbox — one that may determine whether the work opens something or overwhelms you. It is called titration, and it is very important to understand in the healing journey. The body knows something that well-meaning helpers sometimes forget: more … Read more
What Does It Mean to “Hold Space”? Holding space is the capacity to remain present, non-interfering, and internally grounded while another person’s process unfolds. Drawing from Matt Kahn, Michael Brown, and Stanislav Grof, it means offering unconditional acceptance, taking responsibility for your own internal state, and trusting the innate intelligence of the psyche to move … Read more
Non-Directive Breathwork: Trust, Surrender, and the Intelligence Within Non-directive breathwork largely emerges from the work of Stanislav Grof and Christina Grof in the late 1960s and 1970s. But its roots are inseparable from Grof’s earlier work as a psychiatrist and researcher in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 60s, where he conducted extensive clinical research with … Read more
Exactly What You Need to Face One of the most radical principles of breathwork—and life itself—is this: whatever is happening in the moment is exactly what you need to face. As Stan Grof says: “[Expanded] states of consciousness engage something like an ‘inner radar,’ bringing into consciousness automatically the contents from the unconscious that have … Read more