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
The Meeting Point of Nondirective Breathwork and Mindfulness At first glance, nondirective breathwork and mindfulness might appear to belong to different traditions. Breathwork can seem active, embodied, and sometimes intense, while mindfulness is often imagined as still, quiet, and contemplative. Yet at their core, both practices share a deep kinship: each invites us into direct … Read more
There’s a saying in breathwork that you’ll hear over and over: Trust the Process. And most of the time, that’s exactly what we need… a reminder to keep Trusting that there’s a deeper wisdom at play in the unfolding of our breathwork process. The best thing we can do is lean back into the breath, … Read more