Holotropic Breathwork
Pallavi and I attended a holotropic breathwork ceremony in a little one-story pied-à-terre tucked away in a courtyard from the booming hustle of the flatiron district. The ceremony was lead by Elinore, a shaman and druid from Germany, who greeted us with hugs. Contemporary mystical culture in all of its willy-nilly hodge-podge of self-creation is like Arthur Danto’s old definition of the postmodern artist as the cut-up of genre: in the morning a dedicated post-impressionist, but a pop-art provocateur by the afternoon. Of course you can be a druid and shaman; I think Elinore is also a light-worker based on her language, and of course, always a Jungian.
Freud’s careful transposition of the language of thermodynamics into the economic system of psychical energy had been further transposed, and desexualized, by Jung into a kind of cosmic life force. The force of Star Wars is Freud’s libido stripped of all carnality. So the language of energy is rife in modern mysticism, a very Jungian domain. Bad energy, stuck energy, moving the energy, energetic, everyone talks like this, and it makes sense, to me, who tends to fall back on Freud’s electrical language as the last best metaphor of mind stuff—a stuff, to be sure, that is itself made out of systems of metaphor.
Anyways, holotropic breathwork (registered trademark) was invented by psychonaut gurus Stan and Christina Grof back in 1975, as a means of accessing non-ordinary states of consciousness without the use of schedule 1 substances. It is psychedelic, but of an endogenous origin. Its purpose is to access, not only our psycho-biography, but perinatal experience and the transpersonal psyche; TBD on that one.
We sat down on mats, along with six other women (I was the only guy) and after stating our intentions, we laid down with eyemasks on and began to breath in deep double gulps, breathing fast into the belly and then the chest and then exhaling. Elinore explained that this would activate our pineal gland by making small crystals form there that would emit beams of light and this is what consciousness is. The double breathing is hard work, takes a certain amount of concentration and it caused me (asthmatic when a child) to have the faint dread of suffocation. We did this for twenty minutes while tribal new age music set the mood.
If the conscious ego is a kind of loop, a semi-organized matrix of habit and repetition—that we might otherwise call “sanity”—it is precisely this ego-loop that goes offline during the altered state effected by holotropic breathing. This is what I felt, when, after twenty minutes of doubled breathing, I held my breath for what seemed like forever, and a spring was released (one does not notice this until afterwards), and the conscious mind is carried forwards away from the coherent narrative of the day’s routine and out into a space of liquid thought and free-flowing affect. Thoughts bloom there, like the petals of opening flowers, that you had not known had been so closed. Thinking becomes big and elastic. Thoughts themselves are realizations; every one a revelation. Rorsach rainbows pool in the visual field. The body-high is incredible; the whole body vibrant with flowing sensorial lucidity; like being turned into hot wax.
Elinore walked around with various musical instruments, rattles and chimes that had become very tactile and sculptural in my altered state. She said a lot of stuff about calming white light and inner knowing but I had tuned inwards and didn’t listen.
Afterwards in the hot Saturday street it was like returning from a dream and I had to actively recall the day’s contents. If in the hours before I had had a certain quantity of anxiety, this now became unfamiliar and very far distant. In fact I noticed no anxiety at all, my thoughts retaining their aura of revelation, as if I had fallen through some hatch, or veil, into an altogether different set of metaphors.
The Flammarion Engraving, 1888?, Anonymous
