Holotropic Breathwork

Meeting What Rises

I have finished the four-day retreat—and I can still feel the rawness of it, the way the experience is pressing against the edges of my mind and body, not yet fully shaped into a story.

There’s no one way to describe what holotropic breathwork is, because there’s no one way to experience it.
It’s not a technique you “do.”
It’s not a method that guarantees a result.
It’s a meeting point—between your body, your history, and whatever rises when you clear enough space inside yourself to let something ancient and current move.

For those who’ve never heard of it:
Holotropic Breathwork was developed by psychiatrist Stanislav Grof and his wife, Christina in the 1970s, after LSD therapy—once considered a major tool for emotional healing—became illegal in the United States.
Grof wanted to find a way to access expanded states of consciousness without substances.
What he and his wife Christina created was simple but radical: breath and music, inside a safe and attentive container.

You breathe deeper and faster than normal.
Your brain shifts—not because of oxygen deprivation, as it might feel, but because the rapid breathing reduces carbon dioxide levels in your blood.
That lowered CO₂ changes your brain chemistry.
It loosens the rigid boundaries of ordinary consciousness.
It opens a portal—not metaphorically, but physiologically.

Grof believed that when you enter this altered state, the material that surfaces tends to come from four major realms:

• Somatic — intense physical sensations, energy, movement, bodily memories.

• Biographical — memories and emotional residues from your lived life.

• Perinatal — echoes of the birth process—the trauma of being born, the primal separation from mother.

• Transpersonal — experiences beyond the individual self—cosmic, archetypal, spiritual.

You can move through any or all of these spaces in a session.
You don’t choose. Your body chooses.
The intelligence that moves through the body chooses.

But even with breath and music carrying you, there’s another layer of work happening underneath:
Managing your own mind.
The old stories show up uninvited—desire, fear, control, expectation.
They don't ask permission. They just rise.

The first day, that surrender came easily for me.
There was no history to wrestle with, no standard to meet.
I walked in curious, with nervous excitement. Open. Alert. Ready to see what would happen.

But after a powerful first session, I felt the desire rise—I want that again. I want to touch that place again.

Managing that longing became part of the real work.
And it’s not just about craving a good experience.
If your first session is hard or confusing, a different fear surfaces:
What if it doesn’t work? What if it’s worse next time?

Anticipation itself—whether for beauty or pain—becomes the barrier.
Even the hunger for transformation is something we end up needing to let go of.

And even that, I realized, was part of the process.
Learning not just to surrender to breath, but to surrender to not knowing.
To surrender to not being in charge of my own consciousness.

Even the idea of setting an intention—which is often framed as a good thing—felt too rigid once I was here.
It was clear to me that curiosity, openness, and willingness were enough.
The body knows what medicine it needs.
The breath knows where to go.

The container they build here is not accidental.
Everything is designed to let the breathwork move as deeply as it needs to.

You lie on a mattress on the floor, with a pillow under your head.
You’re blindfolded, sinking into darkness.
You create your own little nest—blankets, layers, whatever your body will need to stay grounded and free at the same time.
No one touches you unless you ask.
No one speaks unless you need something.

When you’re breathing, you partner with a sitter —someone who watches you attentively for three hours straight.
Their job isn’t to fix you, advise you, or guide your experience.
Their job is to anticipate your needs without interrupting you.
If you need water, they pass it silently.
If you shift and lose your blanket, they gently replace it.
If you gesture for help, they are there—but they never impose.

It’s a level of vigilance and care most of us rarely experience in daily life.
Someone watching every micro-movement, every flicker—not to control you, but to hold the space so you don’t have to come out of it.
The sitter moves with you like a shadow, tuned to the music of your body.
And it builds something rare: a container safe enough to dissolve into.

Sometimes the facilitators are called in to do bodywork—especially when people’s bodies hold deep trauma or need physical release.
And sometimes the work is just holding—literal human holding.
At one point, I watched a woman completely overwhelmed by the screaming around her.
She described herself later as hypervigilant, and it showed—in her shrinking, in the way she tried to push the terror outside herself.
She insisted it was "just the screaming" that disturbed her, as if it had nothing to do with her own history.

But it was visible: her little girl self, trembling beneath the adult body.

Her sitter and a facilitator moved in, surrounding her, creating a cocoon of bodies around her—a living sound barrier to shield her from the intensity she couldn’t yet meet alone.
It was fierce tenderness.
A way of saying: You are safe here, even when your system doesn’t yet believe it.

And the truth is, some of the screaming was terrifying.
It touched places in me, too.
The primal fear.
The unknown.
Holotropic breathwork doesn’t create new fear.
It surfaces what is already living inside you—not what you consciously choose to face.

Some people moved through heavy, painful places—yelling, crying, shaking.
Others floated through vast inner landscapes, visions, cosmic spaces.
What rises is what needs to rise.
There is no good or bad session.
There is only what your system, in that moment, is ready to meet.

For me, what rose wasn’t dramatic.
It wasn’t violent or chaotic.
It was quieter, but no less real.

A deeper kind of listening.
A surrender to experience without narration.
A trust in the body’s way of knowing.

Are you interested in working on your personal development? Are you looking for a life coach or a life consultant? Are you feeling stagnant? Do you want to jumpstart change?

 My transformational approach is a process where awareness, alignment, and action work together as catalysts to create momentum for change. 

*Awareness is knowing what you genuinely want and need.

*Alignment is the symmetry between our values and our actions. It means our inner and outer worlds match.

*Action is when you are conscious that what you say, do and think are in harmony with your values.

Together we build an understanding of what you want to accomplish, and delve deeply into building awareness around any thoughts and assumptions that you may already have. To truly transform your life, I will empower you to rethink what’s possible for you.

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