Breathwork Replaces LSD and Founds a New Field

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Stanislav Grof and his wife Christina Grof developed Holotropic Breathwork at the Esalen Institute in the mid-1970s, after legal restriction of LSD research in the United States had closed off the clinical method his earlier career had depended on. Holotropic Breathwork used controlled breathing rather than any substance to reach the non-ordinary states of consciousness his LSD research had previously studied.

That technique let Grof continue investigating the same territory his psychoanalytic and LSD-assisted work in Czechoslovakia and Maryland had opened, now through a method any participant could undergo without a controlled substance or a clinical LSD session of the kind his earlier research had required. The breathwork practice became closely associated with his name internationally in the decades after Esalen.

Beyond that specific technique, Grof is a founding figure of transpersonal psychology, the branch of psychology that treats certain non-ordinary states of consciousness as potentially meaningful rather than only as pathological symptoms to be treated away. He has written extensively on the theoretical framework behind both his clinical research and his breathwork practice.