Stanislav Grof
Holotropic Breathwork is the notable work most closely associated with Stanislav Grof, a psychiatrist, psychologist, psychoanalyst, physician, and academic who has worked across Czech, German, and English throughout his career.
Grof was born on July 1, 1931, in Prague. He received his education at Charles University and went on to build a career that spans psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, medicine, and academic teaching. He has held citizenship in both Czechoslovakia and the United States, a span that reflects a career conducted on more than one continent. He has also worked as a writer, producing texts that complement his roles as a clinician and university teacher.
Holotropic Breathwork stands as the work the record most firmly attaches to his name. His output as a writer has allowed him to develop and communicate his ideas in Czech, German, and English, giving his work a reach across more than one language community. As a university teacher, he has brought his perspectives into academic settings alongside his practical work as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.
Grof received the VIZE 97 Prize, a concrete recognition of his work as a psychiatrist, psychologist, psychoanalyst, physician, academic, and writer. His name is catalogued in the Library of Congress Name Authority File under the authorized form "Grof, Stanislav, 1931-," a designation that reflects the continued documentation of his published output and professional record.
Quotes by Stanislav Grof
Stanislav Grof's insights on:
This sense of perfection has a built-in contradiction, one that Ram Dass once captured very succinctly by a statement he had heard from his Himalayan guru: “The world is absolutely perfect, including your own dissatisfaction with it, and everything you are trying to do to change it.
The key experiential approach I now use to induce non-ordinary states of consciousness and gain access to the unconscious and superconscious psyche is Holotropic Breathwork, which I have developed jointly with Christina over the last fifteen years. This seemingly simple process, combining breathing, evocative music and other forms of sound, body work, and artistic expression, has an extraordinary potential for opening the way for exploring the entire spectrum of the inner world.
The elimination of the fear of death transforms the individual’s way of being in the world.
I read Freud’s Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis in basically one sitting. I decided to enroll in medical school. It was almost like a conversion experience.
Materialistic scientists have not been able to produce any convincing evidence that consciousness is a product of the neurophysiological processes in the brain.
The human mind is so complex that many different theories can be constructed, all of which seem to be logical, coherent, and explain major facts of observation, yet at the same time are mutually incompatible or actually contradict each other.
In an effort to find an explanation, he or she might attribute the ominous feelings to poisons, electromagnetic radiation, evil forces, secret organizations, or even extraterrestrial influences. The spontaneous emergence of memories involving intrauterine disturbances or of the onset of the delivery from the womb, seems to be among important causes of paranoid states.
It is possible to spend one’s entire lifetime without ever experiencing the mystical realms or even without being aware of their existence.
Very few people, including most scientists, realize that we have absolutely no proof that consciousness is actually produced by the brain and not even a remote notion of how something like that could possibly happen. In spite of it, this basic metaphysical assumption remains one of the leading myths of Western materialistic science and has a profound influence on our entire society.
The fact that so many different cultures throughout human history have found shamanic techniques useful and relevant suggests that the holotropic states engage what the anthropologists call the “primal mind,” a basic and primordial aspect of the human psyche that transcends race, gender, culture, and historical period.