Regulating the breath
With concerns around high-profile practitioners like Wim Hof and Dan Brulé, breathwork associations in Europe and the US are trying to introduce stronger safeguards for consumers.
Retraction and apology: In an earlier version of this article, on 1 February 2025, I discussed allegations concerning Breathless, first reported in the Sydney Morning Herald. My article contained statements regarding events and individuals which have since been determined to be incorrect. Specifically, the article inaccurately suggested that:
• A sexual assault occurred at a Breathless retreat, when the assault occurred in a private residence completely unrelated to any Breathless event.
• The alleged offences took place in a setting connected to Breathless. There was no such connection other than the offender and victim having met at a Breathless event.
• William Solis was a repeat offender, and the claim involving Deborah Sarah was not his first. However, the offence against Deborah Sarah was William Solis’ first known offence.
I now acknowledge that that the statements in my initial publication were false. The claims made in the article do not accurately reflect the facts and have unfairly harmed the reputation of Breathless and those associated with it. I unreservedly retract these statements and sincerely apologise to Breathless and all affected individuals for any harm or distress caused by their publication. I have since amended the article. This retraction and apology will remain published in this space permanently.
In 2022 a woman named Deborah Sarah went to a breathwork retreat run by Breathless Expeditions, perhaps the leading breathwork organisation in Australia. On the retreat, she later told the Sydney Morning Herald, she says was given magic mushrooms and made to do ‘healing ceremonies’ for hours in the blistering heat. At the retreat, she met breathworker, William Solis, who told her his healing touch could cure her childhood trauma. At later private sessions, not run by Breathless, Solis groped Deborah’s breasts. He was later convicted of sexual touching and supplying drugs, according to the Herald, and sentenced to a two-year community correction order.
According to the Herald, the owner of Breathless, celebrity breathworker Joahannes Egberts, then tried to dissuade Deborah Sarah of reporting the incident, texting her repeatedly that any police report or media coverage would damage her life and also the wider breathwork and psychedelics movement. ‘There are literally hundreds of people who have volunteered hundreds of hours into our research in the past two years, and it is about to be made completely useless by this action if you proceed,’ he wrote to her in text messages seen by the Herald. I contacted Sarah but didn’t hear back. Breathless’ PR firm told me: ‘Becoming aware of the allegations and claims that were made was extremely disheartening. Upon learning of such allegations, we took swift action to remove the offender from Breathless programs. Safety is our main priority and Breathless Expeditions continues to embrace improvement in something which we passionately believe in and have done for many years.’
These kinds of incidents happen with depressing regularity in psychedelics and the wider field of alternative health and wellness. If consumers experience harm or abuse through a wellness treatment, what are their options? They can confront the organisation involved, report them to media or social media, or they could go to the police if a criminal offence occurred. Often, they do nothing, because they don’t want any more stress, or they don’t want to be blamed for ‘harming the movement’, or they blame themselves.
What if there were trade associations for psychedelic facilitators and guides? The trade association is a basic mechanism for trying to improve standards found in many wellness and alternative health modalities - acupuncture, hypnosis, yoga, homeopathy and even astrologers and tantric masseurs all have professional associations with accreditation procedures, a database of accredited practitioners who promise to uphold an ethics code, and a complaint procedure for consumers.
There is still no trade association for psychedelic guides. There have been attempts to set them up, like the American Psychedelic Practitioners Association (which had its funding pulled last year). But none have really taken off, not for facilitators anyway, because psychedelics are illegal and facilitators don’t want to be listed on an association’s website for offering criminal activity. They prefer to work underground, for now. But eventually psychedelics will probably be legalized or decriminalized and trade associations will emerge. Will they actually protect consumers, and if so, how?
We can look at the breathwork industry for precedents, because breathwork is legal and has two professional associations that try to uphold standards - the International Breathwork Federation (IBF) and the Global Professional Breathwork Alliance (GPBA), as well as organisations that try and uphold standards for particular breathwork modalities, like the Institute of Holotropics. Do such associations really work to protect consumers from negligence, misconduct or abuse? Could they work for psychedelics?
Booming breathwork
Like yoga and meditation previously, and psychedelics today, breathwork is an example of a psycho-spiritual practice that’s gone from the New Age fringe to the wellness mainstream today.
Like psychedelics, breathwork’s popularity has been boosted by celebrity media endorsements by people like Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber, and by best-selling books such as Breath by James Nestor. There are breathwork apps like Breathwrk, which has 15,000 reviews on the Apple store and raised $7 million from investors. There are charismatic breathwork gurus like Wim Hof or Breathe With Sandy. There are breathwork sessions in prisons, in the military, in local councils and corporations, breathwork sessions for the English national football team, breathwork sessions on BBC Radio One. Every man and his dog are offering breathwork sessions - the barrier to entry is even lower than calling yourself a ‘psychedelic guide’ or a ‘space holder’.
Of course, ‘breathwork’ can mean a variety of things, from slow breathing to hyperventilation. There are a host of different modalities - Holotropic Breathwork ™, Transformational Breathwork, Integrative Breathwork, Liberation Breathwork, Clarity Breathwork, Neurodynamic breathwork, Wim Hof, Tummo, Pranayama fire breathing, Breath of Bliss, orgasmic breath…you name it.
According to a paper co-lead-authored by Guy Fincham, who runs a breathwork lab at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School: ‘there are likely to be tens of millions of breathwork practitioners worldwide, since just one breathwork program—Sudarshan Kriya Yoga—is recorded to have been taught to over six million people in 152 countries.’ Guy developed this chart to show all the different modalities that have emerged over the millennia.
These different modalities do different things to the mind and body. Slow breathing techniques have been the most studied, as methods to relax the body and sympathetic nervous system, calm the emotions and focus the mind. There are all sorts of proven health benefits to slow, regular breathing.
Then there are what Fincham calls High-Ventilation Breathwork techniques, like Holotropic Breathwork, which can be used to reach psychedelic-like altered states of consciousness. Fincham and co-authors write that Holotropic Breathwork
has been described as inducing ‘psychedelic’ experiential states by over 80% of psychiatric inpatients, and to evoke a ‘complete mystical experience’, assessed by The States of Consciousness Questionnaire (SCQ), in around 10% of those participating in a day-long workshop. [High-ventilation breathwork techniques] represent a promising non-pharmacological alternative to engender alterations in an individual’s state of consciousness that might mediate therapeutic benefit to mental health and wellbeing.
That’s pretty remarkable if you think about it. High-ventilation breathwork represents a promising non-pharmacological alternative to psychedelics?? How exactly does it work?
As with psychedelics, there are a variety of possible mechanisms of action. Fincham tells me:
When you're hyperventilating, you're blowing off CO2, which causes vasoconstriction, which means reduced cerebral blood flow, and this causes neuroexcitability in the brain. This affects a whole milieu of things and causes a, for lack of a better word, shitshow in the body. But unlike with psychedelics there’s a sense of agency, you’re in control and can stop the journey, but you’re over-riding your body’s message to stop hyperventilating, so there’s a kind of interoceptive prediction error overload".
Hence in his paper, the authors ‘propose that HVB impacts representational states of internal physiological agency through a profound discounting of interoceptive prediction errors and agency, which possibly accounts for its perception as a positive feeling state’.
But why would this overload and switching off of various systems in the brain lead to mystical, transformative experiences of the sort that Fincham and many others report? He says: ‘I think it’s the setting, the whole therapeutic environment, the music, the container in which it’s delivered. The hyperventilation is just the catalyst for change in my opinion.’
A brief history of breathwork for psychedelic experiences
Intense or high-ventilation breathing techniques have existed in ancient religious practices, particularly yoga, for millennia. They were rediscovered as an alternative means to psychedelic states of consciousness in New Age Californian circles in the 1950s. Captain Al Hubbard, a psychedelic pioneer of the 1950s, used to use ‘carbogen’ (a mixture of 30% C02 and 70% oxygen developed by Hungarian psychiatrist Ladislas Meduna) to induce altered states. His friend Aldous Huxley wrote in Heaven and Hell:
carbon dioxide transports the subject to the Other World at the antipodes of his everyday consciousness, and he enjoys very briefly visionary experiences entirely unconnected with his own personal history or with the problems of the human race in general
When psychedelic drugs were banned in the US as part of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, two modalities emerged that relied on hyperventilation to achieve psychedelic-like states - Holotropic Breathwork, developed by Stan and Christian Grof; and Rebirthing, developed by Leonard Orr and Sondra Roy. These two modalities used a similar technique, and there were similarities in their healing theory - Stan Grof and Leonard Orr both suggested that many psychological problems come from birth trauma. Through ecstatic experiences induced by hyperventilation or psychedelics in particular settings, people could supposedly achieve catharsis of their birth trauma and liberation into Ultimate Divine Reality.
Stan Grof had been a psychedelic therapist and researcher in the Czech Republic and then at Johns Hopkins and Maryland Psychiatric Research before he and his wife Christina moved to Esalen in Big Sur in 1973, where they lived for 14 years. The Grofs developed Holotropic Breathwork as a legal alternative to psychedelic therapy, relying on a similar protocol of preparation, set and setting and post-trip integration.
Holotropic Breathwork typically takes place in three-hour sessions, in pairs taking turns to breathe or sit with the breather, in a group overseen by two certified facilitators, with a musical accompaniment. During the experience, the Grofs believed that meaningful content would spontaneously arise from the psyche as it sought wholeness (hence ‘holotropic’, meaning seeking wholeness). This could be perinatal trauma (Grof developed a whole theory of the different stages of birth trauma and how they affect the psyche, which has never been rigorously tested), or autobiographical material, or archetypal or transpersonal content including the possibility of divine union. As with other forms of ‘transpersonal psychology’ , Grof attempted to map higher states of consciousness, and this involved some theology of what these higher states connect with (Cosmic Consciousness, the Primordial Void and so on) although Grofians would say he was always first-and-foremost a scientist guided by data. Any Grofian dogma would hopefully not be actively imposed on participants in retreats - the theory is to trust the ‘inner healer’ and let whatever wants to emerge and find wholeness.
Interest in Holotropic Breathwork has grown as a legal alternative to psychedelic drugs. It’s particularly popular in Europe, although it faced some issues in France where it was briefly put on a ‘sect-watch list’ by aggressive anti-cult agency Miviludes, along with many other alternative health modalities.
Rebirthing
Rebirthing, meanwhile, was also developed in northern California in the 1970s, by someone called Leonard Orr, an ex-born-again-Christian who briefly became a senior figure at erhard seminars training before launching his own personal growth method. Orr discovered he could achieve mystical experiences by hyperventilating in a hot tub. He taught that through hot-tub hyperventilation one could process birth trauma, access the divine, achieve physical immortality, and eventually become ‘a true spiritual master; who could ‘dematerialize and re-materialize at will’. He introduced his technique to small groups in the Californian New Age milieu. He was a guru-like figure, whose disciples would proudly recount how they were one of the ‘first 12’ disciples. Later he and many of them became devotees of Babaji, who Orr insisted was a millennia-old Messiah, but that’s another story.
Accounts of the early days of Rebirthing - as recounted in the wonderfully-kooky book Rebirthing in the New Age - sound like a cross between Pentecostalism and Wet N’ Wild Waterpark. Here is one of his key collaborators, Sondra Ray, describing her first rebirthing (to be clear, these were the free-for-all early days of breathwork and it’s professionalized a lot since then):
The first night of the seminar everyone did a process whereby they openly communicated all their reservations about each other.. The room lightened up and the love was flowing. The second day we dissolved barriers and fears to loving each other unconditionally. Some of the processes were very intense and people went right into their birth traumas (which we considered very valuable).
That evening we did group massages, four people massaging one person. We also did nude processes about loving your body. By the third day I myself was so sensitive to the love vibration in the room that I surrendered to it spontaneously and went into a state I had never been in before. It was like having one cosmic orgasm after another. One by one several others came to lie next to me to get a rush of the energy coming through me. As I held each person, something happened: there was a spontaneous rebirth…I was carried from the couch to the bed so more people could lie next to me. At one time there were eight on the bed with me. At times there was so much love coming through me that I wept unashamedly. People standing in the room fell on the floor and wept or went into a primal state. At one point someone went into an epileptic seizure…I knew intuitively it was a cure for him.
Rebirthing became one of the more popular practices in the New Age alternative healing marketplace of the 70s to 90s. It even makes an appearance in the 2005 Burning Man episode of Malcolm in the Middle (30 seconds in to this clip). However, ‘rebirthing’ got a bad name due to an incident in Colorado.
In the 1990s, Jeanne Newmaker adopted a five-year-old girl called Candace. The little girl was very troubled, and failed to bond with Jeanne. When Candace was 10, Jeanne turned to Rebirthing therapy to try and heal her adopted daughter. In April 2000 she paid two social workers, Connell Watkins and Julie Ponder, who offered what they called Rebirthing sessions. They and two assistants covered the little girl in blankets and pillows and pressed down on her, urging her to resist and be reborn (in order, supposedly, to recreate and process birth trauma). For 70 minutes Candace complained she couldn’t breathe and pleaded for her life. Then she stopped responding. She had asphyxiated and was declared brain dead the next day. The awful case was seen around the world, thanks to a video and transcript of the session, and led to the two social workers being imprisoned and rebirthing being banned in the state of Colorado.
Rebirthing breathworkers point out that this was not breathwork - no breathwork would involve covering someone in a blanket in a constrictive way. Nonetheless, the incident gave rebirthing a bad name and shortly afterwards, rebirthing breathwork rebranded as simply ‘breathwork’ (for example the Australian Rebirthing Association changed its name to the Australian Breathwork Association in 2001). Also in 2001, the Global Professional Breathwork Association was founded, in an attempt to introduce better ethics and standards into the breathwork Wild West.
Part two: regulating the breath
In the early 1990s the International Breathwork Foundation (IBF) was established - it was more of a network than a regulatory body, which emerged out of the Global Inspiration Conference, a big breathwork gathering. One breathworker, Jessica Dibb, felt there needed to be better safety and ethics standards in the field. Jessica tells me:
I had some encounters with facilitators in the breathwork field that concerned me. At the time people were using terms like ‘certified’ or ‘qualified’, when I had met a number of people who had had breathwork experiences that had blown them out and scared them. In general most breathworkers were not trauma informed.
Jessica developed her own ethics code at her consciousness and breathwork school, Inspiration, and then in 2000 she was invited by Rebirthing pioneer Sondra Ray to teach in her place at the Global Inspiration Conference. There Jessica met Jim Morningstar, a psychologist who was also concerned about ethical and safety issues in breathwork, and the breadth and depth of training programmes. Together they launched the Global Professional Breathwork Alliance (GPBA), in a partnership model, with Jessica focusing on the ethics code and complaints procedure and Jim focused on professional standards in training courses. She tells me:
Sixty other breathwork trainers gave us a vote of confidence to co-found and co-direct the GPBA to promote ethics and standards in breathwork. From the beginning, we knew that these values and orientations were critical and the breathwork field would begin to see that. In fact, breathworkers who were also very concerned about ethics and training standards started signing on right away. We knew that if we just held on, eventually, the professionalization of breathwork was inevitable.
Jim and Jessica formed a board with about seven other breathwork leaders and created what they call ‘the gold standard for international certification, which is a 400-hour training over a minimum of two years, including ethics training’, in Jessica’s words.
Today the GPBA has around 40 breathwork schools certified at the 400-hour level and another 20 or so working with them to upgrade their programs to the certified level. There’s also around 200 individual certified breathwork practitioners at the 400-hour level and Jessica thinks that could grow to 500-1000 certified individuals in the next few years. The GBPA also recently introduced a 100-hour certification for practitioners with less intense breathwork training who receive ethics training and sign onto the GPBA code of ethics. Jessica says that most GPBA schools and breathworkers promote deeper breathing with a relaxed exhale which prevents hyperventilation, and supports people in finding their own preferred rate.
Jessica worked on the ethics code and ‘concerns’ process (what is traditionally called a complaints process) using a five-step restorative justice model - mediating between the complainant and the facilitator, then gradually bringing in other people including external experts or adjudicators as required, until hopefully the process is ‘completed’ to the satisfaction of all parties. There are easy-to-find pages dedicated to ethics on their website, including a page called Request for Support for Ethical Concerns and Alleged Misconduct.
The Dan Brulé case
Jessica thinks the process has generally worked, and is slowly but surely infusing the breathwork field with ethical sensibilities. The most high-profile recent case was Dan Brulé, sometimes called the Godfather of breathwork or the ‘Bruce Lee of breathwork’, who was accused of sexual misconduct and boundary-crossing by several female clients (here’s an article by Andy Murphy about the incident and fall-out from it).
The GPBA initiated a restorative justice process with Brulé and the complainants. I hear varied accounts of how well this confidential process went. Brulé himself published an open letter announcing he had gone through this process and was returning to work (although no longer doing private sessions). However, his membership in both the IBF and GPBA remains rescinded. The GPBA ethics committee has a strong ethic of confidentiality so Jessica won’t share details of their process. However, since the case was known she can say that the restorative justice process led to some reparations, changed Brulé’s teaching methods and hopefully prevented some future harm. It was an early case, she says, and their complaints process was still being developed. They would have done some things differently and have learned a lot from that. There is a more recent complaints about Brule’s behaviour on Reddit.
The case highlights the limits of the trade association model: the association can rescind its certification, but big-name practitioners can simply keep practicing and ignore the association. Wim Hof, for example, is not a member of any breathwork association, and doesn’t need to be as he has a massive global following. The Sunday Times tracked down 11 deaths in which the victim is believed to have tried to copy the Hof method or a similar technique. The Iceman has also been accused of mistreating his family by Dutch newspaper Volkskrant. But he has sufficient personal charisma to attract millions of followers (Hof didn’t reply to a message asking for comment).
In addition, the restorative justice model depends a lot on self-regulation - a narcissist sociopath could insist (and really believe) they have ‘done the inner work’ but not really change.
Jessica Dibb says:
The GPBA is not a police organization or judicial organization, although we are becoming the regulatory organization slowly over time. We don't have the legal authority to stop someone practicing. We can educate and support, and it seems to be effecting change. Every practitioner who has had a concern about them brought to us has agreed to participate in the process of healing and learning.
Meanwhile the IBF is now following the GPBA’s lead, working closely with it, and also trying to take more of a leadership role in raising ethics and safety standards within breathwork. Adela Barcia, who volunteers on the Integrity Committee of the IBF, tells me:
We are feeling tasked with raising [breathwork] to a much more professional level and setting standards for training and for what it means to be to call yourself a breathworker. Anybody at this point could say ‘I'm a breathworker’ after one weekend’s training. If someone experiences a violation in a breathwork school, or training course, or as a client, they can notify us. We have an integrity committee, with three of us on it. We work really hard - there have been times when I’ll spend five or six hours on this work a week as a volunteer.
However, Adela adds: ‘At the moment we are a dog with no teeth.’ There is an ethics page on the IBF website although it’s a little hidden away. It has an email for the Integrity Committee, who responded quickly to my email.
In addition to these umbrella breathwork associations, particular schools also have their own accrediting bodies, ethics boards and complaints procedures, like the Institute of Holotropics, the accrediting organisation for Holotropic Breathwork ™. This was set up by Tav and Cary Sparks - Tav passed away in 2020 so Cary now heads it up on her own. The Institute has a consumer complaints procedure, according to Cary, though it’s not mentioned on the website, nor are the ethical agreements which certified facilitators sign up to (you have to dig around for it, it’s here). I ask Cary who at the Institute deals with consumer complaints:
At first it was Stan [Grof], though he didn’t really want to deal with this stuff. Then it was my husband Tav Sparks and me, with Stan and Christina as advisors. I should mention that Tav (who died in 2020) was, in addition to Stan, the main teacher of this work and he travelled all over the world with it, so he knew every certified person. Now it is a combination of me and Institute for Holotropics Board members and senior staff members.
Holotropic Breathwork seems to be a small world where everyone knows each other and spends many hours together on training courses and retreats. Tomasz Kwiecinski is founder of Holotropic Poland and involved with both the Institute of Holotropics and the Holotropic Association Europe. He says:
I’m really proud of the fact that, with Holotropic Breathwork, we always work in groups, or at least in pairs. We all get to observe each other’s methods of working. The training for the certificate is 450 hours, done over a minimum of two years. That include intensive retreats where people go very deep and you see how they work with altered states. Sometimes we don’t certify a person until they’re ready, and sometimes a person never gets certified. Still, I think we could improve the complaints procedure and perhaps have an independent ethics board. We are looking into that in Europe.
While anyone can call themselves a breathworker, Holotropic Breathwork is actually trademarked. In fact, there was a legal dispute between the Grofs and the Sparks over that trademark, which is a whole story I won’t go into now. But this trademark gives some protection over quality control. Tomasz says:
There was one woman we couldn’t certify because she was unable to work with groups. She also introduced all sorts of unnecessary esoteric things - music at a certain vibration, even special smells. She ended up calling it ‘transcendental breathwork’. In her first workshop she forgot to screen people for epilepsy and someone had an epileptic attack.
Tracking both benefits and adverse events
This brings us to a final important issue for the regulation of the field - how well does the breathwork industry make sure it is fulfilling the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm? Does the field track outcomes properly, including adverse events ? Jessica Dibb, co-founder of the GBPA says:
In general I would say that adverse events are not tracked widely enough yet, and so there are practices in various schools that need to be examined. For example, we received a concern about one respected school where a person felt adverse events like dissociation and retraumatization were being provoked without proper after-care. However, in 2024 the GPBA began using a Significant Event Analysis process (the Gibb’s reflective cycle that has been used for years in health care) for ethical concerns. It can also be used for adverse events or near misses. Transformational Breath UK has been using it since 2017 and it has resulted in beneficial changes in their practices. In 2025 the GPBA is planning to distribute this form and guidelines to all its certified schools to use and share the information into a database.
Jessica thinks if breathwork is done with well-trained facilitators, education, and proper screening (such as for bipolar or epilepsy) fewer adverse events will occur than with psychedelics primarily because deeper breathing can be moderated at any time, and you can down-regulate the process immediately. Both the GPBA and the IBF feel that where breathwork is being used in combination with psychedelics it is no longer ‘conscious breathwork’.
I also asked Cary Sparks if adverse events can occur with Holotropic Breathwork, if screening and protocol are properly observed:
Rarely. We do have a screening process and people with psychotic or manic disorders, and certain medical conditions, shouldn’t take part. Beyond that, if we have a question about whether someone should participate, we speak with them. Sometimes we ask them to check with their doctor or want to know that they have a support system in place when they go back home.
I think more could be done to track outcomes, including adverse events, in every single wellness modality, including talking therapy, but especially methods involving altered states of consciousness like psychedelics and intense breathwork. There can be an attitude - including in Stan Grof’s work - that whatever emerges in an altered state is what needs to emerge according to the ‘inner healer’, and even if someone has a psychotic episode that’s actually a ‘spiritual emergency’ as the soul evolves to wholeness. As someone who edited an entire book on spiritual emergencies and has much admiration for Grof’s work, I still think there is a risk that this sort of attitude to adverse events can over-spiritualize harm. We can’t rely on alternative healers to recognize when their beloved method is causing harm. We need scientific data and proper objective tracking of adverse events, something the extra-academic renegade Stan Grof never really did, preferring the informal network of Esalen with its more charismatic model of authority.
To be clear, there are obviously tremendous benefits to breathwork practices, and to psychedelic therapy - tracking outcomes carefully maximizes the benefits while hopefully minimizing the harm. It’s the ethical thing to do.
Guy Fincham is one academic researcher trying to bring greater scientific rigour to the study of breathwork through his lab at Brighton and Sussex Medical School. He tells me: ‘We did a meta-analysis of 26 breathwork RCTs, although 80% of them studied slow breathwork rather than faster techniques. Only six of those 26 reported on adverse events.’
Fincham thinks trying to regulate the breathwork industry is a fool’s errand ‘because there’s so much out there and people will always do their own thing — it's kind of the Wild West’, and he’s incredulous of attempts to trademark the breath since mother nature holds the patent. His solution, which he acknowledges isn't perfect, is:
I think there should be an attempt in the West to develop an equivalent to Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction or Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. Why can’t we aim for a sort of gold standard breathwork-assisted therapy and then integrate that into healthcare settings, in the way that MBSR and MBCT were?
He adds:
I recently learned Rick Doblin is a trained Holotropic Breathwork facilitator. I found that really interesting - there's this potential non-pharmacological alternative, which wouldn't need to go through all of the drug-development, FDA approval process, so there would be much less resistance to scale breathwork. Why wouldn’t you go for that more accessible alternative, at least in tandem with the extremely promising psychedelic treatments out there?
Thanks to all the interviewees for their time and their work trying to improve standards and reduce harm in the breathwork field. I made this article free as I think it’s important. After the paywall, some more from my interview with Cary Sparks regarding the dispute with the Grofs over Holotropic Breathwork. We also discuss whether Grof was or is ever treated like a ‘guru’. On that topic, on Monday free and online I’m in discussion with Rick Doblin, president of MAPS, about cultiness and guruism in psychedelic organisations, and what antidotes could exist to these dynamics.
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