The Birth of LSD with Dr. Stanislav Grof, Father of Transpersonal Psychology - #428

Bulletproof Radio A state of high performance.

Today's episode is amazing and you totally want to listen to the entire episode all the way through to the end. It is with one of the great luminaries in the field of transpersonal psychology. Again, the guy who pioneered the use of psychedelics for personal development and one of the world's leading experts on non ordinary states of consciousness. You'll learn the story of how LSD was legal, how it got banned, and even how governments attempted to misuse it. You'll learn how you might consider not using a hallucinogen like that and replacing it instead with some powerful breathing exercises that you use in a group setting. And you'll learn about how the circumstances of your birth can impact the course of your life and how that trauma can stick around. And you'll even learn what one of the leaders in the field thinks about how psychedelic drugs are used today and why you shouldn't use them, and maybe why you might want to and all the different modalities that are now available to you to reach a flow state or a transcendent state of high performance.

So this is one of the coolest.

Interviews I've ever done. You're totally going to want to hear the whole thing. This is a chance to hear from someone who's spent almost 100 years learning and growing and changing the world. It's just an incredible honor to be able to listen to it and I.

Hope you enjoy it.

What if there was something you could add to your water to make you perform better, have more energy and protect your cells from damage? Hydrogen is the smallest molecule in the universe and the only one that can get deep inside your cells, mitochondria and even your DNA. It fuels energy production, crushes oxidative stress and supports sharper brain function. Hydrogen's a gas, so you can't take.

It as a pill.

So you either have to breathe it in or infuse it into your water. But your tap, bottled or filtered water doesn't have it. That's why I use the Echo Flask. Echo Flask is a hydrogen generator that uses advanced electrolysis and a proprietary proton exchange membrane to infuse your water with pure hydrogen. No chemicals, no ph change, just therapeutic science backed hydrogen. I've noticed more energy, faster recovery, less inflammation and mental clarity that lasts all day. Go to echo.comdave and use code DAVE10 for 10% off your Echo Flask. You'll feel the difference in days. You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. This cool Fact of the day is really cool because. Because a team at Georgetown figured out that they could use something called transcranial direct current stimulation, or tdcs, to simulate an area of the brain associated with creativity. They did this while they were giving test subjects verbal cues to think more creatively. And previous researchers had shown that creativity was a static trait that you couldn't hack. However, these guys did hack it. Now we know that creativity is a dynamic state that changes quickly in an individual. And that means you can put your thinking cap on, literally, and it just might have electrodes. From a personal perspective. You can learn to turn your creative states on and off. It's a question of set and setting. Also just learning how to tap into that part of your brain. And that's something that I've trained very extensively myself. And it's really, really paid off to be able to say, hold on a second, let me, like, find. Find that creative state, just like you could find some other calm or meditation state. Pretty cool, though, to see that you can do it with electricity, which is something I also like to put into my brain. Today's guest on the show is a luminary in his field and kind of a legend. His name is Dr. Stanislaus Grof. I'm recording this episode live in front of a relatively large audience at the bulletproof BE Unlimited event in the Bay Area. And Dr. Grof, you'll hear during this episode is one of the just great leaders in the field of psychedelic research. He's both an MD and a PhD, and his research in the 60s and 70s, along with his wife, led to the creation of the field of transpersonal psychology, which is a school of psychology that integrates the spiritual and transcendent aspects of the human experience with the framework of modern psychotherapy and psychology that we're all familiar with. He literally wrote the book on LSD psychotherapy. His clinical research started in the 60s in Moscow, Czechoslovakia, and Johns Hopkins University. I'm mentioning Czechoslovakia because it wasn't the Czech Republic back then and it wasn't Slovakia. It was one country.

This was before they split.

And he focused on the types of experience that become available to an average person when they're using these powerful psychedelic substances, including things like psilocybin, mescaline, dpt, dmt, mda, and lsd. So basically a laundry list of the things that are most regulated and most feared. It turns out he used them legally, with a prescription, as a therapist, and as a psychiatrist, and had profound results with his patients. Results that led people to understand what early childhood Trauma can do to adults. Stuff that you barely remember does affect the way you experience reality. And there are things you can do with and without substances to change that. In fact, at the event here, the bulletproof BE Unlimited personal development event, we actually use breathing exercises to reach some of those same states, no substances required. Dr. Grof was later a scholar in residence at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.

And.

And that's where he and his wife developed holotropic breath work, which is what we're actually doing at this workshop. It's a combination of non pharmacological self exploration and psychotherapy where you do accelerated breathing, evocative music and a special form of bodywork. He's the author of over 20 books and 150 articles and still teaches others despite being more than 90 years old. He lectures and leads holotropic breathwork and transpersonal psychology programs and workshops all over the world and is one of the great masters of this school of therapy. And it's an incredible privilege to have him on stage in front of an audience and to share his work with you on Bulletproof radio.

So welcome to the show, Stan.

Well, I started psychiatry because I was interested in psychoanalysis. When I finished what would be high school gymnasium in Europe, which has a different meaning here, I wanted to go into animated movies. And I already had an interview. I was supposed to star. And then a friend of mine came to visit me and he was holding this book and he had kind of a strange look in his eyes and he said, you have to read this book. You will never be the same. I looked at it. It was Freud's introductory lectures. Psychoanalysis. I knew very little about Freud because it was something that was forbidden under the Nazis or the fabulous books were burned. And then we had three years of freedom. And then the communists came and forbed everything on index. Lackey of the capitalist regime created psychoanalysis to discredit the revolution. Trying to blend on edifice complex. And so I knew only what they told us in his Marxist classes, that he was a pansexualist trying to explain everything from repressed sexuality. So it was kind of interesting to start with.

Wasn't that kind of true though?

Kind of, yeah. So I started reading it. I really got into a similar kind of state as my friend was in. And I read through the night and then finished reading. And I decided within two days that I dropped the animated movies. I become a psychoanalyst just in one night require enrolling in a medical school. You have to have an MD or PhD degree in Europe to be a psychoanalyst. And then I also started my personal training analysis. And as I was getting deeper into psychoanalysis, I was getting increasingly disappointed, initially not by the theory, but by the practice. I realized how long it takes, you know, how much money, how much time it takes, how much energy. And I realized that the results were not exactly breathtaking. And I started kind of nostalgically thinking about the animated movies. I should never have sort of started this profession. And then I was working at the psychiatric clinic in Prague and we got a box from Sandoz Pharmaceutical company in Switzerland full of ampoules. We opened it, very mysterious LSD25. And it came with a letter describing this is a new investigational substance. It was discovered basically by accident by Dr. Hoffman, who's working in ergod alkaloids. He actually intoxicated himself as he was doing this. And, you know, it seems on the basis of some pilot study that this would be something interesting for psychiatrists and psychologists. Would you like to do this work and let us know if there's any legitimate use for it in psychiatry? And they actually gave several suggestions. One was that this could create experimental psychosis and we could sort of study people before, during and after and get insights into what might be happening in naturally occurring psychosis. The second one from suggestion from the pilot study was maybe this could be used as a therapeutic agent. But there was a third little note that kind of became my destiny, or karma, if you want it said, maybe this could be used as a kind of unconventional educational tool. You know, psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, students could have an experience of maybe spending six to eight hours in the kind of world that some of their patients seem to be living in. And as a result, I would be able to understand them better, to be able to communicate with them better, and hopefully get better results, which was kind of sorely needed. You know, at that time, psychiatry was medieval. We were using electroshock, we were using cardio shock, we were using insulin coma. There was even prefrontal lobotomy was done at that time. So I got very excited. It was like a sudden possibility of a whole new approach. So I volunteered. I had an experience that just transformed the completely and within six hours professionally sent me in a completely different direction. So it's combined. Actually, my perceptor was very interested in electroencephalography. So everybody had to have EEG before and during and after. And he was specifically interested in what's called driving the brain waves, exposing people to a very powerful stroboscopic light and different frequencies and picking up if the suboccipital brain waves pick up the frequency. And so I had to agree also to have my brainwaves driven in the middle of this experiment.

Where did they drive them?

It was like between the third and the fourth hour when it was culminating. This research assistant came and said it was time to drive the brain waves. So she put me into this little cell, and I lie down and she put electrodes on my head and then brought this gigantic strobe and turned it on. And then in the next moment, there was light like I had never seen. I couldn't even imagine something like that existed at the time. I saw this is what it must have been like in Hiroshima when this thing went off today. I think it was more like the dharmakaya, the primary clear light in from the Tibetan Book of the Dead that we're supposed to see at the time when we die. My consciousness was catapulted out of my body. I sort of somehow ceased to exist. I felt extinguished. But I had the feeling that I became everything there was. So to study paradoxes from mystical experiences, you know, you become nothing. And by becoming nothing, you become. You become everything. And then I had some experience coming back that I became sort of part of the. Part of the astronomical universe. And as this was happening, she was following the scientific protocol and starting from two frequencies per second, taking it to 60 back, leaving it in the alpha range, in the delta range, theta range, and then turn it off. And then my universe started shrinking again. And then I found the planet. I found Prague. I found the clinic and found my body. But there was a major problem because I didn't know how to align my consciousness. My consciousness was separate from my body. I couldn't figure out how to get those two together. And at that point, it was absolutely clear to me that what they taught me in the university was absolute nonsense. Something like consciousness can be created by a neurophysiological process. It's in the brain. And so I ended. I landed in a wonderful place. My brother was actually four years younger. He was in medical school, too, and he was my sitter. So we had a wonderful, wonderful evening then. And. But I was very, very impressed. And, you know, I was already stuck with psychiatry. I felt, if I'm in psychiatry, this is by far the most interesting thing I can do with my. With my life. And so the study of these states became, like I say, my profession, my vocation, my passion. For 60 years, I have done very little that would not be in one way or another related to these non ordinary states.

So one powerful experience changed the direction for you.

How?

That one night, that one time you tried to change your entire career, just the whole path of your life.

Well, I was going, you know, to become a psychoanalyst and then suddenly I became interested in consciousness. Actually became interested in a particular important subgroup, large subgroup of these non ordinary states which have healing, transformative, heuristic, the heur as a source of new information and also evolutionary potential.

What do you mean by evolutionary potential?

I believe if we had responsible work with the substance, we would become a different species. You wouldn't see what you see in the television these days. This is mass insanity.

So everyone on CNN should take acid.

CNN is because they're not the worst. But I'm serious. I have seen people who did it responsibly. Transformation that would create different species.

We're going to adjust your mic.

People for whom violence is not an acceptable form of solving conflict. People who are aware of the fact that we are deeply embedded in nature and that we cannot destroy nature without destroying ourselves. People who feel like global citizens rather than being first Czechs or Russians or Americans. People who are for international peace. People develop spirituality which is ecumenical, which is universal, which is all embracing, all inclusive. It's not organized religion which unites a certain group of people and puts it against another. You know, we are Christians, you are pagans, we are Muslims, you are Jews. You know, something that's source of, of bloodsheds or even within organized religions. Hundreds of years of bloodshed between Catholics and Protestants and Sunnis and Shia. It's not the religions that help the planet where we are, but this kind of mystical spirituality that is that you find in mystical branches in people who do really serious spiritual practice that could change where we are.

We talk about non ordinary states of consciousness. If they become ordinary, that would certainly drive the change of the species. But then what happens to the ordinary states of consciousness we have today? Like if everyone was walking around, I'm exaggerating here, but walking around in these altered spiritual states are things going to work?

That's not the point. I mean the non ordinary state is transformative and then you have to ground it. You have to go back, you have to, you know, you have to get a zip code and place to stay. This was the problem with the hippies, of course in the 60s. This was an unbalanced way of using this. But no, it's not enough to go in the Z bend and stay there. Experience can be transformative. And then I Believe it doesn't have any value unless it changes the way you are in the world.

So the idea is by introducing people to the fact that these states are possible and possible through breathing, through holotropic breathwork, or through a variety of ways you might get there. There's many spiritual practices that that one experience changes the way you see the world. So when you're back to your ordinary state of reality, you act differently.

Well, the transformation takes more than one session, but certainly it's a way. And what's very interesting is that a lot of people and increasing numbers of people, it seems, are going into these states spontaneously, of course. Now, let me say I mentioned that I was interested in a special subcategory of these experiences that have the healing and the transformative potential. Those are experiences like that the shamans experience as part of the transformative initiatory journey or they use in their work with clients. This is what the native cultures experience in the rites of passage. This is what the initiates experience in the ancient mysteries of death and rebirth. And you know, what I call the technologies of sacred that were developed in some of the great religions, different types of yoga, the Hindu practices, the different schools of Buddhism, Taoism, Christian mysticism, Sufism and so on. So those are very, very important, important experiences. But we don't have a category of a mystical experience in psychiatry. Spiritual experience. Everybody who would have a spiritual experience and has some problems with it gets tranquilizes and is hospitalized and gets a diagnosis. So my again late wife Cristina and I developed the concept of spiritual emergency crisis, of spiritual opening. People who have spontaneous experiences like this, which can be healing, which can be transformative, but are misdiagnosed, you know, people are basically punished for them. And so as the situation, the world is getting worse and worse, more and more people are going into these spontaneous kind of experiences. And we don't have a system, a supportive system that would use the, the healing potential, the transformative potential of these states. Again, we tranquilize and hospitalize the wrong people.

At the same time that you were starting your research. It's pretty well documented. The US government and probably the Russians as well, were looking at using LSD and various other substances to gain control of people. And there are people who say, you use this stuff, you become more vulnerable, you could be mindwashed, it could be dangerous. What do you say to that? Set of discussions?

Psychedelic substances like LSD are tools. And what's going to happen depends on what we call set and setting. Who does it to whom, under what circumstances. For what kind of purpose? And somehow wrongly, everything that ever in relation, good and bad that happened with LSD was attributed to the drug itself. You can imagine a discussion about a knife. Is the knife a terribly dangerous thing or is it a very useful thing? And you would have a discussion where one of the people who discuss it is a chief of New York police who talks about the number of murders that were committed somewhere in back lanes in New York City. And, and the surgeon general would say wait a minute, if you have the right kind of training, you can do great things with a knife. There would be a housewife who would say it's a wonderful tool for cutting salami or vegetables or butter. And an artist, and an artist, artist would say use it all the time. You can create sculptures. So we would understand that. We're not talking about that the knife is bad or good. It's what I about ways of using it in a good way or in a bad way. So lsd, you see there are wrong ways of using psychedelics. I would not do raves, for example, where people don't know what they are taking, they are exposed. They know there's something illegal, you know that the police can come at any point. It's minimizing somehow the tremendous benefits that they could have and maximizing the, the risks. So those are wrong ways. And then there are vicious ways. This has been explored by the military of all countries, by secret services. CIA had this program, MK Ultra. Yeah. When they were hiring prostitutes and you know, ask them to put LSD into their coke. And they were filming it through one way screens. I'm trying to learn how they can discredit foreign diplomats or politicians and stuff. And they were thinking about this is extremely powerful substance. Millions of a gram are very effective. Put it in the water supply of a city, you know, as a chemical weapon or use it in aerosols and so on.

Wow.

The industrial civilization has just abused just about everything. Nuclear energy, lasers, rockets, I mean biology, microbiology. So how could we handle reasonably psychedelics? It's a powerful tool. You have to have mature people using it.

Very, very well said.

Yeah. By the way, it has a credible influence on creativity. This is now becoming very clear. Creativity, both artistic but also stimulating scientific insights. So this, for example, Francis Crick admitted that taking LSD helped him to crack the molecule of DNA. Kari Mullis was another one who did the polymerase chain reaction Nobel Prize for. He gets quite specific that this was due to his process. What is it? Dagger Engelbart, who developed the mouse, described Quite, quite in detail how he was using LSD to stimulate his creativity. Microdosing is now rampant in Silicon Valley. Well known. Yeah, so there are all kinds of good uses, but there are also, you know, there are dangerous potentials in psychedelics.

How did you feel when it became illegal?

I thought it was tragic. I mean, I thought psychiatry lost the best thing that has ever happened.

How long did it take you to find another way with breathing?

Well, I, you know, I was very lucky. I came to the United States on a scholarship. This was 67. And I joined the last surviving official psychedelic project when Walter Penke disappeared in the Atlantic Ocean during diving.

You know that story do tell for our audience.

Yeah, even scuba diving can disappear. They never found the body or they, or the equipment. So I inherited it and was actually heading that research.

Was this Harvard? I don't remember what university this was. Where was he doing the research when he disappeared? I don't remember.

Well, he was on our staff in the Maryland Psychiatry.

I was in Maryland.

Okay, cool.

Got it. And went diving.

He did this famous experiment, the Good Friday Experiment he did in the Mars Chapel at Harvard.

So talk about this. It's famous amongst people who are fans, but I think a lot of listeners probably haven't heard the story.

Good Friday. Yeah, well, it was a situation where he wanted, we knew that psychedelic lsd, psilocybin, could induce what people consider mystical experiences. So he designed an experiment where on Good Friday, during the divine service, he got a group of students of theology and half of them got psilocybin, half of them got what was considered placebo. Very problematic because it was niacin that gives you hot flashes and makes you itch. So after an hour, everybody knew who had what. And some people were lying there and some people were screeching. Not very double boy. He developed a very, very interesting instrument where he could compare that. And he found out that he couldn't distinguish the experiences that people had with psilocybin from what you find in spiritual literatures. And this was actually repeated several years ago at Johns Hopkins. Very, very well, sort of planned study methodologically. Well, where they were proving that psilocybin can actually induce mystical experiences, which is something extremely important because we have freedom of religion in this country. So it says something about any legislation that blocks people from doing that. We also know that for centuries this has been used by native cultures. There's no question that this is a tool, ritual, spiritual tool.

So is Burning Man a good thing or a bad thing?

Well, you know, that's One of the wild ways of using psychedelics. But, you know, on the positive side, there are a lot of quite experienced people who can help some of them who would be in trouble. And it's, you know, somewhat more receptive environment that people would have somewhere in an open square in a big city. That's an amazing phenomenon. Yeah.

Sort of a yes and a no at the same time, I would say.

Yeah, it's, you know, I don't think you get the best out of psychedelic.

Doing it there, but it's better than Disneyland.

You know, they have certainly they are aware people, pretty experienced, they're aware what can happen and they have systems of support for people who get into trouble.

I once camped at Burning man next to a group of government physicians, very, very high end ones. And one of the guys who'd spent many, many years working with hallucinogens could literally look at people dancing and say mdma, mdma, meth acid, mushrooms, just by how you danced. And he was there to help. So there definitely can be bad experiences in a place like that. But I would say it's safer than a lot of places. But clearly it's an uncomfortable place. And I know people have had negative experiences as well. Are there people, let's say there are people listening to this who are sort of thinking, all right, maybe I should try this one time. I want to try this one time. Should they?

I don't want to be a Pied Piper responsible for.

That's why I.

This is a big thing that decided to do something like that. And we never were trying to advertise it. We were always being available for people who wanted the experience. But I would never tell people they should do it.

It's not about a should or a shouldn't. I'm asking people hear this and go, all right, I've been interested. Maybe I do want to try this. How do they go about the thought process to decide? I want to take the legal risk, I want to take the personal risk, I want to take the psychiatric risk. How would you advise someone to go through the thought process of deciding whether they want to do this?

Well, you have money, you probably have money. You go to Peru, you go to.

That's what I did the first time.

Mexico, you go to Brazil, it's legal. You can have ayahuasca. Ayahuasca, people, you are legal. You know what you're taking and hopefully will have also somebody experience guiding you.

My first time was ayahuasca in Peru, actually about 20, 20 years ago, before it was cool I guess. And now I think it's a little bit dangerous to go to Peru because you can get off the airport and just guys holding up signs that they'll do it. But these are not things that you want to do with someone who doesn't know what they're doing because they're not without risk.

Yeah, you have to be very careful. You have to do some sort of exploration to know that there are some decent people and experienced people.

There are lots of teenagers who feel attracted to all sorts of things they shouldn't do, including drugs like this. What is. Is there a minimum age of safety? I can't imagine kids doing this stuff.

But I also. There is a. I mean there's a whole tradition, cultural tradition. There are rites of passage. This is something that was. The term was coined by Arnold Van Hennepin was a G E N N E T who was an anthropologist and studied native cultures and they all have these, what are called rites of passage where people in regular intervals, usually at the time of some important biological or social transitions, they have these powerful experiences either with psychedelics or with some non powerful, non drug fasting, non drug methods. And somehow all the cultures decided independently that the time of puberty was the time for going through some very powerful transformative experience. And I think the teenagers are tuning into the tradition. There is that need for. It's also a question of individuation. If you see what was happening in these rites of passage, these powerful technologies of the sacred people were experiencing death, rebirth experience, psychospiritual death rebirth. And this was interpreted as dying in the old role and being born to the new. So you die as a boy or as a girl and now you are an adult. Once you've been through this, nobody dares to treat you as a child. Not like in our culture where you can be 50 and go to your parents and they still making decision what kind of car you should buy, you should meet. So then you are really a member of the tribe with all the duties and all the responsibilities. And if you look at the deep psychodynamic of it, the death rebirth experience is drawing on what I call the perinatal level, the memories of biological birth. So we are entangled in the unconscious with the maternal organism. We spent nine months total dependency and then we were taken for this roller coaster of birth. And then we emerge into long dependency as you know, being nursed and toddlerless and so on. And so it creates a kind of sense of deep emotional, kind of a dependency and entanglement and so going through the death rebirth experience, you bring that memory into consciousness and you complete that process. So you really separate from your, from your mother. You become, you become adult in a different way. The western culture is really culture of adolescence. I mean, if you look what kind of Hollywood movies are being made, you know, or, or how people behave in relation to weapons and solving sort of political problems and so on. It's more like the toddlers who are getting these incredibly powerful, powerful weapons to play. You have hundred thousand people, you know. Sure, we straighten them up.

It's not a pretty thing. Do you think that holotropic breathing can serve as that rite of passage for teenagers?

Definitely. I mean it has all the, all those elements. I mean similar things have been used. Breath has been used as one of the ways. There are others. They went out of their way to create safe and effective ways of creating these holotropic states. This involves fasting, sleep deprivation, stay in the mountains on a vision quest or desert or in the Arctic in a cave. It involves all night dance, you know, dancing and drumming.

I think I've done all those things.

Fire walking, did that with Tony Robbins.

A couple weeks ago. So those are important.

They really value these experiences enormously. And they should because they really have tremendous potential in many, many different ways.

So rites of passage are missing and I don't think that I would recommend that parents use substances to bring this about in your kids for all kinds of reasons that it's just not necessary when there are even things as simple as you're going to spend two days in that cave. Well be back for you. That's plenty scary for a 13 year old, even if they don't know you have a webcam watching them.

So.

But this is largely missing. But you mentioned something kind of in passing that I think is critically important. In fact, let me poll the audience. How many of you experienced something to do with your birth when you were doing holotropic breathing? Just give me a show of hands. Roughly 20% of our audience the first time I did holotropic breathing.

And many, many of you had it the first time.

Yeah, yeah. So is that normal?

If I was, I was in training analysis for seven years when in the fourth year I was sort of touching on some material which were from the nursing period in my dream that was considered a really successful psychoanalysis or people in psychedelics or you get to burst.

Sometimes in the first session, in the very first session.

Very, very powerful way of accessing your unconsciousness.

It's interesting because you become Aware of the sensations you had at the time. And it was something that really helped me just understand. Oh like some of the patterns I have in my life derived from very, very early childhood experience experiences which is still, I would say largely not accepted by some schools of psychiatry. And certainly if I talk to my parents about that, they're like, you can't remember it, therefore it has no effect. How do you respond to the people say that? That just has no bearing, that it has no. Just that those very, very early childhood birth related things just have no bearing, like they're too early to have had an effect. How do you respond to people who say that?

Say it once more. Exactly.

Some people say what happens when you are born has no effect on you later in life because you can't remember it. How do you respond to those people?

Well, let's look at the situation. The medical profession has not been accepted that birth is a psychotrona, which is bizarre because there's general agreement actually that what happens right after birth, nursing is extremely important. What kind of nursing you have, what kind of mothering you have. Even child psychiatrists and obstetricians accept the concept of bonding that they look between the newborn and the mother can influence the whole relationship. Now how would it be possible that birth that could be 20, 30, 40 hours, where this is a, you know, potentially life threatening situation or a person died in the birth canal, had to be resuscitated. How come this would not be a psychotrauma? I cannot relate to that kind of logic. You know, of course, I mean there is a, it's a powerful and I think we talked a little bit before, you know, we have this meek kind of psychology where this about nursing toilet training and Freudian analysis and you know, things that happened in childhood and so on. And then we suddenly are surprised when there's a holocaust or you know, Stalin's archipelago or what happened in Tibet when Chinese or when you watched. I watched it, I watched Tube and I think it's a different species. I mean I don't relate to that, what they're doing, it's Syria and so on. So where is that coming from? So in my experience this is. There is this perinatal level. There's the memories of hours of birth, cut out the struggle, vital struggle. And then there is a whole also the dimension of the psyche that also has not been accepted by academic psychiatry, which is the yogi. And of course very, very powerful insights about the archetypal and dynamics and so on. Collective unconscious. So that's where these Kinds of impulses coming from. They're not coming from early childhood, they're.

Coming from birth, not early childhood.

I mean, the postnatal is important, but it's, you know, some of the other things are paramount importance. If you think about it. I mean, let's say compare. We will compare a situation where you just broke up with a woman. It's a trauma. It's one kind of trauma. Four of us would take you to the swimming pool and hold your water underwater for a couple minutes so that you get a sense of the impact of the trauma the birth could have in people. You cannot breathe, you're squeezed and you experience pain and so on. That is recorded in the organism. And then, you know, if you have good childhood, good motherhood, it creates a kind of buffering zone. So it's deep there. And you might not know about it unless you do something, do some experiential work or spiritual practice or something like that. But that material is there. And for many people, particularly if they had bad postnatal kind of situation, it stays there as a very powerful force that creates nightmares. And then even beyond that, it can erupt like in everyday life and creates powerful psychological disturbances.

What I figured out when I did holotropic breathing in combination with birth regression at the same week was that I came into the world. I had the cord wrapped around my neck, so I was basically getting choked, but I didn't like get brain damage or anything like that. And then as soon as I came out, so I'd already been traumatized more than average, they put me in a warming chamber, which means immediately take away from the mother. And I actually viscerally remembered the sensation of this just sitting there going, great. I don't know what just happened, but I'm all alone. And then I said, you know, I guess then I'll just be alone. And literally didn't make good connections to people from. For 30 years because of stuff that happens very, very early, like right at birth. And when I learned about that, I was kind of pissed off. I'm like, I wish someone would have. Wish someone would have told me a little earlier. All this suffering was sort of unnecessary, right? Like once you acknowledge or you see a pattern like that, you can do something about it. So given that, but you have to.

The first thing, you have to have a kind of theory that that alerts you that something might be there that is possible. If you have profession, you know, people who know and they tell you that it's irrelevant because your cortex was not myelinized as it is called, was not mature enough to register birth and create a memory of birth, mature enough to experience bonding. You know, so it didn't myelinize them, you know, a few minutes after you were born, still the same brain that was there in the birth canal. So unless we correct this, we have totally, totally misguided psychiatry. We just don't have decent understanding what we are dealing with in emotional psychosomatic problems. And we don't have effective ways of dealing with. We either do talking or we use just suppression of symptoms, which is not. It's not therapy. Increasingly, psychiatry is becoming suppressing, finding ways of suppressing symptoms and not dealing with the reasons for those symptoms, the underlying problems.

Your work has highlighted how important the pre and perinatal period is because you saw these patterns in your patients and you started studying this and. And I think it's blindingly obvious to people who look at the research today. And it helped me to write my first book, which is about what do you do for a baby in the womb and even during birth to have kids who basically have better epigenetic expression? The implications of this are that we need to change how children are born. What is C section doing to kids if you're born through surgery versus well.

Usually people say, when I talk about birth trauma, why don't we take out everybody with a cesarean CE section? It's just another type of trauma, major trauma. And I'm very, very concerned about what's happening with Caesarean sections. You know, we had 15 years ago Fritjof, Capra, Rupert Sheldrake and myself were invited to Argentina. There was a weekend which was new approaches to physics, new approaches to biology, new approaches psychology. And we had this fascinating discussion. And the rate of cesarean birth was 75%. Three out of four babies born cesarean section. So before we do that, we want to know what kind of impact this will have, you know. But the general attitude, which certainly I was brought up with in my medical studies, and it's still true for much of the profession, is that it doesn't matter. It doesn't have psychological impact. You just want to deal with the body mechanics. When the baby is born, you calm the fingers and check the blood groups and so on. We used to put a few drops of some antibiotic into the eyes in case the mother had gonorrhea.

That's still required by law in California.

Fine. Whatever else would have been no problem. Now it's different. You probably know that there is now association of prenatal perinatal psychology annual conferences and also international conferences where there's a meeting of the people who do this kind of psychotherapeutic work and midwives and obstetricians and they learn from each other. Fascinating discipline.

It was the founder of that group who did my birth regression and led my first holotropic breathing. Barbara Findisen, probably someone you know.

Barbara Findeisen is a great friend. She was running the pocket wrench where we were doing a lot of training there.

There you go.

Very, very experienced.

I was very fortunate she was the one. You guys might have heard me tell the story on bulletproof radio before where she said, tell me about your birth. And I said, I don't know, hospitals, vaginas. And I said, and I had the cord wrapped around my neck. And she said, yeah, I thought so. And she puts up like this like chart saying, here's all your strengths and weaknesses. And like my whole personality like a butterfly pinned to a board. Like, how could you possibly know that? And she knows that because she said, well, there's a science around what happens when you're born. It's predictable. And so I was very fortunate to have just been connected with her right when I was ready to learn some more and to hear some things.

She's a wonderful, wonderful lady.

Yeah, just a great human being. She runs something called the Star foundation, which is still operating. And it scares me when you talk about the evolution of humanity and all. If you look at the C section rate or you look at just the tail, typical, very traumatic birth that we put people through today. And you want people to grow up to be well grounded, well adjusted people. If the first thing you do is you basically bring them into the world and smack them in the face a few times, say there. How about that? Which is roughly what a hospital birth looks like, unfortunately, these days, at least in the west, it's kind of frightening. Do you think that the way people are born and have been born for the past 20 or 30 years affects global politics? Affects?

Well, I believe, you know, that what happened in the 50s, I think when obstetricians started using routinely anesthesia and twilight, twilight sleep and all those things, that it is somehow related to the fact that we have this drug epidemic.

Interesting.

If you imagine there's something called imprinting, which is known from, called ethology, which is the study of animal instinct and stuff. So the things that happen right after you're born are extremely powerful influences on your life. So for example, there were people like Conrad Lawrence or Nicholas Steenbergen doing These experiments, you have little ducklings and there's a period of about 16 hours. Whatever moves around becomes the mother. So if you remove the mother and you walk around in red rubber shoes, they will follow rubber shoes, not the mother. They actually used it in a wonderful movie which was called Winged Migration. Everybody wonders, everybody saw it. There's incredible shots of close ups of birds flying. How did they get this? So they imprinted these little birds on it on this four seater plane. So they always following the plane, wherever the plane would go. So these are incredibly strong influences. Now if you, let's say, are in the birth canal and it's a very, very difficult situation, but there's a successful completion. It actually leaves you with a kind of cellular imprints of optimism. I can deal with life if challenges come in the future. I have done it before, I can do it again. Now. If you couldn't complete it successfully, you needed the forceps or the plumbers, suction, suction cup and so on. That gives you a feeling. We hear from people, they say, I get involved in project, I can work in the early stages, but I lose somehow confidence just before the completion. I have to bring in some kind of assistance into it. Now if you are in a difficult situation in the birth canal and suddenly the solution comes with a drug. It's a powerful imprinting, telling you are in trouble. If you're uncomfortable in the future, go for drugs, not stay there and see if you can somehow resolve that situation. So I believe that it creates a, you know, creates a generation that's dependent on drugs. I mean, I have medical training, I know that sometimes you have to do it, but this was done unnecessarily. I talked to a lot of mothers who wanted to deliver naturally and they were sort of basically given the drugs anyway.

Yeah, there's no doubt that drugs can be necessary and C section can save lives and, and there's nothing wrong with doing that when it's necessary. I'm very concerned about doing it optionally because of the things we just talked about. There's even something else called self attachment that we did with our kids, which you talk about those early patterns. And I look at our bodies, even our brains primarily as pattern recognition systems. Like we pick up patterns with more fidelity as we mature, but we remember patterns. And so what we did with our children, as soon as they were born, we set them on Lana's stomach, near the nipples, but not too close. And you can actually see a baby who's minutes old. As long as the room is calm and Dark and peaceful. It doesn't work if there's blinking monitors and fluorescent lights and strobe lights and needles in your heel to see if you're bleeding or whatever else. And you can actually see that the baby will taste the amniotic fluid on their hand and the nipples will smell like amniotic fluid, and the baby will actually slowly find its way. It's like its very first motor movement is to find food. And then they actually attach themselves to the nipple. And you can just see this look of just like a triumph from a little baby. Like, yes, I got the nipple. And so I hope that did good things. And I'll tell you, my kids are 40, but those experiences, they do set up patterns that really matter. And I think just by acknowledging that it can matter, we can start studying it more and we can start acknowledging this in medicine. Now let's say that you're like me. You had a pretty, I think technical term is a pretty fucked up birth. But there are people who have far worse births than I do, and people have much better ones. But I'd say no one goes through the birth canal without getting smashed a little bit. So what do we do about that? Like people listening, people in the audience here, how do you go about resolving those problems?

Well, that's the first thing, if it makes sense, at least, you know, we are thinking individuals. So does it make sense that the hours in the birth canal would not be a psychotrauma?

Let's assume it is. If it is a psychotrauma, what do we do about it?

Given that we all recognize that we can carry this and that there are ways of. We can sort of get there, we can, we can complete it, we can experience the emotions, we can release all the pent up energies. You know, a lot of people carry enormous amount of blocked energy. The Reichian character armor and all their pains and, you know, shoulders and in the back and so on, without any kind of medical finding, no structural. These are all jammed energies that we carry. So all this is a software. I mean, it's negotiable, it's workable until it starts creating some changes, like arthritic changes. After, you know, years of tensions in the jaws, you develop real structural damage to the. Then it's too late to try to do some kind of experiential work on it. But for years, when you are young, you can free your jaw, you can free your shoulder, you can free your lumbar area.

One of the ways of doing this is holotropic breathing. And I realize Some people watching may not be familiar with this at all. You have a website for holotropic breathing.

What's not even personal?

What's the URL they could go to to find out what it is?

It's my full name if you want to go there. Stanisa Grove.com and there are all kinds of, you know, many, many other things. Interviews, papers. There's access to a whole photo gallery, the whole history of transpersonal movement, all the major characters.

Okay, it's S T A N I S L A Stanislav L A V G R O f dot G R.

O F dot com And.

And we'll put that in the chat field. Bulletproof team who's monitoring this will do that. And it'll be in the show notes for you as well.

Also books, a lot of books.

The Holotropic Universe is one of your books. I think that explained this really well. If people were to read one of your books to get an understanding of your life's work, what would the top book be?

There are two books. One is called Psychology of the Future. Okay. This is deliberately kind of provocative title. I was writing books like beyond the Brain and Spiritual Emergency. And it's not, you know, sufficiently eye catching. So I think if you call it Psychology of the Future, people will notice. They will either get excited and curious or they get pissed out. Do you think that, you know what the psychology of the future should be? That's called Psychology of the Future, but that is. It has chapters. You know that each of them or most of them have a book behind them. So you get a sense of what the content is. Because it was, as with Freud, this kind of research takes you into many different areas. You know, he started with psychoneurosis, and then he started looking to psychopathology of everyday life and jokes and art and revolutions and, you know, so when people have experiences like this, it takes you. Takes you into very, very different area. Some new understanding of death, for example. A lot of people have mystical. One book is called Cosmic Game where people ask questions like, what is this universe like? Is it really just a material system or does it have some kind of blueprint? Is there a superior intelligence? If there is something like God, what is my relationship to God? And so on. So there was a whole lot of people who travel in that. They get these kinds of insights into philosophical questions, you know, metaphysical questions. There's insights into violence.

So I would highly encourage you to pick up one of Dr. Grof's books because he spent an enormous amount of. Amount of Time studying these things. I would say one of the world's leading authorities on these non ordinary states and looking at them from a well grounded western medical place as well as from a non ordinary state. I've certainly learned a lot from your work. I still want to go back to the question though. Someone's listening to this, like, oh, wow, it turns out I was born with, you know, I was breech or I had birth trauma. I just heard this. Now I know that that might explain why I'm pissed off all the time or whatever else. So now they're sitting there feeling probably kind of angry that no one told them this before. What's the next step if you realize, okay, I may have birth trauma and I may want to do something about it. What's the first thing that a person should do when they figure out, all right, I want to work on this?

Well, there are a lot of possibilities. I mean, I was listening to a little bit of your history. You were finding ways, all kinds of way ways. I don't know if you would consider it useful what you have done.

It was terribly useful. I just want to offer more actionable advice. I was lucky. A friend said, dave, you should go to this ranch place. And I'm not going to tell you what it is because if I tell you, you won't go. And I'm like, well, let's see, I just got out of a really bad relationship. I don't really know what else to do, but I'm completely unhappy in my career. Even though I'm really successful, I have to do something so I've got nothing to lose. And I was lucky that a friend sent me to the right place. I could just as easily have probably shaved my head and joined a cult or something. I have no idea. Glad I didn't go that path. So for someone who's listening to saying, I want some guidance, is finding a transpersonal psychologist a good idea as a place to explore?

Obviously, I believe in experiential self exploration and therapy more than talking about myself, which I done for seven years. If you ask me, you know, did it change you? I say, well, I changed, you know, but seven years is a long time. They will change anyway. I loved every minute of it. I was analyzing my dreams and every slip of my tongue and so on. But if you, if you ask me, you know, did it change you? I wouldn't find any significant relationship between what I was doing on that couch and any significant changes in my life. If you ask me. I already asked actually, what did Your LSD session do for it? I'd say, well, there was a different story. There was one person walking into that room in the morning and another one walking out in the evening. And there's no question in me what did that, you know, so there's a. There's a significant difference in the power, if it's really used properly, the significant power in the efficacy of those, of those approaches.

So there.

And so it doesn't have to be psychedelic. There are a lot of, you know, there's reversing, there's the holotropic breath work, all kinds of other ways of working with breath. So I would recommend, you know, going to. Once you go to a workshop, you know, you get a sense of what it could do. But then if you want to work with it, you would have to join a group that's meeting regularly and sort of continue. Especially group that involves the same people trust develop in the group and people actually support each other. So you use all that healing energy which is in the group.

One of. One of the things I noticed when I learned about holotropic breathing and for people who aren't in the audience, because you all experience this, but people listening, what happens is for several hours, one person does special breathing exercises that put them in an altered state of consciousness, while another person basically watches over them and takes care of them. And then they change places and you're listening to music that helps you sort of see things and you go places and you experience things that are not easy to put words to, but it's an altered healing experience. Can you talk about the psychology and the role of being the person who's watching or watching over or helping someone doing the work versus being the person doing the breathing? What's the reason for having both?

You know, I spent a lot of time and also Christina, my late wife, around Swami Muktananda, the Siddha Yoga, both in India, in different places in the world as he was traveling. And he actually came to San Francisco and had a group in the. What is it? The. As you sort of cross Golden Gate Bridge and go. The palace of Fine Arts.

Yeah, the palace of Fine Arts, right?

Big hall, 1500 seats or so. And so all the psychiatrists, psychologists came that pick the brain of this. Of this Yogi. He's traveled 40, 40 years in India. What could I do with my patients? They wanted techniques. And he said, no, you don't understand. You work with yourself and then these things will come automatically. So people pay much less attention to changing themselves and finding some kind of technique. So each psychotherapy gives, it gives you a different technique, but unless you change yourself as that instrument, I mean, it's not going to do very much. If you just look at the situation, we have any number of schools, psychotherapy, each of them tells you something different. There's no unanimity, no agreement as to what are the most important motivating forces in the psyche, why symptoms develop, what they mean, and what do you do with your patients, what kind of technique you are. So if you want to do therapy, you flip a coin, you choose a school. Each school gives a different story, what's wrong with you? And you'll be asked to do something different. If I am a beginning psychiatrist, I look at the market and then one of the schools starts talking to me. For me it was Freud. Wow, that guy has got it. This is where I'm going to get my training. It's just more about me than about, you know, about Freud. So that's, what is the, what is the alternative to this? Now if you work with non ordinary state holotropic states, you activate, you engage self healing intelligence, in other words, something starts coming up and if you look at it, it's going to be just what you need. You know, if I'm doing verbal therapy and I have to figure out what is relevant, what isn't relevant, I've got a problem. Particularly if I know something about different schools. I usually tell a kind of anecdote story from my own analysis. I had an analyst who was, I want to say elderly gentleman, was probably in his 70s, you know, much, much younger than I am. He looked like ancient at that time. And his thing was that he fell asleep once in a while during the session and you had to do something, try to bring him back into the, into the process. And there were about seven of us, psychologists, psychiatrists about the same age. And we talked about it and we were making jokes and so on. And we could also have seminars when he was, we were borrowing books because the books, the Nazis destroyed them and the communists. So we had to borrow books from his library. We were discussing case histories and so on. And then one of us asked the question, just pure theoretical, what happens if a psychoanalyst falls asleep? If I keep re associating, does analysis continue? You know, it is, is the process interrupted? Does it require a really awake and aware analyst? Should you be refunded? Because money is so important in psychoanalysis. So he couldn't say this doesn't happen. He knew, we knew. So he had to do something about It. So he said, yeah, it can happen. Sometimes you're tired, you're recovering from a flu, you didn't sleep enough can happen. But if you are in this business for a long time, you fall asleep only when the stuff that's coming up is irrelevant. When something important comes up, you wake up and you're right there for your analysis. He was from Russia and he loved also Pavlov, the Nobel prize winning guy who for conditioned reflexes, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov. And Pavlov talked a lot about inhibition of the cortex and said sometimes when your cortex is inhibited, like in sleep, there can be a waking point. This certainly is true in hypnosis. The hypnotist can get through to you. And Pavlov's favorite example was a mother who can sleep through heavy noises, but when her own child starts moaning, she wakes up and she's right there for the baby. It's just like Pavlov's mother. When something important comes, you really, you wake up, you're right there. Well, you know, I thought about myself. Well, important according to whom? That according to Freud, Is it according to Reich? Is it according to from. Is it according to Karen Horney? All the people who created these different schools. So if you would be doing verbal therapy, the attention of the therapist is shaped by their specific training, what is important, what isn't important. And there's no agreement in these schools. So what happens in this holotropic state? This holotropic state creates a situation where those contents in your unconscious that have a strong emotional charge and they are close enough to the threshold of consciousness, they emerge for processing. So it's not up to me to decide what is important, what is important. I have to work with whatever comes up in this process. We have to learn to support the process that people, we are not the fixed type of sort of coming with a brilliant interpretation, diagnosis and stuff like that. So it's basically, it is a process of self healing. And a lot of people, it's a feminine method, the masculine method. You try to figure out what is happening there. What do I do? This is more like a midwifery. You are there, the process has its own intelligence and you're just supporting it and you help it when it gets stuck. A good obstetrician doesn't say, let me see, how do I get the baby out? Go there with the forceps and you know, wrestle it out. So yeah, so this is. There is a self healing, self healing intelligence. And so this is why these states that appear to be, from one perspective, pathological are really powerful movements in the psyche to heal itself, to get rid of traumatic imprints. Because, you know, story of incarnation could be very heavy. People can have prenatal problems. There could be RH incompatibility, where the immunological forces of the mother are attacking you already in the womb. You know, there could be all kinds of traumas that the mother has, or she's abused by her husband, or she's sick or emotionally disturbed. Then you have the birth trauma. And whatever happens to people, whatever happens to people in the nuclear family, there are all kinds of dysfunctions in families and so on. We carry a lot of trauma. And so in these kinds of states, the organism is trying to unload. It's going to get rid of this. So when you start developing symptoms, it's really an opportunity. Something is halfway out. Fritz Perls was doing it. He asked you, what do you feel now? And you tell them what symptom you have. And that's where you start. You're trying to do something to help it out, which is the opposite of what you do in allopathic medicine. You give something to keep it down. To the extent to which there is a lot of birth dynamics in the psyche. This would be like when the head of the baby starts coming up, you would push it back from coming up.

It's a lot of information to absorb from someone who's not. Who's first hearing this information that says, wow, this stuff matters at all. And assuming that they got over that initial credibility gap, now we're suggesting that they might want to explore non ordinary states. And I would like to list some non ordinary states that I'm aware of. And can you tell me good. Good.

Bad.

Good.

Okay, so this is kind of a menu for people listening or people in the audience. If you wanted to explore altered states, that may allow you to get in touch with the visceral, emotional side of things from a more feminine perspective than the. You know, I'm going to think my way through this because the one big thing that Barbara Fundisen taught me was Dave. Those are feelings. Feelings don't have a reason. You can't think your way out of a feeling because they don't. They don't listen to thoughts.

So.

Drumming, like drumming circles. Shamanic drumming. Useful.

Yeah, it's an ancient.

All right, I think you're going to see us to this one, but blinking.

Michael Harner is a very close friend.

Michael Harner, very famous guy.

Uses in Mill Valley where we do.

Oh, excellent.

Into many of our month longs and other, other workshops and started the foundation for shamanic studies and trained a lot of people how to, how to work with shamanic techniques. Beautiful.

So you would definitely do that. You already talked about fasting and at least maybe in the context of caves or just is fasting by itself for 10 day fasts, is that useful?

Maybe? Definitely. You know, in spiritual practice they tell you if you want to have spiritual experience, you have light diet or in the past again, a lot of people overdo it. They think they want to make it in this lifetime. You know, people do crazy things with sleep and with, I mean you can overdo everything but okay. But certainly light diet and you know, fasting is important.

Okay. We talked about sleep deprivation. So staying up for a couple days in the context of becoming more self aware, not of partying might be helpful.

Well, I like sleep too much. You know, I had great difficulties when we were in Ganeshpuri in the Muktanadashram. The best time to meditate is to feel good. It's like 3 o' clock in the morning. I feel fine the way I am. Why would I just go to cold morning, you know, to meditate to feel good. So I haven't tried, I haven't done much of it myself. Sleep deprivation.

How about vipassana? Like extended periods of silence.

Great.

Again, another great friend, Jack Cornfield. We have done over 37 day retreats when we combine vipassana with the holotropic breath work.

Wow, that's going to be my retreat.

With you know, silence in meals and stuff. And those are very, very powerful transformative experiences. Jack is phenomenal. His sense of humor and a great teacher. You know, we had amazing synchronicity. But two years ago I went to China for the first time to do, to bring transperson psychology and do the breath work. And what happened? I was somebody who programmed my trip took me to the Beijing University on one particular evening. And then I found out that somebody who was organizing Jack Cornfield's trip tried to put him on the same podium, you know, the same evening he was attending some Buddhist conference in Singapore. They said, Jack, we have a possibility for you to make a side trip. And so then finally we had to share the Ozark discussion. Cornfield graft discussion.

Wow.

We have never met, you know, casually in any, any other city unless we planted together and to, you know, of all places to meet in Beijing on the same evening. It was incredible synchronicity.

Entirely random, right?

This was a magical time in China. There was another Synchronicity, which was when Christina and I started the International Transpersonal Association. We were looking for some kind of logo. What is a sacred geometry? And we came up with the Nautilus shell and so on. All the conferences, number of conferences, on all the programs and all the correspondence, you know, always a nautilus shell. And we were doing breathwork in Jinan, which is the birthplace of Confucius. And one of the participants came to me, and since then, I had a dream about you. I said, what did you dream? And she says, oh, my grand grandmother appeared in the dream. And she said, we have a very precious stone for generations in our family. And it actually should go to Dr. Groff. And she had a little velvet, a blue velvet, and open it up. And it was a nautilus. Wow. Now, the nautilus. Nautilus is a marine, you know, the marine mollusk. So it was from the. From the ocean, obviously, but it was found on the top of Mount Everest.

Wow.

And then I studied since how Himalayas were made. There was a. The way they see was a crash of tectonic plates. And so they lifted all these oceans to the top. So they're finding these marine fossils on the top of. They were all so volcanic. So there are several different layers. So this thing is like over 50 million years old. Symbol of the nautilus. So we're bringing transfers of psychology to China. And here comes Nautilus from the depths of the ocean and top of Mount Everest. And so the Chinese press didn't talk about how great holotropic breath work is, but they were just totally blown by this synchronicity. We showed our stationary and then juxtaposed the image of the Nautilus.

Has holotropic breathwork taken off in China.

Yeah. Good. They really love it. You know, they love the freedom of it because, you know, we don't have any rules for what people can do, what they cannot do. There are certain things that we don't like in our workshops. You know, a lot of people when we were at Esalen took off their clothes. It was not a big deal because there was integrated bathing in Esalen. So if somebody does it, like in Ayat, there are some journalists there. This is what people are going to read about if somebody took off their clothes. But otherwise, the only rule is people don't destroy anything. Nobody gets hurt. And no other rules. You know, no behavior and no manifestations are crazy enough that we would think that it's inappropriate. We have seen powerful healing in most strange ways. People talking in Tongues and chanting mantras and getting into lotus positions or asanas.

I can tell you the first time I did this, one of the women in the room, I heard about this afterwards because I was in an altered state myself. But apparently she ripped off all of her clothes and danced naked the entire time and had a profound healing experience. Like, hey, no judgment here, but I'm like, that was what she needed to do. I'm not. No, but stuff like that happens.

It's very liberating if you're part of a species that hasn't come to terms with its physiology, you know, like association. Jackson sort of exposed their breast, you know.

Yeah.

It was for a week on the television.

It was a holotropic induced wardrobe malfunction.

People actually found the liberating part of their sound was exactly the nudity. You feel comfortable about your body.

It can be really important. Now we're coming up on the end of this episode of Bulletproof Radio. And there's a question I've asked all guests on the show. And I'm really intrigued to hear what your thoughts are. If someone came to you tomorrow and said, Dr. Grof, based on everything that you know, everything you've experienced, I'd like you to give me three pieces of advice that'll help me be a higher performing human. I was going to be better at everything I do as a human being. The three most important things I need to know, what would they be?

Well, I would go with Jung in the first place. Jung said that I. You would not have a fulfilling life if your orientation is only outside. So spend some time in some kind of focused self exploration. He talked about the fact that we have something that he called self, higher entity, you know, other instance, it's written with capital S. And then in the, what I would say holotropic states, you can connect with it and get the guidance from the collective unconscious. He talks about the. The integration. What is it? When he did the active meditation of geriatric movement.

I'm sorry, you're allowed anytime you're over 80. You can.

Somebody can process individuation.

Individuation.

Okay, cool.

Individuation process. And so you then live your life as a synthesis from what. What is on the outside, responding to the external circumstances. And then what you get from inside, you know, you combine that. So I believe that combining whatever you do in the external world with some focused self exploration using the whole range of methods that we now have, and you can experiment with them like you do, and then find that one of Them might be your way.

Okay, so that was one then.

I think the other thing important is to the recognition of the dimensions of the human psyche. We talked about it today, knowing that we have the perinatal level, that we have the transpersonal level, five ways of connecting with it, spirituality of the kind that I was talking about, that's sort of non humanistic, you know, non demand on the denominational, mystical kind of spirit. Cultivate it any way you can. I believe that enriches life enormously. Joseph Campbell had another great one which was following your bliss. Yeah. Choose something that sort of really works for you. And even if momentarily are not getting any kind of monetary or, you know, other kind of responses, just stay there, pursue, you know, nourish. Nourish yourself. I have been extremely lucky. I have, you know, since my graduation, I've been doing what I was fascinated by, interested in. And I was always surprised that they gave me money for it, what I wanted to do anyway.

It's fascinating that you got put in this direction when you received that box from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals and had that experience and sort of said, wow, this is happening. When my brain wasn't working and I was having some career problems actually as.

A result of it.

I ordered the first batch of smart drugs I ever received. And these were very hard to find in the 1990s. I had to order them from Europe and they came in a brown unmarked box and cost a lot of money. And so I opened up these nootropics and the very first box that came out of there was Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. They're the manufacturers of Piracetam, the medical grade stuff, which is a smart drug I've taken for 20 years. But that was one of the things that turned my brain back on enough that I could then learn all the things I know about human biology and psychology and everything else. But when you talked about opening the Sandoz box, that just came right to mind. Because if I hadn't have had that experience, I certainly wouldn't be doing what I'm doing today. It's pretty profound how sometimes just a little thing like that can make a difference. And you've made, though, a lot more than a difference. I think the work you've done in the field of psychology isn't recognized enough. And I'm hoping that by letting people understand just how broad and how important your work is here on bulletproof radio that we get a few more people working with holotropic breathing and just understanding that, look, the stuff that happened that you can't or at least you think you can't remember might have a real important effect. And it's easier to work on that stuff to make yourself happier and just better off than it is to do a lot of other things like seven years on a couch or a few weekends of doing really intense special breathing. You might find that it is, I'm going to call it a shortcut, but it's actually much deeper and maybe more impactful than you're ever going to get with the long struggle that you otherwise would face.

You know, rather than giving one kind of advice, mention something else. We did about 30 month longs at Essay and then of course, you know, the 37 day retreats which with Jay. But people who spent a month at Essel and we did like everybody did like eight holotropic breathwork sessions and we were bringing people like Fritjof Capra, Rupert Sheldrake, Carl Pribram, you know, all the people, the rising stars in the 60s and so on, and yogis and shamans and so on. And then, you know, there was an integrated basic and there was also a lot of bodywork that people could get all kinds of, you know, Trager and Rolf Inc. And so on. But we get a lot of letters from people who say that turned their life around, that they can sort of go back to that point. And they started going in a different direction, which turned out to be very fulfilling. But it's not a one time thing. But it was like they experience things and they now sort of were interested in different kind of books and they were interested in going to different kind of lectures and different kind of workshops. And then it started from there. It started snowballing, you see, and suddenly life became something completely different, became very fulfilling and interesting. Something that, you know, wasn't there before. But, you know, certain problems. This has to be done in tandem if you have a, if you have a partner. Because this can also break relationships. If somebody starts becoming interested really intensely in the spiritual pursuit and the other person does not and maybe makes fun of it and criticizes it, this can really be enough. It's such an important fulfillment in life that people who discovery they want to have it and want to have a partner that would support that.

I'm happy you said that. And I've seen this over and over, not nearly as much as probably you have, but if one part of a couple, one of the people goes on down the spiritual path and the other person is unwilling to at least embrace and accept that, you can almost predict what's going to happen, they're going to split up.

On the other hand, if both of them do it, that can just bring the relationship to a whole other level.

Yeah, it's something you kind of have to do together, but if your partner won't, quote, let you do it, you need to evaluate why that is. Anyway, on that note, it's a great honor to have you on Bulletproof Radio. Thank you for coming and presenting at the BE Unlimited Bulletproof event. Really, really appreciate your time and your work.

Thank you very much.

We're going to take a break for 20 minutes. Mark, do I have this right? A break and then an audience Q and A.

Is that the plan?

And we're done with our live broadcast. If you liked this on Facebook, would you share this with someone who would care? Hit like that's what this is all about. So if you can take the time to do that, I'll go through and our staff will go through. We'll answer some of your questions from the comments. But just likes and shares actually matter, especially for this, this depth of knowledge. So it's a rare thing and I'm happy you were here. You had some time to watch it.

A Human Upgrade Formerly Bulletproof Radio was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully, read all labels, and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.