Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork

SettingSun offers workshops based off of Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork, which is a breathwork practice that stems from Stanislav Grof’s Breathwork.  Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork is the work of Lenny and Elizabeth Gibson of Pawlet, VT.

Breathwork is a powerful technique that fosters healing, transformation, and self-exploration and discovery.  Breathwork holds the potential of producing a cathartic experience that can help shed the mind and body of accumulated stress and trauma, by potentially re-experiencing particular life experiences.  This technique should not be substitute for any traditional forms of therapy.  Breathwork can though, help deepen your own personal inner-work and hold the possibility of gaining new insights about one’s self.

About Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork

From Dreamshadow.com:

Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork is an applied, practice-linked philosophy that uses the method of Stanislav Grof’s Breathwork as a modern shamanic practice for self-discovery through cathartic re-experience of events from a person’s biographic history and the process of birth, as well as the potential apprehension of archetypes and events in the cosmos.

The experiential aspect of Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork uses a combination of group process, intense breathing, evocative music, body work, and expressive drawing.

The term “transpersonal” refers to those experiences where our sense of self-identity expands beyond our personal biography and ego boundaries and transcends the usual limitations of time and space. These experiences facilitate deeper understanding of ourselves, our relation to others and our place in the universe. They help us gain increased comfort in daily life and a spiritual intelligence that fosters calm and optimism amidst the difficulties of the world.

Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork draws on the work of William James, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, Stanislav Grof and others. Grof is a pioneering psychedelic researcher, investigator of exceptional human experiences and cofounder of the transpersonal psychology movement. Together with his wife Christina Grof, he developed Holotropic Breathwork, an inspiration of Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork, Integrative Breathwork and other methods. In his book The Holotropic Mind, Grof describes Holotropic Breathwork as a seemingly simple process with “extraordinary potential for opening the way for exploring the entire spectrum of the inner world.”

Stanislav Grof, M.D., and his wife Christina created Holotropic Breathwork at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. They drew from his ground-breaking psychedelic research in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and at Johns Hopkins University, as Chief of Reaserch at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. They also used material gleaned from Eastern disciplines, including Yoga, from practices of indigenous peoples, from depth psychology, and from intense experiential psychotherapies. The Grofs have refined Holotropic Breathwork over the course of more than forty thousand participant sessions.