Almost every traditional culture knows and uses some form of ritualized and integrated expanded state of awareness. Our modern industrial world not any more. The result is meaningless life, disconnection from our own true self and degradation of mystical experiences to pathology, so called illnesses that need to be treated with pharmaceuticals.

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Michael Stone, B.S. , MBA, Founder of Neurodynamic Breathwork and NeuroDynamic Institute; International Speaker,
Michael Stone attended his first breathwork session in 2005 and was blown away by the power of the breath. It was such a life-changing experience for him that it changed his career direction and he decided to focus his life around breathwork in support of world healing. Michael has a unique way of combining his science background with his breathwork training and experience that allows him to create a safe space for participants to open their hearts and have transformative life-changing experiences. After starting by facilitating Holotropic Breathwork workshops for over a decade, in the last 6 years he has facilitated over 1000 online sessions of a breathwork modality which he created, Neurodynamic Breathwork, and has been instrumental in creating a thriving worldwide breathing community in support of personal and global transformation and healing.

Dr.Stanislav Grof’s M.D., Ph.D. professional career has covered a period of over 60 years in which his primary interest has been research of non-ordinary states of consciousness that have great therapeutic, transformative, and evolutionary potential. He coined for these states the term “holotropic,” meaning literally “moving toward wholeness". Grof’s legacy is the mapping of all states of consciousness that he encountered during his work over many decades and developing Holotropic breathwork as a modern modality that enables us to reach expanded states of consciousness that were thought possible only though the use of entheogen. By integrating these experiences into our daily life we can renew our sense of meaning and purpose of our life. Feeding the Zeitgeist who’s illness is meaninglessness, with meaningfulness and thus healing ourselves and the world one step at a time.

Here is an overview of his impressive  life work: Four years of laboratory research of psychedelics (1956-1960). Fourteen years of research into psychedelic psychotherapy. Dr.Grof spent seven of these years (1960-1967) as Principal Investigator of the psychedelic research program at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague, Czechoslovakia. This was followed by seven years of research of psychedelic psychotherapy in the United States. The first two of these years, he worked as Clinical and Research Fellow at the Henry Phipps Clinic of The Johns Hopkins University and in the Research Unit of the Spring Grove State Hospital in Baltimore, MD. The following five years, he held the position of Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins and Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Catonsville,. MD. In this capacity he headed for several years the last surviving official research project of psychedelic therapy in the USA. From 1973 until 1987, he was Scholar-in-Residence at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where he developed jointly with his late wife Christina Holotropic Breathwork, a powerful non-pharmacological form of self-exploration and psychotherapy combining accelerated breathing, evocative music, and a special form of bodywork. They have used this method in workshops and in professional training in North and South America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. They have also worked with many individuals undergoing spontaneous episodes of non-ordinary states of consciousness, currently diagnosed by mainstream psychiatry as psychoses and treated by suppressive medication. The Grofs realized that these episodes are actually psychospiritual crises or crises of spiritual opening and coined for them the term “spiritual emergencies.” They discovered that - if they are correctly understood and supported – they have great therapeutic potential and lead to profound positive inner transformation.