On June 21, 2008, Christina Grof received an honorary Ph.D. from Wisdom University in Oakland, California. I had the pleasure of interviewing Christina at her home in early June. An abbreviated version of this interview appeared in the August 2008 issue of the AHBI Inner Door journal.
Karey: Let’s begin with a little background.
Christina: I had a longing, for as long as I can remember, for something larger than myself. I was fortunate enough to grow up in Hawaii, so nature was a constant companion.
My father left early when I was five. My mother remarried, and we moved to Honolulu when I was about seven or eight. It was a household that was very dysfunctional, with physical and sexual abuse. I became very interested in the story of Jesus; it was during the time when the big Cinemascope movies were coming out: Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, and in particular The Robe with Victor Mature—I cried and wrote poetry about it. All of that was very alive for me. I also read the Bible.
When I was about nine, I found my way to the Episcopal Church, and it was not a very High Church at all. A wonderful Maori minister from New Zealand was there. It was a place with stained glass windows and music, which I’ve always loved, where I could go inside myself when things got difficult at home. I was taken care of there and nurtured, and whatever beings who were there kept me safe inside. That became the place I was most comfortable; I was much less comfortable in everyday life than in my inner safe places. And I was and am an introvert, so that didn’t help. But a lot of my work in the last years has been about getting my feet on the ground after a whole period of spiritual emergency and as part of my spiritual life, dealing with whatever my life brings me, in hopefully as compassionate and strong and caring a way as I can.
When I got to college, I was old enough to realize that the dogma of the church was not for me, so I became much more interested in literature, and mythology, and art, and writing. I was fortunate enough to go to Sarah Lawrence College, which was a wonderful college. My senior year, I studied with Joseph Campbell, who taught a lecture class with about 35 people. It was before he used slides, and he had 4 blackboards on which he would map out the art and the geography and the history and the mythology and anything that human beings are involved in—politics, humanity; I still have my notes from that class. We remained friends because his wife, Jean Erdman, was from Hawaii, and they would come out and see her family. And his mother was in a nursing home out there.
My first husband, who I married shortly after finishing college, was a teacher, and we dated during my [school] vacations. It was a very safe, long-distance relationship. He was a really good man and continues to be. … We had two children, whom I am eternally grateful for; they are beautiful adults with families of their own now. He was the principal of a large private school in Hawaii, so we lived on campus. I was the principal’s wife, and I also had a job teaching art to first through sixth graders in a nice, progressive elementary school.
I loved teaching, and I loved art. I also got involved in yoga as exercise—it was not treated as anything having to do with spirituality. And I read the book, Thank You, Dr. Lamaze, and became interested in the Lamaze method of preparation for childbirth. We studied it and were really fortunate that our obstetrician allowed us to do it and allowed my husband to be in the delivery room because that had never been done before.
When I got into the birthing situation, it took seven hours; it was a relatively easy birth, if any birth is easy. But between the breathing and the spontaneous movement that started happening, I suddenly was shaking uncontrollably and breathing uncontrollably, and there were shots of white light going up my spine and exploding into my head. I thought I was nuts—this was not what they taught me in Lamaze. As soon as my firstborn, Nathaniel, was born, I was given two shots of morphine and that calmed the whole thing down.
I was very much a good girl and raised as a good girl should be. I took this experience to be a signal that I had done something really bad. The same thing happened two years later when my daughter, Sarah, was born, and by that time, the marriage was beginning to weaken.
Just around that time, I went with a friend from yoga class to see Muktananda, a guru who was coming into town. There was going to be early morning chanting; that’s what got me because I always loved music. It was a very small group, before he had been discovered by Westerners. I just was captivated by the chanting. I became more and more enthralled. Meanwhile, I was trying to hold down the experience that had started in childbirth and had some psychosomatic problems instead, which I think were related.
I then attended a weekend retreat [with Muktananda] that blew the lid off of everything I had been trying to hold down. I had just gone for his darshan [blessing], and he looked at me and hit me over the head with some peacock feathers. I went back to my seat, and suddenly I was having visions and that strange breathing again and those spontaneous movements. Again, I thought I was crazy, but some of the people around him said it was a natural thing, and it was connected with something called “kundalini.”
Fast forward, it came time for my husband and me to separate, and I had been in a car accident where I had a near-death experience. Again, I didn’t know what it was, except that it was just more proof that I was crazy.
So, I decided I needed to go to the mainland, to leave the kids for a short while. This was shortly after we divorced, and I was still on crutches from the car accident. I wanted to see Muktananda and to see my family and to see what I was going to do, whether I’d stay in Hawaii, or get a teaching job in California and bring the kids here.
When I got to the ashram to see Muktananda, he motioned me forward and reached out and grabbed my head, pulling it into his lap and said, “You’ve seen death, you’ve been in death’s bed, and now you have a new life.” Something in me knew I was okay.
Later on the trip, I went to see Joseph Campbell in New York. We had dinner, and I poured out my story. I told him that I was having these things happen to me and that it had something to do with death and birth and rebirth and spirituality. And I think I’m nuts. And I’m hanging out with this guy from India who wears this ski cap in the middle of summer and dark glasses. Joseph said something along the lines of “I can’t give you advice from experience because I study these things, but someone I know well does know what these experiences are from experience, and his name is Stan Grof.” He made a call to Stan that night; he then introduced me to Stan. A couple of weeks later, I met Stan at Esalen, and no big thing, but I was invited to a six-week workshop on Buddhism and Western psychology, given by Stan, Jack Kornfield, and Stan’s then wife, Joan Halifax. She and Stan were on very rocky territory at the time.
During this workshop, Stan and I fell in love, and the day after the workshop, we moved in together. I keep telling him we never dated. We’ve been married 32 years, and we never dated!
My biggest regret is coupled with my biggest happiness, my relationship with Stan. My biggest regret is I lost my children. I saw them on vacations, but it was always such a struggle. It was very difficult to work out times to see each other, and they were traveling between two very separate worlds, between Esalen and being the kids of the principal.
My relationship with Stan was for me kind of like looking into a mirror and seeing someone very deep and very special just to me. He opened his life to me and his work and every other aspect of what he was about. We started coleading workshops together, both at Esalen and internationally.
But I started having those experiences again in my everyday life. As they became more and more intense, it became hard to function in daily life—it was like having a foot in each realm. I was kind of out there and here at the same time. I always struggled when we were working with trying to keep my feet on the ground and be there for other people. I think I was fairly successful at it—until I wasn’t.
In the late seventies, we did a monthlong at Esalen called something like “Spiritual Experience or Psychosis,” and we invited different leaders [to share their wisdom]. Ironically, at that time, I couldn’t hold on any longer, and I slipped into a five-day, nonstop, spiritual emergency, kind of like a long LSD experience. As I began to integrate [the experience], I became more and more interested in what is the line between psychosis or schizophrenia or madness, and a spiritual experience that is overwhelming that renders a person nonfunctional for a while.
I became interested in the lives of the saints, like St. John of the Cross, who walked the dark night of the soul and wrote about it. You know, it isn’t all sweetness and light and crystals and bliss. Slowly, I began to become interested in the idea of spiritual emergency.
Then, we discussed the Spiritual Emergence Network (SEN) that Christina cofounded. Following which, the talk turned to addiction and Christina’s own story of her struggle with alcohol.
Christina: Because it was a secret, I didn’t know that there were a lot of alcoholics in my family. I was a prime candidate for it. I’ve since learned that 70-90% of women alcoholics have been sexually or physically abused and I can see so easily how that happens. If you’re abused, your boundaries shatter and if the strong process of transformation starts happening, there’s no container to hold that experience and so it's leaking out all over the place. The alcohol provided a kind of a buffer. Plus at the beginning it was almost a spiritual experience, it almost provided me with what going into those other realms did when I was a kid.
And then both Stan and my daughter, bless them, independently and completely unplanned each confronted me. I was really getting bad. This was after 8 years. Sarah, bless her, at age 14 said if you don’t stop, I won’t be able to see you again. And losing my children was the most painful thing in my life. And Stan, told me if I didn’t stop, he would leave me, he loved me too much to watch me kill myself, and I knew that he meant it. I just felt my whole world slipping away and I sat up the whole night with the yellow pages and a bottle of brandy for treatment centers.
I see addiction as a spiritual emergency. … [Recovery] was a profound, life-changing experience. For Stan, too. What is required when going into treatment is to hold your nose and jump in. And I finally just did that.
It seems as though living next to Stan and being involved in our work together and in his world a lot, I had to find my own niche. I found that I couldn’t do brilliant lectures on the mind and the psyche like Stan did, nor did I want to. That wasn’t my interest. Whenever the topic of getting an advanced degree came up, I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to become a psychologist. I didn’t want to waste the time sitting around in a classroom when I could be planning an ITA (International Transpersonal Association) conference.
So the way that I found to participate in this dyad was to experience things and then develop my work out of what I experienced. And so the childbirth experience and the spiritual experience became the fodder for that work; the alcohol and addiction and spirituality became and still is a real passion for me. I ended up trying to bridge transpersonal psychology and the addictions field because each had access to tools and insights that the other lacked. In the addictions field, they were doing such deeply spiritual work, but they didn’t have in so many cases the tools that the transpersonal world did, where people could have a real spiritual experience. And I looked at the transpersonal world and saw all the addictions that were going on, including the addiction to becoming spiritual. I realized they need to know about each other, and that’s what I’ve attempted to do.
The thing that pulled it together for me is that in the first 6 months of my sobriety, yes there was a craving for alcohol, but there was a deeper craving for something that was larger than myself and that’s what led me to the Episcopal church, to nature, to yoga to Joseph Campbell, to Stan.
Then I read this letter from Jung to Bill Wilson the cofounder of AA, where Jung was talking about one of his alcoholic patients, where Jung was saying the craving of the alcoholic for alcohol was at a low level the thirst of the soul for wholeness or union with god. And when I read that letter, I realized that’s it, what it’s about. That’s the deepest layer of what becomes addiction. It’s the distorted yearning to be part of, to connect with one’s deeper self. And I believe that to be true for all addicts.
I wrote a paper called “Elephants in the Global Living Room.” What are the issues that no one’s addressing that everyone’s tiptoeing around in the living room? Global addictions. Not only are we as individuals addicted to one thing or another, but so is our global community as a whole. Obama talked recently about our addiction to petroleum, to war, to power, to weapons; it’s as though our global community is an addict spiraling toward the bottom. This could be the end of everything, or it could be the beginning of a new way of being; this is what happens to thousands of alcoholics and addicts all the time: They are born into a whole new life.
We also discussed how Holotropic Breathwork began and Stan’s back injury that led to the necessity to have participants work with each other in pairs.
Christina: It was remarkable where these people had gone with just this bit of breathing.
Karey: How long would that breathing last?
Christina: Maybe an hour and a half. Then, we thought, we’re onto something. Stan had used music in the psychedelic work, so we decided to use music. My father was a musician, and I have a musical ear, so I became the music woman. I gathered some music together, and we played music—and [the breathwork] was even more powerful. They used mandala drawing in the psychedelic work, so we incorporated that. We couldn’t believe the feedback we were getting, so we continued, and the rest is history.
Karey: How did the breathing come up in the first place?
Christina: Well, I was teaching yoga at Esalen, and I was doing pranayama both in my own practice and in my classes, including the savasana, the relaxation. I threw that in. So, the laying down and breathing came from yoga. But also, Stan had observed that people sometimes spontaneously do this type of breathing in psychedelic sessions; so, it was kind of a mix of those influences that led to our incorporating the breathing.
Karey: Did the Lamaze factor in, too?
Christina: Yes, it was all part of a continuum. I don’t think I ever sat down and said, now we’ll incorporate Lamaze. We just brought together all of the influences that we had.
Karey: So, you were searching for some experiential thing to do, and both of you knew from your own experience, perhaps unconsciously, and consciously from the yoga, that the breath is definitely something that can change consciousness?
Christina: Whether we’re cooking or doing work together, somehow we tend to throw some ingredients in a pot and out it comes.
Karey: So then the breathwork was born at Esalen. What was the time frame relative to your work and Rebirthing? Were they parallel discoveries?
Christina: We knew about them [the Rebirthers]. People started asking, “What’s the difference between the two?” Stan would say that the only similarity is that they both involve breathing; other than that, the whole theoretical construct is very different. Leonard Orr [the originator of Rebirthing] had come to Esalen, and we tried the work. My experience was that the person who was my so-called “sitter” tried pushing me into birth when I was wanting to go someplace else. He at one point left, which was very unhelpful. I think it was Leonard himself who sat for us individually, and it just wasn’t for me.
So what started happening was that rebirthers would get trained, and they would notice that their people were going into different places and that some of them widened their framework and allow people to go into past lives and transpersonal experiences.
Karey: Stan’s cartography is wide enough to accommodate everything really.
Christina: One of the many things that impresses me about this man, I’m madly in love with him, is that he says, if anything better comes along, I’ll be the first in line. He is very loyal to the work he’s done, but he is such an adventurer, and has the curiosity of a six year old in everything he can get his little hands on, so he’s open, if there’s a greater paradigm that comes along, fine. He’s not possessive. I get possessive, and say, “how can you be giving that person your slide show, do you realize how long that took you.?” But he feels that work is there, it should be made available. He’s so generous in that way. So he’s a unique character, that one.
We then discussed mandala drawings:
Christina: If it terrifies you when you look at a blank piece of paper, see if you can put that aside for now and just use it as a source of information for yourself and whether you think it's artistic or not is not important, its what maybe you can hang on your refrigerator that can remind you of your experience, it may not feel important now, but in a few days you’ll look at it and say “ah that’s what it was about.”
Karey: Did you do any mandalas when you did your recovery work?
Christina: Yes, I didn’t do mandalas as such, I did drawing and painting, and I actually have a whole slide show that I do. I basically used them as a backdrop to what I’m saying about addictions and trauma. It really is a kind of a heroine’s journey into the depths of addiction and out the other side. In relatively safe language.
We discussed the origins of the Holotropic Breathwork training, which began in the 1980s in Switzerland with two three-year programs and then was followed by two three-year programs in the United States. In those early programs, the same people did the entire training together. Nowadays, people can choose to attend discrete, six-day modules in any order; they don’t even need to be enrolled in the training to attend. We then discussed Christina’s departure from breathwork.
Christina: During the second group, I started having physical problems. I was aching and tired all the time. I was having trouble keeping up. Stan was really hard to keep up with, and it wasn’t because I was in inner turmoil anymore. I thought maybe it was just a leftover from the alcoholism, but I was fine; my liver was in great shape; I was so lucky. I decided I just needed a break. So for the next six months, I participated less in the trainings, where I wouldn’t do the music anymore. There were enough trained people then; I would come in and do the lectures that I do.
Gradually, I pulled away because I was feeling so terrible. … Within a very short time, I realized that I was going to have to leave the breathwork. It was incredibly painful, both for me and for Stan, because this was our baby. And I just loved the people who came into the training. Slowly, after the six months were over, I pulled out, and it was not well received. I went to an AHBI conference and gave a talk “A Trip Down Memory Lane.” I showed slides of every place that we took the breathwork and told stories of some of the things that we encountered. Then, I ceremoniously handed the music over to Stan.
In the following AHBI newsletter, on the 4th page, there was a tiny little paragraph mentioning that I had left. It really hurt, and it was like Oh, they’re not going to miss me all that much. I took it personally and felt that if it were Stan, it [the announcement] wouldn’t have been on page 4.
Fast forward again, our house burned down at the beginning of 2001. I took it really hard. I was depressed and just put one foot in front of the other. About six months after that, I had in quick succession two small strokes or TIAs (transient ischemic attacks), which affected my verbal ability. I could see the words in my mind but couldn’t get them out of my mouth. It was really scary. And I was diagnosed with lupus.
Lupus is usually diagnosed in 30 and 40 year olds, and some men have it too, but mostly women. And not very many people know about lupus. I was told I had to totally take care of myself, change my life. I had to lie down every afternoon; I couldn’t keep the travel schedule that I had. I now think that when I began to have such trouble keeping up in the breathwork, I was coming down with the lupus, that I had it then.
After discussing Christina’s participation in a conference with the New York State Legislature on instituting rites of passage in the New York school system, Christina told me that Stan and Jack only agreed to do the most recent Insight and Opening on the east coast if 20% of the participants were under 21.
Christina: It was an amazing event. If someone took up that mantle, bringing breathwork into the school system or in work with young people it would be fantastic.
Karey: So where do you see the future of breathwork?
Christina: I think that Tav and Cary and Diane Haug and Kylea have done fantastic jobs, and there will be another generation coming along in the not too distant future to take their place. And there will be a time when we won’t be there to see how it’s going. I would just hope that if our names are attached to it, there would be the structure and the integrity that we’ve tried to maintain. If it’s to continue, it needs to be in the hands of people who are going to maintain the quality that we’ve tried to achieve. It’s hard to see into the future, exactly how it will be. I’m really biased, but I think it’s a really important tool and will become even more so, especially as the world becomes more complicated.
Karey: Have you been actively breathing the whole time? You were doing it before it was invented!
Christina: I like to do it in groups. I try to go to the Insight and Opening groups. I always do it there and sometimes during weekends, but it’s been a little tricky since I’ve been sick.
What my practice is and has been for some years is not to escape somewhere out there but to find, as much as possible, spirituality in everyday life and to keep my feet on the ground and to try to do as much as I am able to. I used to live my life in a kind of cotton-padded world. I didn’t want to feel things too deeply because I felt everything too deeply all the time, but I robbed myself of the joy and the beauty—as well as snuffing out some of the pain. Now, I am working on pushing back some of the boundaries to be able to not be bowled over when I see the kind of catastrophe that is happening to Burma and to China and to Tibet, and to not be immobilized by all of the suffering in the world and to look at it all straight in the eye and to realize that it’s all part of life. Maybe there’s something or nothing I can do about it, and it isn’t something to turn away from.
Karey: Do you think that being the Mother of Breathwork and having to do that in the room with people’s suffering has helped you to develop that capacity?
Christina: I’m trying to develop that now, and it’s a good reminder [that those experiences can help me]. I’m glad you reminded me.
Karey: When I see people suffering, I sometimes say to myself, this is like breathwork; let them be with their stuff. Maybe there’s a time to jump in, but the whole “doing, not doing” has been a really profound teacher, along with the cartography and your model of letting people be in their stuff and being a witness and being there for them and being a loving human presence. That really helps me to be able to contain myself in the face of both my own and others’ suffering.
Christina: That’s it, why I’d love to see the breathwork continue
Karey:Who would you say some of your heroes or role models are?
Christina: Joseph Campbell, I’ve really lived a lot by the model of the hero’s journey. It applies in so many ways. Muktananda definitely changed my life, my experience of him was nothing short of amazing. My children, and now grandchildren, 4 amazing grandchildren, no one told me this stage of life would be so amazing and of course Stan. Stan has been a real role model. Two other really important influences were the Dalai Lama who we’ve had the pleasure of spending some time with. and Mother Teresa.. We spent time with her and she spoke at one of the ITA conferences. She talked about finding the Christ within each person and loving.. When I get overwhelmed and helpless with the atrocities of what is happening all over the world. I remember that. She did it. She didn’t walk into Calcutta and say I’m going to save Calcutta; she went to the first person and then to the next and the next and then helped them. Those are my main heroes.
Karey: So, tell me about the award you’re receiving.
Christina: I’m getting an honorary doctorate.
Karey: You didn’t have to do it after all. [Christina laughs]
Christina: That’s right.
Karey: You wait long enough, and they’ll come to you.
Christina: It’s from Wisdom University in Oakland, the university that Matthew Fox, who’s a renegade Jesuit, started. Creation Spirituality was developed there, and now it’s being run by Jim Garrison who was very much involved in organizing the Russian Esalen project. … I think this is the second year of Wisdom University; it’s a transpersonal school, and I’m their first honorary doctorate [recipient]. It’s happening on June 21st.
Karey: So, on the summer solstice, there’ll be two Dr. Grofs living in this house. What a fitting day! |
