Spiritual Threads in Psychotherapeutic Work

The Numinous, the Shadow and the Unborn

Expanded states of consciousness are found in everyday life, in crisis, in psychiatric emergencies and in spiritual emergence. These states can be beautiful or terrifying, sacred or dread-filled. They can cause breakdown but, if carefully negotiated, they carry enormous potential for accelerated psychological development. We may enter such states spontaneously or we may choose to enter them to seek psycho-spiritual growth. Any serious work with expanded states of consciousness must be fully committed towards supporting any problematic manifestation of the numinous towards its natural conclusion. Dr Tim read discusses the implications of the new era of clinical research using psychedelics and describes holotropic breathwork – a non-drug method of inducing expanded states of consciousness developed by the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof.