Cultures of healing Book

In this book, Stanislov Grof details his theory about the connections between a person's birth experiences (being born, not giving birth) and later issues in life, psychological, physical and spiritual. Grof breaks birth down into stages, or Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPMs). He then details the experience of the infant in each of the stages, cycling through the blissful experience of floating in the womb, the increasing sense of being crowded and then panicked, feeling the contractions and having no way out, the physical pain of being out of the mother and into the world, and the first bewildering experiences of world outside the mother. Grof ties these experiences to later symptoms such as anxiety, addiction, chronic pain, asthma, etc. He describes a method of taking a person back through the birth experience, through breathwork, to resolve some of these issues. Some critics countered that breathwork is ineffective and noted that Grof's initial information came from research with LSD in psychotherapy, which is currently illegal in the United States.

I have no idea what initially prompted me to pick up this book. It's a fairly hefty read, and this was years before I was in graduate school for counseling. And truthfully, reading Grof's work, I had no desire to practice the kind of experiential, birth-focused therapy he advocated. But this book was my introduction to the world of transpersonal psychology, and I still remember my incredible excitement, reading some of his ideas, thinking, that's it, this is what I want to do.