velosimed

The Healing Potential of Non Ordinary States


To quote C.G. Jung: “Healing comes only from that which leads the person beyond himself and beyond his entanglement with ego.”

Based on fifty years of study the Grofs have developed a non-pharmacological method of reaching non-ordinary states of consciousness that use the healing capacity of the person’s own psyche. The psyche itself illuminates its own potential and capacity for healing insight and wisdom (Inner Radar and Healer).


Inner Radar


Therefore, there is no practice other than to use the breath to allow a non-ordinary state through which emerges whatever the person’s psyche is bringing into consciousness at that time. Non-ordinary states allow us to transcend experience “beyond the limits of cause and effect, the three dimensions and linear time”. This means that we may undergo mystical experiences of union and connection with the divine. We may experience any aspect of all that is – everything and no-thing.

We may remember, discover, and explore many levels of the spectrum of consciousness. We can experience aspects of birth, repressed or unfinished trauma, family dynamics, etc in a safe environment within which healing can occur most easily and deeply.

There are infinite possibilities, however, there are four categories of experience observed by Grof as emerging in non-ordinary states.

1. Sensory experiences and physical manifestations i.e. we may have very strong experience of the senses, possibly including what feels like the fusion of senses (e.g. feeling the music in the body or hearing colors and patterns, etc.). There may be sensations tension or discharge of energy – often pleasurable in a release.

2. Biographical experiences reliving events which have happened to us from birth to the present day – both negative and positive allowing release of trauma and full expression of pain or joy which is often held in the body, never experienced or expressed fully.

3. Perinatal experiences – foetal experiences of gestation and pregnancy, the birth process itself including experiences immediately after birth. Arguably the most traumatic experience for us, certainly it is the earliest threat to survival we undergo, involving our encounter with death and rebirth – we die to being a foetus and are born as a baby breathing as a separate entity. Grofs’ work suggests that these experiences during the birth process act as an imprinting and we may replay the process during subsequent life changes. If we relive the process we can reach the core of repetitive life patterns which frees us then to make new choices rather than repeating old patterns – we can act consciously rather than react unconsciously.

X relived an ecstatic experience of the release of birth and then the traumatically hasty cutting of the cord too short, followed by reliving an umbilical hernia operation when she was two years old and during the process became aware of others’ pain being expressed in the breathwork room – she felt their pain entering her body at the site of the umbilical hernia and pervading her whole body. Later she became aware of being present after her sister’s birth just a few weeks after her operation and being told “this is your baby”. As a two year old child she had taken responsibility for her baby sister and equated that with her pain and she then focused her attention on others pain and deflected her own. She realised that she had lived her life driven unconsciously from this position. She has choice now and is no longer driven by the imprinting of her own existence in the world being connected to pain – the two are now separte – she is free from that old imprinting

4. Transpersonal experiences. These can lead us beyond our personal ego, out of our self as we know it. We may experience conception and incarnation. We may have ecstatic states of unity with all or part of life, nature and the whole universe.

Y felt herself becoming smaller then realised that she was being carried upwards – she was on the back of an eagle which soared higher and higher up over a mountain. She became aware on one side of vast almost infinite pain, all the pain of the world she wep uncontrollably and inconsolably then she could see, on the other side, all the beauty in the world, all the joy and life of everything in the universe – she felt wihin her the presence and power of both.
Y in other sessions felt hersel drawn into both aspects, both sets of experiences – experiencing them fully, surrendering to them ultimately realising that for her life the universe contains these polarities of dark and light and that all is one in the flow of life.

Out of body experiences can occur – observing self, others and different aspects of the universe. We may have a sense of merging with other forms of life, the elements, presence in other places, times and cultures. We can become one with an archetypal figures – gods, goddesses, saints, angels, heroes, etc. We may, also, access very deep yogic sleep states within which healing and tranformaion can occur outside consciousness.

P, after breathing for awhile felt that her body was dissolving into light, expanding until she was no longer aware of the boundaries of her body. The light began to fill the room, moved out of the building into the whole valley extending out until boundless, infinite.
On return to “ordinary consciousness” her body felt free of tension, soft and flowing filled with gentle excitement and calm exhiliration, She described it as a beautiful, wondrous experience to take into her ordinary everyday life.