You folks seem upbeat and sincere, so it pains me to tell you this, but
having looked into your site I believe you're being irresponsible (that's
the nicest way I can say it.)
Yours is not the first crew to do this. It's got a bit of a long history
here in the SF Bay Area, going back at least to Leonard Orr in the
1970's, who believed he was on the trail of physical immortality.[1]
I was looking up Grof's "Holotropic" breathing, but WP now just redirects
to "Breathwork" which actually lists the big names, including W. Reich
and Orr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathwork
(It's written by skeptics with the usual obvious BS: E.g.
> Derived from various spiritual and pre-scientific traditions from around
the world, it was pioneered in the West by Wilhelm Reich.
Reich didn't derive anything from any "spiritual and pre-scientific
traditions". He was a scientific genius, one of Freud's contemporaries
before he was driven out of Vienna for saying folks would be less uptight
if they had healthier sex lives. His discoveries around what he called
"Character Armor" have yet to be appreciated in mainstream psychology.
He is one of the few Western researchers to independently discover "Chi"
energy. He did some amazing research and then went insane, died in
prison, and had his papers burned by the FDA. True story.)
Anyway, y'all are just "selling air": teaching folks to hyperventilate,
to pop music, in their own homes, where they are on their own if any
adverse effect occur, and then you use that as a convincer to get people
to give you $40/mo.
I have to side with the skeptics here: you don't know what you're doing,
the breathing techniques you appear to be teaching can have adverse
side effects, you're misrepresenting it as some sort of intro meditation
for beginners (the very people who need MORE individual time and
attention from their Guru) which it is not, and you are putting
yourselves in the position of Guru without taking on the responsibility
or having the qualifications (by your own admission.)
This is all bad, and you should probably stop.
[1] He used to say, "Physical immortality: the only cause you can't die for!"
and "I made my first million dollars selling air."
For more about Orr and his "Rebirthing" breathwork see:
=> https://ibfbreathwork.org/7715/ "Tribute to Leonard Orr"
Thank you so much for the honest feedback. There has been some great research around the nervous system health benefits of the kind of breathing we do (the 3 part breath) in this book:https://www.mrjamesnestor.com/breath -- check out the section he calls "breathing plus" - essentially what it does is stimulate the vagus nerve which allows us to more actively control our autonomic nervous system.
You are completely right that we must take incredibly seriously the space we are holding for our community when we engage in this practice. All of our teachers are trained by professionals, including trauma informed training from professionals at UCSF. We always make sure the customer is empowered to stay in a zone that feels comfortable to them. Additionally, when we breathe in this way we are doing similar things to the body as we do with cardio exercise, so it's generally totally safe and the physical sensations of the breath subside when you stop the pattern. Of course we are not doctors so we recommend, in the same way that any gym or physical exercise solution does, that you should consult your doctor before engaging in cardio vascular work.
First, thank you very much for taking my criticism so well. I did my
best not to be harsh but I know I could have done better. I'm sorry.
Second, I'm gratified to learn that you're not teaching the more
potent forms of breathwork. That makes me walk back a lot of what I said
above. I apologize for jumping to that conclusion from a superficial
reading of your page and what you said above.
> All of our teachers are trained by professionals, including trauma
informed training from professionals at UCSF. We always make sure the
customer is empowered to stay in a zone that feels comfortable to them.
Additionally, when we breathe in this way we are doing similar things to
the body as we do with cardio exercise, so it's generally totally safe
and the physical sensations of the breath subside when you stop the
pattern. Of course we are not doctors so we recommend, in the same way
that any gym or physical exercise solution does, that you should consult
your doctor before engaging in cardio vascular work.
Ah, well, shut my mouth. :) As you say, that doesn't sound any worse
than e.g. those indoor climbing gyms, eh? (Why not put the grippy things
on a big cylinder suspended over a ball pit and slowly rotate the
cylinder? Much safer and more fun than climbing up and down, no?)
Still, there's a little bit of the "blind leading the blind" if you're
teaching homemade techniques without a depth of experience (as in decades
of experience.) There are good reasons why Guru and Lineage figure large
in the structure of traditional methods of transmission, beyond just the
economic obligations. (One invisible problem in the West is that we have
almost no modern tradition to fit this sort of knowledge into our
society. I.e. Venkataraman Iyer would have died homeless on the street
somewhere if he had lived in the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramana_Maharshi )
To put it in concrete terms, are you going to know what to do if one of
your students has some sort of abreaction[1] with your methods, as mild as
they may be? I've seen a lot of weird stuff go down out there in the
wild, among the bush psychologists and street shamans, and while it
mostly turns out okay, I've had friends become shattered shambling
homeless madmen.
> a psychoanalytical term for reliving an experience to purge it of its emotional excesses—a type of catharsis. Sometimes it is a method of becoming conscious of repressed traumatic events.
Criticism has its place, and some of your concerns may be helpful, but "you don't know what you're doing" and "this is all bad" are simply rude judgments.
I don't see the point in accusing the team of "selling air". Would you accuse a trainer of "selling movement" or a coach of "selling words"??
Breath is a fundamental component of the human experience that affects our mood, health, and everyday experience. Learning how your breath affects your experience is valuable just like any other physical activity (yoga, running, meditation, exercise). There is also a spiritual component to introspective practices like meditation which can be quite valuable. For some people, it's definitely worth paying for these things.
If you're only comfortable with gurus doing this work, what would a guru need to be "qualified"?
As Gurdjieff said, "there are many delicate parts in there, which cannot be gotten from any repair shop".
To be qualified as a Guru you should know how not to break your students, and how to fix them if they break or come to you already broken, to the extent that that is possible.
To teach people how to ignite themselves without a fire extinguisher handy is not wise?
Come now, I love that you know about all this stuff and as someone who used to order Esalen catalogs as a teenager, I share your fascinations—but this is an extreme stretch. These guys aren't doing orgone therapy, rebirthings, or (heaven help us) immortality. Also, it's a category error to conflate Wilhelm Reich, Leonard Orr, and Stan Grof—three completely different figures. Totally agree about the fascination of Reich, though—he is unsummarizable.
> Come now, I love that you know about all this stuff and as someone who used to order Esalen catalogs as a teenager, I share your fascination with it—but this is an extreme stretch. These guys aren't doing orgone therapy, rebirthings, or (heaven help us) immortality.
Yeah, I think I overreacted. I've had friends who lost their minds doing weird things in irresponsible ways and I think I pattern-matched badly here.
> it's a category error to conflate Wilhelm Reich, Leonard Orr, and Stan Grof.
I agree! I hope it didn't sound like I was doing that. I think the Wikipedia article does that, and it's ...um, not as accurate as it should be, to say it nicely.
FWIW, it seems to me that Reich must have injured himself somehow when he tried using his "orgone" device on a radioactive sample. Before that he was a scientific genius, and then, almost from that moment, he seems to descend into madness, fighting with UFOs and the FDA.
I can't resist going further offtopic! Apologies to the thread.
> Before that he was a scientific genius, and then, almost from that moment, he seems to descend into madness
I'm not sure. With Reich, everyone picks the point at which they get off the train—almost no one is willing to ride all the way to the end with him. But people pick different points at which to bail.
For some it is when he broke with Freud around the libido theory (no one cares about that any more but it was a big deal at the time). For some it is when he went into radical politics. For some it is his advocacy for adolescent sexuality—there his views (though still radical) no longer seem nearly as extreme as they used to—but it is society that changed, not Reich. For a long time that was by far the biggest black mark against him in public.
For some, it is when he broke the taboo against touch in psychotherapy. That one's hard to appreciate now because in retrospect, it was a breakthrough, leading to all the somatic therapies that came later, including the trauma work that is currently fashionable.
For most people nowadays, the breaking point with Reich is when he claims to discover orgone energy—that's what splits him off from the current mainstream. In this view, Reich is a genius when he invents body-oriented psychotherapy and analyzes the psychology of fascism, but goes mad when he starts doing laboratory science and making grandiose claims in biology and physics.
Then there are some who stick with Reich through that, but when he starts manipulating weather with his cloudbuster (dramatized by Kate Bush! [1]), that's too much—that's when he becomes a nut. A few stick with him even past that, but when he starts going on about UFOs, they're out. There are even a few diehards who can handle Reich all the way through the UFOs but feel like he loses it when defending himself at trial. It's like a customer retention funnel!
My point is that "He was ok up to $X but went crazy at $Y" has always been the template of responses to Reich. How we fill in $X and $Y probably says more about us than it does about him. I hadn't heard the radiation theory before, though—that's an interesting one.
Wow, you do know your stuff Dan G. I tip my hat to you sir. I love that
you're fascinated by this stuff too. :)
FWIW, I was 110% Reich for a long time (UFOs too, why not? He's
obviously one of the intellectual titans of his age, I wasn't there, who
am I to second guess him?) but then I read a particular biography (it's
in storage and I don't recall the title or author, sorry, but it was
sympathetic to Reich) and it seemed to me that he became irrational after
what he called "the Oranur Experiment". I found a site that seems to have a
description: https://stillnessinthestorm.com/2013/08/orgone-energy-neutra...
I have no idea what really happened, of course, but I suspect he injured
himself somehow experimenting with radium and "orgone".
Even if you set aside the fight with the UFOs, his response to the FDA
seems crazy (to me) even for someone who was literally persecuted for much
of his professional career. The actions of the FDA don't seem quite so
egregious in light of the personal fight Reich picked with ... crap I
can't recall now, some bigwig in the FDA, or a federal Judge, someone
like that who took it personally, and that's how he wound up serving two
years in prison. They still shouldn't have burned his papers, that's
messed up. And his end is deeply tragic. But was doing things like
refusing a lawyer, representing himself, insisting that the authorities
read his books, and that they had no authority over him. Ah, it makes me
sad.
I sometimes wonder what an alternate history would be like where Reich
and his work took root in Vienna and grew into ... who knows what?
I'm curious dang, if you don't mind me asking, where do you fall out of
the funnel on Reich? And on "woo-woo" in general? What's you
metaphysical story like? :) Where does the sidewalk end?
- - - -
That Kate Bush video! Wow, LOL, Yay! I'll see that and raise you Gurdjieff's Fourth Way embedded in the middle of "Meaning of Life" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2QJvc_SxFQ
The answer to your question is I don't know. I guess I'm agnostic. He's too hard to assess objectively, and the resources to do it aren't available. By the way, there is a recent documentary about Reich that I haven't watched yet: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/wr1897.
Wow! That's incredible, and would have gone over my head when I saw the movie as a kid.
I wonder which Python was into that stuff. Perhaps Cleese? Edit: looks like it: https://theweek.com/articles/677504/john-cleeses-6-favorite-..., https://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/25/magazine/cleese-up-close..... Maurice Nicoll is another character; an early UK psychiatrist and son of a prominent Victorian critic, who was Jung's British colleague. Jung was asking him to lead his work in England, but by then Nicoll fell into the Gurdjieff/Ouspensky orbit and ran off to Fontainebleau. The books Cleese is referencing ("Psychological Commentaries" [etc.]) are Nicoll's lectures to his Gurdjieff group that went on through WWII until he died in the 1950s. They're a strange mix of sharp psychological observation and impenetrable esoterica.
If you're interested in Gurdjieff's influence in Britain, I recommend the memoir of J.G. Bennett, who encountered both Gurdjieff and Ouspensky when he was running British intelligence in Constantinople just after WWI: https://www.amazon.com/Witness-Story-Search-Collected-Bennet.... As an old man in the early 70s he became the spiritual teacher of a lot of English hippies, eventually including, of all people, Robert Fripp. You can hear Bennett's voice at the beginning of Fripp's new-wave dance record (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPQWHEu_rqQ), which also went over my head when I was a kid and frankly creeped me out. But what a great record! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPQWHEu_rqQ#t=12m
> The answer to your question is I don't know. I guess I'm agnostic. He's
too hard to assess objectively, and the resources to do it aren't
available.
Eh? There are a handful of Reichian therapists around, cloudbusters are
pretty cheap to make, I don't think they'll arrest you for building an
orgone accumulator, etc.
I'm not seriously suggesting you go out and mess around with this stuff
but I'm curious about your motivation. Did you just read about it and
never try any of it?
I was looking to cure my depression so I tried things. Now my depression
is cured but I feel like a visitor from the future. I went too far too
fast, raced out ahead of consensus reality, and now I have a kind of
reverse futureshock. I can feel a rant coming on so I'll cool it.
I'm bored and lonely and everyone's problems seem so simple and easy to
solve... Y U NO Golden Age already Humanity!?
Aaaaaaanyway...
> I wonder which Python was into that stuff. Perhaps Cleese?
Yeah. He used to have an old flash site and there was a video there of
him doing a kind of talking-head fireside chat bit, and halfway through
that he starts talking about Gurdjieff. Blew me away. After that, I
guess I was primed to see it, that scene I mean. It's incredible to
think that they wrote that and filmed it and stuck it in there as a
killer joke: the Meaning of Life is in "The Meaning of Life".
It's interesting how they set it up: there's basically a post-hypnotic
suggestion to get distracted and then sudden attack by the Crimson
Assurance acts as an amnesia induction pattern.
I wonder if they told anyone? I mean there had to be a group of people
in on the joke, yeah? I've never heard of anyone else noticing that
scene and making the connection to Gurdjieff, but then I don't get out
much. At all. (I'm kind of a recluse. In fact, this HN account is
pretty much my only connection to the outside world. Great work btw
dang. I can't tell you how grateful I am to you for all you do. I owe
you. If you're ever in Southwestern SF and want to experience some Chi
or other weird shit get in touch.)
I met John Cleese once and roundly failed to serve him popcorn. I was
working at a movie theater in Santa Barbara and he came in with a date to
see "In the Name of the Father". Slow night. Empty lobby. I looked up
and there he was. He's tall. Over six feet. I managed a sentence or
two before I just started stammering. One of the other kids had to step
up and serve him while I leaned against the wall and just gaped like a
fish. He was ver British, didn't notice, might have been waiting to
catch a bus. I thought that was wonderful of him, and his date was
really enjoying it. :) They left via the side door... heh
> If you're interested in Gurdjieff's influence in Britain
Nah, like I said, once my depression was cured I lost interest. Not proud of it but there it is.
appreciate your comments! (not that we mind the above discourse) - but you are totally right that we are doing VERY different things from the intense breathwork (e.g. rebirthings, Gof, etc) you noted. A big reason we created Chorus was because those forms of breathwork were too intense for us, and certainly too intense to do more than, say every 3 months. So Chorus is a much more approachable and dialed down practice that you can do to unlock a daily mindfulness habit.
Yours is not the first crew to do this. It's got a bit of a long history here in the SF Bay Area, going back at least to Leonard Orr in the 1970's, who believed he was on the trail of physical immortality.[1]
I was looking up Grof's "Holotropic" breathing, but WP now just redirects to "Breathwork" which actually lists the big names, including W. Reich and Orr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathwork
(It's written by skeptics with the usual obvious BS: E.g.
> Derived from various spiritual and pre-scientific traditions from around the world, it was pioneered in the West by Wilhelm Reich.
Reich didn't derive anything from any "spiritual and pre-scientific traditions". He was a scientific genius, one of Freud's contemporaries before he was driven out of Vienna for saying folks would be less uptight if they had healthier sex lives. His discoveries around what he called "Character Armor" have yet to be appreciated in mainstream psychology. He is one of the few Western researchers to independently discover "Chi" energy. He did some amazing research and then went insane, died in prison, and had his papers burned by the FDA. True story.)
Anyway, y'all are just "selling air": teaching folks to hyperventilate, to pop music, in their own homes, where they are on their own if any adverse effect occur, and then you use that as a convincer to get people to give you $40/mo.
I have to side with the skeptics here: you don't know what you're doing, the breathing techniques you appear to be teaching can have adverse side effects, you're misrepresenting it as some sort of intro meditation for beginners (the very people who need MORE individual time and attention from their Guru) which it is not, and you are putting yourselves in the position of Guru without taking on the responsibility or having the qualifications (by your own admission.)
This is all bad, and you should probably stop.
[1] He used to say, "Physical immortality: the only cause you can't die for!" and "I made my first million dollars selling air." For more about Orr and his "Rebirthing" breathwork see: => https://ibfbreathwork.org/7715/ "Tribute to Leonard Orr"