Foreword

Abstract

You hold in your hands a visionary book, one that offers a new understanding of healing, mental health, and human potential, along with powerful techniques to bring about these transformations.Developing such an integrated understanding, which combines science, experience, and spirit is critical for the twenty-fi rst century.The prevailing materialistic culture has created a divided world where the sacred is relegated to churches and temples, the body to the gym, mental health to pills from the pharmacy.Economic growth is pursued as if it had nothing to do with the environment and ignorance, racism, and warfare continue to separate people and nations.These divisions and the great suffering they produce result from a restricted and limited human consciousness.Through decades of their work, Christina and Stan have developed a psychology that reintegrates the fractured consciousness of the world.They offer a psychology of the future, one that expands our human possibility and reconnects us with one another and the cosmos.In forging this new paradigm, they exemplify the courageous and prophetic spirit of pioneers and join a handful of remarkable fi gures who have helped the fi eld of psychology grow in revolutionary new ways.This book is foremost a detailed guide to the experience and practice of Holotropic Breathwork, but it is more than that.It outlines the radical vision of this new psychology.To begin with, it includes one of the widest possible maps of the human psyche I have ever encountered.Within it the full breadth of human experience is valued and integrated.Just the knowledge of this map, presented in the beginning of their workshops by Stan and Christina, has a benefi cial effect on those present.It includes, validates, and integrates such a wide range of experience that healing takes place in the hearts of some who simply hear this map.The holotropic map of human experience is not just theoretical, it is born out of extensive clinical and experimental experience.To witness a