By Filis Demirov
On a warm June afternoon in 2022, I sat with Annie, a 76-year-old breathwork facilitator, outside the Peace Chapel in Unity Village, Missouri. The breeze stirred the trees; birdsong drifted through the quiet campus. Annie watched the leaves sway and said softly:
“If you just sit and listen—to the birds, the wind in the trees, the quiet—you enter a slightly expanded state. The possibility for our own healing is right there. We get so focused, looking through a narrow, anxious window. But if we slow down and stay open—here we are.” (reconstructed conversation with Annie, Missouri, June 5, 2022)
This calm, relational ethos contrasts sharply with the early years of Grof Breathwork, when sessions often revolved around electrifying intensity under a charismatic leader’s gaze. Today, women facilitators like Annie center slower, embodied forms of care and attunement—treating the body and breath as sites of memory and transformation. What happens when the breath no longer serves as a tool of catharsis but as a practice of listening and relational presence?
Medical anthropologists have long traced how alternative therapeutic practices reconfigure healing beyond the biomedical lens—emphasizing embodiment, care, and the moral and sensory dimensions of suffering. As Nasima Selim (2024) shows, healing unfolds through bodies, breath, words, and sounds—practices that blur boundaries between the material and the spiritual. Situated within broader anthropological conversations on affect and ethics (Stodulka, Selim & Mattes 2018), my fieldwork in New Mexico (Demirov 2025) explores how these dynamics take shape in contemporary Grof Breathwork, inviting us to revisit its earlier paradigm, when healing was defined less by attunement than by cathartic release.
The Cathartic Paradigm in Grof Breathwork
Developed in the 1970s by psychiatrist Stanislav Grof and his wife Christina, Holotropic Breathwork emerged from psychedelic research, transpersonal psychology, and the countercultural fascination with consciousness expansion. The method combined deep circular breathing, evocative music, and focused bodywork to evoke nonordinary states of consciousness—a process the Grofs described as holotropic, or “oriented toward wholeness” (Grof and Grof 2023, 9).
Unlike conventional psychotherapy, Grof Breathwork framed healing as an experiential, embodied journey guided by the “inner healer.” Sessions unfolded in pairs—a breather and a sitter—within dimly lit spaces energized by percussive music. Facilitators supported participants through waves of intense emotion and movement, sometimes applying bodywork, followed by quiet integration through drawing and reflection (Bray 2019, 187–188).
In its early decades, breathwork was defined by intensity. Sessions emphasized purging—screams, tears, shaking, or sweat—as healing was imagined as cathartic breakthroughs guided by the facilitator’s presence. One elder facilitator recalled Grof as “a towering, electric figure,” whose hands-on approach demanded full immersion from facilitators and deep surrender from breathers, producing experiences that were both awe-inspiring and ambivalent (online conversation, August 4, 2024).
The early ethos combined liberation and hierarchy: transformative spaces for confronting deep emotional and bodily patterns, yet structured around charismatic male authority and universalized trauma models. Fifty years later, the atmosphere has shifted. While catharsis persists in popular imaginaries, contemporary facilitators—especially elder women—favor quieter, relational approaches that emphasize attunement, co-regulation, and treating body, breath, and relational field as interconnected sites of care and transformation.
The Turn Toward Attunement
On October 21, 2022, I participated in a breathwork session in New Mexico, with Annie guiding the relaxation. The room was quiet but charged; participants lay on mats, eyes closed, their bodies moving with the rhythm of their own breath. Annie’s calm voice threaded through the space, supporting each person as they navigated waves of sensation and emotion.
She described the purpose of breathwork not as forcing release or reliving trauma, but as enlivening the body and meeting what is already there:
„There are people for whom it’s just not the right time—the trauma is too deep. They can’t access those places yet, and that’s fine. We can’t push them. But we can meet those places in ourselves, where we’re frozen, or holding our breath, or unable to unlock parts of ourselves.“ (interview with Annie, New Mexico, October 19, 2022)
Safety and relational support were central. Participants were never alone; multiple layers of resources—facilitators, music, the container of the session itself—allowed even those who were afraid to trust the process, if only partially. Annie noted that over decades of leading workshops, she had only once seen a participant leave early—and it was the right choice for her at that moment. The practice, Annie explained, is as much about attunement and presence as it is about breath:
„Healing trauma is being able to feel what is happening, just really sense it and stay with it long enough to come to know it. Trauma may never be fully healed, but we can start to have a relationship with it.“ (interview with Annie, New Mexico, October 19, 2022)
Her pedagogy replaces intensity with attunement, foregrounding co-regulation, subtle touch, and embodied presence, turning breathwork into a practice of relational, embodied attention rather than a tool for dramatic breakthroughs.
Annie’s approach exemplifies a feminist transformation of healing praxis—shifting the emphasis from mastery and heroic breakthroughs to relational listening and attuned presence. Just as Michelle Murphy (2012) traced the embodied politics of reproduction in feminist technoscience, Annie’s practice reclaims the means of healing through the sensing body, privileging lived, felt experience over abstract intervention. In line with Stodulka, Selim, and Mattes’s (2018) notion of “affective scholarship,” both anthropology and healing depend on tuning into subtle currents of emotion, sensation, and relational dynamics, cultivating an epistemic sensitivity that attends to what is already present in the body. Such sensitivity also reconfigures how memory and trauma are understood—not as objects to be expelled or purged, but as sensations to be met, felt, and integrated. It is this attuned, relational orientation that marks the shift from the cathartic intensity of early Grof Breathwork toward a practice rooted in care, presence, and embodied listening.
Breathing as Embodied Memory
Elizabeth, a 73-year-old breathwork facilitator in New Mexico, described how subtle shifts in breath can open bodily memories and ancestral emotion:
„Often, even a small movement can reveal what the body is trying to convey… the movements that emerge help consolidate memory. More often it’s about being present with something you remember and experiencing it differently“ (interview with Elizabeth, New Mexico, 13 October 2022).
For her, these recollections often concern omissions rather than direct harms:
„It’s not that something terrible was done to us, but that we didn’t receive something we desperately needed… This process bypasses cognitive memory; it’s about experiencing through the body what it feels like to receive unconditional love“ (interview with Elizabeth, 13 October 2022).
Attuning to these pre-verbal, embodied memories allows participants to engage with histories beyond cognitive recollection. Breathwork becomes a medium for sensing, integrating, and re-experiencing what is carried in the body, bridging personal biography and familial patterns. This somatic orientation was echoed in a retreat with Annie, who invited the group to “breathe with” rather than interpret, transforming individual experiences into a collective field of care. She encouraged lingering and reflection:
„I encourage people to write about their experiences… If you notice tension in your jaw, think about what it might mean. Write from the voice of your jaw… finding your own meaning is the important part“ (fieldnotes, New Mexico, October 23, 2022).
The body, as Elizabeth and Annie reveal, functions as an archive—a site where memory and sensation intertwine (Demirov 2025). Through this approach, embodied experience is treated as knowledge, and interpretation becomes personal and exploratory. Annie’s pedagogy emphasizes co-regulation and attuned presence, allowing individual sensations to ripple outward and shape a relational, attentive group field. As Nasima Selim (2024) shows in Breathing Hearts, Sufi healing situates breath within a relational and ethical practice, where respiration holds social and historical weight and intersects with anti-racist praxis. In both cases, breath operates as a medium of connection that unsettles the mind-body dichotomy. Attunement emerges as an ethics of remembering—a practice of staying with what moves through us, of breathing with the traces that shape our being.
The Ethical and Political Tensions
Within Grof Breathwork, the practice itself reveals ethical and political tensions in its presence within therapeutic markets—trainings, retreats, and certifications that commodify care and turn healing into something to be bought. Locating trauma in intrauterine imprints, ancestral residues, or planetary configurations can shift attention away from structural violence—racism, colonialism, and economic precarity—that contour lived experience. Breathwork thus becomes not only a ritual of personal repair but a site where ethical, political, and ontological stakes are negotiated. Its healing is real but partial, situated within economies that both resist and reproduce the very conditions they seek to transform.
The rhetoric of “holistic health” adds tension. It gestures toward unity while glossing over contradictions (Saks 2003). Rooted in Anglo-European ideals that oppose “nature” to “technology” and idealize the former as pure and safe, such imaginaries obscure how breathwork is hybrid—drawing from biomedical rationalities, ancestral techniques, and consumer logics (Barcan 2011). As Nikolas Rose (2007) notes, biomedical and alternative health practices are now entangled within neoliberal governance. Somatic ethics treats the body as a moral project—monitored, optimized, and improved through consumer choices. Breathwork exemplifies this: a technology of self-regulation aligned with productivity, well-being, and self-responsibility. Within what Rose calls ethopolitics, individuals are expected to display emotional stability and therapeutic progress, making breathwork both healing and a measure of moral accountability (2007, 27).
The breath—often invoked as freedom—also becomes a site of regulation. In the Global North, to breathe consciously is to inhabit a moral economy where care and commerce, spirituality and governance, liberation and discipline interlace. Such accountability is often absent in Global North wellness cultures, where individual growth eclipses reciprocity and collective responsibility.
Healing under capitalism is ambivalent: it can generate transformation while remaining entwined with regimes of self-improvement. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2021) reminds us, decolonizing knowledge requires attending to relational accountability. Within this landscape, Annie’s attunement to wind, trees, and birds as co-facilitators gestures toward an ecological ethics of interdependence. Her practice reorients healing toward relationality, suggesting a decolonial potential even as structural inequalities persist. From a feminist and affective anthropology of embodiment, such tensions reveal how healing enacts both care and contradiction—how the breath, intimate and collective, holds the promise of connection amid unequal worlds.
Closing Reflection: Breathing with the World
Returning to Annie, the rustling trees, the pause between breaths, I am reminded that attunement—unlike catharsis—asks for slowness, reciprocity, and listening. It is a practice of being present, of letting the world inhabit us as much as we inhabit it. As anthropologists, and as humans, we too engage in epistemic attunement (Stodulka, Selim & Mattes 2018), where affect is both method and encounter: our bodies, senses, and emotions respond to—and are shaped by—the people, spaces, and phenomena we witness. This sensorial reciprocity demands attention to both care and contradiction, to relationality as much as to structural inequalities.
In this light, Annie’s insight resonates: “If you just sit and listen—the healing is already there.” Feminist breathwork, then, is not about breaking through or escaping, but about breathing with—with the wind, the trees, the birds, with others, and with the uneven worlds we inhabit. In a global context struggling to breathe—ecologically, politically, collectively—this attunement offers a radical, embodied pedagogy of listening, presence, and relational accountability, where healing emerges through connection rather than control.
References
Barcan, Ruth. Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Bodies, Therapies, Senses. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Bray, Peter. “Holotropic Breathwork as a therapeutic intervention for survivors of trauma: an autoethnographic case study.” In: What Happened? Re-presenting Traumas, Uncovering Recoveries: Processing Individual and Collective Trauma, edited by McInnes, Elspeth and Danielle Schaub, 187-218. Leiden, Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2019.
Demirov, Filis. “Healing Trauma is being able to feel what is happening.” Grof Breathwork and Transformative Healing in New Mexico, USA. M.A. Thesis, Freie Universität Berlin, 2025.
Grof, Stanislav and Christina Grof. Holotropic Breathwork. A New Approach to Self-Exploration and Therapy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2023 [2010].
Murphy, Michelle. Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
Rose, Nikolas. Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Saks, Mike. Orthodox and Alternative Medicine: Politics, Professionalization and Health Care. London: Continuum, 2003.
Selim, Nasima. Breathing Hearts. Sufism, Healing, and Anti-Muslim Racism in Germany. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2024.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., 2021 [1999].
Stodulka, Thomas, Nasima Selim and Dominik Mattes. Affective scholarship: Doing anthropology with epistemic affects. Ethos 46, no. 4 (2018): 519-536.
