VOLUME 1 ISSUE 1 SPRING 2015

sition to violence can, at a certain point, take the form of experiential identification with a tiger or a black panther. Or the deepest root of serious antisocial behavior can be a demonic archetype, while the final resolution of a phobia can come in the form of reliving and integrating of a past life experience, and so on. The overall architecture of the COEX systems can best be shown by a clinical example. A person suffering from psychogenic asthma might discover in serial breathwork sessions a powerful COEX system underlying this disorder. The biographical part of this constellation might consist of a memory of near drowning at the age of seven, memories of being repeatedly strangled by an older brother between the ages of three and four, and a memory of severe choking during whooping cough or diphtheria at age two. The perinatal contribution to this COEX might be, for example, suffocation experienced during birth because of strangulation by the umbilical cord twisted around the neck. A typical transpersonal root of this breathing disorder might be an experience of being hanged or strangled in what seems to be a previous lifetime. Detailed discussion of COEX systems and their role in various forms of psychopathology, including additional examples, are available in several earlier of my publications (Grof 1975, 1987, and 2000). 5.4 Effective therapeutic mechanisms Traditional psychotherapy recognizes only therapeutic mechanisms that operate on the level of the biographical material, such as weakening of the psychological defense mechanisms, remembering forgotten or repressed traumatic events, reconstructing the past from dreams or neurotic symptoms, attaining intellectual and emotional insights, analyzing of transference, and obtaining corrective experience in interpersonal relations. Psychotherapy involving holotropic states of consciousness offers many additional highly effective mechanisms of healing and personality transformation that become available when experiential regression reaches the perinatal and transpersonal levels. Such mechanisms include actual reliving of traumatic memories from infancy, childhood, biological birth, and prenatal life; past life memories; emergence of archetypal material; experiences of cosmic unity; and others. This therapeutic dynamics can be illustrated by the story of a participant at one of our workshops at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, whom I will call Norbert. At the beginning of the workshop, Norbert complained about severe chronic pain in his left shoulder and pectoral muscle that had caused him great suffering and made his life miserable. Repeated medical examinations, including Xrays, had not detected any organic basis for his problem and all therapeutic attempts had remained unsuccessful. Serial Procaine injections had brought only brief transient relief for the duration of the pharmacological effect of the drug. Norbert’s breathwork session was long and very dramatic. In the sharing group following it, he described that there were three different layers in his experience, all of them related to the pain in his shoulder and associated with choking. On the most superficial Spirituality Studies 1 (1) Spring 2015 19 (17)

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