VOLUME 1 ISSUE 1 SPRING 2015

level, he relived a frightening situation from his childhood in which he almost lost his life. When he was about seven years old, he and his friends were digging a tunnel on a sandy ocean beach. When the tunnel was finished, Norbert crawled inside to explore it. As the other children jumped around, the tunnel collapsed and buried him alive. He almost choked to death before he was rescued by the adults who arrived in response to the children’s alarming screams. When the breathwork experience deepened, Norbert relived a violent and terrifying episode that took him back to the memory of his biological birth. His delivery was very difficult, since his shoulder was stuck for an extended period of time behind the pubic bone of his mother. This episode shared with the previous one the combination of choking and severe pain in the left shoulder. In the last part of the session, the experience changed dramatically. Norbert started seeing military uniforms and horses and recognized that he was involved in a fierce battle. He was even able to identify it as one of the battles in Cromwell’s England. At one point, he felt a sharp pain in his left shoulder and realized that it had been pierced by a lance. He fell off the horse and experienced himself as being trampled by the other horses running over his body and crushing his chest. His broken rib cage caused him agonizing pain, and he was choking on blood, which was filling his lungs. After a period of extreme suffering, Norbert’s consciousness separated from his dying body, soared high above the battlefield, and observed the scene from a bird’s eye view. Following the death of the severely wounded soldier, whom he recognized as himself in a previous incarnation, Norbert’s consciousness returned to the present time and reconnected with his body, which was now pain-free for the first time after many years of agony. The relief from pain brought about by these experiences turned out to be permanent. 5.5 Strategy of psychotherapy and selfexploration The most astonishing aspect of modern psychotherapy is the number of competing schools with vast differences of opinion and lack of agreement concerning the most fundamental issues. What are the dimensions of the human psyche and what are its most important motivating forces? Why do symptoms develop and what do they mean? Which issues that the client brings into therapy are central and which are less relevant? What techniques and strategies should be used to correct or improve the emotional, psychosomatic, and interpersonal functioning of the clients? There are as many answers to these questions as there are schools of psychotherapy. The goal of traditional dynamic psychotherapies is to reach intellectual understanding of the human psyche, in general, and that of a specific client, in particular, and then use this knowledge to develop an effective therapeutic technique and strategy. An important tool in many modern psychotherapies is “interpretation”, by which the therapist reveals to the client the “true” or “real” meaning of his or her thoughts, emotions, and behav20 (18) Stanislav Grof

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