Explore every episode of the podcast Deep Breaths

Content warning: this episode covers addiction, overdose, sexual assault, and victim-blaming

* Image: Konspiratorzy – stan I (1931) by Tadeusz Makowski

* The Curious Life and Mind-Altering Death of Justin Clark: It’s rare to become addicted to esoteric hallucinogens. But it’s not impossible.

* R/mdmatherapy

* I deleted this bluesky post because I didn’t know whether I should name this person like this or not, but I think it is necessary and important public info:

* They mistake Sessa for Yensen and Dryer.

One of many ridiculously wrong statements:

* Organic content:

6, A full guide to the sexual misconduct allegations against YouTuber Andrew Callaghan

Reddit comments on his appology:

* The Nelk Brothers

* I’m not going to link to this article, but here it is. Note the edit

Links and notes in order of mention:

* The Dimensions of Dying and Rebirth

* Casey “not-like-the-other-psychiatrists” Paleos and the NYC psychedelic therapy scene around Fluence are big GPM (II-IV).

* “Key competencies for psychedelic treatment in real-world mental health care settings” Wolff et al., 2025

* Some other points on The Tell:

-I think Amy Griffin is involved with an extremely dubious scene of psychedelic therapists/sitters, all revolving around the orbit of MAPS, T Cody Swift, NYU, (I have no evidence to back this, but I would be entirely unsurprised to see connections with NYC-based Fluence et al.).

-It was reckless for Olivia, the “practitioner” that Amy and John Griffin worked with, to go into the session with Amy, intending to look for repressed memories of sexual abuse.

-There are numerous other glaringly large red flags in Olivia’s practice e.g. this whole quote:

““AS TIME WENT ON, I found myself asking more people if I could share my story with them. I understood that it was a lot to hear, and the person listening needed to be ready to hear it. But I also understood that to tell—the thing I promised I would never do—was a gift to myself. Each time I gave myself permission to tell, I felt freer.Sometimes, when I told people, they praised me for doing “the work,” because, they said, it made me a better example to my children, a better wife to my husband, or a better friend to those closest to me. Women are always doing things so we can be better for other people. My relationships had changed for the better, but I didn’t do it for anyone else. I did it for me.There is also, I’ve learned, a way that people sometimes respond when I tell them about my experience. They grow tight, zipped up, locked away. “I don’t think I could do anything like that,” they say. “I’m too much of a control freak. And besides, I don’t think I want to know. What if I don’t have the space for “ it? What if I find out something that I can’t deal with? I don’t have the time to process what comes up on the other end. Why would I want to wallow in the pain?” Or the line I hear the most: “If I don’t remember something, isn’t there a good reason for that?” In these comments, I hear the sound of their tell—the thing that nags at them with gnawed edges, the way it did at me for so long.Olivia laughed when I told her this. “You and I both know those are probably the people who need it the most,” she said. “Just like you did.”She was visiting me and John on a summer night not unlike the one when she’d first entered my life. MDMA had recently been legalized for therapeutic use in Australia, which indicated that the rest of the Western world would likely follow in the years to come. I was wearing the bracelet Olivia had given me for my birthday a year earlier, which had become one of my most cherished possessions—a tangible link to the leap of faith I’d taken. Just like the one I’d held on her wrist “during my first session, the bracelet was made of coins that I now knew dated to 1912, the year MDMA was invented.”

-There are big question marks for me about how and why this book got published. It seems a literary agent sought out Amy, although Amy’s writing was originally intended entirely for herself. It feels incredibly fast, almost like running into publishing a memoir. Ironically, Amy claims that her entire therapy process has been about teaching her to slow down? This feels like the fastest sprint into blowing up a massive and still very fresh story involving repressed memories. Though I have a lot of reservations about saying this, I feel that Amy is being exploited in some ways by the publishing behemoth that put this book into the public consciousness.

-Olivia of all people should have been strongly warning about this book being published — my guess is though is that she’s probably all on board, rationalising as being guided by Amy’s inner healing intelligence.

-Amy isn’t without agency in this — I’m not saying she has been ‘brainwashed’ or is in a cult. But she’s definitely repeating the Grof party line, without ever mentioning him. I think she might be the greatest example of Grof Promulgation Matrices four (GPM IV). Amy is somone who has every resource available to look at participate in good research. She has every financial resource available to fund women’s research and companies, and she does. Her first big investment was in…Goop. Gwenyth Paltrow. That is who Amy Griffin is — we should believe her, because she has told us exactly who she is. Amy lives in a world without intersectionality. which leads me to the next point

-There are many extremely valid reasons why you shouldn’t tell people your story. It is not safe for many people to tell their story. They don’t deserve to hear it. They can’t hear. Or, just simply, you don’t feel the need to tell them. Stories hold different weights for everyone — some big some non-existent. This insistance to “tell” is such a huge, glaring point that she never puts any conditions around. It reminds me of myself at 23-ish, 2011-ish. I had a friend from an extremely strict family. There were many layers of culture, religion, and probably just plain abuse. She was dating a white guy and her parents could not find out. She was clear about this. I told her she should just tell! It will be so freeing! You have a right to — you need to live your truth. I was an idiot — I did not understand. Many years later, I look and see how she tried to teach me and explain to me why that wasn’t possible. I understand a lot better now after a lot of experience working in family court and family violence response services.

This whole thing is just…deeply unsettling to me

Then of course there’s the whole thing of John Griffin donating $1 million to fund the MAPS phase III trials. This was a few months after the Phase II abuse became public throug Olivia Goldhill’s reporting

Of course this is all tied to PSFC.

OAnd his $77million townhouse.

Don’t worry though, John is figuring out why poverty persists.

* If Grof had been a 20-something dude in 2025 telling you about doing a huge hit of Salvia in highschool instead of a 25-year old psychiatrist in 1956 Czechlosovakia who writes books about doing LSD for the first time:

This week I talk about a few things involving violence, victim blaming and general misogyny — please take care when considering whether/when you listen.

First, I mention being back in Canberra and the view from my old apartment over Parliament House, where a woman was raped and torn through the media. In 2024 civil suit, a judge found Bruce Lehrmann committed the assault https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-15/bruce-lehrmann-defamation-trial-judgment/103706656

From The Way of the Psychonaut, Vol 2, on the “perinatal roots of violence” according to Stan Grof.

From Will Hall:

https://www.madinamerica.com/2025/09/a-call-for-retraction-how-a-journal-condoned-psychedelic-therapy-abuse/

From The Microdose:

Hamilton’s Morris on the Microdose from his now-deleted interview. There arre further screenshots making allegations and false statements about serveral people. Screenshots: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q_iB7z5Pr0kPAeQHKbatYEeVHUVBjMAV/view?usp=drive_link

This week I go back to last week and talk about my breathwork session, stroboscopic light and Stan's first LSD trip, the book The Tell and discussion of certification for facilitators in the Ethical Trip. Here are some screenshots/links/quotes in order of mention throughout the episode:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8248711/

https://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN82430224

https://lannayoga.com/ajnalight/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Theory-and-Science-of-the-Ajna-Light-2.pdf

Grof’s first LSD trip, from The Way of the Psychonaut (2021):

“I was at that point becoming disillusioned by psychoanalysis, realizing the amount of time and money it required and how unimpressive the results were. I was extremely excited about such an extraordinary training opportunity and asked Dr. Roubíček if I could have an LSD session. Unfortunately, the staff of the psychiatric clinic decided that, for a variety of reasons, students would not be accepted as volunteers. Dr. Roubíček was very interested in the new substance, but too busy to spend hours at a time in the LSD sessions of his experimental subjects. He needed help, and there were no objections against me supervising the psychedelic sessions of others and keeping records of their experiences.

I thus had sat in the LSD sessions of many Czech psychiatrists and psychologists, prominent artists, and other interested persons before I myself qualified as an experimental subject. By the time I graduated from the medical school and was myself eligible for a session, my appetite had been repeatedly whetted by fantastic accounts of the experiences of others that I had witnessed. In the fall of 1956, after my graduation from the medical school, I was finally able to have my own LSD session.

Dr. Roubíček’s area of special interest was research of the electrical activity of the brain. One of the conditions for participating in the LSD study was to agree to have an EEG recording taken before, during, and after the session. In addition, at the time of my session, he was particularly fascinated by what was called “driving” or “entraining” the brain waves. This involved exposure to various frequencies of a strong flashing stroboscopic light and finding out to what extent the brain waves in the suboccipital area of the brain (the optical cortex) could be “entrained,” that is, forced to pick up the incoming frequency. Eager to have the LSD experience, I readily agreed to have my EEG taken and my brain waves “driven.”

My brother Paul, who was at that time a medical student and was also deeply interested in psychiatry, agreed to supervise my session. I started feeling the effects of LSD about forty-five minutes after the ingestion. At first, there was a feeling of slight malaise, lightheadedness, and nausea. Then these symptoms disappeared and were replaced by a fantastic display of incredibly colorful abstract and geometrical visions unfolding in rapid kaleidoscopic sequences. Some of them “resembled exquisite stained glass windows in medieval Gothic cathedrals, others arabesques from Muslim mosques. To describe the exquisite nature of these visions, I made references to Sheherezade and A Thousand and One Nights and to the stunning beauty of Alhambra and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s fantastic description of Kubla Khan’s legendary Xanadu.

At the time, these were the only associations I was able to make. Today, I believe that my psyche somehow managed to produce a wild array of fractal images, similar to the graphic representations of nonlinear equations that can be created by modern computers. As the session continued, my experience moved through and beyond this realm of exquisite aesthetic rapture and changed into an encounter and confrontation with my unconscious psyche. It is difficult to find words for the intoxicating fugue of emotions, visions, and illuminating insights into my life, and existence in general, that became available to me on this level of my psyche. It was so profound and shattering that it instantly overshadowed my previous interest in Freudian psychoanalysis. I could not believe how much I learned in those few hours.

The breathtaking aesthetic feast and the rich plethora of psychological insights would have been sufficient in and of themselves to make my first encounter with LSD a truly memorable experience. However, all that paled in comparison with what was yet to come. Between the third and fourth hour of my session, when the effect of the LSD was culminating, Dr. Roubiček’s research assistant appeared and announced that it was time for the EEG experiment. She took me to a small room, carefully pasted electrodes on my scalp, and asked me to lie down and close my eyes. She then placed a giant stroboscopic light above my head and turned it on.

The effects of the LSD immensely amplified the impact of the strobe and I was hit by a vision of light of incredible radiance and supernatural beauty. It made me think of the accounts of mystical experiences I had read about in spiritual literatures, in which the visions of divine light were compared with the incandescence of “millions of suns.” It crossed my mind that this was what it must have been like at the epicenter of the atomic explosions in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Today, I think it “it was more like Dharmakaya, or the Primary Clear Light, the luminosity of indescribable brilliance that, according to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Bardo Thödol, appears to us at the moment of our death.

I felt that a divine thunderbolt had catapulted my conscious self out of my body. I lost my awareness of the research assistant, the laboratory, the psychiatric clinic, Prague, and then the planet. My consciousness expanded at an inconceivable speed and reached cosmic dimensions. I lost the connection with my everyday identity. There were no more boundaries or difference between me and the universe. I felt that my old personality was extinguished and that I ceased to exist. And I felt that by becoming nothing, I became everything.

The research assistant carefully followed her protocol for the experiment. She gradually shifted the frequency of the strobe from two to sixty hertz (frequencies per second) and back again, and then put it for a short time to the middle of the alpha band, theta band, and finally the delta band. While this was happening, I found myself at the center of a cosmic drama of unimaginable dimensions. In the astronomical literature that I read over the following years, I found names for some of the phenomena that seemed like what I experienced during those extraordinary ten minutes—the Big Bang, passage through black holes, white holes, and wormholes, as well as exploding supernovas and collapsing stars.”

https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-025-01274-2

https://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/this-book-plunged-the-world-into-a-terrifying-obsession-with-satanic-cults-in-the-1980s-1.7031992

https://www.capitaldaily.ca/news/satanic-ritual-abuse-michelle-remembers-lawrence-pazder-victoria?wptouch_preview_theme=enabled

https://theethicaltrip.beehiiv.com/p/the-phantom-certification-893e0d3f2407a534

This week I take the quick out of quick breather and talk for 39 minutes. Topics include Synergistic Press, Buckminster Fuller, Myron Stolaroff, the Sequoia Seminars, Drawing it Out by Sherana Frances, Meduna’s mixture, Rachel Yehuda, Bessel van der Kolk, Gaza and Ben Sessa.

Links and screenshots are below in order for your further exploration…

Please note, I do not cover Bessel van der Kolk's comments in depth, but I should highlight that he later apologised:

“Van der Kolk sent an apology letter to participants, retracting his claim about the war in Gaza and tracing the reaction he shared to his early life. He was born in the Hague in 1943.

“I want to express my deep regret for talking about what is happening in Gaza being equivalent to what the Nazis did in the 1940s,” he wrote. “It was a gratuitous, offensive, inaccurate and completely unnecessary comment, rooted in my own identification with children in bombed out cities during, and shortly after, World War II.”

Also note that I went on the so-called “Birthright” trip in 2007. I was ignorant and regret going, though I did learn a lot.

* Synergistic Press and Stolaroff

https://online.ucpress.edu/ch/article-abstract/69/1/36/31895/Sequoia-Seminar-The-Sources-of-Religious?redirectedFrom=fulltext

https://online.ucpress.edu/ch/article-abstract/69/1/36/31895/Sequoia-Seminar-The-Sources-of-Religious?redirectedFrom=fulltext

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/medunas-mixture-surreal-ecstasy-or-perplexing-abreaction-psychiatry-in-history/676A1DF9DF23987A91BA6487A6470AF7

https://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=80817&utm_

* Can you remember your birth on LSD?

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-025-06771-5

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14793387/

I meant to quote from the preface to The Way of the Psychonaut, but I started reading from Holotropic Breathwork by accident and just went with it. Here’s the preface I meant to read:

https://www.primals.org/articles/lake.html

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0022399978900454?via%3Dihub

http://heidelpost.de/buecher/praenatale_psychologie/PP_PDF/PP_14_1-2_Kafkalides.pdf

https://www.stangrof.com/images/joomgallery/interviews/PDF/Interview_-NovaConsciencia_Brazil.pdf

* Rachel Yehuda and Omega Institute

https://www.jta.org/2025/08/19/united-states/renowned-trauma-expert-bessel-van-der-kolk-banned-from-teaching-at-omega-institute-over-antisemitic-comments

* Ben Sessa

My complaint to the UK medical board re: Ben Sessa’s LinkedIn post from March 2025.

In order of mentions in this quick breather…

* NY Post on Dave Asprey and Grof:

“It felt like tripping balls — my mind was on a hyperdrive tour of the universe. But there were no drugs involved,” Asprey wrote about his first experience in “Heavily Meditated.”

The article from the Cleveland Clinic that gives an entirely misleading, simplified overview of Holotropic Breathwork:

2.

https://psychedelicalpha.com/news/one-year-after-fdas-mdma-rejection-insiders-and-observers-reflect

https://www.psychedelicarchive.com/archive/psychoanalysis1957

“This article holds significant historical importance as it represents one of the earliest documented attempts to integrate the use of psychedelic substances, specifically LSD, into the framework of Freudian psychoanalysis. Alvarez de Toledo outlines the theoretical foundations and practical applications of this “combined” therapeutic approach, followed by two case studies presented by Fontana and Perez Morales, which serve to illustrate the potential benefits and challenges of incorporating LSD into psychoanalytic treatment.”

3.

Welcome to the first audio recording for my Substack, Deep Breaths, about Holotropic Breathwork and Stan Grof's influence on psychedelic therapy.

Today I am going to speak about two different topics. The first will be about the recent allegations that are going before the California Medical Board against Phil Wolfson, a well-known ketamine assisted psychotherapy doctor. And the other is Joe Welker's most recent Substack post on psychedelic candor [Psychedelic Priest Deposed by the Episcopal Church]…”