A spiritual emergency, in the sense the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof and his wife Christina Grof gave the term from the 1980s, is a crisis of personal transformation, a dramatic and often frightening experience of non-ordinary states which psychiatry would usually treat as mental illness, but which, met with understanding and support, can heal and open a person to a new level of awareness, a ‘spiritual emergence’. The Grofs also warned against the opposite mistake of treating every psychosis as spiritual. Therapeutic Shamanism holds the same two-sided view, and puts groundingGrounding. Returning fully into the body and physical reality; the bedrock of safe practice, and how every journey ends. More about this and the ability to return at will at its centre.
Who is Stanislav Grof? #
A psychiatrist and one of the best-known figures in transpersonal psychology, the branch of psychology that studies spiritual and non-ordinary experience. He was born in Prague in 1931 and trained as a psychiatrist and Freudian analyst. A powerful experience in an LSD session, taken as part of his training, turned his attention to non-ordinary states of consciousness, and he led a research programme at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague exploring the therapeutic potential of LSD and other psychedelics.12 In 1969 he became chief of psychiatric research at Spring Grove in Maryland, later part of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, where from 1972 he worked with dying cancer patients alongside the anthropologist Joan Halifax, whom he married that year; together they wrote The Human Encounter with Death (1977). From 1973 to 1987 he lived at the Esalen Institute in California as scholar-in-residence. When legal research with LSD was shut down in the early 1970s, he and Christina Grof developed Holotropic Breathwork, now called Grof Breathwork, which uses fast, deep breathing, evocative music, bodywork and mandala drawing.1 See Who is Joan Halifax?
Christina Grof came to the subject by her own road. During childbirth she had a sudden and unexpected spiritual awakening, followed by years of experiences ranging from hellish to ecstatic, which she later found matched descriptions of Kundalini awakening in Indian scriptures. In 1980 she founded the Spiritual Emergence Network, to support people going through such crises and to tell them about alternatives to standard psychiatric treatment.2 She died in 2014.1
What is a spiritual emergency? #
A crisis that is also an opening. The Grofs’ central idea is that some of the dramatic experiences and unusual states of mind which psychiatry diagnoses and treats as mental disease are really crises of personal transformation. Episodes of this kind have been described in the sacred literature of every age, as results of meditative practice and as signposts on the mystical path. Understood properly and supported, and not suppressed by standard psychiatric routines, they can heal and leave a person better off. The term is a play on words, both an emergency and an emergence, a chance to rise to a new level of awareness.3
Behind this lies a much wider map of the mind than most of psychiatry allows. Along with the personal history of Freud’s unconscious, the Grofs include the realm of birth and a transpersonal realm, in which people may feel themselves become animals, plants or trees, or meet deities, spirit guides and mythological beings who seem as real as anything in daily life. Seen this way, what surfaces in a non-ordinary state is not the random product of a damaged brain but material from the deep recesses of the psyche, which can heal if it comes up in the right circumstances. Spiritual traditions “from shamanism to Zen”, in the Grofs’ words, are rich stores of knowledge about these deeper regions of the mind.4
What forms can a spiritual emergency take? #
The Grofs list ten main forms, while stressing that no two crises are alike and that overlaps are the rule, not the exception: the shamanic crisis; the awakening of Kundalini; episodes of unitive consciousness, or ‘peak experiences’; psychological renewal through return to the centre; the crisis of psychic opening; past-life experiences; communication with spirit guides and ‘channelling’; near-death experiences; close encounters with UFOs; and possession states.5 The shamanic crisis heads the list, and it is the subject of its own answer: see What is shaman’s sickness, or initiatory illness?
What sets a crisis off varies. It may be physical, such as illness, an accident, an operation, extreme exhaustion or childbirth; it may be emotional, such as a bereavement, a divorce or the loss of a job. But in the Grofs’ experience a major trigger is deep involvement in meditation and spiritual practice, the very methods designed to bring on spiritual experiences: Zen, Vipassana meditation, Kundalini yoga, Sufi exercises, and Christian prayer and contemplation among them.5 See How is journeying different from meditation, and can the two work together?
Is every breakdown a spiritual emergency? #
No, and the Grofs said so themselves. Non-ordinary states run across a wide spectrum, from purely spiritual states with nothing pathological about them to conditions that are clearly biological and need medical treatment. Traditional psychiatry tends to pathologise mystical states, they wrote, but there is also the opposite danger of spiritualising psychosis and glorifying pathology, or worse, missing a physical illness. Their approach was not meant for clearly psychotic conditions marked by a lack of insight, paranoid delusions and hallucinations, nor for people with chronic conditions and long histories of institutional treatment who need large doses of tranquillisers.6 A thorough medical examination comes first, so that infections, tumours or circulatory problems in the brain are not missed.7
Therapeutic Shamanism draws the same line. A shamanic awakening can feel like a form of madness, largely because people having one in the modern world usually do not understand what is happening to them. But it is not at all true that all madness is therefore a shamanic awakening, and shamanic cultures clearly distinguish healthy shamanic experience from madness.8 One of the differences is the ability to return at will. A shaman can leave ordinary reality, travel in the shamanic realms and come back, again at will, whereas being stuck in the shamanic realms and unable to return would indeed be a form of psychosis.9 Healthy practice keeps one foot in this world and one in the other; both feet in shamanic reality all the time is not shamanism, but madness.8 See How is shamanic journeying different from psychosis? and Were traditional shamans mentally ill?
What helps someone going through a spiritual emergency? #
For the Grofs, the most important thing is a positive context and enough information about the process, so that the person can move away from the idea of disease and see the crisis as healing. Good books, and people who understand, above all people who have come through a similar crisis, can be invaluable; so can a spiritual teacher who knows the inner territory. Whether family and friends are supportive or fearful and judgemental makes a real difference to how a crisis goes. When the process becomes too much, they suggest slowing it down for a while, setting spiritual practice aside and turning to ordinary, earthy things, with professional help where it is needed.10 In the same book the meditation teacher Jack Kornfield gives similar advice for when spiritual energy runs beyond what a person can handle, which is to slow the process down and do grounding things, walking, digging in the garden, anything that connects with the earth.11
Grounding is the bedrock of shamanic practice too. For anyone who is psychotic or having psychotic episodes, the starting point is grounding practices, and most definitely not shamanic journeying.12 For anyone prone to schizophrenic episodes, paranoid fantasies, moderate to severe dissociation, unstable and unmanaged manic depression, or anything else that makes it hard to keep a grip on everyday reality, journeying for themselves could make matters worse. Shamanism may still help, with an experienced practitioner journeying for them, ideally one who understands mental health and the difference between mental health issues and shamanic ones.13 See Is shamanic work safe if I have a mental health condition?
How does Grof’s idea relate to Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Closely, in taking the other realms seriously. The Grofs treat what surfaces in a crisis as meaningful, not as the noise of a sick brain, and they count shamanism among the traditions that know this territory best. In Therapeutic Shamanism the Upper and Lower Worlds are not reinterpreted as the human unconscious. The unconscious, the under-world, and the shamanic Upper and Lower Worlds are not the same thing, and the work moves in all of them as appropriate.14 The Grofs’ map, in which encounters with spirit guides and identification with animals and trees are part of the psyche’s deep regions, does not draw that distinction in the same way.
The difference lies mostly in the route. Grof’s own work grew out of psychedelic research and then breathwork, ways of bringing on intense states deliberately. Therapeutic Shamanism does not hold that a dramatic crisis is needed at all. It is often said in the shamanic community that people come to shamanism, or to finding their Soul, through near-death experiences or other traumatic events, and sometimes that is true, because such events can bring the death of an old way of being. But there are other paths, gentler and steadier ones, which are equally effective, and the aim is to teach shamanism in ways that are effective and yet manageable: grounded, trauma-free and free of unnecessary drama.15 See What is ego death?
Has psychiatry accepted the idea of spiritual emergency? #
In part. In 1994 the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, DSM-IV, added a category called ‘Religious or Spiritual Problem’, proposed by the psychologist David Lukoff and the psychiatrists Francis Lu and Robert Turner and approved by the manual’s task force in 1993.16 For Lukoff, it was the first time distressing religious and spiritual experiences were acknowledged “as nonpathological problems”, so that a person in a spiritual crisis can be helped without being labelled mentally ill.17 The category does not adopt the Grofs’ whole map of the psyche.
Some of Grof’s wider theories remain contested. The psychologist Susan Blackmore called his account of near-death experiences as memories of birth “pitifully inadequate”, and the psychologist Chris French has pointed out that people born by caesarean section report the same tunnelTunnel. The descent at the start of a journey. Still middle-world territory, all the way down: the Lower-World begins only where you emerge. More about this.18 Grof’s own position, set out in Spiritual Emergency, is that more than three decades of observing non-ordinary states, in others and in himself, convinced him that the usual understanding of the psyche is superficial and cannot account for what he had seen.19
