Why is there a prohibition against posting about plant teachers and psychedelics on this HB Community Site?

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Permalink Reply by AHBI Webmasters on November 3, 2008 at 7:20am

Public Confusion about What Holotropic Breathwork Is
One reason for the prohibition is the real and potential confusion in the public about what Holotropic Breathwork is and is not. When someone looking for information about Holotropic Breathwork comes to this site after it is public (and this is a lot of people - the current www.ahbi.org site gets about 8,000 visitors a month from over 70 countries) it will be confusing for them to find a lot of information about methods that are not Holotropic Breathwork. Also, when someone signs up for an HB workshop, they should know what to expect. So our hope is that they will find information about HB here.

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Permalink Reply by AHBI Webmasters on November 4, 2008 at 12:17pm

Correction on Site Visitors
Sorry - the visitors per month is wrong in the above post. in October 2008 we had 7,870 site visits, not unique site visitors. But it is correct that the site receives visits consistently from over 70 countries each month. There are two reasons for this rating. First, Lenny Gibson many years ago bought the domain breathwork.com and donated its use to AHBI. We continue to use it as an alias address for ahbi.org. (Thank you Lenny!!!) Plus we have a lot of links to our site (Thanks to all of you who have put AHBI links on your sites!!!) The result is that we are number one in Google in searches on either breathwork or "holotropic breathwork" and number two and three respectively in a Yahoo search. This situation means we have a great opportunity to inform and connect people with HB immediately when they are looking for a web reference.

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Permalink Reply by AHBI Webmasters on October 14, 2009 at 7:00pm

Holotropic Breathwork Does Not Involve the Use of Chemical Substances
may be a clearer expression of this point, as noticed by Elisa below. So discussions of substances on this site could be confusing. Or maybe it would be better to HAVE discussions, but for the purpose of distinguishing between these things. What do others think about this?

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Permalink Reply by AHBI Webmasters on November 3, 2008 at 7:25am

Legal Issues
In many parts of the world working with psychoactive plant teachers or chemicals like LSD is illegal with varying degrees of penalties associated with this use. Since this is a public site, and law enforcement personnel - especially increasingly border control personnel - routinely use internet searches to check on individuals, there is a clear risk for individuals who post in an internet site concerning these approaches. AHBI does not want to be in the position of either being party to getting someone in trouble in this way, or itself having to deal with responsibility for appearing to advocate illegal activities. Therefore the prohibiition.

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Permalink Reply by AHBI Webmasters on November 3, 2008 at 7:30am

Importance of Holotropic Breathwork in Chemical and Alcohol Dependency Recovery
One of the best researched and most promising areas for the therapeutic use of Holotropic Breathwork is in recovery programs. For those evaluating or administering or searching for methods for assisting in recovery, it would be confusing to encounter information about Holotropic Breathwork in a mixed context with the apparent use of psychoactive chemicals. This could in fact lead to their discounting the potential of HB as an aid in recovery, which would be very regrettable. Therefore the prohibition on that information.

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Permalink Reply by AHBI Webmasters on November 3, 2008 at 7:35am

Wanting as Much Identity Openness as Possible.
One desire we have had in starting up this on-line community has been to have as much openness about identity as possible. A kind of "coming out" as it were for those who choose to take that route, about our interest in and experiences of the Holotropic Breathwork as a method for experiencing a non-ordinary and healing state of consciousness (NOSC). A prohibition on the site for discussions about chemical approaches to NOSC enables us to be more open about identity and perhaps shift our own and the public perception to realize that healing and transformation through altered states of consciousness are an inherent capacity of every human.

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Permalink Reply by Jimmy Eyerman on September 24, 2009 at 1:37am

One of the best aspects of HB is that it is an entirely legal approach to the direct archetypal experience. This is a huge asset in promoting a new world consciousness

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Permalink Reply by Elisa Sawyer on October 15, 2009 at 12:42am

We are always directly experiencing archetypes.

That is why movies move us.

New world consciousness comes about as our conscious awareness expands.

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Permalink Reply by AHBI Webmasters on November 3, 2008 at 7:40am

Ease of Starting Up Other Communities for Other Discussions
The state-of-the-art of internet community platforms (like ning.com) is such that it is quite easy for anyone to start up a new community on-line for whatever purpose or whatever focal point. That is, limitation of content on the Holotropic Breathwork site does not in any way limit the possibility of other communities with other content. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

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Permalink Reply by Elisa Sawyer on October 14, 2009 at 4:13pm

I think that the simplest answer is that Holotropic Breathwork does not involve the use of chemical substances.

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Permalink Reply by Kenneth Edwin Sloan on October 14, 2009 at 6:56pm

Thanks, Elisa! That is certainly a simple answer. I think I will try to get the first item in this discussion to more clearly state that.

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Permalink Reply by Roland (Lenny) Gibson on October 25, 2009 at 4:06pm

Personally I would attest that Holotropic Breathwork, LSD, and psylocibe mushrooms can facilitate experiences identical in their apprehension of cosmological ultimacy. To me this demonstrates beyond doubt that there are various effective paths to peak transcendental experience, and more importantly that the experience is independent of the particular means that facilitate it. Although all the varied paths to ultimate experience, which Stan characterizes as "spiritual technologies," are worthy of study in their particularities, it is useful to focus this site on the particularities of Holotropic Breathwork. Because there are many sites that focus on psychoactively facilitated spiritual technologies, entertaining such foci here would be redundant. Nonetheless, I would hope that focussing this site on the phenomenology of Holotropic Breathwork would not mitigate against discussion comparing and contrasting Holotropic Breathwork with psychoactively facilitated spiritual technologies, just as this site does not exclude discussion, for instance, of shamanism or astrology.

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