AHBI Board Members

President

Martin (Marty) Boroson studied philosophy at Yale University and earned an MBA from the Yale School of Management. He was certified to facilitate Holotropic Breathwork in 1993 and facilitated monthly workshops in Ireland with the Transpersonal Group until 2000. His article, Radar to the Infinite , relating Holotropic Breathwork to the spectrum psychology of Ken Wilber, was translated by AHBI into German, Spanish and Portuguese. He is the author of the creation story, Becoming Me, based on his holotropic adventures, and now uses this book to teach interfaith spirituality to children and adults. A student of Zen Buddhism, Marty has co-facilitated combined Holotropic Breathwork and Zen workshops and is fascinated by the experiential differences between these two forms. His most recent book is One Moment Meditation: Stillness for People on the Go. He trains managers in holistic approaches to decision-making, and lives in England.

Vice President

Ted Riskin, LCSW, is a psychotherapist specializing in relationship issues and cognitive therapy. Along with his Grof certification, he is also certified in Core Energetics, Internal Family Systems Therapy, Integration Process, hypnotherapy, and EMDR. Since January 1997, he has been facilitating Holotropic workshops regularly in New Jersey, New York City, and Florida, along with the occasional weekend retreat elsewhere. He is on the faculties of Integration Concepts and the Institute of Core Energetics, and he presents workshops for therapists called "Body, Breath,and Spirit in Your Clinical Practice." Unable to kick his 1 CD per week music habit, he uses the music to create session sets that he makes available to Holotropic and other Breathwork practitioners internationally. He served for eight years as the music editor for The Inner Door and five years as AHBI's President.

Treasurer

Roland Gibson, Ph.D., graduated from Williams College and earned doctorates from Claremont Graduate School in philosophy and The University of Texas at Austin in psychology. Lenny has over thirty-five years of experience exploring and working with non-ordinary states of consciousness. He has taught at The University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Lesley College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He served his clinical psychology Internship at the Veterans Administration Hospital , Boston Massachusetts. Lenny teaches Transpersonal Psychology at Burlington College. He is a cancer survivor.

Secretary

Elena Francisc joined the AHBI Board in November of 2007. She was elected AHBI Secretary in January of 2009. Elena is the first Board Member from Eastern Europe having been born and growing up in Romania and living and working there now. She spent some years in Canada as an adult getting a bacholer's degree in Psychology with a minor in Italian at the University of Waterloo. After the fall of the iron curtain she returned to Romania to help rebuild the country . Her activities in Romania since then have included being editor of the Romanian edition of Cosmopolitan Magazine for seven years where she focused her work on increasing women's self-consciousness and self-confidence, participating in making changes to Romania's laws to protect women against violence, and founding a transpersonal publishing house to make transpersonal books available in Romanian (www.efpublishing.ro). Her goal with the publishing house and the events she organizes is to bring together both psychological and spiritual principles in the process of healing and growth. She has been involved in Holotropic Breathwork for many years.

Ana Maria Aguirre is a 1969 graduate of the Catholic University of Argentina in psychology and philosophy. She offers both Gestalt and transpersonal therapy. She has had formal training in the US working with the terminally ill with Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. She was certified as a facilitator of Holotropic Breathwork in the US by Grof Transpersonal Training in 1996. She has been the coordinator and organizer for the training in Argentina since 1996. She has been a member of the Association of Transpersonal Psychology since 1980 and a founding member of the Association Transpersonal Argentina. Ana Maria is the director of Trans-formar, an institution dedicated to the Holotropic Breathwork and other complementary activities.

Tim Brewerton joined the AHBI board on April 13, 2008. Already a member of the Research Committee and leading the first research project sponsored by AHBI (see his call for case reports in the Research Section of this site), Tim offers us a huge amount of valuable experience, along with his love of Holotropic Breathwork. Besides his private psychiatric practice near Charleston, Tim has been a professor at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) since 1987, where he has served as Principle Investigator (PI) or co-PI for a number of research projects. After earning his medical degree at Tulane University, Tim completed his psychiatric training at the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco. He also completed a research fellowship at the National Institute of Mental Health (1984–1987) and a child-adolescent psychiatry fellowship at MUSC (1994–1996). He has published almost 200 abstracts and over 100 articles, edited the book Clinical Handbook of Eating Disorders: An Integrated Approach, and presented at more than 100 conferences.

Bonnie Bright is one of the newest practitioners of Holotropic Breathwork on the AHBI board, experiencing her first session in 2006. Because of the tremendous impact HB had on her, Bonnie is actively moving toward certification. Bonnie brings 15 years of experience in corporate training, marketing communications, and public relations to AHBI, having worked in a variety of industries including retail, technology, and media. Bonnie ran her own internet and marketing design firm for several years and is a previous board member of AWRT (American Women in Radio & Television). As a new AHBI board member, she is heading up the PR committee to help get the word out to the general public about Holotropic Breathwork. Bonnie is an avid student of the Enneagram, a psycho-spiritual personality typology system, having completed over 350 hours of training since January 2006. She is currently finishing a Master's Program in Depth Psychology in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her thesis work has focused on shamanism, the goddess, and the disappearing honeybees.

Karey Pohn has more than 20 years experience as a management consultant, Lawyer, and entrepreneur. She obtained her BS in Finance and JD from the University of Colorado. Karey is a licensed attorney in California and Illinois. She also has a Ph.D. in Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. Karey has researched the organizing principles of play and creativity. Her dissertation is a website—www.cosmicplay.net— Playing the Cosmic Game: Exploring Play’s Archetypal Aspects Through the Kaleidoscope of Culture. It is based on the work of Dr. Stanislav Grof and shows how this universal death/rebirth archetype is truly at the heart of the cosmos, and she illustrates this through the myths of Shiva’s dice game, quantum physics and chaos theory and in popular culture using Disneyland and the movies Mary Poppins and Chicago. Karey brings the entrepreneurial knowledge of having been a partner of an international importing manufacturing business Additionally, she is a Certified Trainer in Neuro Linguistic Program. Her legal and academic background, along with her professional experience enables Karey to help her clients anticipate challenges and develop creative strategies to achieve their goals. Karey has worked with geographically diverse clients from Australia, Europe, and Asia. Her experience includes organizational and leadership development, team building, process analysis and development, as well as cultural integration issues related to mergers/acquisitions.

Oliver Williams works as a map-maker and illustrator for The New York Times and other publications. His self-exploration began in 1972 when he came to the US from his native England to pursue primal therapy, and has continued with Holotropic Breathwork since 1992. He trained with Stan and GTT, certifying in 1996, and in addition to offering monthly HB workshops in NYC began work at that time to bring legitimacy to HB within the evidence-based medical community through clinical research. He was invited in 2006 to join the AHBI board to found and chair the research committee with the goal of mounting research utilizing the broad facilitator base worldwide. He has facilitated at Insight and Opening retreats in Europe and the US, facilitates bi-monthly with Tim O'Connell, PhD, in New Jersey and offers private HB sessions in New York City. Oliver is divorced, the father of two sons.

Cary Sparks, (ex officio) co-directs GTT with her husband Tav. She has been administrator of the training program since 1990, working at that time with Stan and Christina Grof. In 1999, the Grofs retired from training. Tav and Cary took over the management of GTT, caretaking the continuation of the practice of Holotropic Breathwork as developed by Stan and Christina. Cary is a certified HB practitioner since 1986. Besides the breathwork and her family, Carys passions are writing and riding/training horses. She is currently working on her second novel, Inscensed, set in the world of transformational workshops (not breathwork!), while querying agents for her first, The Colin Firth Film Festival. She trains warmblood sporthorses and Thoroughbred ex-racehorses, several of whom have gone on to have successful show careers.

Tav Sparks, (ex officio) is the Director of Grof Transpersonal Training and leads most of the training events in the United States and worldwide. He has been the primary faculty member since the training began in 1989. Since 1985, Tav has led numerous workshops internationally in Holotropic Breathwork and in transpersonal approaches to wellness and recovery. He is the author of The Wide Open Door: The Twelve Steps, Spiritual Tradition, and the New Psychology; the training manual Doing Not Doing: A Facilitator's Guide to Holotropic Breathwork; Through Thunder - A Poetic Death Rebirth Journey and seven screenplays combining the transpersonal perspective with modern popular culture. His current project is the book Movie Yoga: How to Turn Your Local Cinema into a Temple of Transformation. Since 1990, he has been program coordinator for three conferences of the International Transpersonal Association (ITA) and served as a member of the ITA Board of Directors.

Jack Silver, AHBI legal Advisor, is active on a number of environmental boards in his community and is interested in stronger ties to the breath community and the inner environment it seeks to protect and enhance.