Breathwork and SoulCollage - the first experiment.

I puttered around the kitchen in the big open area of our home making brunch for the small group of participants in an intimate Breathwork workshop. On the other side of the kitchen counter, our dining room table was extended to its fullest range to accommodate the six people. This morning, after their Breathwork experiences of the day before, they were sitting around our table, piled with magazines, cans of rubber cement, and small stacks of pre-cut mat board cards. Following the simple SoulCollage™ directions, they were moving around fragments of pictures they had cut from magazines, greeting cards, photos, postcards, catalogues, and calendars, fitting them together in surprising new ways and gluing them down on cards.

The deep, meditative mood in the room contrasted with the chaos of magazines, partially cut-out images, half-glued cards. Jai Uttal chanted Om Namah Shivaya from my favorite CD, but the mood was due to more than music. These six people and their two facilitators (Jim and I) had spent the whole previous day together during two Holotropic Breathwork sessions. Emerging from the sessions, the breathers had begun to look through magazines, photos, cards, and calendars to find images to make their first SoulCollage cards. This Sunday morning they had returned to finish their cards. All six were silent, yet in communion at a deeper level than words, each also in creative connection with his or her center. They focused during these morning hours on this new SoulCollage method as a way to express their experiences from Breathwork. As I prepared brunch for these engaged and contented artists, I free-associated my own mental collage to represent the moment. Images flashed through my mind of quilting bees, community gardening, and visits to large, ancient cathedrals and generated emotional flavors of community, music, mood, spirit, growing things, and art.

I had made several dozen SoulCollage cards myself. The SoulCollage process had been so satisfying to me as a way to express the inexpressible, that I decided to make it available to others. As a one-person publisher I had been spending the last three years working on producing the book, SoulCollage: An Intuitive Collage Process for Individuals and Groups by Seena B. Frost. I believed the process could be a way for people to do self-exploration in an easy, non-threatening, and fulfilling way. I also had suspected that Breathwork and SoulCollage were meant for each other - that the deep experiences of Breathwork could be well-expressed through SoulCollage and that SoulCollage in turn could help amplify and integrate those experiences. I watched that interlacing that first morning and was relieved and happy to see others finding SoulCollage card-making as compelling and valuable as I had found it.

After that first SoulCollage success, I introduced it at two other Holotropic Breathwork events this year (2001). One was the Trauma and Transformation six-day training module of the Grof Transpersonal Training (GTT) in Sedona, AZ, USA. The other was the two-week Certification Intensive, which concludes GTT's nine-week, resi-dential training requirements, and this year was held in Taos Ski Valley, NM, USA. Some of the personal quotes that follow in this article are from participants who attended those two Holotropic Breathwork trainings.


Holotropic Breathwork has always included art.

Holotropic Breathwork has always included an art component to its technique. The Grofs, developers of Holotropic Breathwork, both brought art to the technique. Christina Grof had worked as an art teacher. Her own art had facilitated and illustrated her personal spiritual emergence and recovery from post-traumatic stress. Stan Grof had used Joan Kellogg's technique of "mandala" drawing effectively as part of the research protocol for the therapeutic use of LSD in his early work at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. From these separate streams, the Grofs had incorporated their own synthesis of "mandala" art into Holotropic Breathwork.


The mandala art of Holotropic Breathwork

At the end of a Holotropic Breathwork session, participants usually are presented with a large circle penciled onto a sheet of drawing paper. Breathers are encouraged to take the opportunity to express themselves in this non-verbal, but concrete way even before the verbal sharing. It is a step towards integrating the intangible, non-ordinary experience of Breathwork back into tangible, ordinary life. Often participants draw something that will remind them of the experiential events of their session. Sometimes what they draw is mysterious. Its meaning, immediately after the session, is as yet unclear. These "mandalas," as we call them are usually descriptive of the process just experienced, but occasionally seem to be predictive of an unfolding process through which more will be revealed at a later time. Sometimes the mandala tells a story. Sometimes it simply expresses emotion by the placement and intensity of colors.


What is SoulCollage?

SoulCollage is an expressive art process - the process of making a deck of cards, one card at a time, using collage to depict one experience or one kind of energy per card. Many pieces of collage art are rather large and have a multiplicity of messages and images. SoulCollage cards often are more simple. Each 5 inch by 8 inch card in one's grow-ing deck of cards represents a facet of oneself (e.g., a sub-personality, an energy, or an archetype), which one finds relevant to and operant in one's life. Or, a card can depict an experience (dream or journey) such as a Breathwork journey. Author of SoulCollage and developer of the process, Seena B. Frost, says that, "the whole deck reflects the panorama which is 'you' - your SoulCollage."


SoulCollage and the therapeutic objectives of Breathwork

High on the list of therapeutic benefits of Breathwork are connection to self and others and increased trust in one's own creativity and self-expression. Breathwork induces a non-ordinary state of consciousness, which enables one to reconnect with parts of oneself from which one has become disconnected. Because Holotropic Breathwork is done mainly in groups, there is also a benefit of reconnection, even sometimes reconciliation, between people and groups. Participants connect to strangers and see the common thread of humanity through entering the deep well of spirit together. People who know each other deepen their relationships by doing the work together. People who come from different ethnic or cultural backgrounds often find that greater respect and understanding replaces their preconceived and alienating beliefs about differences.

SoulCollage also facilitates connection with self, connection with others, and artistic self-expression, which is a way to make both internal and external connection. SoulCollage provides a means for connection and self-expression immediately following the session, The connection continues as people go on to make, reflect on and use, and share their cards.

Maria Santos-Elgart feels that Breathwork and SoulCollage "complement each other as techniques of self-discovery."