Creating Holotropic Breathwork Music Sets is a “work of art” and is the subject of a six day course entitled “Music and Transcendence”  that is hosted by Grof Transpersonal Training (GTT). This course is available to anyone who is interested and is also a requirement for anyone going through the Facilitator Certification Training.

Music is used in the Holotropic Breathwork Workshop experience not to guide the breather in one direction or another but to allow a participant to go deeper into the transformational experience that they are guided to have by their inner healer.  In order for the experience to be considered a “Holotropic Breathwork” experience and produce the intended results, the music set must be between 2 1/2 and 3 hours long.

A short summary is that the first hour of a Holotropic Breathwork Music Set is designed to facilitate physical releaseand help support continued deep breathing and includes music with a driving, rhythmic beat.  This can include such things as tribal drumming and certain types of electronic music.  Examples of artists that are sometimes used in this section are Ganga Giri, Lost at Last, Brent Lewis, Juno Reactor, Babatunde Olatunji, Byron Metcalf, James Asher and Afro Celt Sound System.

The second hour of the Holotropic Breathwork Music Set is designed to facilitate emotional release  and can include artists such as Lisa Gerrard and Azam Ali,  or emotionally evocative soundtrack music composed by artists such as Hans Zimmer, Dwayne Ford, Thomas Newman, Howard Shore and James Newton Howard and more recently groups that produce movie trailer music such as Two Steps From Hell, Audiomachine and The Immediate.

The third hour of the Holotropic Breathwork Music Set is designed to facilitate integration of the experience and normally includes some sacred chant from artists such as Deva Premal, Jai Uttal and Lama Gyurme.  The final song many times includes sounds from nature to help participants return from their journey and ground themselves back into an ordinary state of consciousness.

Putting together the music set is extremely complex and there are strict guidelines to make sure that the music set supports the Holotropic Breathwork process.  A few of the guidelines are:  1) there can be no gaps between the songs and all tracks should be “DJ mixed” so that they flow seamlessly from one to the other (there is software available for doing this for under $75 on the internet);  2) There can be vocals, but there can be no English, French, Italian or Spanish words in any of the tracks.  Language that a participant understands accesses the left hemisphere, “thinking” part of the brain and tends to pull him or her out of the Holotropic Breathwork process; and 3) the tracks should flow as smoothly as possible from one to the other energetically so there is not a dramatic shift in beats per minute or in volume from one track to the next….as a result of this, there can be times while putting together a set where there are tracks that sound great individually but do not work together in a set.

Although the track lists from Holotropic Breathwork Music Sets are generally available at Holotropic Breathwork workshops, the actual Holotropic Breathwork Music Set CDs are not available for purchase due to copyright protection laws.

For more information regarding Holotropic Breathwork music sets, e-mail Michael