Stanislav Grof

Stanislav Grof, MD, is the living godfather of psychedelic therapy and one of the great explorers of human consciousness — a psychiatrist whose seven decades of research laid the foundations for transpersonal psychology, modern breathwork, and today's psychedelic renaissance alike. Born in Prague in 1931, he trained in medicine at Charles University and began, in the mid-1950s, what would become one of history's longest and deepest research careers into non-ordinary states: as Principal Investigator of the psychedelic research program at Prague's Psychiatric Research Institute, he personally guided thousands of legal LSD psychotherapy sessions, mapping territories of the psyche that conventional psychiatry had never charted. Moving to the United States in 1967, he became Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center — home of America's last official psychedelic research program — and taught psychiatry at Johns Hopkins.

From that unmatched clinical base, Grof drew a radical new cartography of the human psyche. His books — from Realms of the Human Unconscious and Beyond the Brain to The Cosmic Game and Psychology of the Future — described how consciousness extends far beyond the biographical, through the profound imprint of biological birth (his famous perinatal matrices) into the transpersonal realms of the mystics. With Abraham Maslow and colleagues he co-founded the field of transpersonal psychology; with his late wife Christina he coined the concept of "spiritual emergency," reframing many psychological crises as potential breakthroughs rather than breakdowns. And when psychedelics were outlawed, the Grofs — during his fourteen years as scholar-in-residence at the Esalen Institute — developed Holotropic Breathwork: a legal doorway to the same healing depths, using nothing but accelerated breathing, evocative music, and focused bodywork. The word he coined for it says everything: holotropic — "moving toward wholeness."

Honoured with the Václav Havel Foundation's VISION 97 Award and celebrated in the 2020 documentary The Way of the Psychonaut — companion to his two-volume life's-work encyclopedia of the same name — Grof shows no sign of stopping. Since marrying the psychologist and artist Brigitte Grof in 2016, he has travelled and taught across the world with her, and in 2020 the couple launched the international Grof® Legacy Training, authorising teachers worldwide to carry the work forward — from which, characteristically, the Grofs take no profit, believing the work "belongs to the world." Now ninety-five, still writing, still teaching, he remains what he has been for seventy years: the calm, rigorous elder statesman of the deep psyche, living proof that the exploration of consciousness can be both a science and a lifelong adventure toward wholeness.