Patient, capacious, loving, alive . When you meet Elisabetta Corbieri you get these feelings. But above all you can feel the beauty of having in front of someone who does not believe they possess scepters or hold crystal balls.
This interview took place on a lawn, in the presence of the sun and some trees that gave us deeper breaths. It is from the breathing that we started, since Elisabetta, together with her activity as a psychologist and psychotherapist, has been conducting holotropic breathing seminars since 2001.
After graduating in psychology, he obtained his specialization in clinical psychology at the Institute of Clinical Psychology of the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Siena. He worked for a few years in a Mental Hygiene Center in Rome and at the Institute of Clinical Psychology in Siena, in various Higher Institutes in Rome with Health Education projects and prevention of psychological distress also on the web.
Since 1994 he has been working privately as a Jungian training psychotherapist . In 1999 he became aware of the existence of the Holotropic technique and came into contact with the GTT ( Grof Transpersonal Training ) in the United States where he obtained training and certification for Holotropic therapy.
Experiencing this therapy is one thing, read another, without exception for this article. At least it should be clarified that the technique was brought to light by Stanislav Grof, a Freudian-trained psychiatrist who developed the technique starting from his studies on the psychedelic discovery known as LSD .
If we take up the words of Grof: " I discovered that in America - Grof continues - Freud and the mystic did not give problems, but that for the LSD they went to jail, like Timothy Leary ". Thus, the Prague psychiatrist developed a series of techniques, called "holotropic" (meaning "towards totality") and based on breathing, capable of causing "non-ordinary states of consciousness" (quotation from an article appeared in the Corriere della sera, 15.4.00, by Cesare Medail).
To participate in the seminar, fill out a form with basic information on your health, a brief meeting or interview with Elizabeth. The experience lasts two days, in one of you you breathe and in the other you assist another member of the group. During the two days of work the conscience changes through the combined use of accelerated breathing, evocative music and a work on the body to free up any blocked energy.
The work allows access to new levels of understanding of oneself and of reality, drawing on one's creative, evolutionary and spiritual potential.
I chose to interview Elisabetta because I can say from her own experience that in her seminars she becomes care, strength, grace, listening. Dance with immense presence and moves with active senses among the participants, keeping watchful observation, divided attention. It feels safe. Something predisposes itself to ritual. In the room the conditions for going deeper naturally arise.
Holding the holotropic breathing seminars requires a remarkable presence, it seemed to me. Have you always had this ability? Has fear ever taken over?
When I started I was certainly more insecure, I was much more attentive even to the people who accessed the groups. Now the management is more immediate, I manage to move well even between the various sensations, for example of pain or suffocation, that one lives who participates.
A person participates in a holotropic seminar then returns to the incessant rhythm of the "crisis", to apparent solicitations, to people, to technology. How do you reconcile this frenzy with the rituality inherent in the holotropic experience? How do you guard the profound change that this technique triggers?
It seems to me that things are changing a little bit slowly .
Perhaps the strong pressure given by the frenetic pace goes hand in hand with a need on the other side of inner research, regarding the availability of people to look for something that helps them.
Surely something is changing; also from a theoretical acceptance point of view with respect to holotropic respiration. I mean that there is more openness to the fact that we work through non-ordinary states of conscience.
Let's talk about holotropic withdrawal symptoms. I attend a holotropic seminar, more within the inner world, develop a dependency and enroll in all the seminars scheduled in the calendar. Did these cases happen to you?
I've had people come in "fixed". But then at some point they stop coming. Some are constant over time, but they know which cadence to give and this is a different, conscious discourse. Others sign up for all the seminars but then, in the long run, they no longer come.
In holotropics I tend to leave people free, also because many do not follow them in therapy and there is no comparison in this sense.
The frequency of the sessions is decided by those who experience and the frequency then binds to the importance of personal work.
Who do you think you can solve all the inconveniences with some holotropic seminar what do you answer?
I don't believe in short roads. Okay, in sporadic cases "miracles" can occur, let's say so, but here I do not believe in the streets where there is not a job and a deep process of some kind.
Above all I do not believe in the streets where it is assumed that someone or something does the job for you and the alleged recovery would imply putting life in the hands of another individual.
Last year, after having had my first holotropic experience, I happened to talk about it with a neuropsychiatrist who had no direct experience of it, just some notion here and there. He mentioned the risk of a possible dependence on altered states of consciousness. To put it more simply: I become a tiger during holotropic breathing, then I become trapped in this experience and lose my lucidity, identifying myself too much with that lived sensation. What about that?
I've seen so many take animal forms and not only, even among those I follow in therapy, and I don't think any of this has ever happened. It may have happened that a person who had "crumpled" during breathing, physically twisted and felt some muscle contraction in the following days, but it is a normal physiological response.
Obviously the reading of what happens depends on the degree of awareness . It may happen that you "become" a tiger during breathing - in many cases, in the holotropic, animal conditions are relived - and you experience the power of that animal, which becomes aware of how this strength lives in you. Contact that kind of energy that you can then find in your inner dimension.
I have often wondered why so many people end up in the animal kingdom, as it is also true that so many reports made me think of human evolution. Without excluding also the planetary evolution, given reports of big bangs, stellar visions, planetary suspensions that refer to the historical ages, to the evolutionary passage.
Do you specialize in Sand Play Therapy, what is it?
I have been working for 3 or 4 years, relatively little. It is a therapy that uses sand as a vehicle, an element that has considerable healing power and develops various creative possibilities. Inside a blue box is placed sand which is then wet in the various phases.
Objects are made available to the patient and small indications are given, but the person operates in absolute freedom of expression, provided that the sand cannot be thrown out of the container. The sand has to do with the mother and over the years the therapist learns to read well the messages that the person leaves.
If you want, sand is like a Rorschach test ; to those who have experience and knowledge it allows us to read what is in the unconscious or at least the dominant, to lay the foundations for a diagnosis. Until a few years ago it was a widely used therapy at the Bambin Gesù Hospital, with impressive results.
Together with the seminars you carry on your work as a psychologist. Is the language "milk expired" or is it still a valid tool to help on the human side? Can psychological distress really count on verbal help?
Words are a prerequisite for people to have access to a level of knowledge . Several people come to me and have no knowledge of my own profession, they don't know what a psychologist really does. I don't care about working leaving them in the dark, I explain a lot, I reach out to put in their useful tools.
I worked a lot on the internet, in particular on Psiconline.it, the first portal created with the aim of providing free support to users. I was confronted with all sorts of questions - anonymity allows us to express even more special and intimate feelings - and even in those cases I tried to return a minimum of tools that could guide users.
How does holotropic breathing compare to meditation?
I don't think we can make a single speech. In principle, I think I can say that the final work of holotropics and the depths that are available through meditation can lead to this unusual, very powerful quiet.
I believe in the work of holotropics we go more to "fish" in psychic material . About the outcomes of the two techniques, I have experience of different people I follow in therapy who have found themselves practicing meditation using it as a "cork", something that contains, puts down, compresses.
Last question. Is the psychologist more patient or capacious?
I would say roomy . I strongly believe in the possibility of a psychologist or a psychologist to make themselves capacious. And in love, I believe in love.
