Subject grouping in the Essays & Articles archive.
A Conscious Choice column from July 2007. Pinchbeck traces the childhood certainty that something extraordinary was about to be revealed, the shock of learning that maturity meant accepting constraint, and argues that a revival of shamanic practice may be what is needed to meet what presses in from beyond the edges of the interpreted world.
Reported for The Guardian in 2003. The piece follows ibogaine from Howard Lotsof’s 1962 discovery of its anti-addictive effect through its US criminalization to treatment clinics run by Martin Polanco in Rosarito, Mexico and Marc Emery in Vancouver, and recounts Pinchbeck’s own Bwiti initiation with iboga in Gabon.
A Village Voice article from 1999 on Stanislav Grof’s Holotropic Breathwork. It covers Grof’s seminar at the New York Open Center, his earlier LSD research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, and the claim, seconded by facilitator Oliver Miller, that accelerated breathing reaches the same nonordinary states as psychedelics.
A short first-person sidebar for The Village Voice, 1998, recounting a guided ayahuasca session. Pinchbeck describes green visions of plants and vines, bit-mapped patterns, a sense of the brew scanning his body, and mild vomiting, and concludes that the New Age setting left the experience tantalizing rather than life-changing.
The Village Voice, 1998. The article follows Myron Stolaroff’s New York visit for The Secret Chief, the first book published by MAPS, and a Lindesmith Center talk with psychologist Richard Yensen, tracing how LSD psychotherapy, including alcoholism work under Stanislav Grof in Maryland, was shut down after the 1965 ban.