Holotropic breathwork, just like the many other techniques and discoveries of Stanislav Grof , the American psychiatrist born in Czechoslovakia in 1931, had its beginnings in his native city of Prague.

Already towards the end of the 1950s, in a clinic of the psychiatric hospital in the Bohnice district, Grof had started to conduct therapeutic experiments using LSD, a psychedelic substance produced by the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz. It was during sessions with volunteers that the psychiatrist noted that in the final phase of the experiment, when the substance’s psychoactive effects started to wear off, some of the participants would start to breathe heavily. After discussing this with them, he found out that they did so