Appointment with Cary Sparks

Cary Sparks, Director of the Institute for Holotropics and Grof Transpersonal Training, has been supporting people in their inner journeys for over 35 years. She is committed  to holding space for those going through personal transformation of all sorts.

Cary is also available for consultations with training participants; these can be used toward the consultation requirement for certification.

She particularly welcomes the opportunity to connect with anyone facing their own or loved ones’ illness or dementia, and to share her experience with a partner who courageously chose a death with dignity.

Steps for setting up your consultation:
1. Schedule your appointment using the button to the left
2. The cost of your 60 minute appointment is $95.  You will receive an email with link options to pay for your session.
3. You will receive separate emails confirming your appointment, payment information, and, closer to the appointment, a Zoom invitation.

The Art of Living and Dying: A Dance to the Music of Time

Join us for an in-depth exploration of the fascinating human journey, from conception to death and rebirth.

In embarking on this adventure, we may begin to “DANCE” with the music of time, rather than moving through life, resisting the flow toward death.

Such a shift gives us the opportunity to fulfill our deepest life purposes, and let go consciously of what keeps us from embracing this crucial process of transformation.

By viewing life and death through the lens of Holotropic Paradigm, we are able to explore, in depth, the triple dynamic and experience of death-birth-rebirth.

We will draw upon some of the world’s leading paradigms of the death/rebirth process, including:

–  The work of Stephen Levine and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
–  The shamanic practice of working with mortality
–  The contributions of Ralph Metzner and Timothy Leary, including their references to
the Tibetan Book of the Dead

We will also explore the fascinating and powerful impact of near-death experiences on our everyday experience of living.  This unique journey in facing our mortality offers us a profound opportunity to enrich our own unique life journey.

The process will be deeply experiential. In addition to Holotropic Breathwork® sessions, the week’s inner adventures will involve creative exercises, including art, as well as participation in other modalities of psychospiritual journeying.

Registration materials

The Spiritual Quest, Attachment, and Addiction

New ways to look at psychology and spirituality are offering exciting possibilities in the recovery movement, both for individual seekers and for those who work in the treatment field. This module explores a whole continuum, from the idea of addiction as an extreme form of attachment, which affects everyone and which is crucial to spiritual seekers of all practices, to the more articulate forms of addiction: substance, process, relationship, and more. Through theory, discussion and experiential exercises, we’ll look at:

  • The disease paradigm of recovery;
  • The wellness paradigm and the transpersonal recovery center;
  • Implications of perinatal and transpersonal dimensions for recovery;
  • The 12 steps as a world yoga;
  • Addiction as spiritual emergency;
  • Addiction as shamanic crisis;
  • Recovery as a mystery school;
  • Psychedelics and recovery;
  • Recovery and the feminine;
  • Addiction from the homeopathic perspective;
  • Recovery as death/rebirth;
  • Addiction and the global crisis, and more.

Participants will have the opportunity to experience Holotropic Breathwork, a powerful approach to self-exploration, transformation, and healing that combines breathing, evocative music, and release work to explore the deeper dimensions of the psyche. This workshop will be useful to both laypersons and professionals seeking a more authentic and fulfilling lifestyle.

This will be a very experiential workshop. Besides the breathwork itself, all of the teaching is geared to participants having a direct experience of their own journey. We will work with dance, artwork, film, and other integration practices to engage the holotropic principles in a very personal, embodied way.

Registration forms

The Holotropic Paradigm: The Psyche, the Inner Healer, and Moving Toward Wholeness

This module offers an exciting exploration of the philosophy, principles, and strategies underlying the experience and practice of Holotropic Breathwork.

Topics covered include:

  1. the power of the Inner Healer and moving towards wholeness;
  2. presence: the disciplines required to become an effective Holotropic Breathwork practitioner;
  3. COEX’s: how the Inner Healer orchestrates transformation through our experiences of the psyche;
  4. exploration of the frontiers of the psyche through Movie Yoga;
  5. session stories: valuable teachings from practitioners through their work with breathers;
  6. open forums focusing on every facet of the Holotropic experience;
  7. dance, medication, music journeys and nature celebration.

During the course of the six-day workshop, each participant will experience two sessions of HB as an experiencer, or “breather,” and two sessions as a partner, or “sitter”. Besides the breathwork experiences and the topics covered (described below), there will be art, music, dancing, film, and integration during the workshop.

Registration for for The Holotropic Paradigm Tasmania 2019

Sacred Geometry, Mandala, & Consciousness: New Frontiers of the Holotropic Paradigm

Sacred Geometry is not only a valuable tool for activating deep inner experience, it is a language expressing the interconnectedness of reality. The same patterns of order continually occur at various levels of existence. For example, a simple everyday daisy displays beautiful five-fold geometry. Similarly, this very same pattern forms human DNA and even maps the orbit of Venus around our Earth.

When you meditate upon Sacred Geometric shapes and create Mandalas, you interact with this language. This process illuminates the patterns of the creative principle herself. These higher orders can be revealed through the shapes, invoking a deep experience of their transformative power.

Combining Mandalas with Holotropic Breathwork in the same workshop is a special kind of sacred marriage. The breath takes you inside of yourself, and connects you with your own personal higher ordering principle. This inner healing wisdom is imbued with similar qualities inherent in Sacred Geometry. They both express the archetype of wholeness.

As above, So below (Hermetic axiom)

In addition to Holotropic Breathwork, meditation, dance, ritual, and music journeys, you will:

  • Participate in the creation of a group sand mandala with the tools and techniques developed by Tibetan Buddhist monks
  • Embark upon the Threefold Mandala Process
  • Experience an active guided visualisation combining pattern, focus and breath, built upon sacred geometric archetypes and accompanied by music
  • discover a ‘Grand Pattern’ underlying all of existence, from the shape of our DNA to the movements of the planets and the form of the galaxy
  • Experience how sacred geometry can be harnessed to open a pathway between your everyday awareness and the deeper, hidden aspects of your being

“Regarding Sacred Geometry: You don’t have to understand the ‘geometry’ to experience the ‘sacred’ ”      — Geoff Fitzpatrick

Registration form for Sacred Geometry Tasmania 2019

From past participants:
– Geoff is beautiful person, I like his approach and humor, his teaching is very fluent but also his answering to participants questions and comments, there is a lot of empowerment in his style. He reminds me of Tav (and I love him) :). – Martina, Croatia

amazing energy fields displayed – great insights, exceeded my expectations by far – very good caring and guiding. – Philip, Berlin

– This was one of my favorite modules. – Cielle, Iowa
– The mandala work was fascinating and very profound. – Jane, Ottawa

An article by Geoff on the benefits and beauty of mandala work can be found here: Exploring inside on the outside – my journey with Mandalas.

Geoff Fitzpatrick

Geoff Fitzpatrick B.A. has studied psychology in Trinity College Dublin, and is a Graduate of the Milltown Institute of Theology where he studied spiritual enrichment. He has an active interest in modern consciousness research. He has been constructing mandalas for 10 years and is driven to promote the transformative potential of these sacred circles.

“I have two great passions, one is the exploration of consciousness the other is the construction of mandalas. In effect these are two sides of the same coin. The first time I saw a mandala was about 25 years ago. A group of Tibetan Monks came to Trinity College Dublin. They spent a week creating a magnificent Kalachakra sand mandala. I was mesmerised by the experience, the colours, the shapes and the sound of the chak purs are as vivid in my memory today as they were all that time ago. It was eight years later in that very same university whilst studying psychology I came across mandalas for a second time. I studied the work of Carl Jung and Stanislav Grof both of whom saw the mandala as a powerful psychotherapeutic tool. The depths of the psyche that I touch when constructing mandalas are similar in tonality to those from breathwork. I have borrowed heavily from the map of consciousness drafted by Stan Grof to navigate my way through the experiences activated whilst constructing mandalas.

But the greatest teachers for me have been the shapes themselves – The geometric symbols that date
back into our prehistory and their origins dwell in the very fabric of what creates the universe itself. Nothing has exposed me to more mystery or opened me to greater depths of inner experience than working with these symbols. The sum total of my seeking, the knowledge gleaned from the courses, workshops of all kinds, powerful peak experiences and exposure to enlightened teachers can be distilled down to one very simple thing…….I believe there is a greater wisdom available to us at all times. The thing is, this higher wisdom is easier to experience than it is to explain.”

Celtic Shamanism: The Elemental Wheel and the Ancestral Legacy*

As we travel through life, we are greatly impacted by our environment: culturally, physiologically and through our family lineage. Thus we are shaped, thus we grow. Often, this environmental impact remains unconsciously active within us, influencing our choices and our experience of life.

Within this workshop, we will explore our ancestral legacy – a legacy shaped by the experiences, emotional life, gifts/skills and trauma of our ancestors, both near and distant. Working with the circle of life – inception/birth; youth; middle years and old age – we will track our ancestors in our physical, mental/emotional and spiritual bodies. By doing so, we seek to heal, enrich and awaken to our true selves.

Using shamanic journeying, we will connect to our recent and deep ancestors, finding guides to aid us in understanding the legacy that we carry within. We will delve into the patterns that arise from that legacy and explore the means to resolve that which is unresolved through journeys, pathworking, movement and sound work.

The beauty of this module is that besides the four deeply healing holotropic breathwork sessions (2 as a breather and 2 as a sitter) shamanic journeying will be experienced in a way that you can take this skill back home with you and practice there as well to integrate and foster further transformation.

Registration information and forms

Cait Branigan

Cait Branigan is an Ordained Priestess of the Western Mystery Tradition, a Bean Feasa (Shamanic Practioner) and Healer working within the traditions of Ireland. She works with individuals for healing at her centre in Co. Wexford. She also works with and teaches groups in Ireland and abroad. An essential part of her work is in the area of Women’s Mysteries in which she has conducted workshops and ceremonies around the country. She also facilitates sweat lodges within the Irish Tradition and performs Rites of Passage within the community. She is an Ovate with the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids and a member of the Fellowship of Isis.

Added note:  A truly mystical yet grounded practitioner, what Cait brings to GTT modules is absolutely unique and hugely important. After experiencing her work personally, we recognized that she is one of those special people we rarely come upon – a teacher of great intelligence, power and wisdom, with a true feminine shamanic perspective.  Cait’s depth and ability, mind and heart, add another powerful dimension to the deep inner work we do with Holotropic Breathwork. Cait’s has taught at several GTT modules (only once before in the U.S.) and previous attendees have been deeply appreciative of the opportunity to be with, and learn from, her.

Celtic Shamanism: The Elemental Wheel and the Ancestral Legacy

As we travel through life, we are greatly impacted by our environment: culturally, physiologically and through our family lineage. Thus we are shaped, thus we grow. Often, this environmental impact remains unconsciously active within us, influencing our choices and our experience of life.

Within this workshop, we will explore our ancestral legacy – a legacy shaped by the experiences, emotional life, gifts/skills and trauma of our ancestors, both near and distant. Working with the circle of life – inception/birth; youth; middle years and old age – we will track our ancestors in our physical, mental/emotional and spiritual bodies. By doing so, we seek to heal, enrich and awaken to our true selves.

Using shamanic journeying, we will connect to our recent and deep ancestors, finding guides to aid us in understanding the legacy that we carry within. We will delve into the patterns that arise from that legacy and explore the means to resolve that which is unresolved through journeys, pathworking, movement and sound work.

The beauty of this module is that besides the four deeply healing holotropic breathwork sessions (2 as a breather and 2 as a sitter) shamanic journeying will be experienced in a way that you can take this skill back home with you and practice there as well to integrate and foster further transformation.

Cait Branigan

Cait Branigan is an Ordained Priestess of the Western Mystery Tradition, a Bean Feasa (Shamanic Practioner) and Healer working within the traditions of Ireland. She works with individuals for healing at her centre in Co. Wexford. She also works with and teaches groups in Ireland and abroad. An essential part of her work is in the area of Women’s Mysteries in which she has conducted workshops and ceremonies around the country. She also facilitates sweat lodges within the Irish Tradition and performs Rites of Passage within the community. She is an Ovate with the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids and a member of the Fellowship of Isis.

Added note:  A truly mystical yet grounded practitioner, what Cait brings to GTT modules is absolutely unique and hugely important. After experiencing her work personally, we recognized that she is one of those special people we rarely come upon – a teacher of great intelligence, power and wisdom, with a true feminine shamanic perspective.  Cait’s depth and ability, mind and heart, add another powerful dimension to the deep inner work we do with Holotropic Breathwork. Cait’s has taught at several GTT modules, and previous attendees have been deeply appreciative of the opportunity to be with, and learn from, her.

The Holotropic Paradigm: The Psyche, the Inner Healer, and Moving Toward Wholeness

This module offers an exciting exploration of the philosophy, principles, and strategies underlying the experience and practice of Holotropic Breathwork.

Topics covered include:

  1. the power of the Inner Healer and moving towards wholeness;
  2. presence: the disciplines required to become an effective Holotropic Breathwork practitioner;
  3. COEX’s: how the Inner Healer orchestrates transformation through our experiences of the psyche;
  4. exploration of the frontiers of the psyche through Movie Yoga;
  5. session stories: valuable teachings from practitioners through their work with breathers;
  6. open forums focusing on every facet of the Holotropic experience;
  7. dance, medication, music journeys and nature celebration.

During the course of the six-day workshop, each participant will experience two sessions of HB as an experiencer, or “breather,” and two sessions as a partner, or “sitter”. Besides the breathwork experiences and the topics covered (described below), there will be art, music, dancing, film, and integration during the workshop.