---
title: "Dragon Style, Rebounding and Hermetics: An interview with Jon Younghusband"
url: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/dragon-style-rebounding-and-hermetics-an-interview-with-jon-younghusband/
date: 2026-01-27
modified: 2026-07-03
lang: en
author: "Perseus Arcane Academy"
description: "Introduction It is always great to have the opportunity to ask questions of experienced internal martial arts practitioners who also work with the Hermetic arts. Today we are joined by..."
categories:
  - "Internal Martial Arts"
  - "Interviews"
tags:
  - "Energy"
  - "Franz Bardon"
  - "Hermetics"
  - "Meditation"
image: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/ChatGPT-Image-Jan-27-2026-05_59_56-PM-1024x683.png
word_count: 3246
---

# Dragon Style, Rebounding and Hermetics: An interview with Jon Younghusband

## Introduction

It is always great to have the opportunity to ask questions of experienced internal martial arts practitioners who also work with the Hermetic arts. Today we are joined by Jon Younghusband. Through his depth of experience, Jon has a wonderful way of explaining how martial arts and embodied training can have a profound effect on our cultivation, energy work, and Hermetic practice. For anyone who has ever wondered why some of us emphasise bodywork in conjunction with Hermetics, Jon explores this relationship beautifully in this interview.

We hope to hear more from Jon in the future and to dive deeper into some of these subjects. If you would like to learn more about Jon and follow his work, links are included at the end of this post. Finally, if you enjoy this interview, please leave a comment and consider sharing it with those who may find this information useful and inspiring.

**About Jon Younghusband** - Courtesy of [https://energyalignment.co.uk/](https://energyalignment.co.uk/)

I’m Jon Younghusband — an Internal Arts teacher in Sussex, a life coach, and a guide on a path of alignment. With two decades of deep practice spanning internal martial arts, energetic awareness, and life coaching, I’ve developed a unique blend of skills that help people move with clarity, feel with depth, and live with purpose.

Although I began in Traditional Chinese Martial Arts (Xing Yi), I later realised that I had been practising in delusion for many years when I found my internal arts teacher, Sifu [Tom Braithwaite](http://www.dmaa.co.uk) of the Dragon Martial Arts Association.

Until that point, I genuinely believed I was training an internal art. I had discipline, commitment, long hours of standing practice behind me and the belief that it would all reveal itself in time — but it was far from what true internal development actually was.

Training with Sifu Tom quickly revealed the real meaning and power of internal martial arts. Through studying Dragon Style Kung Fu, Yang Style Tai Chi, Qigong, and Liu He Ba Fa, I eventually became an instructor within the DMAA, continuing the lineage of these traditional systems.

Over time, I discovered that these arts offered far more than self-defence or movement. They revealed a profound connection between body, energy, emotion, and consciousness. This is where Hermetics entered my path.

That’s when I created the **School of Energy Alignment, **to expand people’s understanding of this deeper relationship, and to help bridge internal martial arts, Hermetics, energetic cultivation, meditation, and embodied personal development into a coherent path of alignment.

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![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/image-2.png)Image Credit: [https://energyalignment.co.uk/](https://energyalignment.co.uk/)

## Early Days

**PAA: Can you share how you started out with the Martial Arts and how that journey led you to systems like Dragon Style and qigong methods like Xuan Gong?**

My first ever exposure to martial arts was actually through Jiu-Jitsu at school. I took it very seriously for several years and was deeply drawn to the two-person work; the applications, rolling, and embodied problem-solving that happens when you’re really engaged with a training partner.

That early training gave me my first real insight into how martial arts can be a profound vehicle for inner development, not just physical skill. As a teenager, it gave me clarity about who I was, what my capabilities were, and equally what my limitations were at that stage. Of course I didnt realise that at the time, but I could sense the confidence it built in my body and in my mind.

After leaving school I had a couple of years away from martial arts while working overseas and getting myself settled, figuring out what I wanted to do with my adult life. Eventually I moved to the north of England to study in music, and it was there that I encountered traditional Chinese martial arts for the first time.

I began training Xing Yi at a small kung fu school with a gym attached to it. I trained dilligently, a lot of standing postures, a lot of physical conditioning, a lot of repetition. At the time, I genuinely believed I was studying an internal art. I had the belief that through practice, all would be revealed to me. An. unfortunatelyvcommon limitation in the internal arts scene.

Everything shifted when I met Sifu Tom from the Dragon Martial Arts Association. For the first time, I experienced the difference between internal and external martial arts in my own body. That encounter fundamentally changed my definition of what an internal art actually is.

From that point on, my focus moved decisively into Tai Chi, Dragon Style Kung Fu, and internal training. I’ve now been dedicated to that path for almost twenty years, and teaching for over ten. During that period, I also studied Liu He Ba Fa, often called “Water Boxing”, along with the associated Qigong sets, all of which adding more layers to my practice.

Dragon Style itself is a traditional Hakka system developed by Lam Yiu Guai . It emphasises fast, explosive movements, short-range striking power, and quick, agile footwork. The core principles are to 'stick' and 'blend' with your opponent. As soon as contact is made, you remain in continuous connection, through grabbing, grappling, Qi Na type methods, and even working directly with the fascial web to sieze the whole body.

One of the hallmarks of the system is “Mor Kiu” a sequence of fast twisting grabs and strikes that can be repeated from multiple angles and heights. The strategic idea is to envelop the opponent like a Chinese dragon: Once contact is established, you stay extremely close, wrapped around them, denying them the space needed to generate force from external power.

Dragon Style is also internally sophisticated in ways that aren’t widely recognised. The forms massage the internal organs in very specific patterns, and they are well balanced according to classical Chinese medicine and elemental theory. Traditionally, it’s considered an extremely healthy system, maintaining strong physical vitality deep into old age.

The style doesn’t include slow meditative forms or standalone Qigong sets in its original structure, but internal power (Jin), and consciousness are trained dynamically. Every strike releases Jin. Every movement expands awareness into space. Consciousness is moved rapidly through the body and environment, rather than cultivated slowly as in seated meditation or Tai Chi.

That said, everyone I’ve taught has moved into Qigong, meditation, and Tai Chi alongside Dragon Style. Those slower, contemplative methods profoundly deepen and stabilise the internal side of the art, even if they’re not formally embedded in the original system.

Partner training has always been central to my path. Our two-person drills focus on internal mechanics rather than brute force or free sparring. We work through five core elements of internal martial application:

- **Chi** — touch 

- **Mor** — blend, or stick

- **Fa** — diffuse or deflect

- **La** — issue power

- **Pek** — strike

The emphasis is on building a connected bridge at the moment of contact, so defence and attack happen simultaneously. On contact, you blend with the opponent, neutralise their power, create an opening, and issue internal power through that opening. Finally, once they are off balance and the matricies opened, we strike.

That experiential understanding of internal power, rather than conceptual knowledge, is what ultimately led me into deeper Qigong, meditation, and Hermetic training later in life. It all grew organically out of those early realisations about what internal arts truly are.

## Influences from Mark Rasmus & Dinesh Kumar

**PAA: What drew you to Sifu Mark Rasmus’s Elastic Force Qi Gong, and how did his methods influence your training after so many years of traditional training?**

Interestingly, I didn’t train Elastic Force Qi Gong directly with Sifu Mark. I trained with one of his senior students, [Sifu Dinesh Kumar](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/life-force-mastery-and-franz-bardons-hermetcis-interview-with-dinesh/). I trained in Hermetics with Sifu Mark though.

I was actually drawn to this system though an intuitive knowing. At the time, I was selling my previous business and consciously stepping into a major life transformation, shifting into energetics as my full-time profession. I kept having this persistent inner knowing that I was going to train with one of Mark’s students. I had no idea who that would be or how it would happen.

The day I accepted an offer on my business, I happened to go onto Mark’s website, not really expecting anything, and there was a small banner at the bottom announcing that Dinesh was running a one-month course in Thailand. It felt immediately right and I booked it straight away.

What made it even stranger is that when I spoke to Pari, who organises the courses, she told me they didn’t know the course had been advertised. Mark had asked Dinesh to run it, but it hadn’t been formally promoted. So they were as surprised that I’d signed up as I was to discover it existed. It had that unmistakable quality of a “fated” convergence. 

I ended up training almost one-to-one with Dinesh: six days a week, eight hours a day. It was intense, precise, and transformative.

What really drew me in was the scientific and Hermetic framing of the internal arts. Instead of practising something for decades and hoping results might emerge one day, this was a clear developmental path for energetic and spiritual cultivation. There was a structure, a feedback loop, and an explicit method for refining consciousness, energy, and embodiment together. This was then blended with real world results and pressure testing.

That alone profoundly changed how I understood internal training.

**PAA: What have been the biggest things you’ve incorporated from Mark Rasmus’s Hermetic approach into your own teaching?**

Mark’s synthesis of Qigong with Franz Bardon’s Hermetic system completely reinvented how I teach.

After spending time in Thailand with Dinesh and Mark, I restructured my entire teaching method and mindset around core Hermetic principles. It’s difficult to articulate how deep the change was, because it didn’t feel like “adding something new.” It felt like remembering how this work should have been framed all along. It was like an awakening of an alignment with the universal principles. 

Having said that, I can summarise it as a shift from technique-led teaching to **principle-led teaching**.

Instead of beginning with physical exercises, we now lead from higher consciousness:

- understand the **Hermetic principles**,

- understand **consciousnessness**,

- understand the **astral  body (ego, belief, emotional)**,

- and working with the **physical body**.

Every exercise, even traditional tendon and structure development from Dragon Style, is now revisited through a three-body lens:

- What is the consciousness doing?

- What is the astral energy doing?

- What is the physical body doing?

We work both **top-down** (principles → consciousness → energy → body)
and **bottom-up** (body → energy → consciousness → principles).

That recursive loop creates a completely different depth of internalisation. The exercises stop being mechanical and become initiatory.

Another major influence from Mark is the **scientific method of internal training**.

All my students now journal. They take ownership of their development. The classes have become less about passively “doing exercises” and more about cultivating a living laboratory of embodied self-experimentation. Students used to turn up to class to practice and I could sense many of them weren't empowered to practice much outside of class. Now, they come to class to learn, and then practice at home to take ownership of the learning. I've seen a huge transformation in all of my students.

## Rebounding, Meditation & Embodiment

**PAA: Rebounding features on your blog. How does it help practitioners across martial arts, Qigong, meditation, and coaching?**

Rebounding is essentially **gym work for consciousness**, **energy, and the physical body** simultaneously.

On the physical level, it develops **biotensegrity**, the elastic, integrated spring-like structure of the body. In martial terms, this makes you spongy, resilient, and elastic. When someone pushes into you, it feels like pushing into a trampoline, their force simply returns to them.

On the energetic level, rebounding fortifies the Astral body. You begin to feel your energy saturating your tissues, floating the bones, and forming a coherent energetic sheath around the body. Which is, of course, controled by the mind.

On the mental level, it develops clarity, focus, and the ability to “throw the mind”, to project consciousness and feel energy move with it.

What’s less obvious, but equally important, is what rebounding does for meditation.

I’d meditated for many years before training Elastic Force, but I hadn’t fully connected internal martial mechanics with seated meditation. Dinesh helped me realise that meditation isn’t physicaly passive, it’s **active embodiment**.

When you energise the biotensegrity of the body while meditating: the body and matricies open, muscular tension dissolves, the posture stabilises, and sitting becomes effortless.

That one insight tripled the amount of time I could sit comfortably in meditation over night. It removed the physical limitation that usually ends people’s practice long before the mind reaches depth.

It was a complete game-changer.

## Co-Active Coaching & Hermetic Self-Transformation

**PAA: As a certified Co-Active life coach through the Co-Active Training Institute, how have your own experiences with overcoming self-limiting patterns informed your work with students?**

One of the most powerful things I’ve taken from Hermetics, especially when blended with the Co-Active coaching model, is the realisation that we are not fixed identities.

We have the capacity to choose who we want to be, how we want to be, and what we want to do in our reality. That might sound obvious intellectually, but when it’s embodied as a lived truth, it becomes transformational.

The essence of both Hermetics and Co-Active is **empowerment through conscious choice**. Making decisions not from fear, conditioning, or habit, but from a higher consciousness or higher-self perspective.

That begins with very precise inner inquiry:

- What kind of consciousness do I want to live from?

- What intellectual or creative activity do I want to pursue?

- What beliefs do I need to develop, or release, in order to fulfil my deeper purpose?

- And, what can I do to make those changes manifest in the physical world?

When you view consciousness as **energy and information**, or as the dance between **formlessness and form**, you can start to deconstruct exactly where you are in your life right now.

You can see clearly which aspects of your identity are inherited, which are conditioned, which are habitual, and which are genuinely chosen and in alignment with a right path.

That perspective alone opens an entirely new horizon of possibility. You stop experiencing yourself as trapped by personality, history, or circumstance. You begin to recognise that change is not only possible it’s a natural part of evolution.

Through my own two decades of internal arts, Hermetic training, and coaching, I’ve repeatedly had to confront self-limiting patterns, unconscious belief cycles, and emotional structures held in the body. And what became clear is that lasting transformation doesn’t happen just at the level of thinking.

It happens across three interlinked dimensions:

- **Consciousness** — narrative, identity, and perspective

- **Energy (the astral body)** — emotion, ego and energetic drivers

- **Embodiment** — posture, action, nervous-system imprint

We all understand that our thoughts regulate our emotions and our emotions control how we act and the posture we adopt. They are all intrinsically linked, and when all three are addressed together, change becomes coherent rather than fragmented.

In practical coaching terms, this means we don’t just ask, *“What's next?”*
We ask:

- *Who are you being?*

- *What energetic patterns sustain you?*

- *What do you want to do?*

From there, clients create a conscious roadmap for becoming. They stop seeing themselves as broken or incomplete, and move towards fulfillment. They stop waiting for external permission to change and take empowered ownership of their life. They stop mistaking identity for destiny.

They begin to experience themselves as a creative interface between form and formlessness.

## Energy Alignment, Purpose & Guarding Against Delusion

**PAA: Over 20 years of blending martial arts, Hermetics, and coaching, what has been one of the most challenging aspects of your own energy alignment journey?**

The most challenging aspect of my journey has been learning how to live in balance between **hard practice and soft practice**, between **form and formlessness**, between **yin and yang**.

Learning when to apply structure and when to let everything fall away has been far more difficult than mastering any single technique or system. Especially when what needs to fall away isn’t just habits or methods, but deep beliefs, possessions, identities, relationships, or entire life structures.

That process is hard because it goes directly against the grain of what society conditions us to do. We’re trained to accumulate, to stabilise, to cling, to define ourselves through roles and achievements. The deeper spiritual path often asks for the opposite: subtraction rather than addition.

At a deeper level, it’s always a question of finding the balance point between the physical realm and the spiritual realm. And then letting go of whatever is in resistance to your true path.

Everyone’s true path is unique, but at its core the path is always an **evolution of consciousness**, a gradual ebbing toward greater coherence, clarity, and ultimately toward pure consciousness itself.

That’s a very difficult thing to navigate, because pure consciousness is subtle. It’s not loud. It’s not dramatic. If you can’t feel your way through it, you don’t know whether what you’re practising is moving you closer to alignment or quietly pulling you off-course.

One of my clearest lessons in this came from my early training in internal martial arts.

I genuinely believed I was on the internal path. I practised an internal style. I spent years standing in postures for hours at a time. I was disciplined and committed. But in reality, I was training an internal style in a purely external way. I had a strong self-belief that I was on the right path, and I was wrong.

That experience taught me something essential: one of the great dangers of any spiritual or internal discipline is **delusion**.

Feeling spiritual isn’t the same as becoming more conscious. Doing internal-looking practices isn’t the same as cultivating internal power. You need a way to reality-test your path.

This is where Mark Rasmus’s method of journaling became invaluable to me.

Journaling makes development real.

When you write something down, you externalise it. When you read it back weeks or months later, you can see whether there’s genuine evolution or just conceptual recycling.

I’ve had practices that felt powerful and enjoyable in the moment. I journaled them. Then I came back weeks later and realised: *this is fun, but it’s not actually taking me where I need to go.* So I dropped them.

I’ve also rediscovered practices I’d learned and then neglected. When I reread old journals, it was obvious: *this was golden; this was foundational; this needs to be reintegrated.*

What all of this has taught me is that the spiritual path is not a fixed doctrine or a static system. It’s a continual process of weaving between form and formlessness, staying on the path, and guarding against delusion.

Meditation, Qigong, Hermetics, and internal martial arts continue to evolve my perception of purpose and presence because they constantly bring me back into contact with what is actually aligned, rather than what merely feels good, familiar, or spiritually interesting.

The real work, for me, has been learning how to feel whether a practice is truly on point or subtly pulling me away from my own resonance and life path.

So the path, for me, has been about continually finding that balance point between hard and soft practice, between structure and intuition, between discipline and surrender, and then empowering myself to actually do what I know is of benefit.

Staying on the path isn’t about clinging to a system or an identity. It’s about staying honest with your own experience, testing your practices against reality, and being willing to let go of whatever no longer serves the deeper evolution of your consciousness.

**PAA: Very grateful for your time in answering these and sharing your experiences.**

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## Learn More

##### The School of Energy Alignment

##### Jons Facebook

##### Jons YouTube

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