---
title: "Unlocking Inner Transformation: How Devaraj’s Bioenergetics and Cube of Space Transform Personal Growth"
url: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/unlocking-inner-transformation-how-devarajs-bioenergetics-and-cube-of-space-transform-personal-growth/
date: 2025-06-12
modified: 2026-07-03
lang: en
author: "Perseus Arcane Academy"
description: "Introduction In this interview Devaraj Sandberg answers my questions abou this path, practice and teachings. He is the author of multiple courses, workshops, and books with his latest being Opening..."
categories:
  - "Interviews"
image: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/guardian-2018-400x400-1.jpg
word_count: 9224
---

# Unlocking Inner Transformation: How Devaraj’s Bioenergetics and Cube of Space Transform Personal Growth

## Introduction

In this interview Devaraj Sandberg answers my questions abou this path, practice and teachings. He is the author of multiple courses, workshops, and books with his latest being *Opening the Body with the Cube of Space*. This is a great interview for those who like to work with the body, to realse the energies, emotions and traumas that are stored within. This of course connects deeply with the subconscious and takes a student on a wild ride. I hope you enjoy this interview and if you would like to learn more about Devaraj or follow his work you can find the details below:

##### Bioenergetics

##### Esoteric Writings

##### Substack

##### Devaraj YouTube Channel

---

# Interview with Devaraj

## Section 1: Personal Journey, Early Influences

**PAA: You have a diverse background in therapy and spiritual practice. You trained in an intensive four-year program at the Humaniversity in Holland and spent 17 years living at Osho Leela in Dorset, where you led countless workshops. What initially drew you to body-based therapy and communities like Osho? And how did those formative experiences shape the approach you use in your work today?**

Well, what initially drew me to do therapy, basically, was just a sense in my late thirties that my life was pretty fucked up. But I’d kind of gravitated back to street level from squatting and being a dodgy character, living in London in all sorts of bad places and hanging out with not really great people. If I didn’t take some action, then my life wasn’t going to get any better. In fact, it was going to get a great deal worse. And I’d had some kind of spiritual Kundalini kind of experience when I was about 33 in Thailand, which I hadn’t recognised as such because I didn’t know anything about that stuff. But then about five years later, towards the end of my thirties, I started to get interested in meditation and therapy and things like that. That led me to start to seek out therapists in London. And I found a lot of it a bit mindy and stuff. And I thought I’m way too armoured and protected for that. I need something a bit more kind of meaty and strong. And slowly, I got a connection to the Osho people. That was such a strong connection. It wasn’t so much about Osho, who had already passed away by then, but more about that there was a lot of therapy around the Osho scene. And if you wanted to be part of the gang, you just had to do a ton of really intense therapy. And I was just in a place where I really wanted to make change quickly, so I jumped into that.

After a few years and also at some point moving into an Osho community, I started to get feedback that I should become a therapist, which I hadn’t considered before. I was an electrician for a long time after I moved away from being a bit of a criminal. So I started, I thought, therapist, okay, it’s better than groveling about in the dirt, even though it’s quite well paid, putting wires in buildings and stuff like that. And initially, I was very much in this very gung-ho man of what I’d learned from various therapy trainings I’d been on. But I quickly felt that that wasn’t really my way and feedbacks I got from participants. And I began to develop a much more kind of awareness-based approach, where you really take time to be with people, well, I’m not quite explaining it right, but where you really don’t come from a place of prejudging how the person will be as much as you possibly can. That was my kind of insight. I think possibly it was something that I may have missed at times in my own therapeutic journey.

So, and I was initially running a lot of workshops to do with anger, with a lot of screaming and shouting, and a very intense therapeutic approach. Also running programs at Osho Leela and stuff like that for people who lived there, you know, in-house programs, and slowly over a decade or so, it kind of crystallized into very much based around bio-energetics, consent, you know, bringing people on board, really not having prejudgments about people as much as I possibly could. And also training people, younger people, to leave this work. So, that’s how I would answer that question.

[![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/71NcKlu5e1L._SL1499_-683x1024.jpg)](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Opening-Body-Cube-Space-Bioenergetics/dp/B0DK8HG697#:~:text=A%20twenty-first%20century%20guide%20to%20Spiritual%20Alchemy%20and,Space%20can%20be%20used%20to%20create%20personal%20illumination.)

**PAA: Opening the body with the cube of space has roots in an insight you had while studying Kabbalah. You’ve described how during a Builders of the Adytum initiation in London, you noticed two book-like shapes in the cube of space visualization. And later wrote a brief article about this discovery. Can you share that story? How did this early esoteric insight spark the idea of integrating the cube of space with your bio-energetic body work practice?**

Well, this kind of goes back to the same kind of period of my life, right at the end of the 90s, early noughties. Well, I’d had some kind of slight mystical experience, but hadn’t really noticed it as such in Thailand. And then years later, I don’t know, I got at some point quite a strong, I was also working with a drug called Ibogaine. I’ve got quite into that stuff. I ran a website on Ibogaine for a long time. I had a kind of close relative who had drug problems and, you know, had my own issues as well, but he had quite severe ones. And I was helping him with giving him Ibogaine and stuff like that. I got super into Ibogaine. And it also seems to, I don’t know, some of the times when I was around the drug or giving it to people or taking it myself, it just seemed like I was tuning into some other kind of weird level of something deep inside. And the tarot keys in particular became kind of strong for me.

Somehow I got a connection with this group Builders of the Adytum who, who at that time were kind of active in London. They, their origins were like back in the 1920s in America. In LA, I think. And they, as well as doing like a correspondence course and meetups, you know, where we’d kind of do some meditation and then go for a pint or a pizza, very nice, nice people. You know, we, there was also this thing called Pronaos where it was like ritual work. And then, and I thought that was, they invited me to join that one time. And whilst I was waiting upstairs to kind of be called down for the initiation, I just, I don’t know, I just have this, this strong insight in forming in my mind of how the cube of space, which I’ve been working with, could be resolved into these two book-like shapes, you know, by considering, I mean, you need to understand this stuff a little bit, but the angle needs to be familiar with it rather, you know, the anger, the first sort of direction of flow along each side given of 12 sides of the cube, given by, given by the astrological relationship to the tarot keys, blah, blah. And then this kind of, this insight, you know, I mean, I wrote it up, no one was particularly excited about it. I think it’s fair to say, but I, I kept it in mind somewhere.

And then I got totally into therapy because I just needed that was much more intense for me than esoteric work, but I retained respect for the, the about kabbalistic stuff. And then many years later around, I guess, 2022, I was actually trying to move, I’d been on the road as a digital nomad and I was trying, I’d left the community, split up with my girlfriend of a time and I was on the road and I was kind of living in Georgia in next to Turkey. And then I decided I wanted to check out a few other places. I went to Beirut and Beirut, there was just like nothing to do socially because the country’s just, I love Beirut. I love Lebanon, but it’s a fucking mess, you know, everyone knows. So I ended up spending a lot of time on my own. I ended up one time just going to some meditation group where I had to go through like a massive military checkpoint, people pointing guns at me and shit just to get to this, this one hour meditation. But something in that kind of, I started, it started to trigger this, this, I started to see, I started doing meditation 45 minutes a night because I just didn’t have anything else to do. Usually I’m quite social. And somewhere in that, and then going back to Georgia for a little bit, I started to see like these kind of just old kabbalistic images from the tree or the tarot keys or whatever coming back into my brain and me getting interested in them. And somewhere it gelled into this book a couple of years later where, you know, this concept of opening the body with the cube of space, this cube of space glyph that you can build up around you, can apply, you know, not just as like some kind of mystical, creating some kind of mystical macabre vehicle, but can also apply to like more normal therapeutic pursuits where you’re just unlocking trapped libidinal energy within your system. So that book was like, it’s not the first time anyone’s drawn like this kind of bodywork, bioenergetic stuff with Kabbalah or mysticism. But you know, that was my own my own delving into that.

**PAA: Before delving into the cube of space you were known for bioenergetic workshops addressing issues like depression, anxiety, anger, and sexuality. What have you learned about the connection between these emotional issues and the body? Could you give an example of how working through the body, perhaps a specific exercise or breathing technique helped someone break through an emotional block that talk therapy alone couldn’t resolve?**

Well, yes, an image I often give is like a three-trunk diagram with three kind of circles, you know, like an outer circle, one in a middle and an inner circle. And the outer circle is like the thinking mind. And then the middle circle is like intense emotionality. And then the inner kind of represents who you are when you’ve integrated that in a vast cauldron of inner emotionality. Something I realized from my own life and being in therapy groups and being in very intense therapy groups with a lot of screaming and shouting and not sleeping and super triggering structures was that everybody is sitting on a ton of feelings. Now everybody, and we’re all in certain degrees of kind of denial or forming our own relationship with this reality. And how that manifests in this three-trunk diagram is like a hardened layer between thinking and feeling. And for many people, you know, if they just keep thinking and thinking and doing and doing, you know, they can keep all the feelings down and they have this sense of being kind of socially functional, but it doesn’t really feel very good to be alive. You know, it’s not exciting. You don’t have large amounts of energy flowing through your system.

So a lot of techniques, you know, like a breathing technique is what you’re talking about. Say that you do some rebirthing or you do maybe this belly breathing workout that I developed a while ago. And what it kind of does is allow you to break through into this hardened off layer of deep emotionality. You know, feelings come, you might feel rage, you might feel, you know, intense emotional pain, you know, crying. These are the two real poles of repressed emotionality, which are rage on one side anger, basically, and deep emotional pain on the other, you know, crying. And then if you start to clear those, like they integrate into your system, and this is a long journey, this doesn’t happen easily, you know, it’s a long journey. And if you start to clear those, then you just start to experience more love on the inside. You don’t need so much to kind of cling on to other people or use this kind of always being on the hamster wheel of doing and thinking and doing and thinking.

So you might do like a deep breathing technique, like a rebirthing technique where you’re simply over ventilating your body from how you normally breathe, you lie down, you know, maybe with your knees up or not. And you start to breathe more deeply, you know, filling your chest and your belly, fully breathing in as much as you can, breathing out as much as you can. And you focus on your breathing for 20 minutes. You know, I’ve got guided, free guided things on YouTube where you can do this. And if you focus on it for 20 minutes, it’s like, it starts to do it by itself. And people start to break through this layer. And you don’t know what it’s going to look like, you know, but that’s that’s a way of breaking through an emotional block, you know, other ways can include just really trying in a certain, you know, in a fixed situation to be angry, you know, of other people screaming and shouting, you try to be angry, do like, Osho dynamic meditation, or Humaniversity meditation, something like that. There are ways you can break through. But the breaking through on its own, you know, is useful, you’ve made a breakthrough. But that that that’s just the first step. Really, it’s just the first step.

**PAA: The cube of space is a little-known kabbalistic glyph. And building a somatic therapy around it is quite unconventional. When you first started introducing esoteric concepts like tarot and kabbalah into your therapy work, did you encounter skepticism from either the spiritual or psychological communities? How did you navigate those early reactions? And what convinced you that this blending of seemingly disparate disciplines was the right path to helping people?**

To be quite honest, these days, I do my own thing, you know, so, you know, that if I feel like, wow, I just really want to explore this, I’m going to explore it. And I don’t like shove it down people’s throat. I just kind of like, I’m exploring this. If you want to come and explore it with me, come and check this out, check this article, check this course, check this book, whatever, you know. But yeah, I mean, they are a bit different. Other people have done this in the past. In fact, like one of the more famous kabbalists, Israel Regardie, who was like a, sorry, an assistant to Aleister Crowley, and, you know, famous in the kabbalah scene. And that wrote many, many books. He was also, he was like a chiropractor or someone who got, who knew Reiki and therapy back in the back in the days. And that was his main job. But you know, but he did the esoteric stuff was his writing stuff. And that was his kind of night job, opposed to his day job, I think, as I understand it.

So it’s a bit unconventional, but you know, there’s kind of a crossover. There’s been a few other people around Chris Hyatt and that kind of thing who crossed over with these two things. And it’s like, you’re kind of doing whatever just to get a bit deeper into yourself. You know, when I started doing therapy, I was like, I consider myself the bottom of the pack, you know, the bottom of the heap, low self esteem, super blocked masses of trauma from early life, you know. And as far as I can turn anything that could help was good. The problem with putting mysticism in is that it can drag you off and then some people get into developing like a spiritual ego and trying to become a spiritual person. And then they get lost, you know, but hopefully with some therapy in there as well, you know, that keeps you more grounded and socially real. Hopefully this answers your question.

## Section 2: Philosophy and Vision

**PAA: Bioenergetics is a radical body-based therapy that creates deep levels of psychological change without your mind needing to get involved according to your book description. In a world used to talk therapy and mindfulness, why do you emphasize getting the analytical mind out of the way during healing? How does bypassing the mind help someone access deeper change? And what do you say to those who worry that intense physical emotional release might be overwhelming?**

Well, if you’re very worried about doing this, I would just say, don’t do it. Basically, you know, I don’t believe in ramming these things down people’s throats. You know, I think this thing with consent is very important. And you know, you feel like you’re ready to give something a try. A lot of people come to me, they’ve done quite a lot of talk therapy. And I’m really not against talk therapy. There’s nothing wrong with it. I think it’s great. I happily, you know, feel the need to share what’s going on in my life regularly and have, you know, I don’t have to pay a therapist, but I have a lot of friends from when I was in therapy, you know, and we share about what’s happening on a deep level in our lives. So, I really don’t have a problem with talk therapy. And likewise mindfulness, you know, which essentially is just really paying attention to what’s going on. You know, so, but what I’m offering is what I offer is something a little bit different where you don’t necessarily need your mind because your mind, you know, in traditional psychotherapy, you know, you might sit down and it’s like, okay, tell me about your relationship with your mother when you were two. And this happened. And how do you think this has affected you and your dad and whatever. And that’s all okay.

But basically, you’ve got your mind, your thinking mind as an intermediary between the kind of repressed emotions in the body and repressed energy in the body. And it’s an intermediary with the therapist, you know, and with this kind of stuff like bioenergetics, you can get rid of a middleman, basically, you can get rid of a middleman. If you want to, you know, you can get up and just do some exercises, keep your breathing going and start to work like this. You can do that. For some people, it really works. Some of those people are people who are scared of going to normal therapy and are scared of talking about what’s going on. You know, and hopefully if they do some of this work and it works, they become less scared. Because I think the talking part can be useful. For other people, it’s too much. You know, it’s a bit too much. It’s not, it’s not what they need, you know, not at this type point of their journey and the talk therapy or whatever they’re doing is more appropriate for them. So, you know, it’s just like an option.

And it’s an option more people are coming to, I think with the rise of neurology and neuroscience, you know, and psychology kind of being in a bit of a crisis, it’s clear that the promise of psychology is more limited than what we kind of hoped. The other great thing with bio is often it’s good for younger people in their 20s. You know, often about age, you don’t want to spend long periods of time introspecting about how your mum was when you were like, you know, now that you’re 21, you’ve just escaped from your parents, you don’t want to go back into that stuff. And something like bio can really help. So that’s what I would, that’s what I would say.

**PAA: Your bio describes you as having a radical perspective on psychology and authenticity. What does authenticity mean to you in the context of personal growth and therapy? In your experience, how do body-based practices help people peel away social conditioning or masks to discover a more authentic self? Can you share any core principles that make your perspective on psychology radical compared to mainstream approaches?**

The bottom line with my approach is the more you can feel your body, the more authentic and grounded you will be. Because what happens when trauma comes in or the nervous system comes in and shuts off feeling, you know, and shuts down breathing. And you know, the muscles around your throat lock up, you know, maybe, maybe your diaphragm locks up and becomes hardened over time. You know, what happens in that experience is that emotions and feelings are trapped away and that your sense of a body comes down is reduced. So from maybe the point when you were born, if you could measure it, you know, you have this very powerful wave-like experience of just your body, you know, this huge energetic wave inside, a few years down the line and that’s vastly reduced.

And so all we’re really trying to do is expand that. Because your sensation of a body is you alone. It’s not anybody else’s, you know, you could maybe make a story about it so someone else could relate to it. But your experience of your body, the sensation of it, just for pure sensation without description is hugely important in this kind of therapy. And particularly stuff like feeling your back, your lower back, feeling your heart, feeling your belly, you know, these somatic centers or areas of the body often shut down, shut down by our nervous system in early childhood and as a mechanism to protect us. And unless we take action or some kind of crisis happens, opens those things up, you know, slowly life becomes a bit kind of ever diminishing circles.

**PAA: You’ve stated that your mission is to maintain, develop, and reinterpret the traditions of body-based therapy in the 21st century. Which traditional teachings, for example, Wilhelm Reich’s orgone work or Osho’s dynamic meditation, do you feel are most important to carry forward? And in what ways are you reinterpreting or updating these body-centered therapies for the needs of today’s practitioners?**

Well, I think Reich’s work is very important. It was also controversial. You know, he was the first guy to bring like the body into psychology. You know, he was a student of Freud. He was one of a kind of hot shot, high-flying students back in the 20s and then they kind of started fighting a little bit about Freud’s death drive, Thanatos and all of that. And he got kind of marginalised and the war came along, blah, blah, blah. I mean, I’m not a huge proponent of Reich’s orgone work. You know, I don’t know much about it. I think it’s a good working theory. I don’t have a problem with it in a way that many scientists or physicists might.

Osho dynamic meditation, you know, he just took some kind of Reichian things. You know, you didn’t talk about Reich very much as far as I know Osho, despite talking a great deal. But he certainly used quite a lot of Reichian, Reich’s principles, I think in his meditations, particularly, you know, in dynamic with these different stages where you’re really kind of like doing some kind of blacksmith work on your own body or energy system. I think, you know, what’s important is when you look at Reich, if you try to read any of Reich’s books, good luck with that one. You know, I mean, if you’re a super psychiatrist, academic, fair enough, but they are dense. You know, I mean, they’re written in German and then you have to get, assuming you don’t speak German, you get a translation, I struggle to read Reich’s work. I even struggle to read Lowen and I’m not a great reader, to be honest.

So for me, it’s like bringing, you know, there’s a lot of really useful stuff, particularly in Reich’s character structure, but it’s super dense. You know, it just needs to be brought up onto street level 2020s kind of talk. So my mission is to do that. That’s one of the things I really do. You know, what it serves these complex abstract descriptions of the schizoid or the masochist or whatever, it’s like, no, these guys are doing this, you know, that’s leaving pattern. We call it now, their nervous system is calibrated. When any kind of trigger comes in from the outside, it takes their awareness up into the mind and we don’t call it masochist anymore. They’re endurers now, you know, age two, their dad shouted at them or something and they just shut down hard, you know, and now they’re just staggering through life and grumbling and complaining all the time, you know, but they’re sitting on all this energy because they’re en- the nervous system shut them down. So I just take a lot of these old concepts, you know, which I imagine like some 23 year old trying to understand this stuff and they look at it and they’re like, God, who can read this stuff, you know, so I just try and make it accessible to today’s world in terms of the language.

**PAA: Many spiritual paths focus on transcending the body. Yet your work insists on opening the body as a route to growth. You even suggest that doing so removes energetic blocks, allowing greater energy to flow and can improve the flow of intuitive insight from other dimensions. How do you conceptualize spiritual evolution or enlightenment from a bodily perspective? Have you found that embodied practices can achieve the deep insight and transformation that more ascetic or purely mental practices aim for, perhaps in a more grounded way?**

Yes, I think the body is super important. I think there’s been a huge tendency in many spiritual schools to ignore the body completely and get very focused on the mind, you know, and if you look at a lot of traditional spiritual work, it’s about crystals and chakras and colors and dimensions and blah, blah, nothing wrong with that. But simply feeling your body more and more and more becomes at some point like an oceanic kind of thing. It’s like you’re connected to some vast ocean, it’s a spiritual experience, you know, and it allows some kind of insights to flow from God knows where, frankly, but that can be very, very useful in terms of your own personal development.

So, you know, it’s not an ascetic pathway. I don’t believe in this kind of this pathway is wrong and you shouldn’t do that and this pathway is right and you should do that. I hate that stuff, to be quite honest. I think it’s really unnecessary. You know, the main thing for anyone who’s interested in this stuff or who considers them to be a seeker is to find what works for you, you know, that’s what you need. So for some people being super ascetic or Buddhist or whatever could be really, really useful, you know, for others, they just need to be in a ton of social situations, chasing after lovers or whatever, just to get a ton of feedback or deceive themselves in social situations, you know, there’s all sorts of ways that you can develop awareness.

What I would also say in addition to, you know, expanding the sense of the body is develop self awareness. A lot of people get into meditation or spirituality because they want to be serene, they want serenity, they want peace, they want inner peace. That’s not a very good idea to get in. We all do that stuff, but it’s not a good idea, in my opinion, you know, it’s not a good motivation. A much better motivation is that you want to understand yourself, you want to know yourself.

**PAA: You even hold a diploma in anger management. Your approach often encourages people to fully express emotions like anger rather than suppress them. How do you safely facilitate the release of intense emotions in a group setting? For example, when someone taps into buried rage or grief during a bioenergetic exercise, what guidance or safeguards do you provide? And what changes have you observed in clients after they’ve let out something big, do they report feeling relief, insight, maybe a new sense of freedom?**

I mean, the thing with anger, I used to really, really focus on anger before I got more into just pure bioenergetics, you know, and then you’d work a lot. You know, people would be face to face like a meter apart, just shouting at each other and with a license to just project their negative emotions on the other person, you know. And this is quite a powerful release, but I mean, the thing I found is that, you know, time has changed and society has changed. And actually, it’s a bit much for a lot of people these days. It’s a bit much, you know, it’s kind of a shame. A lot of very deep therapeutic process workers kind of disappeared, particularly the more confrontational stuff over the last couple of decades, you know, and particularly since social media came out, which kind of prioritized stuff, which looks nicer on pictures, you know.

But essentially, you know, when you say when someone taps into buried rage or grief during a bioenergetic exercise, there are some exercises which tend to bring up a bit more emotionality, you know, and when you work in a group that energy is more intense, because there’s a whole group of people doing it. And also because there are either overt or covert dynamics between the people, it’s just natural social beings. But I’ve never really had a big problem in the sense that I just keep a very close eye on people and create a space which I, you know, I work hard to create the space safe because generally, as long as people can say if something’s a bit much or if it’s too much for them right at this time, you know, I let them step out or just stay in the room and breathe and feel their body.

If it’s something very, very extreme, usually in bioenergetics it’s not that extreme, generally bio, you know, when you get into it, it takes the lid off in a more gentle manner, in a more gentle manner. One of the things with working with anger is that for the average kind of person who’s interested in therapy, they will often have the belief that they have huge levels of buried anger and at some point, you know, it’s going to really, they’re just going to go crazy, you know. And this is a kind of standard fear that we have. We do have huge levels of extreme emotions but for most people who don’t have a significant psychiatric history like, you know, something like schizophrenia, bipolar, history of psychotic episodes, for example, they are generally okay to do things like bioenergetics because your ego naturally regulates how much stuff comes out, you know, it just does it.

So generally bio, it’s going kind of slow and deep, you know, but at the same time, of course, especially if you’re working on your own, you know, there will be times when it’s super challenging where you can just feel like you’re much more angry than usual. I get people to reach out to me and, you know, the thing is, is to remember to feel your body because that’s within the sense of bodies where processing is happening at the deepest level. So keep feeling your body, keep feeling your body. Also, you know, if you’re really getting angry in situations at work or around your partner or whatever, you know, and you feel like you’ve kind of overstepped the mark, be happy to go back and explain and apologize and that kind of thing.

As to what changes observed in clients, you know, I mean, generally, sometimes it’s bursts when stuff really moves, you know, often at the beginning, you know, something huge moves and the person gets massively into bio and they just feel like usually you’ll feel more open or more grounded. Pretty much every human on the planet wants to be more open or grounded, but they might not admit this to themselves. But my experience, when you just feel more present on the earth and when you feel like you can be more open around other people, life just becomes moment by moment, much more exciting. You know, it’s just who is this person, but I’m meeting instead of a lot of judgments and control. It’s just everyone somewhere wants to be more open and more grounded. The groundedness gives you the sense that you can put up boundaries if you need to, which means that you feel more safe to open to life, to open to people, basically. So, you know, that those it’s like not so much like some kind of war zone thing, I would say in my approach, working with this stuff, you know, I don’t, I know workshop leaders and I know techniques that will take you into your inner war zone, but I don’t find it always so useful, to be honest, I don’t find it so useful personally, not these days.

**PAA: Somatic therapies like bioenergetics and Reichian work are still outside the mainstream. What do you wish more people understood about the value of body-based therapy? Are there any misconceptions or fears, e.g., isn’t this just screaming and yelling, or do I have to relive trauma, that you often encounter and how do you address them? In convincing skeptics, what evidence or experiences do you point to that highlight how working with the body can lead to genuine psychological and spiritual well-being?**

I mean, I think what I would say is like, if someone’s really skeptical, I mean, just don’t come, you know, it’s okay, you know, I don’t feel like it’s my, when I was younger, I was like, you know, super bullish kind of apostolic about these kinds of therapies and just everyone should do them, you know, but I’m totally not like that now, you know, it’s like this stuff is there if you want to give it a try, you know, and that’s the way to know, you know, someone could be skeptical and say, well, how’s it going to help me to lean over and keep breathing deeply in that body position? And it’s like, so, you know, I could go on a long explanation about what might happen, but it would probably be a lot easier just for you to give it a try and just see later if you feel better, you know, and I think even, you know, skeptical people probably, you can be skeptical, but then you probably won’t come to therapy, there’s probably something that you know, you’re struggling with.

And if you’re struggling with something, for some people, they realize, okay, maybe I have to, you know, I’m super skeptical about therapy, but I’m struggling with this, maybe the therapy will help, I’ll just give it a go. And if you paid to do a workshop, you know, it’s not much point sitting on the sidelines just being skeptical the whole time, you know, you have to just try and give you to go. So I don’t often come across skeptics, I’m sure there are skeptics. Isn’t this just screaming and yelling? I don’t even do much screaming and yelling in workshops. In longer workshops, it might be a little bit. So I don’t really do that stuff anymore. Occasionally it’s relevant to it’s just where the group’s at, you know, I just feel it’s it’s needed, you know, and it’s going to move some stuff, but mostly not.

Do I have to relive trauma? It’s complex, you know, you have to be open to feel what’s there, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to relive trauma with people who really just don’t want to feel, you know, that that attitude is not going to help. You have to be kind of open to what’s there, but you do. No one really knows what’s there. We have all these ideas about what’s hidden away in the cupboard, and it’s not our fault, you know, it’s like the nervous system has just buried it down and then it’s become armored into our system or, or, or, you know, it’s become a dead zone within our body. But, you know, the bottom line is you have to be kind of open to it and just keep feeling your body and then stuff will process. Basically, it’s not, it’s it doesn’t have to be a war zone, you know, it takes a while and you have to get into it, but it doesn’t have to be a massive war zone.

## Section 3: Modern Alchemy and Transformation

**PAA: You describe opening the body with the cube of space as a 21st century guide to spiritual alchemy and achieving the philosopher’s stone, written in down-to-earth language in practical terms. What does spiritual alchemy mean to you for someone on a personal growth path today? What would achieving this philosopher’s stone look like? Is it a state of consciousness, a level of healing, or something else? And how do the practices you teach, the body work or cube visualization, help everyday people work through the alchemical process of inner transformation?**

Okay, well, you know, I am a believer in the philosopher’s stone in the sense that, you know, when I was with the Builders of the Adytum back in the old days, you know, the the guy who wrote the course Paul Foster Case would talk about this and give rather veiled hints about what it was really about. But essentially, as I understand spiritual alchemy, there are two processes which kind of intertwine in the body. One is like the kind of classic Kundalini awakening process which may happen as a kind of explosion in your head or if you’re lucky, your heart, but it’s quite often something much more gentle, you know, that goes on with people where gradual change happens. And what’s believed is, you know, some kind of energy that we can’t necessarily measure moves from the base or the belly up a mate base of your spine or belly up the body in certain ways through certain channels that are there, you know, and it starts to clear out blocks, you know, and we get attracted to doing spiritual things or going to therapy and that kind of stuff.

The other aspect is light that in many of the old alchemical textbooks, you know, it’s all veiled language because of an inquisition and just the way things were in those days. It’s a lot to do with light as in sunlight and how your body can process sunlight. Basically, that there is like a wave at sunlight instead of, you know, because we consume sunlight when we eat food, particularly food which grows above ground, you know, vegetables and stuff like that. We consume sunlight, but then it passes out of our body. But in some of these Kabbalah schools, you know, it’s quite secretive stuff, but they fundamentally believe that you can program the body to start to reprocess that light so that it moves into your bloodstream and starts to fill you with light. It literally starts to illuminate you. And that, I would say, is where this term Illuminati or illumination comes from, you know, this idea that you can illuminate your body.

But this is undertaken by basically using symbol sets. You know, I talk about this a lot in this book, 22 symbols of tarot keys or, you know, various different symbols, Hebrew letters or the astrological signs combined with elements and combined with the planets. You know, and then these symbol sets, when you work with them constantly, like in this cube of space book, they’re like downloading a program. Like you would, if you wanted to put Uber on your phone or eBay, you know, you download it from the App Store and then you run the program and it runs and then you can buy stuff online or get a cab, you know. So essentially, the same thing is happening with these symbol sets. You download them by just working with them, looking at them, thinking about them, understanding their symbolic meaning and how they refer to stuff going on around you in your day-to-day life. That’s downloading them into your body, into your deep unconscious. And they start to run this program relating to Kundalini and relating to light, basically. That’s how I might sound a bit esoteric and out there. That’s how I see it.

**PAA: In your 2024 article, you mentioned that working with the cube of space visualization will improve the flow of intuitive insight from other dimensions or guides as per your own experience. That’s a fascinating claim. Can you elaborate on it? Do you mean that by clearing bodily and energetic blockages, people become more receptive to intuition or spiritual guidance? Have you witnessed any striking examples of students gaining profound insights, visions, or guidance after engaging in these cube of space visualizations with body opening?**

I mean, it’s based on my own experience, basically, that I’ve certainly had phases in my life. And times when I took certain things on, like doing a lot of group room work where I felt like I was really in touch with some kind of intuitive thing. You know, I’m walking around the group room with 20 people doing exercises and like that guy over there, just pushing a little bit harder, encourage him to stay really present. That guy over there, she’s fine, he’s fine. Just leaving alone. He looks like he needs something. You know, these little intuitive kind of not really words, but just intuitive guidance. It’s something you can’t really put your foot on. I don’t get it when I go down the shops or something and you know, don’t get a little voice saying, well, that shirt would look really good on you or something. But there definitely is something and putting yourself in a place where somewhere your activity is needed on a deeper level. You get some kind of support. This is kind of how it works. That’s how I see it.

Now, in terms of students, I mean, I have only really sat back last year and I had a few people come to me with all sorts of insights and dreams and stuff like that. I can’t really just give any out. There weren’t any of what was like world shattering to me, but people had insights about what was going on, maybe in something in their childhood or something in their work or relationship life that they weren’t aware of. I think it definitely helps. It’s one of those things that you can’t really pin down. You’re free to be very skeptical about it. But maybe there’s something there that’s useful and maybe one day we understand this stuff a bit more.

## Section 4: Practical Integration and Audience

**PAA: For someone entirely new to spiritual or somatic practices, what first steps do you recommend? Is there a simple daily exercise or embodiment practice from your teachings that a beginner could start with to get a taste of this work? Essentially, how do you help newcomers overcome any intimidation around words like Kabbalah or bioenergetics and just begin to experience the benefits of being more in their body?**

I mean, I guess I don’t try to convince people. So most people that come to me, they kind of want to do this work. So I don’t sell, really. If someone books a call with me, a free call, and they want me to work with them, but I feel like it’s not appropriate, I’ll just find a considerate way to explain that and maybe suggest something they could do. I make enough money that I don’t need to kind of sell. So I’m kind of in that position, which is a bit luxurious, I guess, partly for being ancient, I suppose. But like, you know, what I say to people who really want to get into bioenergetics is like do the bow and arch daily for three months. Do it daily for three months if you can, you know, which means like put on a two-minute ding, bow two minutes, arch two minutes, go around three times, that’s 12 minutes, two minutes lying on the floor, eyes closed, feeling your body to complete 14 minutes, I think my math's is right. Do that every day for three months. And then you’ll know if bio is for you, because a lot of it’s, you know, you need a bit of discipline. There’s a lot of people out there, it’s partly to do with marketing and how capitalism is who just want some miracle quick fix, you know, and those guys usually end up spending a bit of money and probably not getting very far, but that’s, you know, just part of life in the 21st century as I see it. I like to think I don’t do that stuff.

So I give people something like that an extremely boring exercise on the face of it to do every day for three months, but you will find out in that time if this kind of work is for you, it’ll be worth your investment in it’s only 14 minutes a day. And you may notice a lot of shift happening just from that, you know. So this whole kind of, you know, marketing thing where it all looks like this amazing thing that’s going to change everything, you know, when you’ve been in this scene 25 years, you know, just how much bullshit is out there. And I don’t consider it my job to, to demean other people, therapists or techniques, you know, for some people it may be absolutely what they need, but I offer what I what works for me. And I try to do it in a grounded way.

Intimidation around words, kabbalah, intimidation, kabala. I mean, if you feel internal, don’t do it, I think. But if you intimidate, I don’t know if anyone’s intimidated by a bioenergetic so much, maybe, you know, I think, you know, like I say, you know, people come to my work wanting to do it, basically, they don’t come because I’m like, dude, you really need to do this stuff, you know. So, you know, I just, I just try to be really kind of clear with people.

**PAA: People often have life changing experiences in a retreat or workshop, but then struggle to integrate those insights back into daily life. How do you suggest participants carry the openness and awareness they cultivated in a bioenergetic session, or a deep cube meditation into their daily routines? Do you encourage any particular daily rituals, journaling or body practices to help make the transformation stick? Perhaps you could share how you personally ground yourself or stay embodied amid the day-to-day demands of life.**

I mean, personally, I will do bio every morning. I just, at some point, kind of train myself to do it. I’m a big fan though. I haven’t read it for a long time. That book, James Clear, Atomic Habits, I think that’s an awesome book, you know, it’s just like, if you want real change in your life, develop better habits and develop them rationally in a tangible way that you’re not just suddenly, I’m going to do two hours of this every day and you know you’re going to give up within a week, you know. Look what’s practical and develop better habits and after a while, you know, they just stick, you know, you just get into them.

So, you know, I’ll wake up in the morning feeling like in a mess or whatever, all the ton of stuff going on or half asleep, you know, I do some bio, I breathe more deeply with it, have a cup of tea, a bit of meditation, you know, and I feel that openness and groundedness to kind of go into my daily life, basically, at least most of the time, you know. And so that’s how I do it and I recommend people, you know, if they’ve just come for like a three-day, five-day workshop, I usually give them some practices from the group written out that they already know they can do, you know, just to keep that kind of, keep things churning along. Because when you work with a body, it does take a while, it does take a, take a while and it’s, and it’s like it’s, you know, your body is still processing when you leave a workshop, you know, so you want to keep that moving.

**PAA: You’ve expanded your reach globally through online content, your work has even been featured in mainstream media and you run a popular YouTube channel with heaps of videos on bioenergetics and Reichian techniques. How has teaching these intensely physical practices via digital platforms compared to in-person work? What challenges do you face in getting viewers to feel and embody the exercises through a screen? And have there been any surprising advantages to doing this work online, such as reaching people who couldn’t attend in-person workshops?**

Yes, exactly, you know, I mean, a lot of people who are interested in this stuff are quite young in their 20s, you know, and there aren’t many therapists around and it’s a very big world. They may not have a lot of time, they probably don’t have a ton of money to pay, you know, modern day therapists what they would charge them is hardly anything about anyway, you know, so it’s like this kind of work online can, can be done, you know, for me it’s been an experiment. When I started my YouTube channel around 2016, you know, people pretty quickly were asking me for like paid for content, you know, proper courses to learn this stuff. And I was initially very like, no, you can’t do it like that because I’d run so many workshops in person, you know, and at some point, kind of luckily just before COVID, you know, I started maybe I should rethink that and just try, you know.

So I created a course called the Journey, which is still online and still popular, 52 modules, you know, weekly modules of content, very, very deep, very intense. And it basically worked. I mean, of course, it helped because COVID hit and everyone wanted to do some work on themselves online and that kind of thing. But I think, you know, that digital platforms can really work, you know, they can really work because you can do follow along stuff, you know, so you put your video on or the audio on and you just follow along, you know, and the guy or whoever it is or me reminds you or whoever’s leading lady isn’t whatever. They basically, you know, they remind you to breathe, they remind you to hold the posture and to push in the little places that you need to, you know.

So if you’re up for it and you’ve got a bit of discipline, you can do a lot online, you know, I really believe that and a lot of therapists from my generation don’t believe that, you know, they’re more like it’s got to be in person, it’s got to be in person. But I think there’s a lot, it just needs exploring, you know, it just needs exploring. And I’m hopeful with my training that I run, you know, I get more younger people in in the mid 20s and 30s, you know, starting to leave these things out in the world, you know, and then, you know, they can take that work further. Challenges do you face getting vision, this is actually feeling embodied the experience screen. Well, they just follow along. Yeah, yeah. And there are surprising advantages, there are certainly our advantages, you know, there’s a lot of potential in this kind of online stuff. And I’m sure as AI increases, you know, there’ll be more and more with this for people who really want it, you know, just in terms of, you know, getting this stuff into a marketplace.

**PAA: Not everyone who comes across your work identifies as a spiritual seeker. Some might just be looking for stress relief, emotional healing, or personal development. Can someone engage with your techniques purely as a therapeutic or wellness practice without adopting all the esoteric language? What do you hope a person from the general public takes away from opening the body with a cube of space in your workshops, in an ideal world, how would practices of embodiment and energy awareness be integrated in the ordinary person people’s lives for greater well being?**

Well, you know, initially I was writing books just on bioenergetics, you know, so it’s just therapy for people who are struggling, you know, got stress relief, or they’ve been doing psychotherapy and they want to augment it with something, you know, they want to feel their body more personal development, they’re looking for that stuff. Probably you’d only get, you know, the opening the body with a cube of space book came along only last year, you know, some five years after I started writing other bioenergetics books. So probably that one would only peak people’s interest if they’re already a bit into esoteric stuff. That would be my anticipation, to be honest.

But I think, you know, the regular bio workshops and books that I’ve written, you know, and courses that I have or YouTube videos, you know, they’re really not esoteric, you know, it’s very much about who you are as a social being and, you know, clearing stuff out of your system and starting to understand on a deep experiential level, personal deep experiential level, you know, developing that understanding of how your body kind of functions energetically, internally as a sensation, you know. So I think that’s what I would say about that. Okay, cool. I’ve talked quite a lot in this thing, so hopefully this is useful. And thank you so much for inviting me on to Perseus. Bye for now.

**PAA: Thank you very much for sharing your work with us.**

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