There is a curious relationship between spirituality and geography. Certain places acquire an authority that extends far beyond the teachers and traditions that originally emerged there. India occupies a particularly significant place in the Western spiritual imagination, while Tibet, Nepal and parts of Southeast Asia carry their own associations with contemplative life. Within the modern Western world, particular cities have also become gathering places for teachers, retreats and spiritual communities, creating environments in which someone interested in these questions can move easily from one teaching to another.
Perth is rarely imagined in this way.
It is one of the most geographically isolated capital cities in the world, situated on the western edge of a continent whose largest population centres lie thousands of kilometres away. For someone living in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, travelling to Perth requires a deliberate journey. For someone coming from Europe or North America, Western Australia can feel extraordinarily distant from the places in which contemporary spiritual culture appears to be concentrated.
Yet peiec® developed here.
That was never planned. I did not choose Western Australia because I believed it would become the ideal location for a spiritual school, nor did I begin with an intention to establish a new discipline and then search for somewhere appropriate to place it. The work emerged through the circumstances of my own life and through years of teaching people directly. Techniques appeared while I was working with students. Observations accumulated through repeated application. One part of the work led into another, and gradually something much larger than the individual techniques became visible.
For most of that time, there was no reason to think very much about geography at all. The important question was whether the work did what I was observing it doing.
Only later, as students began arriving from elsewhere and the work became increasingly available online, did another question become relevant. If a spiritual pathway can now be learned by someone living almost anywhere, what is the significance of the physical place from which it originates?
For me, the answer has become unexpectedly simple. A path does not need to originate in a recognised spiritual centre in order to become deep. It needs the conditions in which depth can be allowed to develop.
Spiritual authority has often been associated with elsewhere
For Western seekers, there has long been a tendency to look towards older cultures for spiritual authority. There are understandable reasons for this. India contains philosophical and contemplative traditions extending across millennia. Buddhist traditions developed sophisticated systems of practice and scholarship across vast periods of time. Many Western practitioners encountered meditation, yoga and other forms of spiritual cultivation through teachings that originated far outside their own culture.
The depth of these traditions deserves respect. Their existence also created an association that can operate almost unconsciously: serious spiritual knowledge comes from somewhere else.
Someone in Australia can therefore spend decades looking outward. A teacher from India can seem inherently more spiritually authoritative than someone living twenty minutes away. Travelling overseas can feel like entering sacred territory, while attending something in the suburb next door feels ordinary before the teaching has even begun.
Yet truth does not become deeper because we travelled further to encounter it.
The conditions surrounding a teaching certainly matter. Culture shapes language. History influences the frameworks through which spiritual experience is interpreted. Long-established traditions can preserve extraordinary knowledge that would otherwise disappear. None of this means that consciousness itself belongs to a particular geography.
Human beings in Australia inhabit the same fundamental mystery of existence as human beings anywhere else.
The body still contracts. Thought still moves. Stillness can still become available. Energetic perception can still develop. The questions concerning consciousness, Source and what it means to be fully alive do not become less profound because they arise beneath eucalyptus trees rather than in the Himalayas.
This matters to me because peiec® did not arrive through my attempt to reproduce an older spiritual tradition in an Australian setting. Its language and practices emerged through direct experience and observation here, within ordinary contemporary lives.
The place did not provide the authority for the work.
The work had to reveal its own depth.
There can be value in developing away from a spiritual marketplace
Perth’s isolation is usually described as a disadvantage. Economically and culturally, distance creates obvious limitations. Teachers travelling internationally are more likely to visit Sydney or Melbourne, where larger populations make events easier to fill. Major conferences and spiritual gatherings naturally gravitate towards places where there are enough people to support them.
There is another side to this isolation that interests me more.
Work can develop quietly when it is not continually required to present itself to a marketplace.
For years, the primary concern within my teaching was what happened in the room. A technique was shown and then practised. Students responded differently. Something worked consistently, and then another part of the system became visible and eventually another practice emerged in response to what had been observed.
This happened repeatedly over time.
The development of the work therefore remained close to experience. There was relatively little reason to ask whether a particular idea would be easy to market, whether it resembled something people were already searching for or whether the terminology would make immediate sense to a broad spiritual audience.
In retrospect, that probably protected something important.
When a new body of work develops inside an established marketplace, there is considerable pressure to explain it through categories people already understand. An unfamiliar energetic structure becomes an aura because people know what an aura is. A particular form of perception gets translated into chakra language because that provides an immediate point of recognition. A developmental process gets packaged into the duration people are most willing to purchase.
Those translations can make something easier to sell while gradually changing what is being taught.
peiec® was able to remain relatively unconcerned with that for a long time. If something I observed did not correspond with an existing framework, I did not need to make it correspond. If a technique required considerable preparation before it became useful, there was no need to introduce it earlier simply because it looked interesting. If development took years, then it took years.
The work could remain itself.
I think geographic distance contributed to that, even though I did not recognise it at the time.
A contemporary spiritual path can arise within contemporary life
There is another aspect of Western Australia that has influenced the way I think about spiritual development. This work did not develop within a monastery or an environment separated from ordinary responsibility. It developed while people were living recognisably modern lives.
Students had jobs. They had relationships, families and businesses. They became tired, had difficult weeks, encountered financial pressure and navigated all of the ordinary complexity that accompanies being human. They practised inside those conditions rather than waiting for life to become sufficiently peaceful for spiritual development to begin.
That became part of the teaching.
I am deeply interested in what remains available when life is actually happening. Someone can experience extraordinary stillness in an environment designed to remove disturbance. I want to know what happens to that stillness when the person returns home, receives an upsetting message, walks into work or encounters someone who knows exactly how to engage an old contraction.
Ordinary life provides extraordinary amounts of information about our actual capacity.
This is one reason I have never wanted the pathway to depend upon withdrawal from life. There can be periods when retreat or solitude is valuable, and several uninterrupted days together can allow forms of work that are difficult to undertake amid normal responsibilities. Yet the development itself has to survive re-entry.
Eventually the person goes home.
That return is part of the path.
Perhaps a contemporary spiritual discipline should arise inside contemporary life for precisely this reason. The questions human beings carry are ancient, while the conditions through which those questions are lived continue changing. We need to discover what depth looks like while inhabiting the actual world in which we find ourselves.
For this work, that world happened to include Perth.
Online learning changed what geography means
Twenty years ago, the physical location of a teacher placed significant limits upon who could study with them. Serious long-term involvement often required living nearby, travelling repeatedly or reorganising one’s life around physical access.
That relationship has changed.
A student can now receive detailed filmed teaching at home, attend live sessions across continents, practise with someone in another country and remain in ongoing relationship with a community without relocating. This has limitations, particularly when touch or certain forms of direct physical observation become important, but it also has advantages that are easy to underestimate.
Recorded teaching allows repetition.
A student can stop at the exact point where they lost understanding, return to a demonstration and watch what actually happened rather than relying upon what they remember happening. They can practise for several weeks and then revisit the original teaching with enough experience to notice something that was meaningless the first time.
This is particularly valuable within peiec® because learning the mechanics of a practice is only the beginning. The student’s perception develops through application. What they are capable of seeing or feeling several months later can be quite different from what was available when the practice was introduced.
A recording remains there to be encountered again by the person they have become.
For this reason, I do not consider online learning a lesser substitute for being in Perth. For foundational learning, it can sometimes be the better environment.
Information does not need to compete with the intensity of an in-person encounter.
The person can learn slowly enough for practice to enter ordinary life.
Then physical proximity can be used for what physical proximity does particularly well.
Perth becomes the place of immersion rather than the only place of learning
This distinction has gradually clarified the role Perth holds within the wider pathway.
A student does not need to live in Western Australia to undertake serious work with me. The pathway can begin in their own home, and in many ways I prefer that. I want the work to encounter their actual life rather than exist primarily inside an environment created around me.
Months of practice reveal things.
The student discovers where they become uncertain. They encounter differences between understanding a principle and actually applying it. Their energetic perception develops, and questions become increasingly specific because the questions arise from experience rather than speculation.
If they later travel to Perth, they arrive differently.
They are no longer travelling across Australia or across the world in order to sit in a room and absorb introductory information they could have learned more effectively at home. They arrive with a foundation beneath them. Language is already shared. Practices are familiar. Their own system has become more perceptible to them.
The physical time can therefore begin at another depth.
An immersion allows sustained observation. Touch becomes available where appropriate. Subtle physical changes can be seen directly. The spatial relationship between people can be worked with in ways that become different when everyone occupies the same environment. Students can practise with several different people and experience variations that would take far longer to encounter through occasional remote sessions.
Transmission also becomes part of that environment.
For people who already feel Anandi strongly through recordings, the difference between remote and physical proximity can be substantial. Preparation matters because greater intensity is not automatically useful when the person has little framework through which to receive it. Someone who has already been practising arrives with more capacity to recognise what is happening and allow the encounter to become part of their development.
Perth therefore has a very particular place within the architecture of the work.
It is the physical home of the teaching without becoming a geographical requirement for beginning it.
Distance can change the quality of commitment
There is something else that happens when a person has to travel deliberately.
Convenience disappears.
This is not an argument for making spiritual work unnecessarily difficult. I have no interest in creating obstacles simply to prove that someone is committed. Yet there is a difference between attending something because it happens to be nearby and deciding that a particular stage of one’s development matters enough to cross a continent for it.
The journey itself creates a threshold.
Someone travelling from Melbourne or Sydney has organised their life sufficiently to be absent for several days. Someone arriving internationally has usually made an even larger commitment of time and resources. They have not wandered into the room because there was nothing else happening that weekend.
This changes the composition of the group.
When people gather because the work itself brought them there, there is a shared seriousness beneath the considerable differences between them. They may come from different countries, professions and spiritual backgrounds, but they have already made a decision that the time together matters.
That affects an immersion.
The group can move more deeply because fewer people are standing at the edge wondering whether they are interested.
They have already entered.
This is one of the unexpected advantages of being somewhere that requires deliberate travel.
Yet Australia should not have to travel overseas for depth
At the same time, I think there is something important about serious spiritual work being available within Australia itself.
Australians have travelled enormous distances for spiritual teaching for generations. People fly to India, Nepal, Europe and the United States because they believe the teacher or training they need is there. Sometimes it is, and travelling can become a profound part of someone’s life.
Yet we should also be capable of recognising depth when it arises here.
That does not mean supporting something simply because it is Australian. Geography should confer neither automatic authority nor automatic dismissal. The work should stand on what it is.
What interests me is the possibility that someone in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane or regional Australia can undertake a serious long-term spiritual pathway without needing to imagine that genuine depth necessarily belongs overseas.
They can learn within their own life.
They can practise within an Australian context.
When physical gathering becomes valuable, they can travel to Western Australia rather than automatically assuming that the meaningful journey has to involve leaving the country.
Over time, this also allows a community to develop that belongs to the place in which the work actually arose.
That matters.
The Australian landscape has its own quality
I am cautious about romanticising landscape because spiritual depth is easily turned into imagery. Mountains become sacred, forests become mystical and deserts become symbols onto which human beings project whatever they hope to discover.
The Australian landscape requires very little embellishment.
Western Australia contains an extraordinary amount of physical space. The distances are large. The light can be uncompromising. The bush has a quality that feels ancient without needing anyone to make it spiritual, and there are places in which the absence of human density changes the way attention moves simply because so little is demanding it.
For someone accustomed to crowded cities, the amount of space can initially feel unusual.
There is value in that.
An immersion does not become profound because eucalyptus trees surround it, and the land does not perform the work for the student. Yet environment participates in human experience. The amount of sensory input changes. The quality of sound changes. Distance from familiar routines alters attention, and being somewhere physically different can make habitual patterns more visible simply because many of their usual cues are absent.
Western Australia provides an environment in which this can occur without requiring the landscape to become part of a spiritual mythology.
It can simply be the place where the work is happening.
I prefer that.
A teacher does not have to become geographically portable
Modern spiritual culture has also created an expectation that teachers should continually travel.
A successful teacher tours.
They appear at festivals, conferences and retreat centres, moving between cities because physical visibility is assumed to be necessary for the teaching to grow.
There are teachers for whom this model is entirely appropriate.
It has never felt particularly natural to me.
There is a difference between making a teaching accessible and making the teacher continually accessible. Online education allows the first without necessarily requiring the second. The work can travel further than the person who teaches it.
I think this can create a healthier structure.
Students do not need me to appear constantly in their city in order for their practice to continue. The recorded teachings remain available. Live online contact provides guidance. Partner practice and community create continuity. Their own relationship with the work develops during the weeks in which I am physically nowhere near them.
Then there are periods of gathering.
People come together because physical proximity has a specific purpose rather than because the teaching depends upon maintaining continual access to the teacher.
This allows me to remain where the work developed while allowing the pathway itself to extend far beyond Western Australia.
It also places responsibility where I believe it belongs.
The student walks the path.
The teacher does not have to follow them around the world in order for the path to remain alive.
What began here does not belong only here
As peiec® has developed, students have encountered it from many places. Their cultural backgrounds differ, as do the spiritual traditions and practices through which they first learned to understand themselves. The work inevitably meets those histories when someone begins.
Yet the underlying human territory is remarkably recognisable.
People contract.
They respond to relationship.
The body carries history.
The mind becomes active around what the system finds difficult to receive.
Energetic perception develops differently from person to person, while greater openness changes the amount of information that can remain available within a moment.
These are human questions before they are Australian ones.
That is why I think a discipline can be deeply rooted somewhere without being limited to that place.
Perth is where this work developed and where I live. Western Australia remains the physical centre of the in-person work. Students who come here enter the landscape and environment within which much of the teaching has unfolded.
Then they leave again.
They return to Amsterdam, London, Sydney, Melbourne or wherever their ordinary lives are waiting.
If the work is real, it has to travel home with them.
That is ultimately more important than what they experienced while they were here.
Perhaps the edge is an appropriate place to begin
There is something strangely fitting about this work having developed on the western edge of Australia.
It did not arise from an attempt to establish another spiritual centre. There was no inherited institution around it, no established lineage through which it automatically acquired authority and no large spiritual marketplace waiting for a new system.
For years there was simply the work, the people in front of me and the repeated question of what was actually happening within the human system.
That created a particular kind of freedom.
I could follow observation rather than precedent. When techniques appeared progressively, they could remain in the sequence in which their relationship became apparent rather than being rearranged into something easier to explain.
Eventually the collection of practices became a discipline, and the discipline revealed a larger path of cultivation concerned with a question that had been present beneath the work for a very long time: how far can a human being unfold within a single life?
That question has no geographical answer.
It can be asked anywhere.
What geography can provide is a place in which the asking becomes sustained enough that something begins to develop around it. For this work, that place happened to be Perth.
Perhaps that is enough.
The significance of Western Australia does not need to be manufactured into a spiritual mythology. Perth does not have to become another Rishikesh, and the Australian bush does not need to be declared sacred in order to justify people travelling here. The value of the place lies partly in its ordinariness. This is where the work arose, where it continued to develop and where people can now gather physically when their own path reaches a stage at which doing so becomes useful.
The pathway itself can begin thousands of kilometres away. Someone can first encounter Anandi through a book in London or a video in New York, practise from a house in Melbourne, work online with another student in Europe and gradually discover that what began as curiosity has become a serious part of their life. If they eventually travel to Perth, they are not coming to find the path. They have already been walking it.
They are coming because there are moments in a long development when being physically together allows something different.
That is the role Perth has come to hold.
It is home.
It is where people gather.
And then the work returns with them into the rest of their lives.