New Here
What this place is,
in plain words.
Written for someone arriving with a completely blank slate. If the words on this site have felt like a foreign language so far, start here — everything gets explained from the beginning.
01
The short version
You lie awake at 3am running a conversation from Tuesday. You snap at your partner over the dishwasher and know, while it's happening, that the dishwasher has nothing to do with it. You get through the workday on autopilot and can't say afterwards where the hours went. Sunday evening already has Monday in it.
None of that is a disorder. It's how most people live, and it costs more than we usually admit — in sleep, in patience, in how much of your own life you're actually present for.
There are trainable skills that change this. Not beliefs, not a worldview: skills, the way learning an instrument is a skill. How to feel a wave of anger in your body before it becomes a sentence you regret. How to let your nervous system come down instead of idling high all day. How to be in a room, a conversation, a Saturday afternoon without half your attention somewhere else.
I've been practising and teaching this for forty years. This site is where I put what works, in the plainest form I can manage — for people with jobs, kids, deadlines and a normal amount of scepticism.
02
Three words you'll meet everywhere here
Yoga
In most gyms, yoga means the postures — the stretching, the mat, the class on Tuesday evenings. Those postures are real and useful, and they're one part of something considerably older and larger.
The full tradition is a set of methods for working with four things at once: attention, breath, feeling, and the body. The physical practice is one doorway into that. Breathing exercises are another. Meditation is a third. They fit together, and each one opens onto the same territory from a different side.
So when this site says “yoga,” it means the whole house, with the postures as one of its rooms.
Nondual
An awkward word for something quite simple. Ordinarily you experience yourself as a separate self, sealed inside your head, looking out at a world made of other things. That's the default, and it feels completely solid.
And sometimes it loosens. Standing somewhere in nature, absorbed in music, in the middle of grief, in a moment of total concentration — the line between you and what you're experiencing gets thin. Most people have had this happen at least once, usually without giving it a name.
“Nondual” simply means: that loosening points at something true about how experience actually works. Several traditions spent centuries studying it carefully, and left behind detailed maps of what they found.
You can hold all of that as an open question. It's offered as a description of experience — something you can check against your own, in your own time.
Recognition
You'll see this word a lot here — it's in the name of the Compass and the first area of the teaching. It points at a particular kind of moment: when something you'd been looking for turns out to have been present the whole time, and you simply notice it.
The everyday version happens with your keys. You search the house, and then see them on the table where they've been sitting all along. Nothing arrived. Your seeing changed.
Traditions use the word for the same movement, applied to something closer in: the steadiness or spaciousness people go looking for often turns out to already be here, underneath the searching. Recognition is the moment that becomes obvious.
03
What you'd actually get out of it
- Taking things less personally — a beat of space before the old response fires.
- More energy, freed up from what used to run in the background.
- Creativity coming back, often in places you'd stopped expecting it.
- The capacity to simply be, relax, and enjoy the moment you're in.
- Sleeping better, because there's less to keep turning over.
- Being able to sit with a difficult feeling long enough for it to move through.
- Satisfaction in your life and in your relationships, as they actually are.
04
How this site is organised
Four areas, each doing a different job:
- The Atlas
- The teaching itself. Written material, a reflection tool called the Compass, and a page for people in the middle of something overwhelming. Free, self-directed, open to anyone.
- PranaSomatics
- The practical, body-based path, built and taught together with my partner Lydia. Courses you can take at your own pace, and a longer immersion.
- The Ground
- One-to-one conversations with me, about the practical shape of a life — money, work, relationship, health. Structured around sixteen areas, worked through together.
- Kai
- Who I am, how this came about, and a set of personal notes written as honestly as I could manage.
05
Where to start
Four ways in, arranged from lightest to deepest. Pick whichever matches where you actually are today.
Three short guided practices, free, open to anyone. Four to twenty minutes each. For most people this is the best place to begin, because it gives you something to do rather than something to read.
The free practices →A twenty-minute reflection that gives language to your own experience. Open to complete beginners — every question is written in plain English, and your answers stay with you.
Open the Compass →My own account, in order, including the difficult parts and the long stretches where very little happened. Written to be honest rather than impressive.
The Notes →If something has already opened for you and it left you shaken or wordless, begin there instead. That page exists for exactly this, and it's free.
Find your bearings →06
One honest note about scope
Everything here is teaching and practice. Trauma, a nervous system stuck in alarm, or grief with nowhere to go all call for someone clinically trained — my partner Lydia is a trauma counsellor and somatic therapist, and that work is hers. There are links to her throughout this site.
Practice sits alongside professional support, and the two work well together. Anyone telling you that practice replaces care is overselling it.
If a question came up while reading this, write and ask. mail@pranasomatics.com — a real person reads it, and a real person replies.