Anandi Sano
The person through whom peiec® unfolded
Some bodies of work are planned.
Others emerge gradually, almost despite the person through whom they arrive.
peiec® belongs to the second tradition.
It did not begin with the intention of creating a method, nor with years spent assembling ideas from different teachings. It emerged over more than a decade through lived experience, careful observation and thousands of hours working with people. The techniques were not designed in advance. Many revealed themselves while Anandi was teaching and were experienced and applied immediately by the people in the room before becoming part of the body of work that exists today.
To understand the work, however, it helps to understand something of the life from which it emerged.
Long before peiec
Long before there was peiec®, Anandi was unusually sensitive to people, bodies and energy.
Her father practised acupuncture, and as a young person she remembers being able to feel something occurring around the needles and around people receiving treatment, although she had no framework for understanding what she was sensing.
As a teenager, when her much younger brother became extremely unwell, Anandi instinctively placed her hands on him. There was no technique and no idea of performing a healing practice. She simply stayed with him. He fell asleep beneath her hands and, when he woke, he was well.
There were other experiences she could not readily explain.
One of her earliest memories of profound stillness occurred while standing inside a Japanese temple. Everything became completely still. It was more than the quietness of the room; something within her became quiet too.
Similar openings occurred spontaneously at different times in her early adult life. The usual activity of the mind would fall away and, for periods of time, life was experienced through an extraordinary stillness, clarity and simplicity. Eventually, each opening receded and ordinary experience returned.
It was not simply the experiences themselves that stayed with her.
It was the question they left behind.
Why could something that felt so deeply natural appear – and then disappear again?
An ordinary life in very different worlds
Anandi did not spend the following decades removed from ordinary life or immersed exclusively in spiritual traditions.
She initially worked in design and multimedia, with music and creativity remaining an important part of her life. Her professional direction then changed considerably when she became a paramedic.
For approximately twelve years, Anandi worked on the frontline of emergency care. She encountered people in crisis, trauma, illness, injury, grief and circumstances that demanded both clinical knowledge and the ability to observe and respond to what was actually happening in front of her.
Her energetic sensitivity remained present during these years. On some occasions, she knew that a patient was about to have a seizure before it occurred. At other times, she perceived something about a person or their body without being able to explain how she knew.
There was little reason to make anything of it at the time. There was a patient in front of her and a job to do.
A significant knee problem eventually forced Anandi to leave ambulance work, taking her professional life in another direction. She moved into occupational health and safety and became a Senior Inspector, investigating serious workplace incidents and learning to work backwards through complex events to understand how and why something had occurred.
Her career later expanded into corporate health and safety management, national responsibilities, consulting and senior leadership. She worked across organisations, systems and people, moving between the detail of an individual event and the wider conditions surrounding it.
Those years developed a particular way of looking at things. Where a problem finally becomes visible is not necessarily where it began. Several apparently unrelated factors can contribute to the same outcome. What seems obvious at first may change when more becomes visible.
Anandi could not have known then how relevant those ways of observing would eventually become.
The person helping everyone else
Throughout much of this period, Anandi had become very good at functioning.
What was less visible was how much she herself was carrying.
There was longstanding anxiety, trauma-related responses and flashbacks, physical pain, severe fatigue and the accumulated pressure of years spent in demanding environments. She explored many different ways of improving how she felt, yet much of it simply became part of what everyday life was.
You adapt.
You compensate.
You learn to live around things.
Years later, this would leave Anandi with a question that remains important to her:
How much of what we call normal is simply what we have learned to live with?
2012 – a turning point
In 2012, Anandi’s father, from whom she had been estranged for more than twenty years, was dying in hospital in Malaysia.
During a brief telephone conversation with him, Anandi found herself connecting with and working with him from a distance in a way she had never been taught. What followed became a profound encounter with what she describes as Source.
After his death, something continued. Over the following months, she experienced intense vibrations through her body, heat and cold, headaches and unusual changes in her perception of time and space. Energy, which she had sensed at different points throughout her life, became increasingly tangible.
Later that year, Anandi was diagnosed with breast cancer. Treatment took a significant toll, leaving her profoundly fatigued at a time when so much else within her experience was already changing.
It was during this period that she remembers standing beneath an open sky and saying:
“I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know who I am or what my purpose is. Use me as you see fit.”
She had no idea where any of it would lead.
Looking back, 2012 marked a turning point. peiec® had yet to emerge, but something in the direction of Anandi’s life had changed.
Teaching – 2018
Group Healings – 2018 – 2024
The clinic
In the years that followed, Anandi continued consulting while increasingly working directly with people in clinic.
For a time, these very different worlds existed alongside one another. In one, she was working within conventional professional environments, dealing with organisations, systems and practical problems. In the other, she was encountering things within the body and energy that she could experience and observe but could not always explain through the frameworks she already knew.
People began coming to see her and referring others.
Some arrived with longstanding pain, physical restriction or other difficulties. People sometimes experienced changes Anandi had deliberately worked towards; at other times, something happened that she had not consciously set out to produce.
Word spread largely through personal referral. An informal description began circulating:
“Go and see the Lady in the Hills. I don’t really know what she does, but she fixes things.”
For Anandi, the clinic became more than a place of helping other people.
It became a place of learning.
She began noticing patterns and finding herself working in ways she had never been taught. A placement of the hands would become apparent. A movement. A different way of approaching the body. A way of working energetically that she had never previously learned.
She would follow what came and observe what happened.
There were also experiences that seemed to occur spontaneously around her. People could become deeply still, their thinking sometimes becoming completely quiet, while physical or energetic responses began without Anandi deliberately applying a technique.
These experiences have continued over the years. For Anandi, they became part of a much larger enquiry into healing, stillness and what can occur between human beings when there is very little internal activity standing in the way.
Then the work began to arrive while she taught
By 2017, Anandi had begun teaching groups.
What happened during those early years of teaching would eventually become central to the story of peiec®.
Anandi often did not know what she was going to teach before she taught it.
A technique or application would become apparent while she was teaching. She would follow it and show the people in front of her. They would experience it, practise it with one another and begin applying it for themselves. Then something else would come.
The work unfolded progressively.
The earliest teachings centred around the five layers of self and ways of working within them energetically. Further energetic applications followed, including ways of working with the body without physical contact. More direct physical work and touch came later, followed over time by increasingly subtle ways of working with touch, space, perception and stillness.
There was no completed system sitting behind the teaching.
The body of work was emerging in front of the people learning it.
Over the years, more than 200 original techniques and applications would emerge in this way.
For the students who were there, they were not simply learning an existing methodology.
They were watching one come into being.
A Night with Anandi
The work turned towards Anandi
Anandi applied what was emerging to herself from the beginning.
This became one of the most important aspects of the work.
She was still living with profound fatigue, pain, anxiety and the effects of experiences that had remained within her for years. Much of the work that had emerged was gentle, energetic and initially required little or no physical contact. It gave her another way of approaching herself when she had little capacity for anything forceful.
As she continued applying the work, things began to change.
During this broader period of energetic self-work, the severe fatigue she had lived with lifted. Her experience of anxiety changed. Trauma-related responses and flashbacks diminished. Physical pain changed.
But the changes were not only about what disappeared.
Her mind became quieter. Her experience of her body changed. Energy and perception became increasingly refined. The stillness that had appeared spontaneously at different points earlier in her life began to reveal itself differently.
The work she had been teaching to other people was also changing the person teaching it.
A simple principle became increasingly important:
Self first.
Healing another person could be part of the work, but the person learning peiec® could never stand outside it.
When stillness became the ground
By around 2019, Anandi describes the stillness that had once appeared only temporarily as having become a stable part of ordinary life.
This did not mean that life ceased to contain difficulty, uncertainty or change. It meant that the internal experience through which she met those things had altered profoundly.
It also changed what she observed while working with other people.
Stillness was no longer simply an experience someone might have during a session or practice. It appeared to affect what could be perceived, how another person was touched, how energy was experienced and what became possible within the interaction itself.
People around Anandi sometimes entered that stillness without being deliberately led into it. Thought could become completely quiet. The body could begin responding. Something could change before there had been any attempt to decide what needed changing.
For Anandi, these experiences reinforced something that had gradually become impossible to ignore.
The techniques mattered.
So did the person through whom they were being applied.
And the work kept going
As the years passed, some students remained.
They continued applying the work to themselves, working with one another, receiving from Anandi and returning to teachings they had first encountered years earlier.
Some have now been around the work for two, three, five and even eight years.
They did not remain because it takes eight years to learn the techniques.
They remained because there continued to be more to discover.
As they changed, the work could be experienced differently. Something understood at the beginning could reveal another depth years later. What a person could perceive, receive or recognise did not necessarily remain where it had started.
Anandi saw this in her students.
She also continued to see it in herself.
The fall
In 2023, life presented that development with a very physical reality.
While cleaning gutters at home, Anandi fell more than three metres through a roof, sustaining significant injuries that required surgery and a long period of recovery.
Walking, sitting, standing, sleeping and ordinary movement all became part of rehabilitation.
The injuries were real. Pain was real. The body needed time.
What interested Anandi was the experience of meeting a major physical event from within a system that had already changed considerably over the preceding years.
Development had not made her body invulnerable, nor had stillness removed the realities of being human. Yet the internal experience through which she met pain, limitation, surgery and recovery was very different from the person she had been earlier in her life.
She continued working with herself throughout her recovery.
The fall became another part of the education.
The question is still unfolding
Anandi is now in her late fifties, and perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of her story is that she does not experience development as something that happened earlier in her life and has now concluded.
Some of the most significant changes in how she experiences her body, energy, perception, space and stillness have occurred later.
She describes herself today as feeling more alive, more well and more deeply still than she did when she was younger. Her perception continues to change. Her relationship with her body continues to change. Work she encountered years ago can reveal something different when she returns to it because the person returning is no longer standing in exactly the same place.
Anandi cannot know how far that process can continue.
That uncertainty interests her.
We know that ageing changes us. Bodies change. Circumstances change. Injury and illness remain part of human life.
But perhaps ageing and development are not opposing ideas.
Perhaps there are capacities within us that can continue to develop at the same time.
Still learning
More than a decade after peiec® began unfolding, Anandi continues to teach the work, apply it to herself and observe what it reveals.
She remains the person through whom the work originally came, but she has never regarded herself as standing outside the process she asks others to enter.
The teacher remains a student.
Her books, including Stillness is the Gate, Unbecoming, I See You and The Whisper Within, and her original music offer other expressions of the same long enquiry into stillness, consciousness and the experience of being human.
There is now a name for the body of work that emerged through those years. There are more than 200 techniques. There are students who have remained with it for years and others who are only beginning.
But the question itself remains open.
How much can a human being continue to develop over a lifetime?