What years of working with the same students taught us about development, change, and what peiec® was becoming.
I regularly thank the students who have stayed with us for many years. Not simply because they stayed, but because their staying allowed us to see something that could never have been understood quickly: what this work actually was, and what happened to a human being through sustained engagement with it.
When peiec® first began unfolding, I didn’t set out to create a developmental pathway. Techniques began to be shown, I applied them to myself, and then I began teaching them to others. We could see that people changed. We could see changes in the body, in their emotional and intellectual worlds, in their energetic system, in their perception and, over time, in their experience of stillness.
But there is a considerable difference between seeing change and understanding the trajectory of a pathway.
For that, we needed time.
More importantly, we needed people.
It could never have been enough for Krystle and me to say that we had changed profoundly through years of doing this work. We needed to know whether what we were observing in ourselves was also unfolding in other people who continued to engage with the methodology.
Some of our students have now been with us for eight years. Others for seven, six, five or four. We therefore have people at different points along the pathway, and that has given us something extraordinarily valuable: the ability to observe development over time.
Gradually, patterns became visible.
We saw periods of enormous change and periods when apparently very little seemed to be happening. We watched people doubt what they were perceiving and question their own capacity. We saw them reach places that felt like walls, and we observed what happened when they continued working with themselves, receiving from others, working with other people and remaining engaged with what was being taught.
Then we watched what happened on the other side.
Over enough years and across enough people, certain developmental passages became familiar. When they arise now, we often recognise what is occurring because we have seen versions of the same process unfold before. We know what has happened when people continued to engage, and we have watched what became available beyond places that, at the time, could feel like an ending.
That understanding could never have come from me alone.
It came from the people who stayed.
When there is no inherited map
This is one of the particular challenges of a pathway without an inherited lineage.
When someone encounters Qigong, Kriya Yoga or another established developmental tradition, generations of practitioners have already gone before them. There is a historical framework surrounding the practice. Concepts, language and developmental maps already exist through which someone can begin to understand what they are entering.
peiec® did not arrive with hundreds of years of history behind it.
We have had to watch the map reveal itself.
Perhaps this is also part of the reason peiec® can be difficult to understand from the outside. Human beings naturally interpret something unfamiliar through what we already know.
People see touch and compare it with bodywork. They see us working away from the physical body and compare it with forms of energy work they have previously encountered. They hear us speak about stillness and place it alongside meditation or spiritual traditions.
All of those comparisons are understandable. Elements of what people recognise may be present within peiec®, but none of them individually explains the pathway.
Someone can learn peiec® because they want to work with their own body. They can learn because they want to help a partner, family member, client or animal. They can learn techniques and experience significant change without having any particular interest in where the pathway ultimately leads.
But when someone stays, something else becomes visible.
The person begins to change.
Perception develops. Their relationship with their body changes. Their capacity to touch and receive changes. Their interaction with other people changes. Their internal world and energetic system change. Their experience of stillness deepens. What once overwhelmed them may cease to do so. What they once could not perceive becomes perceptible. What initially required considerable effort can eventually become remarkably simple.
This is when peiec® begins to reveal itself as something more than a collection of techniques.
Development is rarely a straight line
One of the things the years have taught us is that development rarely proceeds in the way we imagine it should.
There are periods when someone feels they are changing rapidly and periods when they are convinced they are going nowhere. There are thresholds at which what previously worked no longer seems sufficient. There are moments of profound clarity followed by doubt. Sometimes people question their capacity precisely at a point when the way they perceive and understand is changing.
Those passages matter.
We have watched them enough times now to recognise many of them, and this is one reason the environment surrounding the work has become as important as the techniques themselves.
Continuing to work matters. Working with yourself matters. Working with other people and receiving from them matters. Observation and correction matter. Returning to something you thought you already understood matters. Repetition matters.
And living your ordinary life while all of this develops matters enormously.
Because ultimately, development has to meet life.
It has to meet another human being. It has to meet relationship, pressure, touch, uncertainty, ageing, responsibility, change and all the ordinary complexity of being here.
For me, this has become one of the most important distinctions in understanding the pathway.
The measure cannot simply be what we experience while practising.
The question is what has developed in the human being who then gets up and lives.
The pathway became visible through the people
The pathway is not ultimately about becoming very good at peiec®.
It is about what develops in the human being through sustained engagement with it.
I could not have known the full shape of that when this work first began. Some things became clear to me relatively early, but understanding the broader developmental trajectory required something that could not be accelerated.
It required years.
And it required people willing to walk far enough along the pathway for us to observe what happened.
Our longer-term students have given us that. Those who have been here for four, five, six, seven and eight years have allowed us to observe different stages of development simultaneously. Their experiences have helped us distinguish temporary experiences from more enduring changes. They have allowed us to recognise patterns, thresholds and passages that would have remained invisible if everyone had simply come, learned some techniques and left.
In that sense, the people who stayed have become part of the unfolding history of the work itself.
I regularly thank them for that.
Because peiec® was not handed to us with a completed map.
We had to walk far enough to see the landscape.
And we needed others willing to walk with us before we could begin to understand where the pathway went.