ABOUT
The world and the inner world
For twenty years I worked in senior management in international corporations. My background is in economics and information technology. Alongside that, over some thirty years, I did sustained personal work, both psychological and spiritual. I am not a teacher who never lived in the world. I built a material life and a contemplative one at the same time, and I do not believe the two are opposed.
Today I work full-time where two traditions meet. One is the depth psychology that began with Jung. The other is the living Vedic tradition of yoga, tantra, and the study of consciousness. This page is the plain account of how I came to that work, what I trained in, and the idea that holds it together.
The thesis
Depth psychology and the contemplative traditions of the East are usually treated as separate worlds. One is clinical and Western, the other spiritual and Eastern. I do not experience them that way. They describe the same inner world in two languages.
Jung mapped the structure of the psyche with great precision. The shadow, the archetypes, the unconscious, the lifelong process he called individuation. What his work does less well is tell a person how to live inside that structure, day after day, in the body. The yoga and tantric traditions are built for exactly that. They arrived at much of the same map thousands of years earlier, by a different route.
Neither tradition stands above the other. They are different languages for the same inner world, and the deeper a question goes, the less any single language can hold it. Taken together, they give a fuller account of a person than either gives alone.
A career, and what came with it
My formal training is in economics and information technology. Thirteen years of study, and a degree from the University of Economics in Prague. I then spent more than two decades in top management in international companies, working in strategy, product, and innovation, while building businesses of my own. I mention this not as a credential but as a plain fact about the kind of work I do. I am not asking anyone to leave the world. I lived in it, did well in it, and found it was not enough on its own. That is where I speak from.
Kristýna and I have three children. I live between Europe and Costa Rica.
A person does not become whole by adding something good.
They become whole by facing what they had refused to look at.
DANIEL PAULUS
Depth psychology
My study of Jung is close to complete, along with the major figures who carried his work further. Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hollis, Robert Johnson, Joseph Campbell, Edward Edinger, and Robert Bly with the mythopoetic tradition. I work with the practical instruments of this lineage as well as its theory. Dream work, active imagination, and the encounter with the shadow.
I have also studied the modern research into consciousness directly with its sources. This includes extended programmes with Stanislav Grof on holotropic states and the relationship between psyche and cosmos, and the work of Jordan Peterson on personality and the psychology of belief.
The Vedic tradition
My training in the Eastern traditions is by initiation and direct study, not by weekend certification.
I am a student in the unbroken lineage of Śrī Vidyā. I was initiated into it under Sri Shivapremananda over more than two years, with further transmission in the Devipuram tradition under Sri Amritananda Natha Saraswati. This is a living lineage, a parampara, and within it the relationship to a true teacher is neither optional nor symbolic. The word guru means the movement from darkness into light. In its genuine form it is indispensable. What I reject is only its Western distortion, the guru as celebrity, the personality cult, the demand for blind obedience.
I have completed four certification programmes at the American Institute of Vedic Studies under David Frawley, known as Pandit Vamadeva Shastri. They were Integral Vedic Counseling, Yoga and Ayurveda, Ayurvedic Astrology, and Ayurvedic Healing, with further study and Vedic readings with him and with Shambhavi Devi. I completed the 800-hour programme in the History, Literature and Philosophy of Yoga under Georg Feuerstein, and I have worked through the full body of work of Robert Svoboda, the first Westerner initiated into the Aghora tradition. My other teachers include Rod Stryker, Raja Choudhury, Everett Newell, Steven Highburger, and the Czech scholar Milan Calábek.
Georg Feuerstein spent his life translating and analysing the primary sources of yoga. He has been my central guide to the tradition as it truly is, rather than as it is marketed.
Where I stand
I am not a religious teacher, and I do not ask anyone to believe in reincarnation or to take on a doctrine. At its core the Vedic tradition is not a faith but a practical science of consciousness, and Jungian psychology is clinical and empirical work. Critical thinking is welcome here. Scepticism is healthy.
I do not trust the wellness and spiritual bubble, and I do not trust secular reductionism either. Conservatives tend to dislike me as much as progressives do, because I refuse to think in camps. I name the mechanism. I do not judge the person.