About Dr Evgenii Timofeev
Evgenii’s path of practice and development can be best described as a movement from bewilderment to peace.
A deep-seated dissonance inside of him regarding the ways of the world, the experience of loss and disillusionment, and conflict with established narratives of consensus reality caused a great deal of turmoil in his younger years. Incidentally, this conflict has also engendered a deep search for truth and commitment to the right kind of practice.

Evgenii recalls establishing a routine for himself at the age of eight, whereby he’d get up early in the morning before going to school and start the day with calisthenic exercises to prepare for the day’s challenges and improve his health. This self-discipline has become characteristic of his approach to training, therapy and cultivation.

Because of an innate interest in human beings, Evgenii dedicated his efforts at school and university to studying humanitarian disciplines and developing his body and character. Although he found many subjects in school to be irrelevant and the education system’s approach to be more on a ‘brainwashing’ side rather than on the side of self-discovery, he persevered by prioritising subjects he deemed important and working with teachers he felt were genuine in what they taught. Much of his younger years were dedicated to physical training, which he was encouraged to do by his father. Callisthenics, running in the hills, weightlifting, swimming in the river and manual labour (because he lived on the farm) were the mainstays of his practice at that time. As a result, he developed a strong and resilient physique, which became a foundation for all subsequent practices.


At the age of ten, Evgenii experienced a first major encounter with the nature of existence: impermanence and unsatisfactoriness. His father, whom he admired and emulated, collapsed with a brain stroke, which rendered him half-paralysed and destined to live the rest of his life struggling through this acquired disability. Witnessing how a man he idealised could dramatically change taught Evgenii a valuable lesson about the uncertainty of life. This event and the family's subsequent path have taught him lessons of perseverance through what at times seemed impossible. Striving for self-improvement against these odds became a personal endeavour. For Evgenii, he embarked on gaining firsthand experience in understanding and caring for people at their most intense and raw— witnessing their pain, their truth, and what can best be described as their ‘real’.

These lessons have formed a foundation of Evgenii's approach to working with people who experience suffering. Meeting people at the level of the 'real', where they’re the most genuine, listening to them, giving them attention, is the ‘rarest and purest form of generosity’, as Simone Weil says, and is transformative in its own right. When the truth of the situation, its acuteness and immediacy are recognised without labelling and prescribing, there lays a potential for change.

Wanting to see the world and train in the Eastern arts, which have long been his fascination, Evgenii entered university to study the intricacies of international tourism. He used it as an opportunity to travel abroad. His first trip was to Northern China, the closest to the Russian Far East where he grew up. He went to Haerbin and stayed in Shaolin Gongfu school training for one summer. At that time he already had other bases of practice apart from physical exercise, such as Shotokan Karate and the discipline of Parkour. These three highly external modalities have expanded his understanding of the body into the martial sphere and the sphere of interacting with the environment.

Karate is highly contrasted with Gongfu in terms of minimalism, precision, directness and one-pointed focus, which doesn’t diverge from the main aspects of combative training: offence and defence. Gonfu, on the contrary, contains an almost infinite vocabulary of bodily use to mobilise and express power, to develop explosivity, adaptability, and artisticity through acrobatic skills, animal forms, weaponry and specific conditioning drills. This multiplicity of methods allowed Evgenii to harness the animalistic and unruly sides of his nature, his drive, which resisted being subjected to the Zen-like discipline of karate.

Parkour had become the ultimate avenue for self-expression and interaction with the wider environment. Being a bit shy by nature, Evgenii found freedom in the practice of Parkour whereby one can simply enter the streets and run, jump, climb, dodge the crowd, roll and dive over obstacles, manifesting the capacity of this body and this heart for action unrestrained by social codes of behaviour. The ethos of this discipline developed out of ‘Le Method Naturelle’, a holistic training system that tackled physicality and character cultivation, has deeply resonated with Evgenii’s altruistic motivation, which can be summarised by the parkour motto ‘being strong to be useful’.
Having graduated from uni, Evgenii moved to China, where he settled in Shanghai and joined one of the first Parkour communities in the country. This marked another chapter of Evgenii’s journey of self-cultivation through movement arts. Practising, teaching and performing as a Parkour athlete, he developed connections with wider fields of expertise. Meeting Ido Portal in Shanghai, helped Evgenii to open up his perspective on human movement even more. It became apparent to him that it is not the training modality or style but the qualities built into the body and character that matter. How can one be fully proficient in movement? Not as a martial artist or a parkour practitioner, but as a human being.

This human body is the vehicle for the manifestation of divinity, it perfectly expresses one’s state of mind, psyche, energy, and nature, and, beyond all that, one’s Soul. Its full potential of self-expression is undefinable. Hence, overcoming blockages of miscoordination, weakness, unskillfulness and inability to perform a particular movement pattern leads to the discovery of truer ground within. It is that groundless ground, of which spiritual traditions speak, which becomes mired by the acquired conditioning. Being detached from this ground manifests in bodies that are rigid, stiff and sick, devoid of flow and gracefulness, empty of power and vigour. Indeed ‘a healthy spirit resides in a healthy body’. Therefore, one can rely on the skilful means of varied traditions that work with the body to find that very spirit.
The prompt to search wider and be uninhibited by styles has led Evgenii inwards to explore the internal arts and meditation. Further travels took him around China, Russia, South-East Asia, and India where he encountered many teachers and practitioners whom he studied and trained with over the years. Their religious and cultural belonging varied, their modalities were yoga, taijiquan, qigong, vipassana, traditional trance, dance improvisation, and more. Yet their dedication, skillfulness and virtuous qualities were praiseworthy. It had become apparent to Evgenii very quickly that those teachers who didn’t have a grounding in the training of their body and energy were somewhat lacking conviction when talking about mind, psyche, soul or spirit. It is as if they have missed an essential aspect of the ‘whole’. It has also become apparent to him that it is very difficult to meet proficient all-rounded people who can be considered masters of what it is to be fully human. The latter implies mastering the body and energy, which is considered an ‘earth-level’ practice in traditions of cultivation, as well as mastering the mind and developing virtue: a ‘human-level’ practice. It is way harder to meet those who have gone beyond the ‘human-level’ and found freedom through realising the Spirit within themselves: a ‘heaven-level’ practice. Yet many like to talk about high-minded concepts pertaining to the level of heaven whilst even their body and energy are yet to be functioning efficiently.
Around his mid-twenties, both of Evgenii’s parents passed away, which marked yet another direct experience of reality and instilled a sense of urgency to continue pursuing spiritual practice.

Evgenii’s discovery of the value of working with the body through arts of movement and internal arts has caused him to critically examine existing approaches to mental health. He felt that the growing number of mental health problems in the world is due to the following two issues. First, there’s disconnection from the intensity of physicality and the drive, which causes the characteristic split between conscious and unconscious. Second, there is a loss of perspective that attainment of realisation regarding the Divine is possible. When contemporary approaches to mental health work with mind and psyche, only involving the body in proxy and not crossing into the territory of spiritual, they create a claustrophobic space of being encapsulated within one’s self, whereby a person thinks that this ‘me’ is all there is and that something is wrong with ‘me’.

Wishing to bring this perspective forth, Evgenii completed a PhD, titled ‘Embodiment of the Real. Interdisciplinary Study of Subjectivity, Trauma and Spiritual Cultivation’.
Working to develop his research, Evgenii travelled even more extensively across Asia and Australia, meeting practitioners and accomplished teachers from such varied backgrounds as Theravada Buddhism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Northern Daoism, Orthodox Christianity and more to study and practice closely with them. It had become evident to Evgenii that a human being in the modern world is largely lost and confused due to a great deal of conflicting information available online. He observed that people have become divorced from systematic embodied practice that takes care of the mind, body and energy converting them in a way suitable to experience the Soul directly. By the completion of his research, it is precisely this multifaceted perspective and interdisciplinary practice that Evgenii had developed.

Participating in various specialised communities such as those of psychoanalysts, Buddhist practitioners, martial artists, practitioners of trance, and enthusiasts of internal arts, Evgenii could see their ethos, approach, method and a particular form of ‘self’ that they create. Although he could resonate with all of them and sympathise with their work, having done his research and having practised in the eclectic way he did, he couldn’t fully associate with any of them.
Each of those fields of expertise was still a particular modality of selfhood, a certain someone, who could be related to and identified as: a psychoanalyst, Buddhist, martial artist, etc. Yet this wasn’t of interest to Evgenii, since he was looking to understand how to be human. For that, one is to meet oneself and others at the fundamental core of our predicament, our pain and joy, our rawness and complexity, our beauty and bewilderment, and our infinite potential for realisation and mastery, irrespective of frameworks. This has become the key aspiration behind Embodiment of Real—an educational resource aiming to be of service to those who seek to understand themselves and better themselves through practice.

Evgenii’s current training consists of energy work, extensive physical exercise, and a traditional modality of spiritual cultivation that is found at the practical core of any world religion. He offers these insights and practices through this online resource. He also works with people who wish to train and develop themselves face-to-face.

The approach to training and therapy that Evgenii promotes is that of developing self-acceptance by cultivating strength, moral virtue, and skillfulness in the ways of living within this wonderful body endowed with energy and mind capable of manifesting attentiveness. The bridge towards the realisation of truth, which can be found only within, is this very human embodiment. By working with it, studying it, learning how to abide within ourselves, by making ourselves into a pleasant place to be, we have a chance to touch upon something deeper, something genuine and more permanent than our ever-changing cognitive processes and emotional states. It is this ground of humanity, relatable to anyone, that Evgenii is interested in embodying, expressing, and sharing with others for the benefit of all.