Brandon Raynor was born in Ottawa, Canada on August the 14th ,1969. His mother, Bunty, is from Enfield, near London, England and his father, Gary, is from a small town called Nyngan, near Dubbo, NSW in the outback of Australia. His father is a civil engineer and ex Australian Army officer and runs his own business called Procon and his mother is an artist and nurse. They currently live in Manly, a suburb of Sydney Australia. Brandon is a citizen of Australia, Canada and the UK.
He grew up in a suburb of Ottawa, the capital of Canada, called Kanata until he was 8. Then his father got a job as vice managing a Canadian Government aid project in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, a developing central African country. He lived there for 2 years until he was 10. Malawi taught him a lot about nature and about people. There was no TV there and most people lived a simple existence but were very happy. In the community that he lived there were people from all over the world including Canadians, Americans, English, Zimbabweans, South Africans, Indians and Australians as well as Malawians.
At the age of 10 the Malawian government lowered the scale of the project and Brandon and his family moved around visiting Kenya and India and Thailand, places in which Brandon got to see many different ways of life and ways of thinking. Brandon then moved to Sydney, Australia for 6 months and then Vancouver, Canada where his father looked for a new job. The Raynor family then moved to Miami, Florida where they lived until he was 14. Brandon attended Junior High School in Miami for 3 years at Southwood Junior High School and 6 months at Palmetto Senior High School.
During his time in Miami, Brandon develop a condition called alopecia where his body decided that it didn’t want its own hair. This was quite hard at first but later Brandon found that he liked having no hair. It saved him a lot of money on haircuts and shampoo he reasoned. It also taught him what it was like to be different from what everyone expected him to be.
At the age of 14, his family moved back to his father’s home country, Australia. He moved to a suburb of Sydney called Balgowlah and attended his last 3 years of High School there at Balgowlah Boy’s High School. He was a prefect and graduated in 1986 with his HSC, or Higher School Certificate and was accepted into the University of Sydney.
This also had a profound impact on his life as he started to realize the depth of some of the Eastern philosophies from India and Asia in general. Brandon found studying Eastern Philosophy to be far more interesting than the Western Philosophy and Psychology that he was learning at university. Brandon was also an animal rights activist at university and found that the vivisection experiments that were being performed at university in the psychology department, such as copping the top of a monkey’s skull off sticking electrodes in his brain to stop the monkey feeling full after eating and other such experiments were not what he wanted to learn about at university. He dropped out of Psychology and in his second year he studied Social Anthropology, Comparative Religion, Education in Society and Child Growth and Development.
By his second year of university Brandon’s continuing interest in meditation, animal rights and environmental activism led him to believe that he could achieve and learn more outside of the university structure so he decided to discontinue his studies at the University of Sydney and instead he moved to Melbourne and then Adelaide to study more at the Australian School of Meditation there. He found the morning classes of yoga and meditation to be very beneficial to his life and his mental and physical health and found the philosophy of bhakti yoga and Ayurveda to be much to his liking.
About the same time and in order to pay for his course because at that time the Australian Government didn’t pay for Naturopathic courses, Brandon started working at a Health Food Shop in Bondi Junction called Macro Wholefoods. Macro Wholefoods was probably the largest health food shop in Australia at the time.
Brandon learned many things working there and made many friends from people following all sorts of lifestyle paths connected to the health profession from Macrobiotics and Aikido to Yoga of all sorts and the Japanese art of shiatsu. There was a shiatsu clinic upstairs from Macro Wholefoods and Brandon was very impressed with the skill of the practitioners and the way that the shiatsu treatments made him feel. He was invited to come along to an introductory night at the shiatsu school that the practitioners had graduated from, called the Shiatsu Ryoho centre and was hooked after the teacher put his hand a few inches from Brandon’s belly ( or hara) and said that you have a sore ankle which he did.
Meanwhile at Macro Wholefoods Brandon was starting to do Naturopathic Consultations for customers. Brandon learned an awful lot about whole food nutrition during his 2 and a half years at Macro Wholefoods packing food, setting up organic fruits and vegetables and dealing with customers and their Naturopathic questions.
Brandon had a Naturopathic office at Samadhi’s and offered Shiatsu massage and Deep Tissue Massage as well as Herbal Medicine Ayurveda and Astrology consultations. Byron Bay is famous throughout Australia as a place of natural healing and natural healers and Brandon took advantage of his time there to learn from other practitioners how to do good massage. One practitioner in particular, John Jones, impressed him with his extremely deep massage that John practiced in conjunction with his martial arts and Chinese Medicine knowledge. Some of Brandon’s later massage work would be influenced by what he learned by receiving John’s massages that took Brandon to his pain threshold but left him feeling so much better after the treatment.
During that time also Brandon was influenced strongly by a practitioner of the healing arts in the Gold Coast, just north of Byron Bay, named Carole Starr. Brandon became very good friends with Carole and learned a lot about kinesiology, Bach Flower remedies and releasing deep seated emotions using the breathe from Carole. Carole’s treatments on Brandon had a profound effect on his own healing journey as well as on the type of treatments that Brandon would later do for other people.
In 1995 the owner of Samadhi’s asked Brandon to teach a shiatsu course in conjunction with the local evening college. This was the start of a new career for Brandon. The people really enjoyed the course and Brandon enjoyed passing on his shiatsu knowledge although is own unique style had not yet totally evolved.
Brandon also started his other secondary career as a political activist in Byron by running for the local council in 1995. His platform was considered quite radical in its day and was a combination of promoting Byron Bay as an environmental, natural health and animal rights showcase for the world. Byron Bay by that time was fast becoming one of top 3 tourist destinations in Australia as people came from all over the world for its natural beauty and alternative lifestyle. Brandon missed out on being elected but received a lot of support for his unconventional platform, much of which would later be adopted by other political parties in Australia.
Brandon had been studying the Bible during his times in the Mountains, attending the Salvation Army church in Katoomba and he defeated McDonalds by using the verse called Proverbs 12:10 which stated that “The Righteous man cares for the needs of his animals but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel.” Brandon had a letter from the Christian Democrat politician named Fred Nile agreeing that that verse meant that the modern factory farming practices of chicken, pigs and veal were acts of wickedness and hence sinful. Brandon wrote to the local owner of the McDonalds wanting to expand, along with the National and International Head Office, and sent a copy of Fred Niles letter of support along with the New Testament verse stating that “it is better for anyone leading children to sin to have a millstone put round their necks and be thrown into the depths of the sea”. McDonalds, not wanting an international debate decided to pull out citing reasons about council objection.
http://www.mcspotlight.org/campaigns/current/residents/blue_mountains.html
Brandon also put up many posters and stickers around Sydney detailing what McDonalds was doing around the world. He was injured and narrowly escaped arrest after grafitiing a McDonalds sign with the words “McRaping the Earth.”
It took Brandon a year to gather the 200 signatures required to set up a state political party and in the meantime he moved back to Sydney and began working at Herbal Solutions in Bondi Beach. He was a resident Naturopath and did Iridology diagnosis, Herbal Medicine, Flower remedies and it was here that Brandon really started to perfect his massage therapy treatments. Again Brandon had the privilege of doing many swaps with skilled practitioners including a Chinese Medicine Practitioner that showed him some extremely deep abdominal massage techniques, some of which he was to use in his later development of Raynor massage. By this stage Brandon’s massage was getting strong appreciation from the general public and many of his clients asked him where they could learn to massage like that. Brandon had noticed that many of the students who had just completed their massage training at the various massage schools in Sydney were looking for jobs at Herbal Solutions yet their practical skill at massaging was very poor, while some of the people that were dropping out of those same schools actually showed more promise. It was then that Brandon stated to some of his clients that he could probably teach more in a few days then they would learn in a year at a bigger college.
Brandon also experienced his first taste of being arrested for civil disobedience when he was arrested in the forests of Goolengook in East Gippsland in Victoria. He was arrested when he asked a policeman if he could speak to his commanding officer and object to the destruction of one of Australia’s greatest and most beautiful forests. He was thrown into jail for a few hours and the fined $1000. Later it was shown that there were high levels of corruption used to jail protestors in the forest of East Gippsland.
He continued on in 1997 teaching his Saturday morning massage classes, all the while continuing developing his political party and starting his campaign for the 1999 State Senate elections.
Brandon and Rebecca, also set up a small holistic health centre for a few months in the Blue Mountains called the Katoomba Holistic Health Centre and learned valuable lessons in setting up a Natural Therapies centre and in running a business, something Brandon did not have any previous experience with. Luckily for Brandon, meeting Rebecca had a good effect on him as she had a degree in International Business Management and was fluent in Japanese, as well as being a beautiful and loyal wife to him which had a stabilizing effect upon him.
Some of Brandon’s political opponents criticized him for this but Brandon believes that the more parties to represent a variety of viewpoints the healthier a democracy becomes. Brandon came very close to getting elected even with newspapers having front page stories of them that were fabricated in order to mislead voters. Brandon was later told by one of his massage clients that worked for a Labor Party politician at NSW State Parliament that the “powers that be” did not want him to get elected due to Brandon’s outspokenness on animal rights, environmentalism and family values.
Brandon learned a lot about Australian politics during that time first hand and was surprised at the level of corruption and collusion between the politicians and the media. After the election the NSW Government used various lies to deregister all political parties and make it much more difficult to register a political party, including having 750 names and thousands and thousands of dollars in fees. Obviously true democracy was very scary to the politicians.
Brandon pointed out exactly what was happening in many press releases at the time but no media would follow up on the story preferring to be compliant with the government’s desires to make participation in the democratic processes of NSW much more difficult for the average person. Brandon learned that there wasn’t much freedom of the press in those pre and early internet days.
After the election Brandon worked part time doing massage at the 5 star hotels in Sydney and made a lot of contacts in the business and professional spheres and gradually shifted to learn more about business. During that time he massaged several well known people such as Annie Lennox from the Eurythmics and several members of the American football teams that came to Sydney in 1999 for the Super bowl.
In late 1999 Brandon again moved to Byron Bay while his wife Rebecca was pregnant with their first baby. Brandon again got involved in local council elections in Byron Bay but by that time his policy of Traditional Family values wasn’t as popular with the local Press in Byron Bay, who couldn’t pigeon hole Brandon.
It was at this time that Brandon started his studies of Ayurvedic Medicine by correspondence with Ayurvedacarya David Frawley of the American Institute of Vedic Studies. He attended many seminars also in Ayurveda in both Sydney and Byron Bay.
Brandon also spent a lot of time training in Shiatsu in the Traditional Japanese way when he worked with practitioners from the Shiatsu House in Sydney. This was also a very influential time in refining the subtlety of Brandon’s later style of massage called Raynor massage. Brandon is still in contact with Uichiro Ogawa, who is now a shiatsu practitioner in Ikebukuro, Tokyo who was his main mentor at the time.
Brandon continued to fly down to Sydney once a month and massage some of his former clients and he also the started teaching his massage courses down there once every few months.
At the start of 2001 Brandon, Rebecca and young Jayananda flew over to Japan, India and Thailand. Brandon got to experience first hand a lot of shiatsu massage in Japan, Thai massage in Thailand and Ayurvedic massage in India. Unfortunately Rebecca got malaria in Northern India and spent several days unconscious in hospital while Brandon got to contemplate life and death at a hospital in Mathura, India where no one spoke English. Luckily Rebecca recovered and they both went back to Australia and moved to an even more peaceful and quiet location, the Northern NSW town of Chillingham.
Brandon and Rebecca would spend time at home then fly around Australia teaching massage courses. It was at this time that they hired their first employee Dina Davis, who would end up working for them for 5 years and helped them get all of their administration better organized. Brandon continued to expand his courses and started teaching in Adelaide in 2001 and by 2002 had started to teach his massage courses in Perth and Darwin.
The school continued to expand with the first massage courses being offered in London, Manchester and Edinburgh in November 2002 and in Boston. Massachusetts in December of that year.
Brandon and Rebecca also started teaching courses in Tasmania and in 2002 had bought their first house in a town called Liffey, 45 minutes drive to Launceston in the north of the island.
Tasmania has many beautiful forests and rivers and although the Raynors were away they appreciated their time in the beautiful wilderness. It was a nice place to retreat too although the remoteness and lack of multiculturalism in Tasmania, eventually got to Rebecca.
The continuing growth of Brandon’s massage school and teaching methods continued to stir up opposition form people who had the most to lose from him teaching his courses. In Montana after his first course in Billings which attracted 34 students the heads of several massage school got together and wrote to newspapers that no one should get massage therapy treatments from Brandon’s students. Brandon challenged them to a Western style “Pepsi Challenge” type event in which members of the general public would decide which students gave the better massages without knowing what school the graduates were from but the other schools refused the challenge and instead continued to criticize from the sidelines.
Brandon continues to get emails from the heads and graduates of other massage schools claiming that he could not possibly teach people massage in such a short period of time. They are obviously very threatened by competition.
“Dear Brandon, Thanks for your communication. Yes, we do indeed know that the AEC took about three years to reach a decision on the registration of your party. As we have stated publicly, the treatment of your party -- and many others -- is an outrageous attack on democratic rights.
In fact, you may be interested to learn that an official at the AEC admitted over the phone that the new -- and highly restrictive/punitive -- naming provisions introduced after the 2004 election were partly aimed at removing Brandon Raynor's Green Liberals from the list of registered parties!
The aim of the electoral laws is clear: the protection of the two-party system and the suppression of the democratic rights of ordinary people. The parlous state of the major parties, including their collapsing membership base, has of course been revealed in the aftermath of the November 24 poll: a spectacular implosion of the Liberal and National parties. Only the machinery and trappings of office masks the same basic process in the ALP.
Laura Mitchell Socialist Equality Party Dec 3, 2007”
That’s from a spokesperson of a political party whose aims Brandon doesn’t totally subscribe to.
It’s funny how ordinary Australians don’t like to believe how corrupt their country has become and how suppressive of real democracy the government is.
Unfortunately Labour Laws in Tasmania did not allow a business owner to sack employees that they believed were dishonest and so one of them decided to take Brandon to court, and the judge was very unfair in his application of the law and Brandon had to pay many months wages for one of the sacked employees as well as legal costs.
This episode, which Brandon and Rebecca both consider one of the most stressful episodes of their lives, led them to close their clinic and sell their property in Tasmania and move to Hawaii in early 2005.
Brandon’s current interests include meditation, following an Ayurvedic lifestyle, gardening, teaching massage, running his business and spending time with his wife, son and their many friends on Oahu. In 2008 Brandon intends to travel to Australia to teach some advanced courses and then spend several months in England teaching his courses and promoting his school and hopefully earning enough money to start to build his retreat centre in Hawaii.
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