Beyond the work

Let's be honest: if we're working together, you'll also be working with me as a person. So, who am I?

Friends call me Rapha. I'm energized by the ocean, by playing my flute in the small forest near my house, by meditation and silence, and by the kind of slow thinking that only happens on a longboard or deep in the woods. I live in Baleal, a small peninsula near Peniche on the Portuguese west coast. Three years in, still no good reason to leave.

Music

I'm a multi-instrumentalist. I've played in bands, recorded albums, and toured. But music, for me, has never been just sound. It's a system that shapes consciousness.

In my first year at university, I discovered that sound could heal. That shifted everything: how I understood music, vibration, resonance, people, life. I went deep and never came back up. Today I understand the world through vibration.

For over 13 years I've practised and taught sound healing, working with individuals and training practitioners. The core of that work is learning to deep listen: to energy, to a body, to what is not being said. Training facilitators means teaching presence before technique. The instrument comes second, the person always comes first.

Being trained in a German methodology meant rigour and depth from the start. It was natural to go further, into psychoacoustics, neuroscience, and neurobiology. That science gave me the language for what I was already experiencing in sessions. And something more: a way of understanding people that doesn't judge. When someone can't sustain a habit, when focus collapses, when willpower runs out: that isn't weakness. That's biology. Understanding the nervous system changes everything about how I see a person.

And here is what I find endlessly fascinating: vibration is code. Music is symbols, patterns, frequencies. Programming languages are the same. A gong, a singing bowl, a line of Python. They all describe reality through a system of structured information. Everything drinks from the same source. That connection is part of why I became an engineer.

Surfing

Rapha surfing longboard in Baleal

I surf longboard. Less about power, more about flow and reading the wave. Living in Baleal with Supertubos a few minutes away means I'm in the water as often as the Atlantic allows.

There's something about being in the ocean that resets everything. You stop being the narrator and just become part of what's happening. It's the same quality I look for in meditation, in a sound session, and honestly in good code: full presence, no noise.

Practices

I've been meditating for 23 years, rooted in a Buddhist lineage that values direct experience over doctrine. Kundalini yoga, sound healing, and study of Buddhist and Jungian psychology all feed into the same inquiry: what does it mean to actually understand a human being?

Sound healing has been my practice and livelihood for 13 years. I trained in the Peter Hess method and have worked with students and clients across Europe. I still run sessions. It's not something I left behind when I became an engineer. It's part of the same work.

Books

  • DemianHermann Hesse
  • Zen Mind, Beginner's MindShunryu Suzuki
  • Cutting Through Spiritual MaterialismChögyam Trungpa
  • 1984George Orwell

Interests

  • Psychoacoustics
  • Naad Yoga
  • Neuroscience
  • Jungian Psychology
  • Buddhist Psychology
  • Linguistics
  • Poetry & Writing
  • Agroforestry (Ernst Götsch)

Nature

Agroforestry

I practise agroforestry in the tradition of Ernst Götsch, an approach to land and farming based on observation and cooperation with natural systems rather than control over them. Forests, hiking, and long walks through quiet landscapes are as essential to me as books or music. I need wild places to think clearly.