Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D.

Full Biography

Sasha Alex Lessin entered the world as a piece of his father’s strategy. Irving Lessin married at twenty-one and chose to father a child right away, because the draft boards of that era passed over married men who already had one. Irving considered war a stupid business. He had also sat through meetings in New York and Central Park where the fifth column showed its hand; he knew that Nazi operations ran out of Mexico, and he took seriously the odds that fascism would reach American soil.

So Irving moved the family to California and built a cover story. He spoke Italian, and for years his son grew up believing he belonged to an Italian family. Sasha learned the truth long after: his father had invented an ethnicity so that his Jewish children would survive whatever arrived.

That decision shaped the man Sasha became. He carries his Jewish heritage with pride, keeps his distance from religion, and traces both positions to Irving. His father read him The Outline of History chapter by chapter through his boyhood, and they spent weekends arguing philosophy. Irving toured churches out of curiosity and brought his son along. After one sermon the boy asked whether the god who had killed all those people counted as a god at all. Irving answered that the figure in the story sounded like a homicidal maniac, that the whole account amounted to nonsense, and that a wise person keeps such opinions to himself in mixed company.

The other half of his inheritance came through his mother, who worked as secretary to Ben Kaplan, executive vice president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Sasha grew up fluent in the language of we the people, and he understood himself as part of a socialist project, a welfare state where workers claimed a fair share and worked in safe conditions. His father’s family held serious wealth, and Irving practiced law. Sasha rode both trains at once. He acquired the analytic tools that show how power actually operates, and he held on to his feeling for the common man. Decades later, he speaks for we the people by choice.

His parents recognized the unusual mind in front of them and sent him once a week to Mrs. Quarry for elocution lessons, which turned him into a formidable public speaker. He can still deliver Macaulay from memory. He auditioned for acting work through his boyhood and won a role, the lead in the television version of “My Friend Flicka”, at which point Irving refused to raise a Hollywood child and ordered him to stay in school in Torrance.

Torrance suited him. He finished his coursework at sixteen. When his mother returned to college, he drilled her on her sociology material and absorbed the whole curriculum alongside her. His teachers moved him to the library for history, since he had already walked through the subject with Irving and the constant correct answers cost him goodwill with classmates. He learned to keep his hand under the desk in biology for the same reason. Meanwhile, he served as class president, held the office of commissioner of publicity, ran a lunch-break record show, wrote a column for the local paper, and took the homecoming queen to the dance. He stayed through his senior year by choice and called it the best of the four.

UCLA struck him as heaven. Nobody took roll, so he walked into any classroom that interested him and joined whatever conversation he found. He earned straight A’s and qualified for an option that would have sent him to USC law school a year early. He kept that offer from his parents, because an early law degree meant a desk in his father’s firm and a life that belonged to somebody else. Scholarships followed his record. He enrolled in a split graduate program in anthropology and sociology and took every course both fields offered.

Psychology arrived through his own appetite. He studied behavioral sciences in the School of Business, learned to run T-groups, trained with Carl Rogers, and built a reputation as a skilled encounter group facilitator. Proxemics gave him the anthropological frame for the same material: the geometry of who sits where, what the body announces, and everything a room communicates below the level of awareness. He still places a co-facilitator across the circle rather than beside him, so that participants feel support from every direction.

Fieldwork took him first through the Indian bars of California and then, on a grant to study displaced peoples of the Pacific, to Fiji. There he lived among the descendants of the Tongans who once conquered the Fijian group and wrote the ethnography that earned him his doctorate in anthropology from UCLA. The University of Hawaii hired him to teach, and he rose to dean in a school of counseling.

The 1990s opened a second education. Stanislav Grof lectured in Honolulu; Sasha and his then-wife Joan went to hear him, and the pair joined Grof’s first three-year training group. They carried holotropic breathwork to Australia and New Zealand and taught the method worldwide. He studied with the Jungian analyst Roger Woolger, author of Other Lives, Other Selves, and holds certification in Woolger’s tradition. He credits the seminars he chose after his doctorate with teaching him far more than his degrees ever did.

Voice Dialogue completed the set. Hal and Sidra Stone had taken psychosynthesis, a discipline Sasha already knew, and refined it into a consistent method for working with the dichotomies inside a person and the bonding patterns that pull adults into parent and child roles with each other. He mastered the technology and uses it to widen the range of choices available to a client rather than to narrow them. Hal Stone came to love him like a son.

[Draft closing, pending a second interview session]

Zecharia Sitchin asked Sasha to carry his legacy program forward, and the Anunnaki scholarship that followed forms the foundation of his published work. In 1997, he and his wife, Janet Kira Lessin, founded the World Polyamory Association, World Tantra Association, and the School of Tantra. They write, broadcast, and teach together from Maui.

Short Biography

Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D., holds a doctorate in anthropology from UCLA for his ethnography of a Tongan village in Fiji, and he taught at the University of Hawaii, where he served as a dean in a school of counseling. He trained with Carl Rogers as an encounter group facilitator, joined Stanislav Grof’s first holotropic breathwork training group and introduced the method to Australia and New Zealand, holds certification as a Jungian analyst in the tradition of Roger Woolger, and mastered Voice Dialogue under Hal and Sidra Stone. Zecharia Sitchin asked him to continue his legacy program. He writes and broadcasts from Maui with his wife, Janet Kira Lessin.