These guidelines are recommendations to help you get the most out of this transformative spiritual experience. They are inner attitudes that can also guide your practice and conduct throughout the process.

Emotional maturity

Any teacher training course is bound to bring up emotional purifications and strong inner processes. In a Tantra TTC, due to the nature of the work with energy and the sensitive domain of sexuality, these can be amplified. It is important to be aware of this from the start and come with a level of emotional maturity: not

looking to vent emotional turmoil on others or leech on the group energy, but to handle anything that arises with awareness and self-sufficiency. As teachers, we are very much here to support you, but with the understanding that ultimately we are all responsible for our own mental state. Furthermore, it should be emphasized that this is a tantra course, not a psychological healing session. We will give some practices from outside the tantric tradition that work on the psychological level, such as family constellations, with the awareness that most modern people need some degree of therapy in order to progress spiritually. However, the goal is always spiritual enlightenment, not merely personal healing. We encourage students always to come from the highest perspective on their personal problems: the view from sahasrara, seeing all mental and emotional phenomena as fluctuations embraced within the Divine Consciousness.

Beginner’s mind

In Zen Buddhism, they talk about something called “beginner’s mind.” Often when we first start learning something, we come with curiosity, openness and a sense of wonder. Only later, once we start to feel like we already understand the subject, there comes a sort of shut down where it’s hard to learn anything new – because we think we know it all already. Zen teachers recommend cultivating the mindset of a beginner, no matter how you advanced you are: to keep that humbleness, enthusiasm and lack of preconceptions. This is also the attitude that we recommend for this TTC. You may already have a long practice of yoga and tantra, or even be a teacher. Still, we recommend coming with an attitude of complete openness, putting aside what you might already be familiar. After all, if you only want to learn what you already know, why bother with such a course? After the course, you will have plenty of time to integrate what you learn here with what you already know. But for now, the more you empty yourself the more you can be filled.

Embrace the intensity

This TTC period will be intense: long days, lots of practice and lots of information. At times, you might feel like it’s too much. If this feeling arises, we recommend trying to relax into the intensity. Remember that it is a relatively short period of your of time: five weeks, and then you have the rest of your life to integrate. It might seem like the information is too much to absorb, but trust that your mind will take it in on some level and it will be there for you when you need it. You don’t have to understand everything right away. Like baking a clay jar, the intensity of the process is what brings the deep transformation. So enjoy it, commit to it, and allow yourself to learn from whatever it brings up.