Dear Friend,

Welcome to the training! It is such an honor to be here with you in this space. Let's begin with a little centering exercise. We will start most lessons in this way.

Stop. Breathe deeply for a few rounds of breath. Connect with your body, connect with this moment in time, connect with the energy in your heart.

Close your eyes and breathe like this for a few rounds. Really do it.

As you read on, we want you to be conscious about this moment as we embark on the next 6 months of training and transformation. Connect to your intentions. Connect with your passion to serve. Connect with your desire to be happier and more powerful. Connect to the tradition of people walking the spiritual path, the WHOLE ancient tradition of transformation that this work comes from. You are not alone. By stepping over this threshold you are joining the ranks of servants and teachers and masters and prophets and shamans and wise men and wise women and sages and healers that have played a very special role in society.

By signing up for this training and stepping over this threshold, you are signing up to be a mystic. In some cases, you may be called to be guides to others, beacons. In the Indian tradition, this work was often carried out by sanyāsins - monks. The sanyāsins in the Hindu tradition (and many others) wear bright orange robes, or robes that were different hues of red. They do this to stand out in the crowd. The sanyāsin stands for wisdom, for service, for devotion, for yoga, for connectedness and discipline, so when people would see their bright robes in a crowd or down the road, they would be reminded. And if anyone wanted to have more of those qualities, or wanted to invest in those aspects of life, they knew where to go, they knew whom to approach.

So that is what you're signing up for. You will be beacons. You probably already are. But by the end of our training, you will attain a new level of this.

In that same tradition, before the sanyāsin was given their orange robe, they were given a white one. This indicated their period of training, their time of preparation. Before they could wear the saffron colored robe, they had to prove themselves, they had to be prepared. It was a safeguarding measure, so that those sanyāsins, those beacons were guiding people in the right direction. It was also to safeguard them so that they were truly ready to carry that light.

It's easy to want to be spiritual leaders. It's easy to have the wish to be mystics or guides for others. But having the desire and having the ability are two different things. The gap between these two shores - wanting to guide others and being guides - is the gap we're going to cross together over the next nine months.

If this talk of being beacons, or guides, or mystics of some sort makes you feel uncomfortable, it should. The idea of being powerful beings - especially ones who claim any kind of mastery - can seem ugly. Most of that is because these positions have been abused in the past. Or at the very least they have been carried out by people who weren't prepared or supported in the right way. Our job and our work will be to make sure that none of you "get your robes" without being prepared.

And... we're not exactly setting you up to run an ashram or start collecting disciples. We are setting you up to be deep practitioners of Mahāyoga. But even that will give us plenty to do.

But you don't need to shave your heads. Or wear white robes. There are a few austerities we are asking of you: practice daily, do your homework... But the real deep "vows" are much more subtle. Your white robes will not be material, they will be energetic. They will consist of OPENNESS. Openness to the process, openness to what we're doing here. Openness to me. For a brief casual encounter, openness is easy enough. But we are asking for sustained openness. We are asking you to be open, even when you might not feel like it. We are asking you to say YES. And in that defiant YES, there is deep work.

We are asking you to say yes to service. Ultimately, this training is a service training. We are training you to serve in a deeper and stronger way. Whatever difficulty you endure in this, remember that it's all tied to serving your fellow human beings. The person in the white robe could always be asked to help. And, traditionally, MOST of a sanyāsin's training had little to do with mystical matters. Much of the training was about offering selfless labor. Many of the wisdom lessons were learned in the gardens and kitchens and dish rooms of the teacher's ashram. There won't be a lot of that kind of service work required of you in this training, but we want you to contemplate that attitude nonetheless.

We are asking you to say yes to learning. Some of you are super experienced in meditation and some of the other inner practices. Some of you are relatively new. Either way, you are going to be learning a lot. We need you to be open for that. One of my favorite quotes comes from the Guru Gītā: "Those who know, know not. Those who know not, know." Meaning it's so important to keep in mind the vastness of this topic and keep ourselves in a position of humble teachability. "You can't fill a full vessel." We expect you to have more questions than answers. When we meet for our sessions, we expect you to have questions about the material ready to discuss.

We are asking you to say yes to transformation. The work in this training is not about a "topic" as such. It's about you. You will learn all kinds of ways to meditate and you will learn all kinds of teachings. But the most important thing you will learn is how to see yourselves as awakened, fully-living human beings, how to hold yourselves in that space. For any of us, there are elements within us that stand in the way of this. We want you to say yes to seeing, working on, and eliminating some of what holds you back. Our standard is not perfection, but you will make progress on your path.

We are asking you to say yes to discipline. We aren't giving you ridiculous requirements, but we are surely raising the bar for you. Discipline Equals Freedom is an aphorism you could have on your altar for these 9 months. If you are teachers or healers, discipline is one of the things you offer to your students, so you will need to have it to give it. You will have to sacrifice a little bit to really do this training. You'll have to sacrifice some time. You might have to sacrifice some little things that you enjoy. We promise you, it will be worth it.

Finally, we are asking you to say yes to training. You are being trained. You are being shaped. If you imagine any other kind of training: piano lessons, martial arts, physical training.... it's a process and one that sometimes rubs your ego the wrong way. At some points you will be on top of the world, at others you might hate it, hate me, and want to quit. This is how trainings go. Say yes.

Sobriety

I want to say a few words about sobriety. In this training, I am not requiring total sobriety but I think it's a great idea. The requirement in the training is something that has evolved over the years. My main requirement is that if you are using drugs or alcohol, that you really are honest about how it effects you on a subtle level. This awareness is important for a number of reasons. First, you'd be surprised how much just a little alcohol or drug use can impair your ability to feel subtle experiences. We need to you have as clear of a canvas as possible within to experience what's happening inside. If we wanted to take it some steps further, I would require a purely vegetarian diet and forbid caffeine or sugar or TV. I am, myself, not ready to observe all of these restrictions, but they would give you an even deeper level of clarity. The other thing, and this is especially true of cannabis use and use of psychedelics - they really support self-deception. They give their users a false sense of deep thinking and produce a very specific kind of self-absorption that the users are almost NEVER aware of. Finally, being totally sober is very rare these days. So being so sets your consciousness apart from the herd which is good during a period of training.

That said, you're not going to get kicked out of the training if you have a glass of Champagne on New Years'. But you will be expected to notice how it effects you and your inner experience. And if you choose to resist the social pressures for these moments of imbibing, I promise you will learn something!

A Note About Me

This is an unusual group of advanced training participants because the majority of you are people who I have not directly met! And few among you have worked much with me directly. Over the course of these months, we are going to get very close, so I want to say something about my role. My role is to train you. It is to challenge you, hold you accountable, hold space for your transformation, and to share knowledge with you. You can always ask me anything. And know that I am always your biggest cheerleader, even if I am challenging you. And also know I am an imperfect vessel. I am still on the potter’s wheel myself. There are many hurdles I have overcome. There are many that have tripped me onto my face. There are still daily challenges in my life as a sādhaka and as a teacher. That said, I am here for you 100%. We’re in this together. If there is something I don’t know or don’t feel qualified to address in you, I will point you in the right direction for further support

With Great Respect and Love, 

Harshada