Pilgrimage to the Center of a New Humanities

In spiritual communities today, authentic depth is often replaced with trademarks and shallow marketing; in academic spaces, the sacred is stripped from what it means to pursue education. As our world convulses with conflict, we need the kind of everyday responsiveness that is uniquely born through a process of deep sādhana.

We need places where philosophy and practice belong together — where rigorous study sharpens insight, and contemplative practice becomes a living experiment in creating a different kind of freedom for our lives and for the lives of others.

Sādhana School revives the original purpose of the humanities: to cultivate wisdom, wonder, creativity, and discernment as the ground of a meaningful life.

Here, liberation is not a final state somewhere off on the horizon, but an aesthetic and dynamic recognition (pratyabhijñā) of the sacred Self that is always already present in every aspect of life.

. . . Sādhana School offers a methodological training in subtle perception, refined knowledge, and experiential insight. Grounded in the texts and practices of non-dual Śākta-Śaiva Tantra, it offers you sequences of study to expand your contemplative worldview and develop practices that inspire and cultivate the imagination.

Throughout this process, emotional and intellectual capacities become heightened and clarified, and the confidence born of embodied values and principles begin to emerge. These capacities provide students with the resources they need to meet each moment with grace, humility, and wisdom.

In his Tantrāloka, the philosopher-mystic Abhinavagupta wove together diverse strands of Tantrik wisdom—uniting the vibratory metaphysics of Spanda, the ritual power of Kaula, the visionary unfolding of Krama, and the theological sophistication of Trika. At the heart of this synthesis is Pratyabhijñā, the recognition-based philosophy that affirms our inherent divinity and the possibility of awakening through direct, contemplative insight. Sādhana School spirals through these interwoven lineages — not as separate systems, but as mutually illuminating orientations. Each seasonal sādhana draws from one or more of these streams, guiding students through a multidimensional process of subtle practice, textual inquiry, and aesthetic integration. Through this arc, we return again and again to a central Tantrik understanding: that liberation is not something we achieve, but something we recognize as already taking place — an intimate and dynamic perception of the sacred pulsating cyclically through everyday life.

The journey of sādhana begins with attention. But in the Tantrik traditions, attention is not passive or observational — it is a vibratory movement of consciousness itself. This first 8-week sādhana cycle introduces students to the foundational metaphysics of spanda, the subtle pulsation of awareness that animates thought, perception, and embodiment. Through the Spanda Kārikās, we encounter a philosophy not of inert stillness but of dynamic equilibrium, where each fluctuation of mind or emotion is an opportunity to realign with the rhythm of our own awakened nature.

We will explore how icchā (will), jñāna (knowledge), and kriyā (action) form a triadic energetic loop that organizes the field of experience — and how stabilizing our awareness within this field cultivates a life of non-reactivity, poise, and subtle responsiveness. Through meditative experimentation and inner attunement, we develop skills in resting in motion, grounding the first of Sādhana School’s seven competencies: subtle perception and energetic literacy.

This sādhana also initiates students into the ethos of contemplative self-tracking, laying the groundwork for practice portfolios, study pods, and the reflective modes of the Inner Travelogue. As we enter the deeper terrain of SLBT (Subtle Liberation-Based Teaching), this first immersion invites us to listen for the hidden intelligence moving through all things — and to begin aligning our lives with that pulse.

Speech, in the Tantrik view, is not merely communicative — it is cosmogenic. Through mantra, sound, and symbol, reality articulates itself into form. This second sādhana cycle turns to the philosophy of sacred speech, examining how vāk, the power of language, functions not only ritually but ontologically. We study Abhinavagupta’s Parātriṃśikā Vivaraṇa, a luminous exegesis on the emergence of sound from silence, as well as passages from Tantrāloka that reveal the deeper practices of mūdrā, mantra, and imaginative imprinting.

Here, the competency of contemplative hermeneutics becomes central: we learn not only to recite mantras, but to understand their inner architecture and implications. We explore the stages of sound, from the unstruck (parā) to the fully manifest (vaikharī), and begin to sense how mantra acts as a vibrational meditation — encoding a pattern of return from dispersion to center.

This phase of sādhana introduces key practices of uccāra, nyāsa, and sound-based visualization, building students’ confidence in ritual literacy and supporting the capacity to transmit teachings with ethical subtlety and clarity — core to the SLBT method. The silent word within becomes the teacher, as we attune to how reality speaks itself through and as us.

To see truly is to be transformed. This third sādhana engages with the Tantrik philosophy of perception, as articulated in the Netra Tantra, Tantrāloka, and the Vijñāna-bhairava Tantra — three texts that challenge the assumption that seeing is a passive act. Instead, perception is a ritual event, an initiatory encounter between the limited and the infinite. The “eye of Śiva” is not just a symbol; it is a yogic function, a refined capacity of attention that must be cultivated through both contemplative discipline and somatic sensitivity.

This phase marks a shift toward embodied insight, emphasizing the competencies of soteriological imagination and spiritual discernment. Through breath, visualization, and symbolic meditation, we explore what it means to “see from the heart,” and how vision itself becomes a doorway to healing, clarity, and ethical intimacy.

As students deepen their relationship to contemplative perception, they begin to take more ownership over the direction of their inquiry. Final project design begins here, alongside peer-led articulation circles and mentorship sessions. Practice becomes philosophy, and perception becomes participation in the sacred patterning of the world.

Our final immersion brings the strands of the year into synthesis — cosmological, somatic, and symbolic. Rooted in the Yoginī-hṛdaya, this 7-day retreat is a meditation on the Śrīcakra, the sacred maṇḍala of Śakti, not as an external object of ritual but as a lived pattern of experience within body, breath, and awareness. Here, students are invited into the inner maṇḍala of their own sādhana: the culmination of months of study, practice, and creative insight.

This final cycle offers a ceremonial space for presentation of final projects, articulation of teaching proposals, and the anchoring of the 8-Fold Methodology of the Scholar-Practitioner. Students are invited to share the fruits of their inquiry in public or kula-based presentations, drawing on the year’s development in articulation, imagination, and subtle pedagogical presence.

In the Śrīcakra, all prior teachings converge: spanda, mantra, visualization, and perception are woven into a unified field of resonance. The retreat becomes not just a closure, but a beginning — a threshold into future roles as teacher, guide, and subtle ambassador for yoga’s deeper technologies.

Cultivate seven core contemplative competencies that support transformation across all areas of life.
Develop a repertoire of subtle, embodied practices to sustain your commitment to study.
Strengthen your skills of articulation, dialogue, and discernment to clearly communicate ideas that may challenge dominant cultural norms and narratives.
Deepen your expertise through a final project that synthesizes your learning into a focused area of specialization.
Have the option to approach your final project as a graduate-level research proposal, with Sādhana School as the field of inquiry and support from our editorial team throughout the writing process.
Become certified in the Subtle Liberation-Based Teaching (SLBT) Method to serve as an ambassador for yoga’s deeper teachings.
Embody the 8-Fold Methodology of the Scholar-Practitioner

"It was wonderful to dive deep into the theory and practice that many of us get a taste for when we first practice asana and attend teacher training school. I learned so very much during the program and I am immensely grateful to have been part of it... what I feel now is an immense joy, a sense of wonder, that I can be a part of this awesome sadhana group from my home in a small African country called Malawi... Thank you, Jacob, for your huge work and for bringing the teachings of yoga alive for me, and for so many of us around the globe."

"There are endless thoughts and feelings that I could be describing. Apart from the huge learning, that I can be in a relationship with this life and its source in a profound intimate way… All of this has been made possible through your work, and I want to thank you again for that. You have created an incredible space, filled with so much authenticity - a word much overused, but absolutely necessary in this context. I loved the mixture between the intense practices and the rich theoretical knowledge! I soaked up every word and am excited for more."

We are living through a cultural crisis rooted, in part, in the loss of the original function of the humanities. Once intended to cultivate the intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic capacities needed for a meaningful and reflective life, the humanities have largely abandoned this deeper purpose.

Across both Western and Asian traditions, the humanities were not just academic disciplines but formative practices — central to paideia in ancient Greece and studia humanitatis in the Renaissance. Their aim was to shape character, judgment, and imagination, preparing individuals to participate in civic life and appreciate the complexity of human experience.

Students at Sādhana School arrive with a rare openness — the kind that recognizes education not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. Asking how the humanities serve the market already misses the point. Learning is, at its core, about cultivating wisdom, wonder, discernment, and creative insight.

Yet today’s humanities have lost their way. In fleeing religious dogma, they have often discarded the very spirit that once gave them life. In rejecting metaphysics and the sacred, they risk collapsing into ironic detachment, where meaning becomes a game and clarity is replaced by cleverness.

Sādhana School offers a counter-experiment — reimagining the humanities not by replicating old structures but by reviving their soul. We begin with a simple premise: that reality is inherently meaningful. Our task is not to fabricate meaning, but to refine our perception to recognize the meaning already present in life.

Even nihilism affirms meaning in its rejection of it. Meaning, in this light, is not optional — it is inescapable. The question is not whether meaning exists, but what kind of meaning we choose to affirm.

What are the consequences of inhabiting a worldview that denies meaning, mystery, or the sacred? How does it affect our imagination, relationships, and sense of responsibility? In discarding religion, we have often discarded the sacred. At Sādhana School, we ask again — where can the sacred be reborn?

We believe that some meanings bind, while others liberate. Through contemplative inquiry, subtle practice, and aesthetic perception, we can cultivate meanings that nourish resilience, insight, and joy. This is not a return to dogma, but a move beyond the narrow confines of materialism — toward an embodied, enchanted way of knowing.

The humanities must again become the space where we ask the most vital questions — not only about texts, but about life, death, beauty, freedom, and being itself.

Sādhana School is a laboratory for those questions — a home for those ready to experiment with life as a path of wisdom.

Beyond general spiritual competencies, students well develop a set of foundational practices drawn from the non-dual Śākta-Śaiva Tantrik tradition. These ritual forms — part contemplative, part embodied, part poetic — become the living grammar of the sādhaka’s inner life. Woven through each seasonal cycle of study, these practices cultivate an intimacy with subtle energies, sacred language, and cosmic patterning.Through careful instruction, poetic immersion, and lived repetition, students will learn and engage with practices such as:

1. A Spiral Curriculum Rooted in the Center

Sādhana School is not a linear course of study with fixed endpoints, but a spiral process — a maṇḍala of return, where each year encounters various texts, practices, and philosophical perspective that deepen and refine our context of understanding. Rather than “progressing” from one level to the next, students are invited to revisit core themes — such as consciousness, perception, ignorance, and imagination — from new vantage points, allowing contemplative depth to unfold cumulatively over time. This cyclical pedagogy reflects the Tantrik perspective that wisdom is not accumulated, but revealed through a cyclical encounter with a reality that is continuously dynamic – coming into being, sustaining, and dissolving at all levels of life. This “eternal return” mirrors the dialectical pulsation of concealment and revelation – a cosmic game of “hide and seek” that we cultivate an ability to participate in with intimacy, intelligence and creativity.

2. Integration Periods: Weaving Wisdom into Life

Between each 8-week sādhana, students are given sacred space to pause, reflect, and integrate. These dedicated periods offer time for personal contemplation, creative expression, and communal sharing. Whether through small group circles, guided journaling prompts, or optional student-led sessions, these weeks provide a moment to digest what has been received, honor the experience that is underway, and begin to articulate the fruits of one’s living practice. Integration is not an afterthought — it is itself an important aspect of bridging sādhana with our commitments in daily life.

3. Rituals of Recognition: Honoring the Thresholds

At meaningful moments throughout the year, Sādhana School holds simple celebrations — Rituals of Recognition — that mark a student’s crossing of subtle thresholds. These are not performances of achievement in the conventional sense, but sacred pauses that acknowledge shifts in understanding, deepened clarity, or new-found devotion that arises through grounded practice. Through collective and symbolic actions, these rituals celebrate inner milestones of the sādhaka’s and kula’s journey and affirm their deepening embodiment of the teachings.

4. Study Pods: Learning in Kula & Community

Each student of the year-long program will be invited to join a small Study Pod — a consistent group of 4-6 practitioners — where mutual support, shared reflection, and deep listening can unfold. These pods offer a space to articulate insights, navigate challenges, and witness each other’s growth with care and accountability. In a world where spiritual study can often feel isolating, these intimate circles cultivate meaningful bonds and remind us that the path of sādhana is one of interconnection. Kula is not just a community — it is a group of individuals bonded by a shared commitment to deep study and practice.

5. Depth Cycles: Periodic Practice Intensives

At key points in the year, students undertake optional practice intensives — 5, 10, or 30 days — meant to function as “punctuated depths” within the broader spiral of study. These challenges mirror the structure of retreat but unfold within the rhythms of everyday life. They serve as embodied rituals of return, keeping the arc of transformation rooted in lived, disciplined sādhanā. Guided themes, peer support, and structured templates offer scaffolding for inner experimentation and reflection.

A Pedagogy of Insight, Intimacy, and Ethical Transmission

Subtle Liberation-Based Teaching (SLBT) is the name we give to a pedagogical orientation that underlies the entire approach of Sādhana School. It is both a framework for how we teach and learn together, and a contemplative method in its own right — a practice of presence, articulation, and subtle perception in service of transformation.

Rather than focusing merely on content delivery, SLBT attends to how insight arises in the relational field between teacher, text, practice, and student. It invites us to ask: What makes a teaching liberatory? What conditions allow insight to take root? How does wisdom move — not just in concept, but in tone, gesture, and silence?

Early in the program, each student will be invited to reflect on how they wish to apply their SLBT training. For some, this may unfold clearly along the path of teaching, guiding, or facilitating others — and SLBT provides a rigorous foundation for this work. But not all students will identify as “teachers” in the conventional sense. For many, this training will support subtler expressions of transmission: in how one holds space for others, speaks in times of crisis, listens across difference, crafts language in writing or art, or simply lives with greater attunement to the liberatory potential in each moment of contact.

Throughout the year, students will be gradually introduced to SLBT through seasonal modules, peer-based facilitation circles, and optional articulation mentorship. These will explore themes such as:

- Teaching as subtle transmission

- The ethics of speech and silence

- Listening as initiation

- Articulating the ineffable without diluting the depth

- Holding a contemplative field for others

- Honoring nuance, not certainty, as a mark of insight

For those who feel called to guide others, these practices offer a grounded foundation in spiritual facilitation rooted in non-dual Śākta-Śaiva philosophy. For those simply seeking to deepen their own understanding, SLBT reveals the subtle pedagogies already woven into mantra, pūjā, visualization, and shared study.

As a whole, SLBT supports the emergence of a new kind of teacher — not one who proclaims, but one who evokes; not one who performs, but one who transmits through the embodiment of deep contemplative experience.

At the same time, SLBT equips students to engage — with skill, integrity, and discernment — the voices that so often dominate today’s cultural soundscape: the skeptics who reduce contemplative practice to superstition, the rigidly politicized who insist on binary narratives, the ignorant who speak with authority, and the misinformed who confuse performance for wisdom. SLBT cultivates the capacity to respond not with defensiveness or dismissal, but with clarity, ethical confidence, and the subtle poise of someone who has actually done the work. In this way, it becomes not just a method of teaching, but a way of being in the world.

1. Living from the Subtle Body in a Disembodied World

SLBT Focus: Subtle Alignment & Yogic Seeing

How to: Teach and cue from the inside out using language that draws attention to breath, sensation, and subtle energetic flows.

2. Shadow Speech: The Ethics and Philosophy of Ferocity and Discernment

SLBT Focus: Relational Pedagogy & Language Ethics

How to: Speak with clarity and depth when navigating charged, complex, or emotional terrain in your teaching.

3. The Alchemy of Longing: Liberating Desire for Devotion without Dogma

SLBT Focus: Transmission of Presence & Holding Field

How to: Work skillfully with spiritual longing and transference dynamics in student-teacher relationships.

4. Freedom & Autonomy: Svātantrya-śakti and What Liberation Means in Contemplative Philosophy

SLBT Focus: Philosophical Grounding & Pedagogical Design

How to: Root your teaching in a non-dogmatic orientation toward spiritual autonomy—free from coercion or ideology.

5. Dying Before Death: Embracing Dissolution on the Path of Sādhana

SLBT Focus: Embodied Observation & Holding Intensity

How to: Guide students through egoic death, grief, and psychological contraction without collapsing the space or over-psychologizing.

6. Manifestation for Realists: The Non-Dual Theory & Practice of “Creating Your Own Reality”

SLBT Focus: Language as Reality-Shaping

How to: Guide students in forming intelligent saṅkalpa (intention) grounded in non-dual awareness rather than fantasy or bypass.

7. Cult or Community? How to Know If You’re In Too Deep

SLBT Focus: Transmission, Consent & Community Dynamics

How to: Build ethical, vibrant teaching communities that empower rather than manipulate—recognizing early signs of unhealthy dynamics.

8. A Theory of Grace: The Nature of Śāktipāta According to Abhinavagupta

SLBT Focus: Transmission of Insight & Timing

How to: Let go of performance-based pedagogy and trust in the subtle, timed transmission of wisdom—especially when working with advanced students.

9. Initiation: A Theory of Dīkṣā and the Stages of Sādhana

SLBT Focus: Curriculum Design & Pedagogical Maturation

How to: Create layered teaching arcs that mirror initiatory stages without becoming hierarchical or over-structured.

10. The Spectre of Authenticity: Tradition, Imagination, and Knowledge Cultivated through Contemplative Practice

SLBT Focus: Teaching from Lineage Without Rigidity

How to: Teach with integrity in the absence of a guru or institutional authority. Balance tradition, innovation, and creative freedom.

The Final Project is not an exam — it is a threshold. It offers each student the opportunity to synthesize the year’s learning into a focused area of personal or professional specialization, rooted in the questions, practices, and insights that have taken root through study and sādhana. Whether you are seeking to apply your training to your teaching, your creative work, your caregiving practice, or your contemplative life, the Final Project offers a structured way to explore what it means to carry this wisdom forward.

Students will receive gentle but clear scaffolding throughout the year, helping them to articulate their inquiry, clarify their audience, and choose the format that best suits their vision — from a short research paper or audio teaching series to a practice manual, guided meditation curriculum, or contemplative creative work.

For those who are approaching Sādhana School as a stepping stone toward graduate work, the Final Project can serve as the early groundwork for a graduate school proposal. This includes building a working bibliography, articulating a guiding question or methodological lens, and beginning to map out the landscape of scholarly dialogue. Our team will offer feedback, editorial guidance, and peer support for those on this path.

In addition, for students specifically preparing to pursue graduate study in yoga studies, Indian philosophy, or contemplative traditions, an optional series of workshops will be offered (available for an additional fee). These specialized sessions will explore topics such as:

- Research methodologies in yoga and contemplative studies

- Navigating primary sources, including accessing palm-leaf manuscripts and rare textual archives

- Understanding academic language and discourse conventions

- Crafting a research question and identifying your audience

- How to identify a lucana (gap) within an area of scholarship

- Mapping the terrain of relevant programs and faculty

Whether you are writing your way toward graduate school or giving voice to an insight that’s been quietly forming for years, the Final Project is a vessel for discernment, synthesis, and contribution. It is the moment when the spiral of the Sādhana School year gathers itself into a point — not an ending, but a refined direction of ongoing practice and inquiry.

Three immersive 8-week sādhanas of live weekly sessions (and recordings)
A 7-day virtual retreat to integrate and deepen your practice
A community of like-hearted seekers and practitioners
A personal small-group study-pod to make your experience in SS more connected and meaningful
A Practice Portfolio for you to log your daily practice
A Sādhana School Sourcebook consistently updated with new translations and materials
An Inner Travelogue for you to explore your reflections as they relate to your pursuit of the Absolute
A certification in SLBT upon successful completion of the SLBT requirements
Guidance on a final project that reflects your desired area of specialization
Access to bonus workshops, guided meditations, and study resources
An experiential bridge between rigorous study and living sādhana

Sādhana School is not for everyone. It’s not a content dump, a spiritual brand accelerator, or a bypassing portal to instant wisdom. It is a method — a culture of contemplative learning for those ready to move beyond noise, posture, and performance into the living current of deep study, disciplined practice, and a fundamental shift in how you relate to yourself, others, and the world.

This path may be right for you if…

🜂 You’re spiritually serious, but not rigid.

You’re done with shallow takes, conspiracy theories, vague references to “the universe” and oversimplified binaries. You want depth — but not dogma. You sense that there is a middle way between traditionalism and spiritual consumerism, and you’re ready to walk it with humility and curiosity.

🜁 You long for a learning environment that honors both the subtle and the scholarly.

You believe that philosophical insight and spiritual practice belong together — and that truth often emerges at their intersection. You want to study primary texts not to collect ideas, but to unearth something timeless and alive in your own being. You long to “drink from the source.”

🜃 You’re a teacher, guide, caregiver, creative, or seeker ready to refine how you serve.

You know that teaching — formally or informally — is a subtle art. Whether or not you lead others now, you want to live and speak from a center of insight that’s been cultivated through contemplation, not just inherited from trends or past teachers.

🜄 You sense that meaning is not optional — and you want to participate in its regeneration.

You feel the fragmentation of our times. You’ve noticed how both spiritual and academic spaces often strip the sacred of its eros, complexity, or embodied reality. You’re seeking a container that helps you remember what matters — and how to live in alignment with it.

🜓 You’re ready to commit — not just intellectually, but energetically.

You understand that transformation takes time, repetition, reflection, and relationship. You’re willing to show up, not perfectly, but with sincerity. You’re ready to engage a living spiral of study, practice, and inner cultivation.

💡 This may not be for you if:

- You’re seeking fast-track certifications without deep inner work

- You prefer externally defined rules to inner discernment

- You aren’t ready to take responsibility for your learning and presence

- You’re looking for entertainment, novelty, or spiritual lifestyle branding

Sādhana School is for those who are ready to participate in a different kind of education—one rooted in subtlety, spirit, and substance. If that sounds like you, we welcome you to the journey.

What is your question?

Rigorous study. Deep meditation practice. A scaffolding to make sense of it all.

In an age of noise, speed, and spiritual consumption, Sādhana School is a year-long training for deep seekers & practitioners in non-dual Śākta–Śaiva Tantra — where the study of ancient texts, contemplative practice, and community meet.

October 2025 - July 2026

Pilgrimage to the Center
of a New Humanities

Where study of ancient texts meets the Tantrik arts, philosophies, and technologies that cultivate liberation in this lifetime.

October 2025 - July 2026: Cultivate the knowledge, skills and competencies to help build and inspire a new contemplative renaissance…

Sādhana School is an inner pilgrimage of contemplative study and practice that helps you:

Why This Matters — and Why Now

What Changes Here — Outcomes You Can Expect

What You’re Here For

In a culture of fragmentation, conflict, noise, and shallow spiritual consumption . . .

Overview of the 2025-2026 Curriculum

Those who Join Sādhana School will:

Sick of all the madness and chaos? Help us awaken the New Humanities.

Core Competencies Developed Through Sādhana School

The Texts of our 2025-2026 School Year

The How: Practice, Pedagogy, and Resources

Tantrik Arts & Technology

The Scaffolding of Sādhana School

How the Journey Unfolds

Who is this for?

Our Signature Pedagogy & Capstone Experience

An optional 100-hour certification included with Sādhana School membership

Core Competencies of the SLBT Training:

Included Workshops

Final Projects: Refining an Area of Specialization

What You’ll Receive as a Student of Sādhana School:

TEAM

Sādhana School 2025–2026 Calendar of Events

Is Sādhana School Right for You?

GALLERY