Facilitation as Living Yoga
Reaching into the transmission of the space.
What is Advanced Facilitation
I’m Libby Rose Waite and I’m a graduate of the 250 Hour Embodied Yoga Training and the 300 Advanced Facilitation Programme. And I also now teach on both trainings.
Being both a teacher and a student is playful, humbling and at times deeply confronting. But there is something in this dichotomy which feels for me like the heart of what we do here at Samāveśa. When you offer from the place between the two, you facilitate.
You don’t only ‘teach’ what you know but you also receive from source in the present-moment attunement to what is happening. To what is unfolding within you and around you. You teach from what is happening in the room. You are taught, informed by and co-creating with the bodies who are breathing life into the space. From the space which is holding the experience and from the transmission of your own embodied intuition.
The divine balance of slipstream, space and transmission.
The Balance of Transmission and Emergence
I love slipping into transmission. To be in the space where the words pour out of me as the pure flow of Shakti. Where I am in the slipstream of creative inspiration, channeling from the depths of psyche. This is a beautiful place to facilitate from. And a beautiful place to receive from.
But it can also be problematic. When you are only in transmission from-within mode, something gets shut off from what is happening in the emergent field of the space. If you get stuck in the transmission channel, then from my experience, your awareness can shut off from what is happening in the room (both physical and on-line). There are also transmissions happening for every person in the space. Awareness of this can inform the direction of your class and invite more space for the students to experience what is happening through them.
The medicine comes from within, not only from your transmission. Access to this for both students and teacher can allow more of that medicine to pour into the shared emergent field.
This doesn’t mean that you can read the minds of what’s happening for people. This doesn’t mean that you can name what someone’s experience is, or even begin to guess at what’s happening for them on the inside. But the way that they are responding carries a non-verbal, non-cerebral charge which your body can absorb. Your bodies are communicating with one another. Soma speaking to Soma.
And from this communication, something emerges. This is the felt-sense connection to self, other and environment. This connection, this communion, is what we call Yoga.
Transmission is crucial. Transmission is divine. Transmission is delicious. But the skill is in keeping one foot in and one foot out. To access the slipstream of inspiration whilst continually attuning to the room and allowing space for what is alive to emerge.
Advanced facilitation means trusting everyone to have their own experience.
Curation and Co-Creation
So how do we do that? A huge part for me, and especially from what I’ve learnt from Samāveśa, is in dancing between curation and co-creation.
On the 250 Hour Embodied Yoga training, you’re taught how to craft immensely beautiful offerings. To learn how to access a somatic gateway, do your research within that and then curate an experience based on your insights and findings.
When I started offering classes that used this approach, I began to understand that everyone will have their own experience when you re-open the door to that gateway. My embodied research and class planning might see me frantically rolling around the room, flinging my limbs through the space and howling. But when I offered that experience back in class, it was so illuminating to see how the gateway lands in other bodies. I began to trust students to have their own experience. I could let go of the curation, which is still necessary to create your class, and to make space for co-creation.
I remember watching a man in class so gently and tenderly, almost imperceptibly, let his hand spiral inwards as I was inviting free movement. And the somatic gateway blew open. In witnessing and feeling his experience, it shifted my own. My expectation, my experience might have been BIG and wild, but this doesn’t mean that the students' experience needs to be. And also, perhaps his gentle hand dance is incredibly big and wild for him.
And this is the skill. In not projecting what you think people are experiencing. Or when you do, to just know that this is what’s happening. To allow space for the projection and the permission for the practice to unfold, enliven and soften however it wants to for each and every being in the space.
When you do this, you co-create the offering with what is happening. With who is there. You are both the teacher and the student.
Feeling Shakti through the stillness, the presence, the grace.
Letting Life Move Through You
This is where the practice becomes essence, not effort. Where facilitation, teaching and being are not separate things. They are expressions of the same life-force.
In the tradition of Non-Dual Shaiva Tantra, all of life is Shakti. Everything — contraction and expansion, silence and speech, stillness and eruption — is part of Her dance. To be in sādhana, which means dedicated and devoted practice, is to remember that we are already woven into the fabric of this divine unfolding.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Sādhana is not only what I do before teaching. It’s what I’m doing as I teach. Every gesture, breath and spoken word can be an offering to the altar of the present moment.
I let myself be moved, not just move others. This is the pulse of Tantra. Not mastering or controlling energy, but being danced by it.
The room is Shakti. The people are Shakti. My body is Shakti. There is no outside of practice and nothing to ‘get right’.
I don’t leave myself behind when I teach. I bring my whole being, the doubt, the devotion, the knowing, the not-knowing and that becomes the ground of relational facilitation.
Transmission is not mine to own. It arises through grace, through attunement, through allowing. It is shared breath, not private brilliance.
Teaching becomes an act of worship. Not of a deity ‘out there’, but of life itself. Immediate, unfiltered, alive in this breath, in this moment, in this collective body. In this endless immersion in life.
This endless immersion is Samāveśa and what you are invited into on our trainings. We are not teaching yoga as a performance of knowledge, but as an embodied sādhana, a devotional offering, a radical act of presence.
An Endless Becoming
If this way of teaching as living practice, as relational art, as embodied sādhana speaks to you, I’d love to invite you deeper. The 300-Hour Advanced Embodied Yoga Facilitation Training is for those ready to step beyond the posture, the plan, or the performance and into the raw, refined skill of holding space with presence, precision and depth. If you’re curious, you can sign up now to receive the info pack or explore our free taster content. Whether you're ready to leap or simply play, the door is open.
Come closer.