Our Faculty
Over the years, thousands of students have worked through our courses and programs. Many of them, under the personal tutelage of our founder Shakti Malan, have become teachers and practitioners in their own right. We are blessed to have some of these experienced facilitators as members of our faculty team. Below you will find info on our senior facilitators, guest teachers, and affiliates – who are all sharing their unique wisdom and guidance on the various on-line offerings and in-person events available through the Academy.
Rhianne van der Linde
PRINCIPAL AND SENIOR FACULTY
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An avid alchemist and a dedicated dreamer with a depth of knowledge and experience of transforming the mundane into the magical, my personal explorations have led me into working with dreams, as a companion to those busy with their journey of dying, exploring the breath as a thread connecting us directly to source & processing and ritual with groups in wild nature.
Truth as emptiness and Truth as embodiment – as consciousness expressing in form, in beautiful breathing bodies of love…it is this language of the heart, this feminine language of embodiment & feeling that I am most interested in learning and sharing.
Specialities: Breathwork, Dreamwork, Shadow Exploration & Integration, Sexual Awakening for Women, Embodiment and Somatic practices, Body De-armouring.
To enquire about booking a one-on-one personal session with Rhianne, you can email her at rhianne@shaktishiva.academy
Kali Satyagraha Widd
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Her deepest love is supporting Lovers of Truth into the discovery of their essential nature – and how to live beautifully with ourselves & others from that knowing, using mindful movement, conscious dance, meditation, ritual, ceremony, & ancestor guidance/channelling.
She counts herself blessed to have been trained & inspired by some of the world’s leading guides in spiritual & sexual embodiment, & devotes her life to the revolution of love that’s needed to re-create the world anew. Anyone with an open mind, playful curiosity & tender heart is welcome to explore & co-create together in the spaces she holds.
Kali trained in Biodanza for 18 months (Personal Development), and with beloved Shakti Malan in BlissDance, qualifying as a facilitator, and has since facilitated several dance forms for 9 years, holding weekly and monthly classes in Cape Town for many years, as well as dance retreats and workshops all over South Africa. She has also taught in the UK and the Netherlands, and has been invited to teach in California, once international travel opens up. She has employed embodied movement therapeutically to support children from very disadvantaged, marginalised communities, as well as recovering heroine addicts.
Kali owns and runs a boutique-style retreat sanctuary in the Klein Karoo, called Santa Fe Soul Sanctuary where she holds bespoke, intimate retreats and plant medicine ceremonies for individuals, couples and groups.
Specialities: BlissDance, Cuddle Parties, Women’s Sexual & Spiritual Awakening, Red Tent, DJ
Learn more about Kali at www.dakinikali.com
To enquire about booking a one-on-one personal session with Kali, you can email her at kaliwidd@gmail.com
Lisa Grace
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With a degree in Performing Arts and Psychology, she has since traversed BDSM (bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, sadism/masochism otherwise known as “kink”), the extreme non-violence of mindfulness based Hakomi Therapy, Advait Tantra (non-duality and the expansive liberation of sexual energy as universal consciousness), and is a Master Practitioner of Transformational NLP (neuro-linguistic programming). Lisa’s work is about getting real with all the internal polarities (such as masculine and feminine identification, desire and fear, guilt and innocence) that motivate pursuits and avoidances, creating grasping, shame, and fear- and finding the full power and authenticity hiding in the shadows. She is especially passionate about furthering conversations around gender and the queering of Tantra.
In 2011 Lisa met Shakti Malan who quickly became a major influence in her life through her Totality Therapy Training, Soulmate Within, Sexual Awakening for Women, and Somatic Healing for Sexual Trauma courses. Lisa was a Senior Student of Shakti from 2014-2017 and is currently in training with Sacred founders, Justin Patrick Pierce and Londin Angel Winters.
Specialities: Shadow work, parts integration, Western Sacred Sexuality, Advait Tantra (non-duality), Transformational NeuroLinguistic Programing, mindfulness and guided meditation, somatic education, kink, polyamory, and other alternative forms of relating
Learn more about Lisa at: www.sacredawakening.com
To enquire about booking a one-on-one personal session with Lisa, you can email her at lisa@sacredawakening.com
Rayven Spirit
Based currently in Auckland, New Zealand, Rayven has been on an ongoing exploration of self, sexuality and relationship since his quarter-life crisis, questioning and exploding the normative conditioned narratives of his upbringing.
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This has primarily been through a broad lens of Tantra, or sexual awakening, with an intention of being: consciously aware, embodied and participating in life. He worked with Shakti Malan over many years, both as student and co-facilitator, as well as benefiting from the work of many other teachers over his path of unravelling.
With a focus on collectively beneficial and authentic paths towards empowered self-expression and intimate connection with others, Stephen invites a dance between deep stillness and embodied expression. As a facilitator he draws on storytelling, counselling and somatic experience and is presently studying for a degree in Psychology and Communication.
Specialities: meditation, mindfulness, breath, energy, sound and embodied movement practices; one-on-one counselling, energetic and loving-touch work; group facilitation and dialogue; attachment theory; conscious sexuality and relating; consensual non-monogamy; boundaries and consent; sexual shadow integration.
Learn more about Rayven here: www.danceswithchaos.com
To enquire about booking a one-on-one personal session with Rayven, you can email them at stephen.tredrea@gmail.com
Claire Rumore
Claire Rumore is a certified Erotic Blueprint™ coach, an Urban Tantra™ trained sex educator, and a skilled facilitator & coach for the past 20 years.
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She became a student of Shakti Malan, founder of the Shakti Shiva Academy, in 2010 and was one of her first North American students. She worked alongside Shakti from 2011 until Shakti’s death in 2017, helping to produce events, trainings, and curriculum, including the original Totality Therapy training curriculum.
In addition to her work in sexuality, Claire has also worked in tech & innovation consulting since 2014 where she learned, amongst other things, how to facilitate ethnographic research and innovation design sprints at large companies globally. She also worked for an organisational development firm in San Francisco, Ca that specialised in facilitated participatory group work. She helped revise their ground-breaking book “Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision Making.” She also became a graphic facilitator in 2015.
Claire has been involved in facilitation work in large and small ways, ranging from groups, conferences, workshops, extended courses and online classes to couples work, private gatherings and 1:1 sessions.
Claire brings ❤️HEART❤️and 🌈PLAY🌈 to her facilitation style as well as a wealth of experience, resources, and insight.
Learn more about Claire at www.ClaireRumore.com
Marcia Baczynski
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As co-founder of Cuddle Party, Marcia has helped tens of thousands of people to speak up for the kind of touch they want, say No unapologetically, and foster more connected, affectionate relationships.
Marcia brings wisdom, humour, and creativity to all aspects of her work, and offers a fresh perspective on love, sex and relationships. Each year, she works with a select group of private clients, helping them identify their needs, boundaries and deepest desires. Since 2003, she has helped tens of thousands of people through her private coaching, workshops and group programs.
Marcia is a sought-after presenter and coach, and she has made over 100 magazines, newspapers, TV shows, books and radio appearances, including The Rolling Stone, The Montel Williams Show, Fox News, NPR, the Washington Post, the New York Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, GQ, Marie Claire, People, Newsweek, The Daily Mail, and Penn & Teller’s Bullsh*t, to name just a few. She has been interviewed for, and cited in, a number of books as well. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Learn more about Marcia here: www.askingforwhatyouwant.com
Swami Advait Rahasya
SENIOR FACULTY
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Rahasya has been a lifelong student of tantra. His worldly involvement has included the practising of several professions, the learning of an unusual range of skills and the sexual learning available through several relationship styles, including 14 years of monogamy.
He’s the founder of the Advait Tantra School, a school known for producing remarkable teachers (several of his students are now significant tantra teachers in their own right) and author of The Rocky Horror Tantra Book.
The Rocky Horror Tantra Book is a deep exploration of Tantric practice and has become a standard work for modern students of tantra. It describes the path through stories and discourse. Be warned. This book strongly challenges many popular ideas about love, relationship, spiritual endeavour. It is also powerfully and unashamedly erotic, as is the journey of tantra itself.
“Tantra is the roughest, rockiest and unquestionably the most horrible of spiritual paths. It is not a journey for the faint-hearted, the weak-minded or the emotionally troubled. It presents serious difficulties even to the heroic. It is as harsh as the Truths of Life themselves. Just reading about it though, is probably not all that dangerous …”
Rahasya has been teaching tantra since 2002 – he lives and teaches in South Africa and is now mostly teaching the volunteers who’re helping him build Little Tibet, a retreat centre 200km from Cape Town.
Specialities: Shadow work, erotic work, touch work, fantasy & taboos, polarity processing
Learn more about Rahasya here: www.advaittantra.com
Watch Rahasya on YouTube here
To enquire about booking a one-on-one personal session with Rahasya, you can email him at tantraschool@gmail.com
Valentina Leo
SENIOR FACULTY
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Valentina is known for her unique talent in creating safe and sacred spaces where seekers of all ages can claim their own Spiritual Eroticism. With grace, charm and humour, she has guided and supported many men and women on their sacred journey towards themselves. From this place, ultimate Freedom can be experienced as the True Essence of Love – which is the heart of all Tantric teachings.
Her deepest desire is to birth a generation of TRUE LOVERS to populate our Beautiful Planet. Italian by birth she has been living in Cape Town for over two decades, offering classes, retreats and private sessions.
Specialities: Tantra Yoga, Kashmiri massage, Tandava, Advait Tantra (non-duality), Bliss Dance
Learn more about Valentina here: www.fascinatingwonderment.com
To enquire about booking a one-on-one personal session with Valentina, you can email her at info@fascinatingwonderment.com
Sheena Witter
FACULTY
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Sheena’s passion lies in facilitating the understanding and integration of personal and collective shadow, and the role trauma has in shaping our daily experience, both consciously and unconsciously. Trauma-informed and trained in multiple modalities, Sheena dances, teaches, and coaches at the intersection where soul meets soma and focuses on how we honour and integrate our experiences.
Her students and clients often describe Sheena as half Ring Mystress, half Fairy Godmother. She’s a Certified Existential Kink Shadow Integration Coach, Soul-based Business development strategist, Soul Realignment® Akashic Record practitioner, and Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy coach. She delights in helping you craft your most luscious life.
Through alchemical transformation, soul crafting, shadow integration, and somatic embodiment, Sheena supports you in recognizing and embracing your own greatness and soul’s expression, walking beside you as you do the things that scare you—holding space for you and teaching you to thrive in the uncomfortable space of creation. Encouraging you and helping you find the joy on the journey as you discover and bring your soul’s gifts into your daily lived experience. Through each of us doing this – we change the world.
Specialties: Shadow integration and play, radical approval and polarity integration, creating connections and communities, and infusing daily lived experience with ritual and magic.
Learn more about Sheena here: www.sheenawitter.com
Marc Peridis
FACULTY
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His approach is often considered radical and his passion lies in transmuting our deep and most shameful shadows into our highest and most transformative power.
He is also a mystery school initiate and guide; initiated into the mysteries in 2012 and was initiated as a shaman in 2014.
He has spent the years following his initiation travelling the world leading ceremonies, and workshops at some of the world’s most powerful sacred sites.
He has completed the 20 levels of the path of the sexual shaman training, By Arizona-Based sexual Shaman Kenneth Ray Stubbs who has been his mentor since 2016.
He has taken Buddhist refuge under Tharig Rinpoche in Kathmandu.
In 2013, he completed the Authentic Eros 1-year tantra and sexual explorations training with Kai Erhardt and Volker Moritz in Berlin.
He is also a trained facilitator in theta-healing, emotional freedom technique, and Reiki as well as a somatic movement facilitator.
His work of orgasmic shamanism emerged from his years of working with tantra, somatic movement and energy transmission work. He is passionate about providing a radical and integrated approach that supports clients and workshop participants in their journey to empowerment, higher purpose and limitless creativity.
Specialities: Somatic movement, tantra, shamanism, energetic transmission, trauma healing, higher purpose, abundance, sexual shame, sexual dysfunctions etc.
Learn more about Marc here: https: www.orgasmicshaman.com
To enquire about booking a one-on-one personal session with Marc, you can email him at marc@marcperidis.com
Paul Abro
FACULTY
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Tiffany Stone
FACULTY
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Karin Ritchie
RETREAT FACILITATOR
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Drawing on her journey of transformation from a traumatic life to one of grace, she seeks to create a conscious authentic life for herself and her clients. She embraces freedom from past patterns that no longer serve. Through gratitude, presence, curiosity and compassion, she witnesses and celebrates the miracles of healing.
Karin is an Indian trained practising Kundalini yoga teacher and a Trauma Healing Practitioner (SEP), a subtle healing modality that focuses on the science of the nervous system and the unlocking and releasing of trauma held in the body, mind and spirit.
As a life-long student, her studies include sexual trauma, global high, eye of the needle 1 & 2, Authentic Relationships, Conscious Communication, Mind and Meditation and Beyond Addiction. Her extensive travels include assisting in training somatic experiencing practitioners in Hong Kong and assisting a Somatic Experiencing Workshop at Omega Institute in New York with Dr Peter Levine.
In partnership with Shakti Shiva Academy, Karin facilitates an experiential retreat, Freedom & The Nervous System, which is an exploration of safe ways for releasing the memory and response to trauma.
Specialities: Trauma including Sexual Trauma, Authentic Relationships, Conscious Communication, Addictions, Somatic Experiencing.
Learn more about Karin here: www.karinritchie.co.za
To enquire about booking a one-on-one personal session with Karin, you can email her at karinritchie.sep@gmail.com
Andrew Barnes
RETREAT FACILITATOR
Andrew Barnes is an internationally acclaimed Tantric sex, relationship, and orgasm coach, sexologist, speaker, master bodyworker, and author of Demystifying Female Genitalia. Andrew is the developer of Tantric Body De-armouring, and over the last several years he has been running courses worldwide in this ever-popular modality.
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Andrew Barnes underwent an Accountability Process from December 2021 until April 2023. If you would like to know more about this please go to this link.
Courtney Ward
RETREAT FACILITATOR
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Essentially a performer in the great arts of the divine, Courtney is a talented artist, actor and musician. She is especially gifted in her spontaneous ability to apply her artistic gifts and musical talents to a group dynamic in aid of personal transformation and creativity. Since 1999 Courtney has worked passionately and intensively with the resident pod of Inshore Bottle Nose dolphins of Southern Mozambique as Halo Gaia’s owner, Ponta Malongane`s Ocean Safari guide, leading Dolphin Swim Facilitator and data collector.
Through her intimate relations with the dolphins, her love of people and her love of the ocean, Courtney offers an extraordinary Ocean Awareness program and together with Shakti Shiva Academy creates a unique annual dolphin swim retreat.
Click here to watch Dolphin Delight:
Specialities: Wild Dolphin Swim Retreats, Ocean Safari’s, Healing with Music – Medicine Song & Sound Journey’s, Conscious, Respectful & Responsible Eco-Tourism.
Learn more about Courtney here: www.halogaia.com
Cora Verkuilen
RETREAT FACILITATOR
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Betty Martin
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Patricia Albere
Patricia Albere is at ground zero of an evolutionary stream of spiritual awakening. Just as meditation can be an opening to an individual awakening, Albere originated the Mutual Awakening Practice – a 21st century spiritual practice that empowers us to enter into new dimensions of relating and expanding consciousness together. One in which we learn to go beyond individual psychology and transformation into a new space of mutual awakening or ‘inter-being’ or ‘we-mysticism’.
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Pri Bertucci
Originally from São Paulo, Brazil, Pri Bertucci (pronouns he/him, they/them) is a widely acclaimed non-binary social artist, author, lecturer and consultant known fondly as “The Queer Prophet.” Pri creates programs and resources that focus on diversity, equality, intersectionality and inclusion.