Love and Ecstasy Training (LET): An Intensive Course in SkyDancing Tantra

Love and Ecstasy Training (LET): An Intensive Course in SkyDancing Tantra

The Love and Ecstasy Training, usually shortened to LET, is one of the best-known intensive courses in the world of modern tantra. Developed over several decades by the French author and teacher Margot Anand, it forms the heart of a method she named SkyDancing Tantra: an experiential training in presence, breath, meditation, emotional honesty and conscious connection. For anyone trying to understand what the LET is, where it comes from and whether it is credible, this guide offers a clear, grounded overview — along with the wider context of how these teachings are practised in London today.

It helps to set expectations early. Popular culture tends to reduce tantra to something purely sexual. The reality of a training like the LET is broader and quieter than that: it is a personal-development course built around meditation, movement, breathwork and communication, in which sexuality is treated as one thread within a much larger fabric of self-awareness and relationship. Reputable trainings in this lineage are structured, consent-led and adult-education in character. Understanding that distinction is the single most useful thing to carry into any research.

What the Love and Ecstasy Training Actually Is

The origins: Margot Anand and SkyDancing Tantra

Margot Anand, born in France in 1944, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and later trained extensively in Gestalt therapy, bioenergetics, massage and meditation. She learned tantra in India in the late 1970s, and went on to become one of the first teachers to introduce tantra and neo-tantra to a broad public across Europe and the United States (Anand, biography). Her 1989 book, The Art of Sexual Ecstasy, subtitled “The Path of Sacred Sexuality for Western Lovers”, laid out the foundations of the method she came to call SkyDancing Tantra.

From that foundation she developed the Love and Ecstasy Training. According to the SkyDancing Tantra Institute, the method has since been taught to more than one hundred thousand people across dozens of countries, through a network of international institutes (Anand, SkyDancing). It is worth noting that both “SkyDancing Tantra” and “The Love and Ecstasy Training (LET)” are registered trademarks. Plenty of workshops draw on Anand’s ideas, but the official LET refers to a specific training within her lineage — a distinction that matters when you are assessing what you are actually signing up for.

What “SkyDancing” means

SkyDancing Tantra draws its imagery from Himalayan Buddhist tradition, where the “sky dancer”, or dakini, represents freedom and awakened energy. In practice, the method weaves together the chakra system as an energy map with a range of modern disciplines: humanistic and transpersonal psychology, bioenergetics, visualisation, communication skills and meditation. The aim, in Anand’s framing, is to meet ordinary life — including its pleasures — with enough awareness that a sense of aliveness and wellbeing becomes accessible in everyday experience, rather than only in special states.

A path of presence, not performance

Although the tradition does include teachings on intimacy and sexuality, treating them as a natural part of human experience rather than something to be sidelined, the everyday texture of the work is contemplative. Participants spend far more time breathing, meditating, moving and learning to communicate honestly than anything a sensational headline might suggest. Much of the value people report has little to do with sex and a great deal to do with slowing down, feeling more, and relating to others with more attention. If the underlying skill of steady attention is new to you, our overview of the physical and mental benefits of meditation is a useful place to begin.

Inside the Training: Structure, Themes and Progression

The LET is not a weekend taster. In its full form it is a serious commitment, typically delivered as a series of residential cycles spread across roughly two years, with a further teacher-training pathway for those who go on to become certified facilitators. That length is deliberate. Skills like presence, emotional regulation and honest communication are not absorbed in an afternoon; they are practised, revisited and gradually integrated.

Sessions tend to follow a recognisable rhythm: arrival and grounding, guided meditation and breathwork, movement, partnered exercises undertaken with explicit consent, and time to rest and reflect. The building blocks below appear in most trainings in this lineage, and understanding them demystifies a great deal.

The overlap with more familiar wellbeing practices is considerable. The interplay of breath, movement and attention is exactly the ground covered by our piece on the relationship between yoga and meditation, which is worth reading alongside any exploration of tantra.

Why the Training Resonates Now: Connection, Stress and the Nervous System

Interest in intensive connection-based work has grown against a backdrop of measurable disconnection. The Government’s Community Life Survey for 2024/25 found that 6.6% of adults in England reported feeling lonely often or always, with younger adults consistently among the most affected (DCMS, 2025). Office for National Statistics data puts the broader picture higher still: around a quarter of adults report feeling lonely at least some of the time (ONS).

Set against those numbers, it is not hard to see why structured, in-person, connection-based work has an audience. People are not only looking to relax; many are looking to feel less alone. If your interest is specifically in easing a restless mind, our guide to using meditation to ease anxiety covers complementary ground.

The Evidence Behind the Practices

Breath and the parasympathetic nervous system

The calm people describe after breath-led sessions is not only atmosphere. A systematic review and meta-analysis of voluntary slow breathing, drawing on more than two hundred studies, found consistent increases in vagally mediated heart rate variability — a marker of the “rest and digest” branch of the nervous system — both during and after slow-breathing practice (Laborde et al., 2022). Practices at roughly six breaths per minute are repeatedly associated with the strongest shift toward that recovery state. This is precisely the sort of pacing a competent facilitator guides, whether or not they reach for the clinical vocabulary.

Connection and health

The connection dimension has an evidence base of its own. A widely cited meta-analytic review found that loneliness and social isolation are associated with a meaningfully higher risk of early mortality — an effect researchers have placed on a par with other established risk factors (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2015). None of this means a workshop is a medical intervention, and it should not be read that way. But it does help explain why practices that build presence and honest relating tend to leave people feeling steadier. Gentle movement plays its part too, as our look at the benefits of aerobic exercise for the mind and body explains.

SkyDancing Tantra and the Love and Ecstasy Training in London

A practical note on geography. The official LET is an international, mostly residential training, historically run across the United States and continental Europe rather than in any one London postcode; a SkyDancing institute has also operated in England over the years. Londoners who feel drawn to this work usually approach it in two stages: they first explore local, preparatory circles and neo-tantra workshops close to home, then travel to a full residential cycle when they are ready. London’s wellbeing scene supports that first stage well, and it is spread right across the capital.

North London — Islington, Camden, Hampstead and Stoke Newington

North London has a long-standing appetite for holistic practice. Islington and Camden host movement studios and meditation spaces, while Hampstead and Stoke Newington lean toward the gentler, community-minded end — a good starting point for a first breathwork or conscious-connection evening.

East London — Hackney, Shoreditch and Dalston

East London carries the densest concentration of embodiment work. Hackney, Shoreditch and Dalston are well supplied with studios and event spaces that regularly host tantra-adjacent circles, from beginner-friendly introductions to weekend intensives.

South London — Brixton, Clapham, Peckham and Greenwich

South of the river, Brixton and Peckham bring a creative, independent energy, while Clapham and Greenwich offer a steadier, more residential feel. Provision here tends toward smaller groups and a warm, informal tone.

West London — Notting Hill, Ealing and Richmond

West and south-west London round out the picture. Notting Hill and Ealing have established yoga and wellbeing communities, and Richmond’s greener setting suits those who prefer a calmer, slower pace on the doorstep of the park.

Choosing a Facilitator or Training Safely

Because tantra is an unregulated label, the responsibility to choose well sits largely with you. A few checks filter out most of the risk.

Certification and lineage

If a course is presented as the official Love and Ecstasy Training, it should sit clearly within Margot Anand’s SkyDancing lineage. Certified SkyDancing facilitators typically complete the LET over roughly two years, followed by a separate teacher-training pathway. Facilitators outside that lineage may still be excellent, but they should describe their own training honestly rather than borrowing a trademarked name.

Professional standards and insurance

Many facilitators come from a bodywork, yoga or massage background. In the United Kingdom, the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC) is the voluntary regulator for complementary healthcare practitioners; established with government support, its register is approved as an Accredited Register by the Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care, a body accountable to Parliament (CNHC). A facilitator willing to talk openly about qualifications and insurance is showing you professionalism in action.

Questions to ask, and red flags

Ask what training the facilitator holds, how consent is handled, whether sessions are clothed, and what happens if you want to step out at any point. Clear, unhurried answers are reassuring. Be cautious with anything that blurs the line between a wellbeing course and a sexual service, or that pressures you toward contact you have not agreed to. Genuine work of this kind is transparent by design.

Is the Training Right for You? A Balanced View

References and Citations