Why I will not take a seventh student
November 2026 · 4 min read · By Vanessa Chugani
I cap every training group at six, and most groups end up smaller than that. The number matters more than the yes, even when saying no is hard.
What an attunement asks of me
An attunement is not something I run once for a room. I give it to one student at a time, standing behind each chair in turn, and each person gets the whole of my attention for those few minutes, not a share of it. That sounds like a small thing until you are the fifth person in a day, and the teacher in front of you is working from what is left rather than what she started with. Six keeps me inside the version of this I actually trained to give. A seventh student would not get a diminished attunement exactly, but I would be giving it from a different place than the one I give the first student from, and I am not willing to let that gap open quietly.
I do not claim to know the mechanism behind an attunement, and I am not going to start now. What I do know is what changes in the room when I am still fully present for the last person the way I was for the first, and what changes when I am not. Usui Shiki Ryoho is taught live, in Canggu or live online, never from a recording and never through anything automated. That claim only holds if the teacher giving it is actually there, start to finish, for everyone in the room.
What integration asks of a student
The attunement itself is brief. What a student does with it over the following hours and days takes longer, and a smaller room is what makes that possible. People ask questions in a small group that they would swallow in a room full of strangers, because the question feels too small or too strange to say out loud. Feeling nothing during an attunement is completely normal, and I want every student to be able to say that plainly rather than perform something they think they are supposed to feel. That only happens if the room is small enough that nobody is hiding in it.
Level 1 already includes the symbols, not just the hands, which is more for a new student to sit with in a first weekend than people often expect. A student who is quietly lost on day one, and too embarrassed to say so in a crowd, will leave the training having paid for something they did not actually receive. I would rather know who is lost while there is still time in the room to do something about it.
Why six, and not eight or ten
I could run bigger groups. The diary would fill faster and the maths would suit me better. Training runs Level 1 through Master Teacher, EUR 488 per level, the same price whether you train with me in Canggu or live online, and that price was never meant to buy a seat in a crowd. A class is a craft I hand over, not a weekend set aside to unwind, and a craft does not scale the way a workshop does. If I stretched six into eight to fit two more people in, I would not be running a bigger version of the same class. I would be running a different class and charging the old price for it.
There is no fixed calendar here and no advertised date. Dates get built around the people training in that particular group, which is only possible because the group stays small enough for me to actually know who they are before we start. A bigger group would need a calendar. A small one needs a handful of conversations, and I would rather keep having those.
If you are weighing whether to join
None of this is a reason to wait for some imagined perfect moment. It is a reason to expect a particular kind of class, taught by someone who is still paying attention by the time she gets to you. The training page has the levels and the pricing if you want to see where you would start. If you are closer to deciding than to researching, this piece on preparing for an attunement covers what to expect from the day itself, including the bit about feeling nothing, and why that is fine.