Spent about 12 hours rewriting the FST new member welcome email.
  Some new info for everyone, please read it.
  I am wondering is there anything you would have liked to have known, that I missed?



Hello $name:

  Thank you for registering for Fire Serpent Tantra!
  Your account has been activated. Welcome to FST!
  Please archive this email for your future reference.

Username: $username
Password: $password
Video password: FireSerpent

  Recover a lost password: http://fire-serpent.com/pr/find_password.html

  You are about to embark on an amazing transformative journey. 

  Below are some instructions for getting started.

-----------------------

  FST is in two password protected folders, the same username and password works to access both Tantra (the lessons) and Tearoom(the support forum.)

  You can now access the course at
  http://fire-serpent.com/tantra/index.html

  Suggested pace is one lesson per week, revisited three times.

>>>  For the first 12 years FST was open, I allowed people to work at their own pace, trusting to "Goddess has it handled." What I did not realize at first is, "Free Will is Goddess law" meant fools could rush in... some egos were going too fast, getting overloaded with the energy triggering too much karma at once, and having a hard time. I was not willing to give up my faith based position but I put it to a vote and the members voted in favour of installing a system that would force people to slow down.

The pacing is now enforced, and a "Veil of Mysteries" page will appear blocking access to some lessons if you try to go too fast. It is a Mystery school and a love affair with the Divine, no rushing it and no spoilers!

  FST is considerably more intense than any of my public websites and needs to be approached with respect. I am not boasting- Goddess did it. 

  To let ego rule and try to rush into enlightenment is so foolish. True growth is experiential and the magic of FST is in the Shaktipat of information, how the energy teaches you directly on an unconscious level. The energy of information encoded into each lesson is potentially infinite, because Shakti is infinite. It is all about, your ability to receive.

You have to allow time for the information to percolate, for insights to rise into consciousness and for Goddess within you to set up the synchronicities in your life to make the understanding real for you.

  Each time you click a "next lesson" button the energy download starts, and some of that energy is keyed to trigger some of your related karma to come up to be resolved. You need to take time to process each lesson before going onto the next.

  I designed FST to be a one year course- but those who become ascended from the practice typically take three years, and go through the entire course several times, experiencing it differently and getting different insights and growth, every time. The magic of intention: "To each according to their need and ability to receive, but not more than they can handle." means the insights you get from each lesson change as you evolve. Even if the words of the lesson have not changed at all you will see it differently because the Shaktipat of information relates to where you are at.   

  The pacing veils are set up to allow you to reach the pre-graduation lesson in 49 weeks, even though FST is 60 lessons because that makes sense for the legal stuff of the membership agreement.
Do one lesson per week anyway, and slower if you need to, do not worry about the time running out. I have a general policy of *not* removing expired memberships. I won't abandon people like that, and it is not up to me to decide or enforce how long someone's process will take: that is up to them, and Goddess within them.
  So please do not try to rush through it.
  Of course, I like it when people renew! The sweet thing is, some people realize they got a lot more than they paid for, and make a donation too. 
  Do not wander off and forget about it either! You have set in motion a process and it is important to stick with it, flow with it and follow through.

         --------------------------

  The Tea Room Area.
(Private Support Forum for members only.)
 
  You can use this same username and password to access the Tea Room Area and read the posts.
http://tearoom.fire-serpent.com  

  Originally, the Tearoom was intended only as a place to get support, and archive that support. FST was concieved as a solitary journey, focused inward. That has not changed, but to my surprise the Tearoom has become a lovely community center. Many graduates continue to visit the Tearoom to stay grounded in the spiritual ideas, and support newer members. This surprised me initially, but I have come to really appreciate what the Tearoom has evolved into.

  You must register yourself to the Tearoom forum to participate, and get occasional emails about events and updates. Use the same username and password, it will be hidden from everyone but me... but it helps me to know the FST username behind the handle. You can set your Tearoom profile to show any name or handle you like, to the other members. You do not have to reveal your FST username, or any personal information to other members unless you wish to.*
  *Please do indicate your your birth gender on your profile. The gender of the energy body is set at birth and it does matter for tantra, both for the energy work and for the gender of your unconscious mind/Divine Self.

  Options on your Tea Room profile:

- You may hide your email address from other members.
- You can select or upload an avatar image to represent yourself.
- You can choose a forum ID/name/handle to display to other members that is different from your FST member username, and change it later if you want. 

  The Tearoom is a sacred space, and the privacy rules of a support group apply. Do not share any Tearoom content, anywhere else or with any non-member unless it is your own writing only.
All Tearoom posts become property of Fire Serpent Tantra as a perpetual licence to archive them for the benefit of future members. You will not be able to delete your posts, or edit them after a 10 minute grace period to fix typos and such. I do not publish Tearoom or FST chat content outside of FST without the author's consent.

  Posting:

   Your privacy is respected, you are anonymous so feel free to share about your process, yourself and your questions.
   Please do not post to recommend or refer authors or teachers that are outside of FST, or promote your favourite author or cause. Study is focused on FST content and process.
   It is beautiful when the students support each other, especially sharing experiences and appreciation for each others posts. Please do not try to teach or play guru for others, focus on your own growing.

  ------------------------------------

  Support.

   - Post to the Tearoom.
   - Come to a chat support meeting. (Currently being held on my island in the secondlife virtual world)
   - Book a private session, after you have completed the first 20 lessons. (#20: Pacing Yourself.)
   - Dreams and visions.
   

  People are sometimes surprised that I am much more available to my students than some other famous teachers. The availability has limits, because FST is about finding your inner guidance and I discourage dependence on me.

  I do have guru powers but I think guru worship is a dead end. Do not try to ship me your karma: FST is about processing it yourself and getting the insights to build a strong foundation for spiritual stability. Calling on my spiritual self for advice is allowed, and effective but focusing on my physical self is invasive.

  Please do not email me unless you have tech issues with your membership, same for personal tea room messages.

  You can best reach me through the email form on the public pages.
  Do notify me if your subscription info changes: your email, location, etc.

  Please do *not* add my email address to your address book! Remove if it is added automatically, especially if you are using a free online account like hotmail or gmail. Do not send me any email you are also sending out to others.
  Email accounts get hacked, computers get spam viruses havesting all the addresses, spammy pages like linkedin want to email everyone and I do not want to get any of those emails or have my primary FST email address shared with those who are not FST students. Do not want to get your important emails lost in a flood of junk!   

  Additional support:

  Kundalini Mystic Isle in secondlife is full of spiritually charged art that can make beneficial changes to your consciousness and your energy body. It is where we have FST members only chats in the winter months. Secondlife membership is free. More information about this virtual world, as well as the upcoming chat event schedule is in the Tearoom, "Tea House" board.
  If I am there (Mystress Weatherwax) on the ground then I am available to chat. If I am in the sky then I might be in a session, please do not interrupt.
  Do send me an instant message with your FST username so I can add you to the secondlife group, Fire Serpent Tantra Members Only. 

   Facebook:
  https://www.facebook.com/groups/FireSerpentTantra/
  At this time, membership is restricted to members only. You will be asked by the system, if you are a member and your username before your request is accepted.
    - Fire Serpent Tantra itself is set up for discretion and anonymity, facebook is not. It is a place for members who are ok with being known, to chat, meet and friend each other outside of FST itself. Cool when members become rl friends, you all have so much in common.

         ------------------------------

  Video Lessons:
  The original videos were converted to realplayer circa 1999 before editing, however thanks to great effort by FST Lineage member Gustaf they have been remastered from the original DV tapes and are hosted by vimeo since 2012. The built-in viewer works with any browser. The videos can only be streamed from the FST website, please do not try to download them.
They are password protected, the password is FireSerpent.

  If it changes in the future, the new password will be announced on the Tech board of the Tearoom.

   Welcome to Fire Serpent Tantra.
   Wishing you an inspiring and beautiful journey..
      Blessings, Mystress.

That's everything I can think of and then some.  I can see how it took you 12 hours to put together.

 Well, Tearoom magic.

After I posted it someone sent me a pm about watching the vids on their phone. (Please no, it crushes the energy.)  I had missed that instruction, and the whole thing seems kind of unfriendly with a lot of "do not."  While working on rewording it, I realized it was much too long because some of the information (like not using your phone) was in the wrong place.  I actually needed to be updating two other documents at the same time: the course info on the public pages and lesson #00 study guide, and working out what info belonged where.

  That led to a (4 years overdue) minor update of the public pages to remove all references to realplayer and get the updated videos there working. It has been 4 years already since we upgraded to vimeo! The welcome email and public pages still had realplayer download info.

    So many little bits and pieces like that, to FST.

   A bigger update and design changes for the public pages, comes after the new lesson pages go live.

  I waded into updating the off site links, spent some time at the wayback machine looking at pages long disappeared, like El Collie's "shared transformation" that was really the start of kundalini on the web, and the birth of the K-list. We were close at one time, she was like a mentor to me in some ways. I grieved when she killed herself to end chronic pain. Not surprised her bereaved husband no longer hosts the pages but made copies of them all for myself.

  Found the original starseed quiz by Mark Roberts. We corresponded quite a bit in 1996, he actually rewrote some questions of the quiz in response to my answers and gave me a score of 150% starseed lol. He was 60+ in 1996, and 22 years later... is probably dead by now. He said he based the quiz on a victoran one that looked for genetic markers for psychic abilities. Makes me wonder if I could rewrite it to be for vampires.

   That little (few hours) derailment into sentimental journey made me realize, updating the off site links is a job I need to delegate or the rest will never get done.

   When Hillary updated them a few years back, she pointed all the lost pages she could find, to the Wayback machine archive. I am considering that archive might not be around forever, and whether it would be ok copyrights and less drain on their resources to host a local copy of the pages, make a little library for them inside the members area. Edu, fair use... and private? 
  Somewhere in my files is a backup of a student's past work, she made a copy of all the pages the off site links led to. That would be better than wayback machine copies... Sorry, thinking out loud.
 
  I have also converted some ebooks to html pages, Victor Frankl's "Mans Search for Meaning" and "the Biology of Belief" by Jameson. It is a classic about how  our thoughts affect our physical biology.
  Epub archives typically have a pdf version that is just a scan of the pages, and then a text version that is OCR on the scan, which loses the pictures and gains some OCR errors. I take the text and convert it to html then do a side by side comparison with the pdf version to fix all the ocr errors and screencap and crop the pictures, to put them back for the web page.  It is tedious work but the end result is much more readable than the pieces it is made from. If I converted the html to pdf then it could be downloadable and phone-friendly. I don't care if people read those books on their phone, its not my writing.

  I think, instead of always squishing people's desire to share links, I will make a new thread in the tech board for people to recommend off site links, and what lesson they relate to.

   well.. back at it...