Course Lab
Interview with Cybele
Crystal Healing Educator & Facilitator
Interview Summary
Cybele (also known as Suzette Rashad) teaches students how to cultivate embodied intuition and practice self-healing through crystals and stones. Her foundation course, Seven Gates, runs as monthly day-long workshops over eight months, blending guided meditation, writing, movement, and tactile stone work. With a background in dance, massage therapy, and Gestalt-informed bodywork, she transitioned her deeply physical practice to Zoom during the pandemic and built a small, devoted community -- some members of which have been with her for over 20 years.
Teaching Tactile Work in a Digital World
Cybele's approach to online teaching centers on slowing people down into their bodies. Even over Zoom, she guides students to focus on "the palm of their hand and the grip of their fingers, and then the texture of the stone and the weight or the lightness of it, and whether it's getting warm from being in your hand." She works extensively with what she calls the inner senses -- inner sight, inner hearing, sensation, and the subtle movement of energy through the body. Each session pairs specific stones with one of the seven chakras, and students bring their own stones to the virtual workshop. The approach demonstrates that even the most tactile, embodied subjects can be taught online when the instructor designs for physical engagement rather than treating the screen as a barrier.
"I will almost always remind all of us to look with our inner eyes and listen with our inner ears and feel sensation and emotion. And any sense of movement of energy, like tingling or itching."
The Anti-Scale Model: Building a Tiny, Devoted Community
Cybele's business model is the opposite of scale. She operates on a sliding scale of $80 to $220 per session, serves a small group of students -- some of whom she has known for 20 to 34 years -- and has created a scholarship fund supported by student donations. When asked about her marketing strategy, her answer was disarmingly simple: "Someone asked me once what I do for my clients, and I just said, I love them." Danny observed in the debrief that even at the low end of her sliding scale, eight sessions at $80 is $640 per student -- and you do not need an enormous number of students to make that sustainable. Her model is a living illustration of the "1000 true fans" concept taken even further: you can build a meaningful course business with far fewer than 1,000 people if the relationships are deep enough.
"Ultimately, it's not really about the money. For me, it's about the creativity and the community and the healing that happens. Most of these people in this group, I've known for 20 to 34 years."
Ongoing Learning Journeys Without an End Date
Unlike most courses with a defined start and finish, Cybele's Seven Gates program continues indefinitely after the initial eight-month cycle. Students who complete the upward "fountain" cycle move to a downward "waterfall" cycle, then continue working with the same stones in new ways -- choosing one stone to work with for an entire year, setting yearly intentions, and selecting supporting stones. Danny compared this to a martial arts dojo: "You might have a course where you go from white to yellow belt, but you're not done. You just keep on training and going deeper." For course creators in domains where mastery is an ongoing journey rather than a finite destination, this open-ended model offers both sustained revenue and deeper student transformation.
"If something really moves you and continues to keep your interest and curiosity, you can trust that and follow it into a course."
Cybele's Action Steps
Cybele recommends these 3 steps to improve your course planning:
Design for physical engagement in virtual settings
Even if your topic seems impossible to teach online, identify the tactile or embodied elements and design exercises around them. Cybele has students hold physical stones during Zoom sessions and guides their attention to sensation, weight, and temperature. Consider what physical props, materials, or body-based exercises you could integrate.
Consider a continuation model instead of a fixed endpoint
If your subject supports deepening rather than completion, design your course to continue beyond the initial program. Cybele's students move through successive cycles of the same material at deeper levels, keeping the community engaged for years.
Explore sliding-scale pricing with community support
If serving a diverse economic community matters to you, consider a sliding-scale model with a student-funded scholarship fund. This lets students in different financial situations participate while keeping the work sustainable.
About Cybele
Crystal Healing Educator & Facilitator
Cybele (Suzette Rashad) is a crystal healing educator and facilitator who teaches students to cultivate embodied intuition and self-healing through crystals and stones. With a background in dance, massage therapy, lomi bodywork, and Gestalt therapy, she has been teaching workshops for decades, including years with the Reclaiming collective in San Francisco and at intensives across the US and Europe. Her foundation course Seven Gates has been running continuously with some students for over 20 years.
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From Course Lab with Abe Crystal & Ari Iny on Mirasee FM