A Path for Teachers
The Seven Requirements for Esoteric Training:
A Path for Teachers
In April 2026, teachers from around the world will gather at the Goetheanum to celebrate 100 years of Steiner Waldorf education. When colleagues at IASWECE reflected on what theme should guide such a milestone, the essential element soon became clear: the teacher, and their path of inner development.
For this reason, the Seven Requirements for Esoteric Training described by Rudolf Steiner in How to Know Higher Worlds (Chapter 5) were chosen as the guiding theme for the conference. These conditions are not abstract ideals, but practical exercises for daily life, offering guidance for teachers in their personal development, their work with children, and their collegial life.
IASWECE invites all colleagues worldwide to take up this theme so that the work is not limited to the conference itself, but becomes a shared focus across our kindergartens. In this way, with our combined striving, we invite the spiritual worlds to support us in our work.
The question is how do we actually work and implement these 7 conditions? A practical thought is for us to take this up as a study in our meetings and to look at how we can work with these 7 requirements in different ways.
The Seven Requirements in Practice
1. Promote physical and mental health
Personal life: Cultivate health through nutrition, rhythm, balance of activity and rest, peace of mind, time in nature, gardening - experience self-activity in cultivating the earth, artistic activity, and inner work.
With children: Create healthy spaces, use natural materials, protect children from the digital world, and engage with gardening so they can experience cultivation, care, harvest, and use.
In meetings: Structure council and collegial meetings rhythmically, integrate artistic work, strengthen content development, practicing Hallelujah together, and ensure healthy financial practice. Hold meetings in person.
2. Feel part of the whole of life
Personal life: Accept life’s contexts, serve and receive from others, practice meditation, cultivate presence of mind, listen deeply, and work with empathy even in conflict. Build bridges between Waldorf education and the surrounding world. With conflicts first listen to yourself. I am a member of humanity and without others we are not complete.
With children: Welcome elemental beings into the kindergarten, practice warmth and patience, and cultivate teacher meditation as a connection with the angels.
In meetings: Deepen the practice of teacher meditation as a shared path.
3. Thoughts and feelings create realities as well as actions
Personal life: Take responsibility for your thoughts and feelings, practice thought control and positivity, avoid judgment, and cultivate ideals like perseverance and gratitude. See every person as a spiritual being. Keep an emotion diary - which three important feelings did I have today? How did they affect the environment?
With children: Remember that children are deeply sensitive to teachers’ inner life—our thoughts and feelings surround them like an atmosphere.
In collegial work: Explore fairy tales and artistic practice together as a way to experience how thoughts and feelings shape reality.
4. Find mental balance and inner steadfastness
Personal life: Work with balance and polarity, find your center, become independent of external recognition, act from your inner truth, and practice concentration and perseverance in small things.
With children: Balance the needs of the present moment with enduring values.
In meetings: Anchor anthroposophy in today’s world with courage and clarity. Courage to reform.
5. Steadfastness in following through on decisions
Personal life: Follow through on what you resolve, work step by step, and treat steadfastness as a promise to your higher self. Recognise fear and comfort often prevail instead of effort. Believe in yourself.
With children and colleagues: Act from love and commitment, believing in yourself and in the truth you serve. Pay attention to simplicity.
6. Development of gratitude
Personal life: Practice gratitude daily—through journaling, reflection, or biography work. Recognize gifts received, even from difficulties.
With children: Develop gratitude for their trust in us, and for the impulses they and their parents bring for our development.
In meetings: Let gratitude permeate the mood of work, remembering that it is linked to hope and trust.
7. Understand life as the conditions demand
Personal life: Practice endurance, patience, and devotion to daily work. Seek harmony and beauty, nurture kindness, strengthen the will to learn, and approach life with love for building up rather than judgment.
With children: Support experimentation and creativity, while creating harmony in the environment.
In collegial life: Build bridges between Waldorf education and the wider world, develop new “artistic translations” of our work, and hold meetings in a spirit of joy and positivity.
Living the Path Together
These requirements are not tasks to be ticked off, but practices to be taken up in small, conscious steps. They invite us to strengthen self-activity through gardening, artistic work, meditation, journaling, reflection, and mindfulness. In our kindergartens, they call us to create warmth, protect children from harmful influences, and live with gratitude. In our meetings, they ask us to create rhythm, positivity, and connection.
Which requirement is the most difficult for me? Perhaps, this is the most important.
Above all, they remind us that the future needs positivity, kindness, and gratitude. The conference theme offers us not only a focus for 2026, but a living practice for today.
Individually, each of us is a drop. Together, we are an ocean - Satoro