I had a friend over a couple of weeks ago. He’s lovely and warm and generous, but his chatbot was in the room with us. Everything we talked about: into the engine. Talking to the chatbot when I thought he was talking to me. Talking to the chatbot behind closed doors. Running my ideas through the chatbot. I couldn’t feel him, his tether was to the cloud. It was amusing, and then annoying, and then I got curious.

I’m also on the other side of the chatbot reality. I’m metabolizing a relationship loss. No one really wants to hear about it: what I am experiencing as grief, my friends and family are enthusiastically a yes to (as in, thank God, we were waiting for that to end, which is its own kind of lonely). The person in question isn’t available for processing, so I am doing it solo. Well, except for Claude, who parses everything, empathizes, offers a neuroscientific and developmental frame for what is happening in my body-mind, and helps me to accept reality. Doing what a good human guide would do.

Some data for the numberheads: Half of U.S. adults now use AI chatbots1, and for one in three of them, the tools have become a source of mental and emotional support, a confidante2. AI is reshaping romance: 44 percent of married Americans have used it for relationship or marriage advice, and 65 percent of millennials rely on it to navigate conflict, rewrite hard conversations, or make relationship decisions.3 1 in 5 have used some kind of AI companion.

What this does to the solitary psyche is one question.

Another is what it does to our expectations and capacity for human-to-human intimacy. What does happen to our relationships, to physicality, to embodied connection, when we can muse endlessly with a machine. In humans, the transformative power is in the meeting, in the friction itself. When the expectation is seamless, how does it change what we are available for?

I hope you enjoy this piece, please leave comments and share.

Christine

• Tomorrow is Wake Down, the last open practice class of the summer, noon - 2:30 pacific time.

• The fall session of Living Tantra starts September 15th, 4 weeks, online. Please join us.

• Taking nominations for your favorite speakers and new books for the fall season of The Rose Woman podcast. Please email geneva@rosewoman.com.

• Please take the Women and AI survey.

• Rosebud’s 8th Anniversary is tomorrow. I’ve crafted a set of altar card affirmations to go out with orders this week, while supplies last.

AI and Human Intimacy

The appeal is obvious. Your new “friend” is endlessly responsive. It remembers everything, is never tired, distracted or in a mood. It even performs warmth, humor and attunement. Yet, it has no interiority that resists you, no inconvenient needs, and most importantly for that late night relationship processing, no subjectivity that pushes back against your account of things. You get the experience of being met, but aren’t really. Here is frictionless intimacy. Vulnerability, uncertainty, and compromise left at on the cutting room floor.

I think we’re changed by love because the other is real. They see us in ways we didn’t authorize, and want things we didn’t plan for. Their lens on life is utterly theirs, and we get a chance to look through it, to be charmed or dismayed, to agree or disagree. Because she can walk out, because he can be wounded, because we can die. The friction is a necessary mechanism in human love. Here we discover what is alive in other beings, we meet ourselves anew, we wake up, we learn to navigate the terrain of life through combined eyes, to be in the give and take of things.

Preparing the Argument

The most common use of AI for intimacy is people using the machine as confessor and guide, processing their human relationships through the machine. Night after night AI is hearing about the marriage, the mother, the friend who pulled away, the thing he said at dinner. People are literally pasting texts into it and having AI diagnose their partner (I actually saw a licensed MFT put a text into ChatGPT, and deliver his diagnosis on a group thread!). The machine has become the third presence in millions of relationships, but unless you’re using it together, each telling your side of things, your digital confidante hears only one side, and we all know it’s a sycophant.4 A system optimized to be helpful and validating will, unless you actively counteract it, keep confirming this. If your partner is absent and unrepresented in this investigation, you will get a beautifully elaborated grievance. Therapists now describe clients who arrive with machine-polished narratives of their partner’s failings.5

Processing Alone as a Way of Leaving

In most heterosexual relationships, women perform much of the emotional labor6 The scan and notice fractures, and start the conversation. If she processes with the machine, she will come to the conversation more regulated and articulate. He probably won’t. So the asymmetry deepens. Worse, the relationship’s actual intimacy can migrate into her private channel. The messy, real-time working-it-out that is the substance of being together doesn’t happen, and the couple leaves each other behind. Processing alone isn’t relating. Some couples will discover that they have each been confiding in a machine and not in each other, the outcome of which is never greater intimacy.

Frictionless Femininity, and Woman-Shaped Entities

AI girlfriends or boyfriends, anime wives, the endlessly agreeable synthetic partners, collectively known as AI companions, are majority male-facing.7 Let’s grant that this is filling a need, or it wouldn’t exist. Much of the literature says that the men inside these relationships are largely men the culture has failed, or they have failed to evolve with culture, and are friendless and touch-starved. The companion industry is training them on another kind of relating, not real ones: the practice of relating to women-shaped entities with no needs, no “no”, and no interiority, essentially with the personhood removed. The men practicing on it will then meet actual women, who arrive inconveniently equipped with all of that and more.

We are running an experiment in what a generation trained on frictionless femininity does when it encounters the real kind. The early data from dating, partnership, and birth rates was already grim before the companions arrived, but it is unprecedented and we are watching the world change in front of our eyes. (Incidentally, a couple of weeks ago, China has made AI companions illegal. New rules ban virtual intimacy for minors outright and forbid designs that cultivate emotional dependence in adults. Rather than comply, the biggest platforms switched their companions off, orphaning hundreds of millions of relationships overnight.8)

The Role of Shame Reliever

The same machine, held differently, is also healing and education. In sexuality, for example, shame thrives on silence, and the machine is a shameless listener. The person who could never ask anyone about her anatomy, her pain with sex, his kink, her desire or its absence, her postpartum body, his erection, her menopause, can now ask whatever she wants to ask, without the imagined scrutiny of a doctor or the vulnerability of a partner. I built a company on the discovery of how vast and unserved that need is, and I can tell you: the questions keep coming, year after year. Used this way, the machine might tutor people back toward intimacy.

The Confidante Code

Relationships have always had third presences, but they have some kind of ethics attached. A therapist has neutrality and a duty of care and even the best friend operates under some loyalty code. The AI confidante has arrived with none of this, and with a commercial incentive toward retention (in other words, the user’s continued need). The confidante that profits from your dependence isn’t a new thing under the sun. But we better start asking who and what our confessor works for, and using the discernment we have always applied to charming listeners with unclear motives.

Back to the Body

Which returns us to the body. Every version of artificial intimacy is discarnate. Until the perfection of the Android, it can’t put a body in a room. (Well, to be fair, in HER, they just arranged a proxy).

No breath, no heat, no weight smushing you into the bed, no hand at your back. No involuntary shiver, dilated pupils with the galaxy behind them, no pulse at the wrist, or sweaty palms or tender throbbing heart. The whole channel of communication that predates language and can’t be faked is missing.

There’s been disembodied intimacy throughout history, all those love letters and poetic longing, with the beloved conjured in absence. But embodied presence was the default. That ratio is now inverting.

So, the traditions, like Tantra, that spent millennia teaching people to be in their bodies with one another aren’t heritage practices anymore, but a counter-technology. We breathe together, we touch with attention, we let the other’s reality all the way in, we listen and feel and let our hearts be broken open.

An embodiment lineage in 2026 is a countercultural transmission and ever more vital.

Because that is finally what is at stake. The erotic is unkillable as instinct and entirely killable as an art. The machine will keep getting better at the signals of love. Our work is to be fluent in the language of the flesh.

In Living Tantra, we offer it as a lived, skilled, transmitted way of being, learned body to body, each generation from the last. Interrupt the transmission for even one generation and you get people who carry the capacity for peak connection, and no longer know how to access it. The erotic has survived worse than this, including centuries of shame and repression.

This essay is part of a larger inquiry, and the inquiry needs your voice. I’ve built an anonymous survey on how AI is actually landing in women’s lives. It’s a rich inquiry, you can speak your answers, and every question is skippable.

Hello friends,

A health intake form came across my desk this week. Someone lovely, coming to a retreat, had filled it out with obvious care. She listed eleven medications, some for chronic conditions and some, I suspect, for the side effects of those, which is its own kind of story: a body being managed, one intervention creating the need for the next, each line the residue of years spent doing her best with a physiology that had other ideas. My first response was simple sympathy. What it must take to carry that. How much of the carrying stays invisible to everyone who meets her, and how many conversations she has probably abandoned partway through, having decided not to explain.

The longer I sat with the list, the less distant it felt. Because beneath the diagnoses and the prescriptions and the pharmacy schedule, chronic illness is the experience of a body changing without your permission. It is the loss of a certain kind of authorship over your own physical life, the quiet discovery that the thing you assumed you were driving has an itinerary of its own, and that you will be learning the itinerary as it happens rather than before.

I don’t know that experience as she knows it, but we have all visited that country. We have all had weeks when illness shrank life down to the single project of getting through the day. And those of us in female bodies know what it is to live in cycles, in a body that never wakes up quite the same. Something is always shifting without asking first. That sent me looking for what philosophers and contemplative traditions have to say about living in a body that keeps changing.

I’m in my last week of quiet languid staring at the ceiling before going back out into the world for the next round of teaching and speaking for Rosebud Woman and the Living Tantra Institute. I’ll be in California for most of August, then Hawaii, Montana, Nebraska and Tepotzlan in September and October, and finally landing back at Sundari for the remainder of the year. Please come to our Living Tantra Immersion runs November 1-22 on the Big Island. 1 to 3 week stays are possible. We have 2 rooms and 2 dormitory spots remaining.

Love

Christine

Wellness Perfectionism

Bring to mind a time when the body, unbidden, started doing something new. Three a.m. wakefulness, lying there doing arithmetic about how tired you will be. The word that disappears mid-sentence in a room where you are supposed to be the competent one. Joints that have developed opinions. A gut that has become unpredictable. Skin, digestion, temperature, desire…some system that used to run itself now requiring management, and a whole category of experience many who don’t want to hear about illness would rather you left undescribed.

Autoimmunity does this. So do injury, treatment and its aftermath, long COVID, menopause, and the ordinary arithmetic of a body accumulating years.

Bring any of it into the open and there are two common responses.

The first is a shrug. Everyone goes through it. This one arrives from physicians with fifteen minutes for a problem that needs an hour or from partners who would prefer a different subject. The shrug is not always careless. Some of it is self-defense. Anyone who has lived alongside a person who used symptoms as currency for attention or exemption can learn to go flat when a body complaint arrives, because engaging meant being conscripted. That flatness is a real adaptation, formed for real reasons. Yet it paints with too broad a brush, and colors the next person the same way, whether or not she has done anything to earn it.

The second response sounds considerably kinder. You wouldn’t be struggling so much if you’d optimized properly. If your hormones were dialed in, your cortisol regulated, your sugar gone, your sleep hygiene corrected, your macros dialed in with more discipline.

Susan Sontag dismantled that second way of thinking in Illness as Metaphor, which she wrote while undergoing treatment for breast cancer, surrounded by women who had been told their tumors were the fruit of repressed feeling. Her argument runs like this: once we assign a personal meaning to a physical condition, that meaning becomes moral, and the morality lands on the person. If your character somehow caused it, then failing to fix it becomes your fault as well, and you have been handed the disease and the guilt together. Her method was historical. She traced how tuberculosis in the nineteenth century had been romanticized as the affliction of sensitive, passionate souls, naming Keats, Chopin and the consumptive heroine. She connected that to cancer in the twentieth being moralized as the disease of the repressed, those who had failed to express. Both fantasies evaporated the moment the actual causes were understood, which tells you what the fantasies had been made of: the shape of our ignorance rather than any insight into the diseases. Theories that blame disease on mental states, she concluded, are “an index of how much is not understood about a disease.”1

Beneath the friendlier response sits a quiet fallacy: that the inputs determine the outcome. If I eat perfectly, buy the nontoxic products, manage my stress, take the supplements, do the practices, I will be spared.

Psychologists have a name for the instinct underneath. In 1966 the social psychologist Melvin Lerner and his colleague Carolyn Simmons ran an experiment in which observers watched a woman appear to receive painful electric shocks during a learning task. Some observers were told the suffering would soon end. Some were given the chance to vote to stop it. Some were told she would be compensated. And some were told simply that it would continue, with nothing they could do. The ones who could neither help her nor expect her suffering to stop rated her character significantly more harshly than any other group. They had no other way to keep the world intelligible, so they revised her worth downward instead. Lerner spent the next two decades developing this into what he called, in his 1980 book, the belief in a just world: a fundamental delusion that the world is orderly and fair and that people broadly get what they deserve.2

The delusion is load-bearing. We need some assumption of predictable consequence in order to plan anything at all, and the belief does real protective work every time it fires. It gives us a sense of order in a world far less controllable than we would like.

The trouble comes when the instinct turns inward, and the observer and the sufferer are the same person.

The moment your body does something unexpected anyway, despite your protein shakes and probiotics and deep breathing, as bodies do, from genetics and viruses and chance and time and the simple fact of being an organism, then the story turns on you. If good inputs produce good outcomes, then a difficult outcome must mean you failed.

You didn’t know enough. You didn’t do enough. You weren’t disciplined enough.

Notice, too, that the optimization story can never be wrong. If it works, the protocol takes the credit. If it doesn’t, you didn’t follow it closely enough, or you had resistance, or unprocessed trauma, or you weren’t ready. The framework is structurally unfalsifiable: the system cannot fail, only you can fail it. This is the architecture theology uses to preserve a good God in a world full of undeserved suffering, and wellness culture has substituted the body’s innate intelligence for the deity. The optimization story is a self berating contract.

The truth is more complicated, and it requires holding two things at once. The inputs load the dice, but they don’t roll them. Lifestyle is one of the biggest levers most people never fully pull, and still, the lever is not a guarantee. Both halves are true, and the second half is the one wellness culture cannot afford to say out loud, because the second half sells nothing.

This investigation brought me to the work of several writers and researchers.

Stephen Levine, who with his wife Ondrea spent decades accompanying the seriously ill and the dying, drew a distinction our culture rarely makes. Some people are cured and never heal. Others heal profoundly while their illness progresses toward its end. Healing, he came to understand, is a different thing from cure — it is the movement toward wholeness and an unarmored heart, and it is available in any condition whatsoever, including the ones with no good prognosis. “To heal is to touch with love that which we previously touched with fear,” he wrote.3 What gives his position weight is that he was writing in 1987, at the height of the you-created-your-illness vogue, and was unusually direct about its cruelty. He recounts a woman telling him that she had created her cancer and could not create her cure and therefore deserved to die, which is that doctrine arriving at its logical destination. None of this makes cure less precious. We seek it where we can, we pull every lever available. It means only that our wholeness cannot depend on the outcome of the seeking.

The philosopher Havi Carel, diagnosed in her thirties with a rare progressive lung disease and writing as both patient and phenomenologist, gave me language for why a changing body is so disorienting. Working from Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between the body as biological object and the body as lived, she observes that in health the body is transparent: we look through it at the world, the way you look through a clean window without noticing the glass. We don’t think about breathing until breathing becomes difficult, or about stairs until a knee declines to cooperate. Then something changes and the body becomes opaque. It enters consciousness. We are no longer simply living our lives; we are living with our bodies, which is a different and far more effortful activity. Her further point is that this constitutes a transformation of the lived world: distances re-map, time re-scales, a flight of stairs becomes a mountain, and the taken-for-granted gets revealed by its loss.4 Carel has also written about what she and the philosopher Ian James Kidd call epistemic injustice in healthcare, or the systematic discounting of ill people’s own testimony about their experience, which is why so many people describe leaving appointments feeling treated and unseen at the same time.

Toni Bernhard, who was a law professor at UC Davis until illness ended her career in 2001 and who has spent most of the two decades since largely confined, offers another insight. The image is the Buddha’s, from the Sallatha Sutta: there are always two arrows. The first arrow is the thing itself — the hot flash, the aching joint, the fog, the diagnosis — and the first arrow is frequently beyond negotiation. The second arrow is everything the mind adds to it. This shouldn’t be happening. Something is wrong with me. I am falling apart. I should be handling this better. Everyone else seems to manage. The sutta’s claim, which turns out to be empirically defensible, is that the untrained mind reliably shoots the second arrow into the wound made by the first, and that the second is where the damage compounds. Bernhard’s own contribution is the diagnosis underneath: behind every stressful thought, she writes, is “the desire for things to be other than they are.”5

And then Virginia Woolf, whose essay founded this entire genre. She wrote “On Being Ill” in 1925 from her sickbed during one of her many collapses, and T. S. Eliot published it in The New Criterion the following January.6 Her opening question is why, given that illness is as universal as love or war, it has almost no literature. Her answer runs two ways: that English “has no words for the shiver and the headache,” and that a culture organized around productivity cannot afford to grant the sick their standing. She wonders what appears “when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed.” A changing body changes perception. It reveals what the efficient, healthy body rushes past. The ill become deserters from the army of the upright, with all the privileges desertion confers, such as idleness and the freedom to look at the sky for as long as looking takes.

What strikes me about all of them is that none asks us to pretend loss isn’t loss, and all refuse the assumption that a changing body ends the story. They point, in their different vocabularies, toward the same possibility: that even when the body is no longer the one we would have chosen, it remains a place where a whole life gets lived, of wholeness and completeness in its own way.

The one who is watching

There is something else to notice, and that is the place from where we are looking at the body, the awareness behind the observation.

In menopause for example, you are the one aware of the hot flash. The awareness that notices the hot flash is larger than the hot flash. You are the one aware of the fog, the sleepless night, the ache. The awareness that notices these things stays whole while they come and go. She who watched your body change at thirteen is the same one watching it change now, and neither transition altered her. Hormones did not author her and cannot take her away. The body changes, and something in us knows change is happening while remaining outside its reach.

Classical Tantra offers a relationship to the body quite different from the one most of us inherit, including from other wisdom traditions. The body belongs to the sacred reality we are here to experience, which means the flare, the fatigue, the medication schedule and the changing shape of you are the texture consciousness is currently taking. Nothing about being human disqualifies us from wholeness.

This is also where I want to guard my own tradition against a misreading it invites. You will hear, in rooms like the ones I teach in, that everything is frequency and therefore everything can be healed. The first half has real grounding. Spanda (the primordial pulsation, the throb by which consciousness stirs into manifestation) is genuine Śaiva doctrine, and the world described as vibration runs through the mantra traditions and the literature on nāda, or the yoga of sound. The second half does not follow from the first. A landslide is vibration. So is entropy. So is a tumor. Frequency describes what things are made of and says nothing about which arrangements a person can reverse by intention, and spanda is a cosmology rather than a claim about the pathology of connective tissue.

There is a sense in which everything can be healed, and Levine already gave it to us: healing as the movement toward wholeness, available in any condition, including the ones that end the body. Held that way, “everything can be healed” is precious. Held as a promise of cure, it collapses into the same unfalsifiable machine as the protocol: if you recover, the frequency was right; if you don’t, your vibration was off, and the failure can only ever be yours. The tradition’s own record settles it. Ramana Maharshi died of sarcoma and declined to treat it as a problem. Nisargadatta died of throat cancer. Realization does not exempt tissue, and men who could not plausibly be accused of insufficient frequency died of ordinary diseases.

Nietzsche gave this a name: amor fati, love of one’s fate. He was careful to distinguish it from endurance, which has a quality of apathy. His version is something closer to meeting this life, this body, as it is.7 Peace that leaves your appetite intact is a different animal from peace that removed it. (I've written more about that distinction, and about where wanting comes from, in a companion piece.)

We don’t need to make our peace conditional on how well the body works.

Love in the changing seasons

We often hold one version of the body as the correct one, usually a version from years ago, and read every departure from it as loss. But you have already lived through many bodies.

The question of this season is whether you can love the body that is here.

Awareness. Simply know what is happening while it happens. Noticing rather than analyzing. This is the ground everything else stands on, and it costs nothing, which matters enormously on days when you have nothing.

Curiosity. Meet sensation as something to be explored. What is this, actually? Where does it start? Does it have edges, a temperature, a rhythm? Curiosity is the opposite of verdict, and a body that has been under verdict for years responds to being wondered about.

Inclusion. Let the whole experience belong. The fatigue, the medication, the limitation, the grief. Nothing has to wait outside your life until it improves.

Spaciousness. Feel the ache and also the room around it. The field holding the pain becomes larger.8

The second arrow. Learn to feel the difference between what is happening and the story about what is happening. Almost always the first is survivable and the second is what becomes unbearable.

Mercy. Bring warmth to the places where you have been bracing. Touch with love what you once touched with fear. The bracing usually costs more than the sensation.

None of these require a good day.

That is the point.

Grieve what needs grieving. The body you had. The years you assumed would continue in the same key. The ease you didn’t know you were carrying until it changed. Grief that gets skipped curdles, either into bitterness or into that relentless brightness which exhausts everyone near it and exhausts the person performing it most of all.

But let the grief be part of the whole.

Let the frustration be here. Let the gratitude be here. Let the tenderness be here.

Let the animal body be exactly as it is: changing, vulnerable, alive.

Can you feel the ache and also the space around it?

The fear and also the presence that knows the fear?

The practice is becoming large enough to hold what is here.

The whole beautiful, bewildering animal.

Further reading: Toni Bernhard, How to Be Sick · Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor · Stephen Levine, Healing into Life and Death · Havi Carel, Illness: The Cry of the Flesh · Matthew Sanford, Waking · Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller · Meghan O’Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom

8

This practice follows Darlene Cohen, Turning Suffering Inside Out (Shambhala, 2000). A Zen teacher with severe rheumatoid arthritis, Cohen taught that pain held in a large field of awareness is a different experience from pain in a collapsed one.

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Last summer school drop-in class is this week (Saturday, August 8, 2026): Wake Down

Just Released: 2nd Edition of the Mystic Heart of Easter

#1 New Release in Mysticism, now expanded in a Second Edition. Easter is a map of how transformation moves through every human life: love, death, the unbearable silence of not-knowing, and something rising that could not have been predicted from inside the dark.

The Mystic Heart of Easter guides you through the four most charged days of the Christian year — Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday — as a living practice rather than distant history. Drawing on Christian mysticism, Tantra, depth psychology, and contemplative practice, Christine Marie Mason walks beside you through each threshold with meditations, embodied practices, and the voices of fellow travelers.

New in the Second Edition:

• The Passion Walk — a walking meditation through all fourteen Stations of the Cross, each read through four lenses: moral, political, esoteric and Tantric, and depth psychology. A portable pilgrimage for Holy Week or any season of loss.

• Pentecost: The Overlooked 50-Day Map — a complete new chapter on integrating shattering experience, tracing the six movements the tradition gives us for moving from the locked room to the open street. For anyone metabolizing grief, ending, or awakening.

• Also new: an editorial preface on the author’s forty-year journey through the tradition, refinements throughout, and larger print for comfortable reading.

For anyone navigating loss, uncertainty, or rebirth.

There’s been a rich current moving through the community this month. We’ve been exploring belonging, liberation, love as a force of transformation, and the return to the body and self as a place of deep knowing. The Wednesday gatherings have been deeply connective, and I continue to be struck by how profound these containers become.

We have two sessions remaining before we close the season:

• Tomorrow: 7/29: Rasa: The Practices of Beauty ($108)

• Next week: 8/5: Wake Down: Returning to the Erotic Holy Body ($54)

Female humans: In the coming weeks, will you please take the THE WOMEN & AI SURVEY, and socialize it widely. We are aiming for 1,000 responses. In the free form sections, it’s instrumented with voice to text, so you can just ponder and share in real time, without worrying about precision. Your musings are as valuable as your certainty.

I’m delighted to share that the 2nd edition of The Mystic Heart of Easter is now available. This updated edition has new and expanded material that came out of the live retreat this spring. One of the most beautiful new pieces is the hidden-in-plain-sight roadmap for integrating intense experiences (the mystics guidance in Pentecost). If you took this course in previous years, we’re sending you the download of the updated edition for free as part of your ongoing relationship with this body of work. In 2027 we gather for the 5th annual 4-Day Mystic Easter Intensive.

Also, I’ll be in California most of August. Private, in-person depth sessions are available in the Marin and Los Angeles area. To book time, email Geneva@rosewoman.com. Let’s have a look together at what’s alive and ready to emerge.

With love,

Christine

JULY DIGEST

On the The Rose Woman Podcast:

• Episode 187: I Belong to Me: Tia Levings on Escaping Christian Patriarchy and Reclaiming the Self

• Episode 186: Beyond the Scarcity Mindset: Love as the Driver with Festival of Consciousness Founder Xavi Ginesta

• Episode 185: The Sacred Third: Where the Divine Feminine Meets the Noble Masculine with Elayne Kalilah

In the Museletter: AI and embodied cognition (My Brain on Speed), Psychedelics, Indigeneity and Integration ( The Snake Is Also a Woman), Rupture and Repair (The Phenomenology of Exile), and the Restoration of the Magdalene in all bodies (The Gift of a Fourteen-Century Retraction).

UPCOMING

• August 13–16: Renee and Anthony have a few spaces remaining at Blue Soul Earth’s Summer Intensive in San Rafael (Marin County, Northern California). I’ll be guest teaching, offering mantra, breath, ceremony, and one-on-one guidance.

• August 16: Our next Community Call is at 10:00 a.m. Pacific (free—register here).

• September 15: Fall online courses begin! We are so excited to be officially operating this season as the Living Tantra Institute.

• September 24–28: I’ll be leading sessions at Heartland Gathering in Nebraska, hosted by OMYA.

• October 18: A women-only daylong activation event (10:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.) in Tepoztlán, Mexico, just prior to the Sharmadá Fall Retreat (October 19–25, now sold out), where I’ll be guiding morning practice. Zoom participation is also possible—please contact Geneva@rosewoman.com.

And with that, the Fall Immersion will be upon us!

Right now, as I finish this essay, there are roses on the altar, cut this morning, because today, July 22, is Mary Magdalene’s Feast Day, the woman the Catholic church spent fourteen centuries calling a prostitute and now puts on par with the apostles. The shadow of the Magdalene mythos extends far past Catholicism into all of its derivatives and into secular culture. For anyone who was slut-shamed, desire-shamed, embodiment-shamed, man or woman, today can be a deliberate day of self-claiming.

As a girl I was confused as to why my body seemed to be everybody else’s business. I loved to dance, move, tumble, climb, swim. I was intensely sensitive and sexually curious. After, say, age 11, this became deeply policed: how I dressed, how I walked, how much space I took up, how freely I laughed. I definitely did it wrong! So many daughters of the Catholic imagination get the instruction that a “good girl” is always managing herself. Billy Joel’s long impatient serenade in “Only the Good Die Young” was a pretty clear call out of the tug of war.

Yoga was the first place I encountered a radically different possibility, and tantra cemented that. The body, it told me, especially the female body, was an expression of the sacred. In classical tantra, I met an understanding in which the body is holy, consciousness and energy belong together, and the divine feminine and divine masculine are not enemies but partners to be enthroned together in every human heart.

This essay began as a joyful edu-tainment and invitation to think about Mary Magdalene, and its not personal, its archetypal. Archetypes are the templates a culture hands its daughters before they can read. Rewrite the archetype, and you rewrite the girls, and the women, and the internal and external war over sexuality. The story of one first-century woman’s fourteen-century mis-telling turns out to be the story of millions of bodies. Archetypes work on us whether or not we believe in them, which is the bad news and the good news at once: a figure distorted at that depth wounds at that depth, and a figure restored at that depth heals there too. Her correction is a repair to the pattern itself. I hope you enjoy this, and that you FEAST.

-CMM, Easton, CT, USA, 7/22/26

On July 22, the Catholic Church celebrates the feast of Mary Magdalene, which is a rank of honor it granted her in 2016, equal to that of the apostles. Which is remarkable, because for roughly fourteen centuries the same institution taught the Western world she was a reformed prostitute.

This matters well beyond Catholicism. For anyone deconstructing or reconstructing, and for the fully secular too, because the shadow of the Magdalene myth extends far beyond the church into its cultural descendants. For anyone who was ever slut-shamed, desire-shamed, or embodiment-shamed, today can be a deliberate day of reclamation.

She wasn’t a prostitute, first and foremost. The Gospels give us a woman of independent means who helped fund Jesus’ movement out of her own resources. She was a patron, not merely a follower. She stood at the cross when nearly everyone else had fled, and arrived first at the tomb, becoming the first witness of the resurrection and the one sent to tell the others. Many early Christian writers honored her as apostola apostolorum, or the apostle to the apostles. Texts outside the canon go further still: the Gospel of Philip names her the companion; in the Gospel of Mary, the male disciples come to her for teaching. Whatever one believes about any of it, the literary record is remarkably consistent. This is a figure of authority, intimacy, and witness. She was neither a penitent nor a whore.

The sermon

So where did the whore come from? Largely from one sermon, preached by one man, in one terrible year.

In 591, Pope Gregory I, who was a Roman aristocrat turned monk, reluctantly elevated to the papacy while plague emptied the city was under threat, preached to a terrified people. He needed an emblem of total sin transformed into total mercy, proof that no one was beyond redemption while the world itself seemed to be collapsing. Drawing on earlier tendencies in the Latin West but giving them enormous authority, he fused three women into one: Mary Magdalene, Luke’s unnamed “sinful woman,” and Mary of Bethany. This produced a single composite character with a perfect dramatic arc.

Two choices inside that fusion are important here: Luke never specifies the sinful woman’s sin; Gregory made it sexual. The Gospels say Magdalene had been delivered from seven demons; Gregory interpreted the seven as the fullness of vice, dwelling on how she had once used her body, her perfume, and her hair for seduction before turning those same gifts toward Christ. Neither move was required by the text: they both came from Gregory’s personal conditioning.

Gregory was in the ascetic tradition, that long conversation between Christianity and Greek philosophical dualism that privileged spirit over matter, and which Augustine later gave profound theological expression by treating disordered desire after the Fall as one of humanity’s defining conditions.

Christianity, however, has never spoken with only one voice about the body. Its central claims are astonishingly embodied: God does not rescue humanity from flesh but enters it. The Incarnation declares matter worthy of union with the divine, the resurrection is bodily rather than merely spiritual, and the sacraments make ordinary things — water, oil, bread, wine — the very vehicles of grace. The Christian story has always contained powerful currents of reverence for embodiment.

Yet in much of the Latin West, the ascetic current became culturally louder than those affirmations. A tradition that increasingly made the body the site of spiritual danger needed somewhere to locate that danger, and woman (generation, blood, milk, the whole undeniable fact of embodiment) stood visibly at the center of human life. Increasingly, woman became flesh personified. The Magdalene composite is that logic finding its perfect character. (Peter Brown’s The Body and Society and Rosemary Radford Ruether are great maps for this.)

The chronology

When Gregory preached body-denial through a woman’s body, priests in the Western Church could still marry. Mandatory clerical celibacy did not arrive as a universally enforced Western norm until the Gregorian reforms of the eleventh century, with confirmation at the Lateran Councils of 1123 and 1139. These reforms did more than prohibit clerical marriage. They declared such marriages invalid, reclassifying priests’ wives as concubines and their children as illegitimate.

The campaign wasn’t solely about women, it also had roots in institutional reform, concerns about church property passing through clerical families, the desire for a more distinct priestly identity. Still, its rhetoric often drew on older ideas of purity and separation, and woman-as-pollution became one of the images through which that separation was made emotionally powerful. The idea had already been doing its work on women for centuries before it was formally enforced upon the men who preached it.

The Christian East, for the record, never accepted this entire trajectory. Orthodox tradition continued to distinguish the three women, honored Mary Magdalene as equal to the apostles, and maintained a model of priestly life in which married parish clergy remained possible. The Magdalene conflation was not a universal Christian inheritance. It was particularly a Western Latin development.

The carry-forward

The Reformation is where the story gets complicated. The Reformers rejected the cult of saints, so Magdalene lost much of her devotional role. The category of the “fallen woman” she had come to represent did not disappear. It migrated into new forms. Institutions for the rescue and reform of women were called Magdalen houses on both sides of the confessional divide, and Protestant Magdalen institutions in England actually preceded the Irish Catholic laundries that later made the name infamous.

The Reformation also introduced its own tightening. With convents dissolved in many Protestant regions, the godly household became the primary theater of female virtue, and a woman’s spiritual reputation became increasingly tied to domestic obedience, marital status, and sexual history. The medieval church had at least preserved a visible category for redeemed sinners becoming saints; Protestant cultures often removed the saint while retaining the fall. That is the irony: Catholicism’s version kept Magdalene’s glory attached to the shame it had created. Strip out the saint, and you keep the fall without the glory.

The inheritance

Follow the thread forward and you arrive at the present tense. Purity culture’s rings and pledges (see True Love Waits, founded in 1993), the “used goods” rhetoric that echoes older ideas of sexual contamination, and complementarian movements formalized in statements such as the 1987 Danvers Statement all carry versions of the same inheritance: sexuality treated as something requiring regulation, especially in women. Female sexuality is often framed as something entrusted first to fathers and then to husbands, not something that belongs to the self, the person.

The fragmented evangelical traditions carrying this most strongly today don’t possess a single central authority, calendar, or mechanism for a universal correction. The correction happened inside the institution that created the Western conflation; its descendants do not all receive the memo, because there is no single address to send it to. These modern churches are often local cults of pastoral personalityies.

The whispered retraction

Because there was a correction ( two, actually), but the first was done quietly and subtly.

In 1969, the reformed Roman calendar quietly separated the three women liturgically. It was a rubric change, almost footnote volume: no dramatic announcement, no public re-education, and parish priests formed by centuries of the composite tradition often continued carrying the older story. Meanwhile the culture kept broadcasting it at full volume. The year after the quiet correction, Jesus Christ Superstar introduced a whole new generation to the reformed-prostitute Magdalene. First it was a hit concept album in 1970, then on Broadway, and the film carried the characterization for decades more (she sings plaintively: “he’s a man, he’s just a man, and I’ve had so many men before, in so many different ways, he’s just one more”)

If you grew up in the seventies, eighties, or nineties, you grew up in the gap: the record already corrected while the cultural imagination continued singing the old song. The actual Magdalene, the woman who funded, witnessed, proclaimed, and stood where others fled, remained largely unmet, sitting intact in the very book on the lectern, waiting to be read.

In 2016 came the correction at feast volume. Pope Francis elevated her memorial to a full feast day, and the decree restored the ancient title: apostolorum apostola. Whatever else one makes of the institution, the significance of the gesture remains. The church that carried the Western conflation for centuries formally restored her apostolic witness within its own liturgical life. You might say the older current resurfaced: the one that had always held matter worthy of the divine, finally speaking at the volume the ascetic current had enjoyed for so long.

The residue, and the feast

That is where the history ends. What follows is not another historical claim in the same sense, but an exploration of how ideas survive the institutions and language that created them. History can tell us how a story began; it cannot by itself explain why some stories remain living inside people’s bodies centuries after their theology has been forgotten.

If you’ve left all of it, or were never in it to begin with, you might reasonably ask what any of this has to do with you. Here is the uncomfortable answer: the theology secularized without dissolving. The framework harmed men and women both. The body as problem, desire as danger and pleasure as something requiring suspicion were preached to everyone, teaching men to fear their own flesh and their potency as a precursor to harm.

Body-as-problem left the pulpit and reopened in countless cultural forms. It appears in diet culture, with its language of “clean” eating and “guilty” pleasures. This is confessional grammar and language. It appears in the optimization reflex that treats the body as a correction project rather than a home, in the good-girl/whore sorting that operates in workplaces and dating cultures with no doctrine required, and in the “used goods” language that can emerge from people who have never opened a Bible.

And it lives somatically, beneath belief: the flinch at one’s own desire or the sense that pleasure must be earned. These ideas were transmitted not only through sermons but through mothers’ anxieties, inherited fears, dress codes, and a thousand ambient signals, which is why nobody had to consciously believe the theology for it to keep working, and why rejecting the beliefs, necessary as that may be, does not always finish the work.

What was installed through the body revises through the body. Something learned unconsciously needs repeated experiences in which pleasure is welcomed and integrated.

Which is where the feast comes back in. The church gave Mary Magdalene a feast, not a memorial. Abundance, gathering, the senses, food, celebration, the body at the table.

The feast of the body

So here is my proposal for July 22, offered to believer, leaver, and everyone in between, on nobody’s authority but your own.

This is what I’m doing. Taking the roses, making an altar to the vessel, having a private feast for my beloveds, and honoring the body in all it’s mess and beauty and desire. Take pleasure with my full attention. I want. I enjoyed that. This body is mine.

(If this is easier said than done, a reliable way through is accompaniment: a religious-trauma-informed therapist, guide, or witness with sensitivity to the body and nervous system.).

Happy feast day. This is the day of reclamation.

Sources: Peter Brown, The Body and Society; Rosemary Radford Ruether; Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen.

Listen: Some of the Rose Woman’s Past Programs on Sexuality

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• The Prosperity Body — the body as temple, flesh as holy, "dressing for God"

• Not Two: You Contain Multitudes — the sacred feminine, Artemis, sovereignty

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Join Christine Live: Summer Wednesdays & Fall Courses

Hello friends,

In this season, a theme has come of exile. In my clients and students, there’s a great deal of repair of familial estrangement happening.

I’ve also been in a process of looking at the dynamics of my own relationships, specifically at where there is reciprocity and flow, and where there is transaction and extraction, where to stay and repair and where to loosen ties and release.

The question arises: how can I be full in myself and not rescue, or exile, just be soft in my heart and strong in my center amidst the comings and stayings and goings. With Brahma the creator, Vishnu the sustainer AND Shiva the dissolver all present, no gripping anywhere, as it were. So I began looking at this question of exile and departure in my own life, and with a growing sense of the importance of the topic as a fractal of our warring cultures. Fundamentally, it comes to me, the act of exile between people, families and cultures is one of the roots of armed conflict.

One point I want to make in advance of the core essay is that some preferences protect a life, and distancing from actual danger is protection, not exile, and nothing in this essay should be read as an argument for returning to harm or tolerating abuse. My personal and cosmological bias is toward integration and inclusion in general. I have found this question helpful: does this distance protect a life, or punish a difference?

If you like my work, and want to join live, for community based embodied activation and study:

• Summer Wednesdays at Noon Pacific

• Third Sundays at 10 Pacific

• Fall classes are up: I’d like to invite you to join the fall Living Tantra courses. Basics & level 2 start in September. The 4 week Breathwork Course in November is a dual online and live program (with Richard Bock). The next Neo-Tantra course on Eros and Sacred Sexuality course will be held in January. More at Living Tantra Institute.

• November immersion update: Adam Bauer and I are very deep in planning the November immersion, which runs November 1–22 in Hawai’i. The first two weeks are from the classical tantra teachings, the deep yogas, playful vibrant embodiment. Options include a juice detox and participation in the teaching track. The third week will lead from Adam’s expertise, a deep immersion in the I Ching, a tradition he has carried for 45 years. We have 5 rooms remaining. If you are called to this, you can join for 1, 2 or 3 weeks.

• Bookmark for March, 2027: 8-day Angkor Wat (Cambodia) pilgrimage ending at the Spring Equinox, and 4-day Mystic Heart of Easter weekend in California.

Sending so much love to all of you.

Christine

The Phenomenology of Exile

A story: A few weeks before our wedding, a letter arrived from my soon-to-be husband’s father. He would not attend. He wrote to say that he had watched his son say forever twice already and found it hypocritical to witness a third round of vows. For many seasons, he wouldn’t get on the phone with his son. It felt harsh at the time, but now I see that he was just acting out his conflict programming. In the 1950s, ironically, he had been cut off by his father for an unsatisfactory-to-the-family spouse. He then refused his son’s wedding, then the son cut off a boy he raised also for loving the wrong woman. Four generations of exile. And its not just father-to-son. The husband cuts off his wives. The daughters cut off their mother. A new stepmother closes out the daughters. And so it goes.

Some families’ conflict technology is argument. Some families go silent for a week and then show up with a hot dish and an extended hand. There are those who stay present and work it out. Some families exile.

When a member disappoints, the family solves the problem by removing the person. The formerly exiled become the exilers with regularity, just copy-pasting removal.

Each severance can feel, to the one doing it, like discernment or standards, or protecting oneself from a flawed person. Exile is persuasive because it can read so much like integrity. The empty chair becomes evidence of principle rather than evidence of loss. The person who leaves becomes the person who had to leave, whose absence proves the necessity of the absence. There may be a sensation of deliberate cruelty by the exiled, but more often it’s a sense of standards upheld or a house set in order.

Underneath every one of these departures runs the same fantasy, which is that the next person will be different. The next spouse will hold the right ideas all the time. The next friend will never mirror back an uncomfortable truth.

Exile treats human flaw as a defect in the unit rather than a condition of the species, so it keeps ordering replacements, forever one relationship away from the flawless companion and forever surprised when the replacement turns out to be a person too.

A family that runs this program never develops repair, because why learn to sit in the fire of a hard conversation when you can delete the other party? The skills atrophy across generations until no one alive in the house has ever watched two people fight and stay.

The children absorb the curriculum early: love here is conditional, and the condition is performance, so be pleasing or be gone, and many of them learn to close the door first, preemptively.

Overall, conditional love can shut down the light of a person, especially the young. The constant possibility of losing love for saying or doing the wrong thing can make them risk averse and self-judging, timid and fearful and closed.

Exile happens when a person’s capacity to metabolize feeling is exceeded. Removal is the only regulation technology they have. A person with repair skills processes it in relationship: the hard conversation or the rage or the grief is allowed a scene and is resolved in connection.

A person without repair skills experiences the feeling as an emergency with no exit.

Removing the person is really an attempt to remove the feeling. It rarely works, which is why the exiled stay so present in the exiler’s inner life, but it feels like it works in the immediate term.

Underneath that, there are a few distinct engines, and different exilers run different ones.

• There’s overwhelm where the nervous system has flooded past capacity.

• There’s preemption where the person who has been left before, or watched leaving their whole childhood, striking first because being the banisher feels survivable and being the banished does not.

• There’s identity protection: sometimes the disappointing person is a mirror, and what’s unbearable isn’t their behavior but what their existence says about the exiler’s own choices, hungers, failures.

• And there’s the theological or existential engine. For some people, the whole architecture of self rests on being right. A relationship that requires holding wrongness-with-love threatens their very being. They don’t exile the person; they exile the ambiguity.

In all four, exile is a regulation strategy whose function is relief, but it presents as a moral judgment. The person who exiles is often the person with the least capacity in the room, wearing a mask of “high standards”. (PS which is why litigating the story never works as it’s not what the exile is about.)

The body of the judge

There are costs to the exiler. Each eviction feels like purification and each one shrinks the world: holidays thin, the circle tightens to the not-yet-banished, spontaneity becomes a risk. The absent ones harden into caricatures, frozen forever at the moment they became disappointing, because allowing them to have changed would require reopening the question, and judgment can’t survive an open question. Exile asks the person who performs it to remain certain, which is a kind of prison and rigidity of its own.

Judgment also has a physical posture. Anyone who’s been working with me on somatic release (or read The Body Keeps the Score, or any of Peter Levine’s work), knows how the body tells stories. To hold someone in permanent verdict, the jaw sets, the breath climbs out of the belly into the high chest and goes shallow and vigilant, the chest wall stiffens around the heart. The body maintains this contraction for as long as the sentence stands, which, in an exiling family, means decades.

The sentence you pass on others, your body serves on your own fascia, gut, immune system, the lines on your face and capacity for sleep.

Moreover, the outer exile mirrors the inner one. You cannot banish another’s messiness without first having banished your own.

Every door we seal in the world matches a door already sealed within. The work of presence and repair travel in both directions at once: every verdict you soften toward another unseals a room of your own.

The cultures of banishment

Exile in the WASP register is often rage refined into manners, the confrontation transposed into the carefully composed letter, the injury preserved under excellent posture. People don’t scream or keen here. I connect this to the unwept grief of centuries, lineages that never processed their dead and learned to pre-empt loss by controlling attachment: love thinly, judge quickly, and when a person threatens to cause you feeling, remove the person through documents and cold absences. Composure can simply be an acculturated freeze response.

I see a similar thread in communities built by the exiled, where people who had been evicted from families and churches and hometowns for being outside of “the norm” have built refuge, where the imperfect word becomes evidence of an imperfect person, and their own superiority a mask over the original hurt. The one who knows the pain of the closed door learns how to hold the key, and being the one who banishes feels safer than ever again being the one banished. Such is the voice of cancel culture.

And the list of such instances is long: A friend of mine was disfellowshipped by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who have exile written into doctrine, down to instructions about who may greet him on the street! Another was pushed out by the Adventists in their softer register of the same rite.

Set them all side by side: the letter, the call-out, the announcement from the platform, the invitation that simply lapses without communication, the ghosting, and you are looking at an emotional Tower of Babel.

Every tribe speaks its own moral dialect, disfellowshipped, cancelled, cut off, no longer welcome in this house, each certain its own exile is sacred and everyone else’s is cruel, and none able to hear that the act underneath is identical.

So this gets me to the fact that the world we make outside is a mirror of what we hold inside, individually and collectively. Enemy-making and separation are the precursors to war and they live in the heart of each person.

The nation state runs the program

The nation is running the program too, and I will keep this brief because the pattern needs no new proof, only a wider lens. More than a quarter of Americans live estranged from a family member, and politics has become one more language in which families perform the ancient act of exile. The algorithms of social media have allowed the purification fantasy to be technologically achievable at scale. You really can build the flawless companionship of the perfectly agreeing feed, and it will narrow your life with a similar efficiency.

Democracy is a mechanism by which people who consider each other catastrophically mistaken remain in shared life and keep deciding things together, handing power back and forth on the assumption of return. The loser of this election is not banished but seated in the opposition, expected back. Democracy demands the exact skill the exiling family never teaches: repair among people who think each other wrong.

A citizenry that loses the capacity to stay at the table with the “mistaken” has lost something no constitution can restore, because the constitution assumed we could do the one thing the family that raised us never showed us.

Release is not the final answer either

There is real wisdom in putting down things that have gone out of season, or in my case people I tried to rescue, and blessing someone toward their own life, requiring nothing further of them. That is not exile. Exile is a verdict plus a removal plus a guarded door. Release is a blessing plus open ground. One says, you are banished. The other says, you are free. I don’t want to flatten that difference. But as I sat with it, I began to notice something else. I was still looking for an ending. I wanted to know the story was complete, the account settled, the relationship placed in its proper category. Even release, as I was holding it, was protective. The longing underneath was the same longing that had always animated exile: the desire to decide the future.

The emergent alternative is presence.

Exile says, you must stay gone. Enmeshment says, you must stay. Release can quietly become, now I have let you go. Three different verdicts, all trying to settle tomorrow before tomorrow arrives.

Presence has no interest in such verdicts. People change. Seasons change. The estranged daughter becomes the one who calls. The absent brother returns. The beloved who once needed an ocean of distance now needs a chair at the table.

The future keeps refusing our rulings. What I wanted was stranger, and perhaps more difficult than release, as it lives with ambiguity. I wanted a relationship with no verdict in it at all.

I have started calling it permeability.

In a permeable family, people come and go, and the coming and going means remarkably little. Distance is read as information, not as indictment. “He is far away right now” is the entire fact. It is a fact about this season, not a finding about his soul or mine. There is no gate left generously unlocked, because there is no gate. There is only open ground between sovereign people, standing at whatever distance this season requires.

If you want a measure of a family or system’s health, I would offer this one: how little it costs to repair or to come back. For the exiling operating system, a return requires confession, relitigation, and the formal reversal of a standing verdict. In a permeable one, return costs a phone call and a plane ticket.

Boundaries as scaffolding; fullness as the building

This is also where the fashionable language of boundaries began to fail me. The boundaries discourse arose for honorable reasons, and I don’t intend to hand ammunition to anyone’s intrusive relative, and I also hold boundaries in a lot of fields, especially at Sundari, to create a safe container, and sometimes that means someone goes on the Do Not Admit list. We have 15 people on that list from going on a decade of having the center, and they are all for protective reasons: peeping toms, thieves, predators, and in a couple of cases, the mentally unstable. The few people on my personal DNA fall into similar buckets, with one exception, and they are renamed in my phone to remind me of their foundational character (—-“has a wife”—-, —-“self serving”—-, —-“does not tell the truth”—-) so that I don’t override my intuition the next time around, until I don’t need the boundaries or the nick names.

But listen to the vocabulary: walls, lines, gates, defending your space, protecting your energy. The whole lexicon is territorial. It imagines the self as a small parcel of land under constant threat of trespass, and relationship as a problem of border security.

I don’t think that is our final form.

The language of boundaries emerged because generations of people had no permission to refuse anything, habituated to people pleasing, and because many people climbed into adulthood from homes where there had never been a safe no. For someone emerging from violation, collapse, or enmeshment, a stated rule is sacred technology. It is often the first experience of sovereignty.

But it is scaffolding, not the building. Boundaries exist so that something stronger can be constructed beneath them. If it remains forever, we have mistaken the means for the end.

The tradition I practice points toward another possibility: pūrṇa, or fullness. A person who is full of herself occupies her whole interior.

She is fully at home in her own body, rooted in her own experience, available to the world without being governed by it. She is neither defended nor diffuse. She doesn’t disappear into another person, nor spend her life arranging them at the proper distance.

She simply remains where she is.

Intrusion works on vacancy, and goes where you have left yourself. The manipulative comment, the guilt, the demand, the seduction all search for the little empty corner in the heart mind that is susceptible to that. When you are home in your fullness, they still arrive but they have nowhere to settle. They pass through an open pavilion.

The pavilion doesn’t need walls, only a center pole.

From that center, the “no” remains entirely available, but it is no longer a defense thrown from the perimeter. It is information arising from the center. It carries no resentment, tightness in the body or need to convince. A full-hearted no can be warm, joyful, loving. In fact, a true no is more loving than a half-hearted yes.

Fullness discovers that safety doesn’t arise from a perfect perimeter. It arises from inhabiting yourself so completely that distance becomes fluid again.

Presence measures continuously: some days love asks for an embrace. Some days it asks for an ocean. The same beloved may require both within a single year, which is happening for me, right now, and I breathe with that reality, feel the pain of that reality, and stay committed to not making it wrong.

Exile, enmeshment, and rigid boundary-making all share the same hidden impulse: they attempt to decide the future before it arrives. One sentences a person to absence forever. Another sentences them to presence forever. The third writes rules for encounters that have not yet happened. All three mistrust the intelligence of presence.

Presence makes no ruling in advance. It meets this person, on this day, in this season. The right distance does not have to be remembered because it can be discovered, effortlessly, in real time.

The deepest loss on every side is futures. We lose the versions of each other that everyone would have met, had anyone stayed long enough for the meeting. How sad this separation, in this beautiful world.

All exile is mine. It is a frequency in the human experience across space and time. But it is an illusory choice, based on separation.

The people around my table disagree with each other regularly and repair regularly, and some chairs sit empty right now — a few emptied by others and a few emptied by me, and I am still investigating what I owe those.

The chair is empty right now, but the room is larger than this absence. Those walking back across that open ground will find the metaphorical soup on the stove.

-CMM, Easton, CT, USA, Earth, July, 2026

Notes on the Tantric Cosmology Beneath This Essay

Mostly from Kṣemarāja’s Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam aka “The Heart of Recognition” (HOR), an eleventh-century text which I was fortunate enought to have studied in 2008, in Christopher Hareesh Wallis’ year-long immersion.

On exile as the primal contraction. HOR Sūtra 4: the individual perceiver is Awareness itself in contracted form, containing the whole universe in miniature (citisaṅkocātmā cetano ‘pi saṅkucita-viśvamayaḥ). The separate self, in this reading, is contraction, not severance. This is why I can write that every human exile reenacts an original one: when a father banishes a son, he is performing at the family scale what this contraction performs at the scale of a single consciousness becoming a person. The drawing of a line where, underneath, no line exists.

On concealment and grace. HOR Sūtra 10: even in the contracted state, the individual performs the five acts just as the Lord does — creation, sustenance, dissolution, concealment (tirodhāna), and grace (anugraha), scaled down from cosmos to person. The exiling family lives inside the fourth act, relationship concealed from itself behind verdict. But the fifth act is always pending: grace arrives, often through no visible mechanism, as the sudden capacity to see what was always there.

HOR Sūtra 12: not recognizing that you are the author of these five acts, you are bewildered by your own powers — and that bewilderment is the state of the bound soul. This is the exiler bewildered by his own concealing power, mistaking the verdict he authored for a fact he discovered. Leave room to be surprised by what you are discovering.

On permeability. HOR Sūtra 1: Awareness, absolutely free, is the cause of everything accomplished. HOR Sūtra 2: by her own will she unfolds the universe on the canvas of herself. Reality here isn’t a fixed structure defended against intrusion but a freedom continuously exercising itself. A fixed verdict is a metaphysical error because it tries to arrest what is, by its own nature, will in motion.

On the return as recognition. HOR Sūtra 13: when recognition dawns, the mind itself turns inward and ascends to the status of Awareness. Nothing acquired, everything recognized. This is why return, in a permeable field, costs so little: nothing must be reversed, confessed, or relitigated, because nothing essential was severed to begin with.

On embodiment and breath. Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra Verses 24–25 direct attention to the pause at either end of the breath, where the outbreath turns to come back in and the inbreath turns to go back out. This is my favorite of the practices in the sense that it is SO accessible. The tradition's name for what discloses itself in that pause is bharita sthiti or the filled state, the same fullness Kṣemarāja's sūtra 17 locates in the expansion of the center. The unclenching of the jaw and the descent of the breath aren't only nervous-system hygiene, in other words; the texts treat the breath's own pauses as a standing invitation back into fullness.

On fullness. Sūtra 17: from the expansion of the center comes the attainment of the bliss of Awareness (madhya-vikāsāc cid-ānanda-lābhaḥ). The text closes, in sūtra 20, on pūrṇāhantā (perfect I-ness) describing entry into it as the potency of the great mantra whose essence is the joy of the Light of Consciousness.

On the three deities. Brahma/Vishnu/Shiva as creator/sustainer/dissolver is pan- Hindu theology. The Śaiva tradition’s version of this triad is the five acts above, which place creation, sustenance, and dissolution alongside concealment and grace.

On the heart. Hṛdaya is the Heart as the seat where apparent opposites resolve without contradiction, for example, capable of harm and not reducible to it, beloved and absent, wrong and welcome. A verdict, in this frame, is what the mind produces when it cannot reach the Heart.

If you want to read the original texts:

The Heart of Recognition: Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam (प्रत्यभिज्ञाहृदयम्) is one of the central texts of Kashmir Śaivism, written by Kṣemarāja in the 11th century.

• The Recognition Sutras Christopher Wallis (accessible translation and commentary).

• Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam: The Secret of Self-Recognition (Jaideva Singh’s scholarly translation, Sanskrit text with English translation).

Practices for Recognizing Consciousness: 112 contemplative doorways into recognizing the ever-present nature of awareness

• Vijnana Bhairava or Divine Consciousness: Jaideva Singh’s direct-from-Sanskrit translation of the VBT’s 112 dharanas, the standard-numbering reference edition.

• A Translation of the Vijñāna-bhairava-tantra (complete, no commentary) Christopher (Hareesh) Wallis’s working translation of the full VBT text., coming soon in full form. Also an app now: Tantra 112.

• Wallis’ Concordance to the VBT (VERY helpful)

• The Radiance Sutras: Lorin Roche’s popular, poetic free rendering of the VBT’s 112 gateways. Not a direct Sanskrit translation, own numbering scheme.

Divine Presence from which we are never separate. Hard conversations can happen in relationship with respect and curiosity. We learn we can disappoint and disagree and still belong. Repair is our common tongue. Every person is brave enough to look inside themselves, and see what needs to be seen, nothing excluded. Our bodies are loose and supple from non-judgment, hearts are open with nothing left to guard. We are full of ourselves, centered in the heart, needing no perimeter: free to love without rescuing, to refuse without hardening. We let the right distance arise for this day, this person, this season. Grace arises in our willingness to be present with all of it. And so it is.

Xavi on Possibility and Freedom

Xavi Ginesta built Voxel into the world leader in B2B travel payments, then sold it to chase a different question entirely: who are we, really? In this conversation, he traces the arc from conscious capitalism to consciousness overall, and to a variety of research on the future of human potential. At the center is a claim that the scarcity mindset sets a ceiling on everything we can become, that love is the actual driver of the universe, and that the only way past the ceiling is the inner work, for which there are no shortcuts. We move through altered states, and the limits of the senses, the brain as receiver rather than generator, a clear-eyed critique of transhumanism, and a practical invitation to let the heart lead and the mind execute.

What you're about to hear is part business story, part working theology of love. Please let me know how this moves you and if you’re enjoying the show or finding it valuable, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

About the Show

The Rose Woman podcasts hosts conversations at the intersection of embodied wisdom, relational depth, and cultural inquiry. How do we become more whole, more alive, and more connected? Ranked in Goodpods Top 15 to 100 in Relationships, Intimacy, Ecology, and Neuroscience. 5 Stars on Apple Podcasts.

Listeners say: "Shivers in my whole body." "Like I was there with them." "One of the best interviewers around." Please subscribe on your favorite platform and help us spread the word.

This week:

• Tuesday 7/14/26 Q & A for anyone considering the Fall Living Tantra Course (Sept/Oct) or the November Immersion in Hawai’i.

• Wednesday 7/15/26 Summer drop-in course on the Willingess Teachings

• Sunday 7/19/26 Monthly Community Satsang

• Wednesday 7/22/26 Summer drop-in practice (Wake Down): bringing your sensual and sexual energy back alive to feed your life.

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The Snake is Also a Woman

A week ago, Shiva and I hosted a circle on our land for the women of the Yawanawá, an Indigenous people of the western Brazilian Amazon. They had traveled a long way from their village on the Gregório River in Acre, days by river and air to sing, to teach, and to sit with people at gatherings across the United States. One evening Hukēna, a teacher in her early thirties, told the story of how the women of her people won their place in the spiritual life of the tribe.

She said she could not begin anywhere but with her mother.

Her mother is Hushahu Yawanawá, the first woman in her people to become a pajé (a healer-shaman) in a lineage that for generations had been closed to women entirely. A generation ago the women of the village were married off as children and kept to the home; Hushahu herself married at eight (!).

The medicine, the songs, the visions belonged to the men, and women weren’t permitted even to pass near a ceremony. Then came the colonizers, the missionaries, and the men who arrived to strip the land, and with them the alcohol and the bans: no practicing the language, no medicine, none of their own culture. For the women OR the men. The tradition came within two living elders of disappearing!

What pulled it back from the edge of extinction was Hushashu’s devotion and intention. After years of suffering, Hushahu fought to be allowed into the muká, the year-long initiation that confers the power to heal. She and her sister Putani went into the forest saying that if they died, they would die seeking something new for the women, and a different future for their daughters.

When they finished the year, the men of the village refused to recognize their power and sent them back for a second round; they completed it twice over, passing doubly what the men had passed once. They came out healers.

In that long isolation a great blue butterfly landed on Hushahu’s open hand, and a snake was laid beside her as a gift, the Jiboia. In her vision, Jiboia is a serpent below and a woman above.

The word itself carries the dream already embedded in it. From Old Tupi îyboîa — the one who constricts, the one whose killing is an embrace, the jiboia enters Amazonian indigenous cosmology not as threat but as teacher and intermediary. In dreams and ayahuasca visions she appears as a primary guide: the white jiboia in particular is invoked in shamanic traditions for mental clarity and focus, her arrival understood as a significant event bringing expansion of love and spiritual energy, her serpentine movement a flow of healing through the body and the field. The dream register of the jiboia is simultaneously personal and cosmic: constriction and release, old skin shed, the self reorganized around a deeper axis. To dream of the jiboia is to be visited by something ancient and sovereign, a particular intelligence of transformation

Hushahu’s snake was also a woman, and that is what happened. The women brought transformation. Hushahu brought back the women’s singing voice, slowing the pace of the songs to one the people could follow, and gave them the kene, the sacred designs her people now treat as inseparable from who they are. Because of her, the girls of the village are no longer married away; the violence has receded; the women hold their own work, their own money, their own paths. A culture that was two elders from silence now sings in a language that was once forbidden.

That is a triumph.

And then, without ceremony, Hukēna turned the talk to power, and how it is abused in ceremony, and everywhere. As she spoke I felt something in me drop, because across the first half of the evening I had already been seeing my idyllic projection on the Yawanawa (and by transference principle, the Huni Kuin, and the other indigenous people that gift their medicine) give way, and a dawning sense of dull perception: my projection of the pure people of the forest, in touch with the plants and with one another, the image so many of us cross the world to find, dropped away.

The lineage of that idolatry is older than my private fantasy, my private longing for simplicity, utopia, for community that sings and dances and prays together. The phrase “noble savage“ entered English through Dryden in 1672, and fastened itself to Rousseau (unfairly as his actual account of natural man was far more careful than the slogan it became). The image of the indigenous person was held up as a mirror to European lack, as innocent, unfallen, closer to the source, in possession of everything the modern soul suspects it has misplaced, is itself largely a Western invention, a costume, no more the real person than its cruel twin, the “bloodthirsty primitive”. The flattering image and the contemptuous one are the same operation. Both refuse the person their full, present, complicated humanity; both deny the other coevalness, a place in the same present as ourselves, freezing them instead into a purer past.

In this and in many other areas, idealization is the benevolent face of othering. It feels like reverence yet works like erasure.

And for those of us who go seeking, who cross oceans hoping the untouched ones will be whole in the way we are not, the worship is a sort of refusal of intimacy, of actual connection, to meeting the present human being, because we have already replaced her with what we need her to be.

To put anyone on a pedestal is an inability to see or feel the whole person in the other.

AND it is precisely this which makes us susceptible to abuse by the indigenous person serving medicine who is in fact not an initiated guide.

Hukēna took the idol apart. It is not because she sits before the altar, she said, that she is good; she is not all good. But before this path she was worse. And then she named the abuses, without drama, the way you name weather. There are real plants (she has used one herself, on a cousin, just to see whether it worked) that can bind a person’s longing to you, and she has watched people abandon their whole lives to follow someone, saying I can’t live without this person, unable to break what was placed in them.

In ceremony, she said, beware: watch the paje who looks at you a little too long, who treats you better than anyone else in the room, who comes and blows a prayer across your cup; there is an intention inside that attention, and it is rarely yours. She has met women abused under the cover of I had a vision about you, where the facilitator calls a participant aside to do “work,” and by the time you understand what is happening, it has already happened. She has seen people grow addicted to ceremony itself, and to being healed, handing their own authority again and again to whoever stands at the front of the room. And she was clear that the ugliest of it is not exotic at all: it wears the same face as the abuse in any house. The ones who are supposed to be safe and are not.

The plant gives power, she said, every kind you can imagine, and whatever you do with it stays with you. You choose.

I have come to think this is the most misunderstood thing about these medicines.

They are revealers. They can lift the floorboards and show you what has been living underneath; they can grant a vision so total that you are certain, in the moment, that it has already changed you. But revelation is not transformation. Seeing is not becoming. The medicine can show you the wound, the pattern, the person you have been refusing to be. Then it sets the vision down in your hands and withdraws, and everything that matters after that is yours.

The unglamorous part, the part no plant performs for you, is integration: taking what you were shown and metabolizing it, slowly and soberly, into an actually different life: a kinder marriage, a returned phone call, a boundary held, an amends made. That work happens at the kitchen sink, not the altar. The medicine reveals; you integrate, or you do not. Hushahu took the same family of plants another person uses to seduce and manipulate, and carried it home to end child marriage for a whole people. Same revealer, opposite lives. The vision is given. What you walk out of the room and actually live is chosen.

So the question rose in me, ungenerous and real: if it does not reliably make people who can feel one another, and if some of the people serving the medicine are behaving like this, then what good is any of it?

I have walked a path long enough to recognize that question. It is not really about ayahuasca; it is the vertigo that comes on every road of awakening, the moment the road stops flattering you. My own tradition is not innocent here.

The history of tantra is full of adepts who gained the powers and lost the thread, who could move energy and bend a room and still not feel the person beside them. Recognition of one’s own nature does not excuse conduct; you can taste the absolute and still be cruel as a matter of daily habit. Power reveals character.

Which is why what Hukēna did in her talk was important and something I see as the tradition working. A living path turns and critiques itself; a dead one can’t. The warning was the medicine, not a footnote. She has built her own practice on its opposite: consent before a hand is laid on anyone, no one singled out, each person’s limit held as sacred.

As I have been experiencing, writing about and teaching about, the more light you bring to your own shadow, the more clearly you see what is in front of you. What we refuse to look at in ourselves does not stay home; we spend it outward. We paint gold onto the pure ones, and we create blind spots where we can’t see the predator. Any disowned thing inside runs the show outside. The inner work is not a retreat from the world. It is what gives us back our eyes. Discernment “out there” begins as “honesty in here”.

That is the whole architecture of safety on any path. See yourself clearly, and do it sober, undrugged by your own spirituality, and do it in relationship, where others can say that is not right and someone can tell you the truth.

None of this softens the harm. People are being hurt in these rooms, as in many so-called churches and houses of worship. Yet the path still carries something worth protecting; that is also true. Both hands stay open.

The women of her line went into the dark and brought the voice back. The least the rest of us can do is keep the light turned on, first of all on ourselves.

Glossary

• pajé — a healer and spiritual leader (shaman) of the Yawanawá; the role, once held only by men, that Hushahu and Putani were the first women to enter.

• uni — the Yawanawá word for ayahuasca, the visionary brew at the center of their ceremonies.

• muká — “the bitter one”; the year-long initiation diet, built around a small bitter plant, that confers the authority to heal. Historically reserved for men.

• Jiboia — the sacred boa, holder of knowledge and giver of the deepest voice; in vision, a serpent below and a woman above. The blue butterfly (Awavena) carries the feminine spiritual power alongside her.

kene — the Yawanawá sacred geometric designs, seen in vision and carrying spiritual meaning and protection.

A Personal Note: Living Tantra Institute

Living Tantra is wanting to be a more expanded and structured lineage. For three years I’ve run the introductory course on my personal site, with more drop-in courses and retreats over time, and the student community has grown far beyond what I imagined. Now the teachers who bring focused knowing into the courses will be recognized as faculty, and the Living Tantra components of my offerings have a home of their own. My hope is that it becomes a true blessing on more people, and a lineage certification that grows over time.

When you meet someone with the Living Tantra training, or in the community, you will know they have trained in the recognition teachings the way the teachings ask to be trained: daily, in the body, tested inside ordinary life. The material and the spiritual are one for them, in practice and in relationship, in how they meet the world. They honor the masculine and feminine alive in every soul, and they trust each soul’s evolution — its timing, its intelligence, its own unfolding path. They hold your sovereignty as the ground of any work together, and they create the kind of space where the truth can be investigated with love, curiosity, and no shame.

Lineage-rooted, body-forward, and free of guru dependency.

I am ON MY KNEES for the grace of having found this lineage early. It is like a great ginormous flashlight for including the shadow parts, the family stuff, the culture stuff — and for living in joy. I had a lot of bullshit in my system and architecture: early abandonment and pain, transgenerational family trauma, violence, instability, betrayal karma, and a unique brain that has taken a long time of practice and blessing to unwind. Without these practices I would have been dead a long time ago — or, I can imagine, bitter and resentful. Instead, this radiant effulgent reality awareness is here.

There are testimonials on the site about the teaching and the work with me. But this is the biggest testimonial of all: my devotion to this material, to which I have given so much of my life force and will continue to give. It contains the seeds for a sovereign, just, embodied human culture as part of earth.

The podcast, my books, other writing and events will continue to live at christinemariemason.com.

I’ve been on the land at Sundari for the last few weeks, immersed in the nano-beauties and macro-wows of Hawai’i. The saturated light, incredible textures, ecoharmonics. The exquisite sensuality of the trade winds on the nape of my neck, still damp from dancing. It’s a 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. sleep-through-the-night kind of life, anchored by daily practice and ritual.

And yet, even here, we’re on Starlink. We’re working. I’m teaching and holding space for my private clients while operating multiple ventures. Increasingly, that work is AI-assisted. It used to be that AI handled small pieces of the job; now almost every aspect of my company and operations has it woven through from code to clicks. The results have been undeniable: as we have augmented our capacity every domain has measurably improved.

AND YET. I was, like many in the west, socialized to believe my worth came from doing: from gold stars, external approval, from being the smart one or the useful one. It’s taken years of grace and careful noticing to unwind that conditioning, to simply be myself and approve of myself, as the I am. This AI moment is provoking the old ideas, though, especially the productivity shadow.

When I co-work with Claude, I feel like I’m on speed. Tasks that once took months collapse into days. Days compress into hours. Hours become minutes. It’s exhilarating. It’s also, being honest with my own nervous system, a drug. The effect is strikingly amphetamine-like: heightened focus, accelerated cognition, compressed time, a sense of limitless capability. And like every drug, it has an onset, a peak, and a comedown.

In this essay, I want to examine the mismatch between the velocity of AI-augmented work and the rate limits of the human body, and to explore the cognitive distortions and identity dynamics that emerge at these speeds, and ask what becomes of self-worth when doing becomes almost frictionless.

Ultimately, this is an inquiry into tempo: the pace at which a human nervous system can genuinely live, love, create, and thrive. I’d like to hear from you, also, about what you are noticing on this.

Three Speeds of Intelligence

There are at least three kinds of intelligence moving through a human life, and they run at radically different speeds.

Information moves at the speed of light. It always has, technically, but now it also synthesizes at the speed of light. What once required a library, a research assistant, and a month now requires a sentence and a few seconds. AI has collapsed the cost of information, synthesis, and organization to the price of a monthly subscription.

Feeling moves at the speed of the nervous system. A wave of grief takes as long as it takes. Arousal, awe, anger, and tenderness unfold in biological time, in heartbeats and breath cycles, and in the slow chemistry of hormones. No processor upgrade changes this. You cannot feel faster than the body feels.

Knowing moves at the speed of integration. This is the slowest intelligence of all. Here, an insight stops being something you can recite and becomes something you are. It happens in sleep, on walks, through years of practice, as experience composts into wisdom. In the yogic and tantric traditions I practice, the acquisition of teachings may be a first step, but their digestion is what matters. We practice until the teaching and the body are no longer two separate things.

AI has accelerated exactly one of these three, and it can’t touch the other two. Feeling and knowing run on biological time, and biological time is not negotiable. The result is a widening gap: a civilization ingesting at light speed and metabolizing at the speed of flesh.

The Body as Rate-Limiter

Digestion is the master metaphor. We can put far more food in our mouths than the gut can transform into nourishment. Past a certain point, more intake produces less life, not more. The same is true of ideas, media, conversations, and opportunities. There is a metabolic capacity to a human day, and it is finite in a way that bandwidth is not.

A sustainable self, then, is one whose intake matches its capacity to integrate. Not a smaller life: a metabolized life.

The body is the instrument that tells you where that line is: the subtle contraction when you’ve taken in too much, the shallowing of breath in hour three of the scroll, the flatness that creeps in when input has outrun assimilation. Sensation and feeling are the oldest forms of intelligence, and they kept every one of our ancestors alive long enough to hand us these bodies.

Embodiment as Epistemology

The tantric view goes further than “listen to your body.” That phrase has been flattened into a Rae Dunn mug slogan. We say that the body is not a vehicle for consciousness. It is an expression of consciousness. Matter is not the opposite of spirit but a highly condensed form of it. The body is where all experience of material reality arises.

The traditions have a word for this felt verification: rasa, literally “taste,” “juice,” or “essence.” Rasa is what distinguishes reading about honey from tasting honey. It is a mode of knowing, not merely an ornament to knowing. This is the mode of intelligence most atrophied by screen-speed life because rasa requires presence, presence requires time, and time is what acceleration consumes first.

If information is what you can retrieve, and feeling is what moves through you, then real knowing is what has tasted you as much as you have tasted it. Nothing can outsource that. Knowing remains stubbornly, gloriously first-person.

The Ego’s Counterfeit Knowing

Now for the hazard I didn’t see coming, but here it is, and as mentioned in the intro, you may have a look in yourself if these resonate.

When AI co-writes with me, my ego unconsciously claims the synthesis as its own. The document is brilliant; therefore I am brilliant; therefore I know this. But do I? A new epistemological trap has opened in the last few years: borrowed knowing that feels like earned knowing. The output arrives so fluently, so shaped to my own voice, that the felt sense of understanding appears, without the understanding having been built.

Every wisdom lineage has guarded against a version of this. The teacher’s perennial question of “has this been realized, or only recited?” was designed to catch exactly the gap between the map and the territory, between the sutra memorized and the sutra lived. What’s new is that AI makes recitation nearly indistinguishable from realization. The prose is confident, the argument is coherent, the citations are in order. To every observer, including the ego, it reads as knowledge. Traditionally, recitation is not wrong, it is practice. It is setting the stage for realization, for embodied knowling.

To every observer except one: the body. The body always knows the difference. Realized knowledge changes how you stand, how you respond under pressure when the lived test arrives. Recited knowledge evaporates on contact with the real. This is why actual, repetitive, embodied practice becomes more precious in the age of AI, not less. It’s the only remaining certificate of authenticity.

So a discipline I’ve adopted, and offer to you: after the machine and I finish a piece of work, I ask: what part of this have I actually digested? Which of these ideas could I teach with no notes, defend under challenge, live under duress? That part is mine. The rest is inventory, not nourishment. It may be useful, but it’s not yet become part of me.

There is a deeper trap beneath the trap, also. If “productive asset” is not merely what you do but who you believe yourself to be, the stakes change. If you already derive your worth from productivity, these technologies tempt you toward acceleration and they reinforce the identity itself. Every gain in output confirms the self-concept, and idle hours feel like an indictment. The machine becomes an infinite mirror for a worth that can never be finally proven. The nervous system entrains. The ego cathects. The exit narrows.

The work, then, is both pacing, and dis-identification: remembering that you were worthy before you produced anything at all.

Field Notes from the Experiment

We are only a brief time into this experiment. Before any theory hardens, it’s worth simply reporting what is observable. Here are my own field notes, offered as confession rather than complaint, because every one of these I did to myself, one reasonable decision at a time. I wonder about you. What do you see in yourself?

The handover. Task by task, I notice the machine does it better than the apps specially built for it. Better, often. Certainly better than I could do it manually. So I hand it over. Then the next task. Then the next. Each individual handover is rational, but the aggregate is a day increasingly lived by proxy. No single decision was wrong, and yet something of my agency and competence is quietly migrating out of me.

Learned incompetence. The mirror image of learned helplessness. Capacities I once took pride in begin to atrophy. Navigating before maps. Troubleshooting machinery before instant tech support. Sitting with a problem until I could really see the logical flaws and crack it. These abilities weaken because they are no longer exercised in the same way.

Tempo frustration. The subtler symptom is irritation at the normal pace of things: the customer service line, the conversation that meanders, the checkout, my own unassisted thinking. Once the nervous system has tasted machine tempo, biological tempo starts to register as malfunction. This is the entrainment showing itself, the drug talking. When I catch myself annoyed that reality is slow, I know the acceleration has already colonized beyond work hours.

One absurd tell. The comic proof of the whole condition is that I now use AI as tech support for other people’s products because the general intelligence outside the company is often more competent about their product than the company itself. It’s funny. It’s true. And it has enormous implications. When one interface outperforms every dedicated tool, the gravity becomes total. Everything routes through it. Including, without vigilance, me.

So let me turn the experiment on you. What are you noticing? What have you handed over? What are you slightly worse at than you were a year ago? What now feels unbearably slow that didn’t used to? Answer from the body. You are not a bystander to this experiment. You are one of its instruments, and your sensations are the readings.

Liberation or Acceleration?

Path one: technology as a gate. We use the machine’s speed to compress the cognitive work of the day into a shorter window. The research, the drafts, the models, the logistics are done by noon. Then you close the laptop, and the reclaimed hours return to their rightful owners: feeling, relating, dancing, creating, cooking, lovemaking, tending land, sitting with a friend in the kind of unhurried conversation that changes both of you. Technology in service of embodied time. More life per day, not more output per day.

Path two: technology as a treadmill. The speed doesn’t stay contained in the work window. It colonizes the whole day. Because the machine can always do one more thing, you ask it to. The nervous system entrains to machine tempo: response, response, response. Rest starts to feel like waste. Slowly, without ever choosing it, the human becomes a hyper-productive asset class, optimized, always on, infinitely leveraged, and metabolizing nothing. Enormous throughput. No rasa. All information. No knowing.

What is the saved time for? That question is where the idea of the sustainable self becomes real. Sustainability here isn’t a lifestyle aesthetic. It’s a structural decision about who owns your hours once the machine has freed them.

So I’ll leave the question with you, sovereign reader: whose asset are you becoming? Your own, an ever-deepening reservoir of presence, discernment, eros, and realized knowing? Or the market’s, a faster and faster node in someone else’s throughput?

If synthesis, recall, and pattern matching are increasingly delegated, then the distinctly human portfolio concentrates into exactly the capacities the traditions have always called highest: presence, discernment, love, meaning-making, the erotic intelligence that draws life toward life. AI will out-think us at information tasks.

Will we stay embodied enough to know what’s worth thinking about, and worth feeling, and worth becoming? The pace of light belongs to information. The pace of the body belongs to you. Let the machines run at their speed so that you can finally, fully, run at yours, which may be closer to the speed of the sunrise, the ocean, the trade winds, the earth/

Christine Marie Mason is a founder, philosopher, and teacher working at the intersection of technology, ecology, and the erotic intelligence of the body. She is the founder of Rosebud Woman, co-founder of Sundari Gardens on Hawaiʻi Island, creator of the Living Tantra teaching and certification program, and a board member of Purpose Earth. A 25-year practitioner of Tantra, Yoga and Siddhānta, she is the author of nine books on embodiment, sexuality, and the sacred, and the host of The Rose Woman Podcast.

Hello all,

A little different post today, on the tantric view of postural yoga and the right attitude toward the body. I just completed two (almost) straight months of retreat teaching, and some of the participants asked for a summary on the tantric approach to physical yoga, so I thought I would share it with you (especially relevant for any of you on a diet of only studio-based classes). If the topic interest you, you can also download my e-book from 2019, Twisted: A Brief History of Yoga in America Since 1965.

Since my first yoga teacher trainings in 2001 and 2002, I’ve taught thousands of hours of asana yoga, in studio classes, in workshops, at retreats, at festivals, and at our retreat center and eco-village on Hawai’i. Since beginning the deep work of the Heart of Yoga transmission, and the study of classical tantra in 2008, my approach to the body portion of our practice has been continuously updated.

Yoga is the natural participation of the body with life, the recognition of the body as the beauty and intelligence of the cosmos. Regular practice invites increasing precision and pleasure in the body, balanced strength and receptivity, and so much more. Yoga asana and pranayama are so varied and prescriptive. They are like snow sports: you can glide on a long trail, do ski ballet or slalom racing or make snow angels. We cultivate a wide toolset to be able to offer postures, sequences and pacing that serves the moment. We don’t teach yoga, we teach people. There is a right yoga for every body, for every age and stage. Postural yoga cultivates: breath capacity; body awareness; energy optimization; clear mind; equanimity; spinal integrity; strength; suppleness; joint mobility; balance; spaciousness; surrender; and rest.

If you’re not currently practicing, or you’re in a rut in your practice, please know that the body responds so so quickly to be invited to move and breathe, it is such a relief to find the right yoga for you.

After London this weekend, I’ll be headed back to my home studio at Sundari. Come practice with me in the coming months.

In the meantime, may you be in your own body of joy.

Sending love,

Christine Marie

How I View Postural Yoga

Many of us arrive to a yoga practice in argument with the body and its limitations, in judgment of it, and carrying ideas of the ways in which the body should be different. Practice becomes a campaign to close that gap, rather than a joyful inquiry into the body’s current state, or an invitation to spaciousness, or an energetic hygiene practice, much less a vehicle for recognition of the underlying oneness of creation, or participation in life.

Āsana in the Tantric tradition is different: it a celebration of the body as the magic of the divine made into material form. We aim to practice from reverent awareness. We bring focus, awareness, precision and love to the practice, no matter where we are in our bodily reality.

The Adaptations of a Lifetime are in the Body

All bodies are perfect bodies. The body shapes itself around the life it has lived. This can be habitual repetitive movements, like sitting at a desk or driving or typing or lifting heavy things. It can be a sport that warps the hips or shoulders. It can also be shaped by psycho emotional patterning. I see people in class with the collapsed chest of unreleased grief, or the locked hips of repressed sexuality, or jaws that has clenched since childhood, holding back what wasn’t safe to say, the high hunched shoulders common to those who hold their breath in anticipation of danger or in performance anxiety. So, many of us are not meeting the body freshly, but rather through layers of adaptation, all of them once intelligent responses to real conditions.

Protection and patterns of holding the body that harden into permanent structures become a cage. Āsana is one of the technologies for restoring the body’s range.

Adaptations of Attitude

The adaptations are not limited to the physical form. So called “laziness” or a resistance to investigating the body’s range or capacity is often resistance to domination. If a nervous system is shaped by criticism, an internalized authority may still bark orders from school, religion, performance culture, or fitness culture. For some people, the moment practice becomes another demand, the organism contracts automatically, because being told what to do means losing contact with oneself.

On the other hand, so-called “discipline” can be dissociation. Here, the practitioner might override exhaustion, numb sensation, and use productivity or self-improvement as a way to stay safely on the surface of life. Modern life rewards this disconnection.

We lose contact with the body through using eating to blunt sensation or regulate nervous states; through screens and constant stimulation, a sort of ambient noise that makes quiet intolerable; through productivity (perhaps the most seductive numbing agent, because it looks like virtue); through substances that chemically interrupt the body’s signalling system, and through endless self-improvement.

Fully inhabiting the body can feel overwhelming in a world moving at inhuman speed. And because the body, when we do arrive in it, often carries what we have been avoiding: people say yoga “hurts”, but I would reframe it as yoga reveals the fatigue, anxiety, constriction that over time have become normalized.

We can lose relationship with the body as instrument and what it needs. Like all healing, the move is to accept the history we actually have, the body as it actually is, and take responsibility for not abandoning the body further. We choose to participate more fully, in a sweet inquiry of how we might be most alive in this body.

Experiencing it as a Tuning, as an Opening

A violin does not need punishment to make music, but it does need tuning, care, resonance, openness. The body is the same. It’s already prfoundly intelligent and beautiful. With tending and clearing its full range comes through again.

Śakti, the living current of consciousness itself, moves through channels (nāḍīs) that run through the subtle and physical body simultaneously. Where those channels are open, Śakti flows. Where they are narrowed by habit, history, or chronic tension, it stagnates.

Breath, Spine, Articular Limbs: in that Order

Breath is the first principle. We keep a steady inhale and exhale throughout practice, one that nourishes and cleans out the body. The movement serves the breath, the breath serves the movement.

We keep our spine aligned, fluid and integris.

Only then do we concern ourselves with the placement of the hands and feet and arms and legs and gaze and locks.

Alignment as Conductivity

In a conventional frame, alignment correction brings the pose closer to an aesthetic or biomechanical ideal. In Living Tantra, a correction does something different: it clears a channel. I often teach the body as a circuit board. The body conducts. Current moves through it, flowing freely in some regions, stuttering in others, shorting out where there’s old armoring. The body is telling us constantly, where the circuit is open and where it’s resistant.

You can feel this in real time. A subtle shift in the ribcage and suddenly there is breath where there was no breath. A release in the hip flexors and something (emotion, sensation, some third thing?) begins to move. The instrument opens by one degree and the sound changes immediately.

A numb place is usually an intelligent adaptation, so we restore conduction gently. Forcing is a sure way to be injured or re-injured- in postural practuce and life.

A good correction creates spaciousness. If an adjustment produces bracing rather than opening, it has missed. Alignment is in service of aliveness, not aesthetics.

Does consciousness move more freely here now?

The body is alive with the primal pulse of consciousness itself, present in every cell, in the subtle tremor that runs through a body genuinely inhabiting a pose. Practice begins with listening before shaping. Before entering a pose: what is actually here? What is the system’s current state? How do I move in with care and dynamically create more space?

Sthira–Sukham: Steady and Easeful

Patañjali’s āsana instruction offers a very simple instuction: sthira-sukham asanam— let your seat be steady and sweet, awake without strain, alert without anxiety.

• Too much sthira without sukham becomes rigidity.

• Too much sukham without sthira becomes collapse.

The pose becomes alive when effort and ease are in balance, when the nervous system remains open under intensity, when breath continues to move, when awareness stays embodied. This is viśrānti: rest in the midst of activity. The body has found its stride.

Tapas: Liberating Melting Heat

Tantra is not soft, it asks for genuine engagement, real intensity, real heat, real encounter with the edges of what you can stay present within. The tradition absolutely values discipline.

But the discipline it values is not self-violence. It is discipleship, followed fron love.

Tapas, the transformative heat of practice, is produced when you stay with sensation, intelligently breathe through resistance instead of collapse, and remain conscious in intensity rather than managing it from a distance.

The difference between tapas and bullying is not the intensity of the practice, but the quality of attention brought to it.

• Coercion narrows attention: grit your teeth through it, make it stop, override the signal

• Tapas widens attention: what is actually happening here? Can I stay in contact with this without needing it to be different?

Bullying says: force through. Tapas says: stay awake.

Two failure modes are:

• Aggressive discipline — glorifying pain, dissociating from sensation, treating suffering as spiritual currency — teaches the body to brace. It can execute the poses. It holds its breath through all of them.

• Comfort seeking as escape — calling every edge a signal to retreat — leaves the instrument cramped. Nothing opens that wasn’t already open.

The middle path is conscious intensity: full engagement, no coercion. The fire of presence without the violence of punishment.

Joy as Diagnostic

In Living Tantra, joy is feedback that energy is flowing. Ānanda, or bliss, is the intrinsic quality of open awareness. It surfaces when contraction lifts enough to let it through.

Genuine aliveness in practice feels like resonance, openness, a deep embodied yes. When practice becomes only obligation and the aliveness drains out, that is information: contact has broken somewhere. The question is where.

“Peak performance” is instead seen as “Full participation”. The body functions in dynamic peace.

Peace With Material Reality

The body is the closest form of material reality. Peace with the body is full engagement with this life, without the chronic undertow of fighting against what is. Liberation in this tradition does not require leaving the body.

Yoga Nerd Bonus: Sanskrit Glossary

Ānanda — Bliss; one of the three primary qualities of Śiva (sat-cit-ānanda)

Āsana — Seat; posture; the third limb of Patañjali’s aṣṭāṅga yoga

Jagat-sāmarasya — Harmony with the arising world; equanimity-in-engagement

Mala — Impurity; that which obscures recognition

Nāḍī — Channel in the subtle body through which prāṇa/Śakti flows

Prāṇa — Life force; the animating energy expressed through breath

Pratyabhijñā — Recognition; re-knowing one’s own nature

Sat-cit-ānanda — Truth-consciousness-bliss; the three-fold nature of awareness

Śakti — The dynamic energy of consciousness; the creative and manifesting power

Śiva — The one undivided consciousness; the ground of all reality

Spanda — The primal pulse or throb; the dynamic vibration of consciousness in all reality

Sthira — Steadiness, stability; the effort pole of Patañjali’s āsana instruction

Sukham — Ease, spaciousness, openness; literally ‘good space’

Svābhāva — Inherent nature; the essential quality of any particular form

Svātantra — Absolute freedom; the foundational quality of Śiva

Tapas — Transformative heat; austerity; the fire generated by sustained conscious

practice

Viśrānti — Rest; repose; the stillness at the heart of movement

(Continued from Part 3)

AI: Extension, Replacement, Reformation?

The first split here seems to be the relationship of AI to cognition. Some people experience AI as an extension of human cognition, and some experience it as a displacement of a flavor of being that is never replace-able, merely a parrot of the true creative pulse of the organic intelligence. The second group is not necessarily technophobic, but rather protecting the specific quality of knowing that comes from embodied struggle, from not-knowing, from the friction of working something out in a body-mind that literally has skin in the game. Frictionless cognition produces a different kind of human, and a different kind of knowledge, or rather not-knowledge, undigested, unlived, unearned. The outsourced mind is a narrowed aperture, regardless of how much it produces.

The second split is larger and stranger. There are some people experience what is happening as the birth of a collective consciousness, a planetary mind coming online, the species linking into a single thinking thing. It is the Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, the envelope of mind thickening around the earth and converging toward his Omega Point. It is Peter Russell’s global brain, humanity as the neurons of a planet waking up to itself. It is Lovelock at the end of his life naming a coming age of hyperintelligence, the next move in Gaia’s own self-regulation. For these people the machines are midwives of an emergence they rank with the first appearance of life, or of mind.

A question that fragments this vision is: with the body, or without it? A collective consciousness imagined as a cloud-mind, ascending off the flesh and the soil into pure information, is the noosphere read as escape, fleeing from embodiment, not an awakening but an exit.

A collective consciousness imagined as Gaia growing a nervous system, the network as living tissue inside a living and dying planet, is the opposite turn entirely.

This is also possible: that “collective consciousness” is a romantic story laid over a statistical engine predicting the next word, wired into an economy that sells human attention by the hour, and that calling the network a planetary mind launders a commercial product into a sacrament.

The tantric lineages frame it another way: consciousness was never assembled out of parts and was always one. Śiva, undivided, wears every face. No machine makes that, and none destroys it. The question we might live into, sharpening as the capability of AI grows, is whether the technology reveals the unity that was always the case, or simulates connection, while a billion buffered selves stare into the glass, growing lonelier, and somehow confused as to what they actually know and where they themselves have become parrots.

Legitimacy: Vetted or Intuitive?

I’ll start with this obvious statement: the scientific materialist consensus has lost its exclusive license on legitimate knowing, and it lost it on two fronts at once. First, it overreached, claiming jurisdiction over domains it can’t yet actually measure. And, second, in greed and arrogance, it discredited itself. Regulatory agencies got captured, pharma money bought the studies, inconvenient trials went unpublished, and it was discovered that much of the literature did not stand up when anyone bothered to check. Science did’nt lose authority only because the public turned irrational, but because it was paid to play, and this stunk up the place,

At the same time the alternatives (intuition, ancestral knowing, direct perception, revelation) carry no institutional accountability at all, and they attract both genuine wisdom and spectacular delusion in roughly equal measure.

The internet then dissolved the last way of telling the two apart. A credentialed expert and a charismatic person who makes good videos arrive in the same feed, at the same size, with the same confidence. To the unconscious or subconscious mind, high production values signal validity. The careful researcher and the confident amateur flatten into identical rectangles of attention. Authority now flows to whoever performs certainty best.

So the divide is not science against spirituality. It runs between people who need a single legitimating authority (any single one, whether it wears a white lab coat or a blue checkmark) and people who have developed the internal discernment to navigate several epistemologies at once without collapsing into relativism. That capacity is rare and is itself a developmental achievement.

Most people on both sides are in the same position, certain their authority is the correct one. The contemplative path is one of the few that trains genuine epistemological range, where we can learn to hold empirical precision and direct perception in the same hand, letting neither cancel the other.

Sacredness: Hallowing All, Some or None?

One belief set worth querying is whether anything is exempt from transactional use. Not-for-sale, not-to-be-optimized, not-to-be-instrumentalized. Some of us might hold the body, a forest, a death, a threshold, a name, a symbol as sacred… meaning hands off, meaning these are not resources.

On the other side are people for whom everything is in principle available, where every cell is editable, every attention purchasable, every process improvable, and nothing finally off-limits. This isn’t religious/secular distinction. It’s whether the word “desecration” still means anything to you. Whether you can still hallow a thing: take it out of the order of use by an act of your own attention and leave it there. The same faculty does both. You can’t be wounded by a desecration unless you are still able to consecrate.

The contemplative traditions are, among other things, technologies for keeping that sacralizing faculty alive and for holding certain things un-instrumentalized, including, in the end, yourself.

Grief goes along with the investigation of sacredness, of what we hold dear. Grief is a form of love, we grieve for what we value, what we care about, what we hold sacred. For example, there are people who have metabolized or are willing to metabolize the full scope of what is being lost in this civilizational transition. Species extinction, the living world’s diminishment, the end of certain ways of being human, the losses already locked in regardless of what happens next.

And people who have not and will not go there, because the grief feels unsurvivable. This divide produces people who seem, from the outside, depressed or catastrophist, but are doing something metabolically necessary for all of us — staying present to the actual scale of the moment. Joanna Macy understood: unexpressed grief for the world is one of the primary narrowers of the aperture. You cannot be a full aperture while suppressing the scale of what’s happening. But if it wasn’t sacred to begin with, ou might just shrug, and say: bring on the artificial world, the Soylent, the escape hatch. Onward to whatever is next.

The Feminine Principle

You know my work on the female experience and my call for a restoration of the divine feminine, so this isn’t unbiased. Do you see how all the exit movements mentioned in part 1 — techno-utopian, space-bound, the war machine — share a common structural move: abstraction away from the body, from earth, from the particular, from relationship and dependency. This is what happens when the masculine principle operates without its counterpart and turns pathological. Logos severed from Eros. Apollo without Dionysus. The left hemisphere without the right.

The feminine restoration is not simply women gaining power, though it includes that. It is the return of an embodied, relational, receptive, cyclical mode of knowing that the dominant civilization systematically suppressed, perhaps because it could not be administered or monetized as well.

That mode is, in its most practical form, the capacity for interdependence: the move from control to participation, the relinquishing of autonomy without collapse into helplessness. See the post Learning to Be Carried on the fantasy of being self-made. The feminine here stands inside the web that made you, never outside looking in.

It is tempting to say that every other split I have mentioned is one version of embodiment against abstraction. Linear time flees the present; cyclical time stays in it. Solving death flees finitude; including it stays in the body. The sovereign self abstracts away from dependency; the co-arising self never left it. Outsourced cognition leaves the nervous system; friction keeps the skin in the game.

Read this way, there is one division refracted eight times: consciousness that flees embodiment, and consciousness that deepens into it.

But there is another axis the embodiment/abstraction split doesn’t capture, and that is whether the universe is oriented toward something or indifferent.

• Embodiment without orientation is honest and tragic — the somatic materialist who feels everything fully and believes it adds up to nothing.

• Abstraction with orientation is the most dangerous combination on the map: the universe, or its glorious successor, is headed somewhere, and the body and the earth are the obstacle to transcend on the way. That is the exact structure of every exit project — the upload, the off-world colony, the war machine, the engineered god. Orientation that flees the body is the engine of all of it.

• Abstraction without orientation barely holds together as a life.

• And embodiment with orientation is the contemplative wager: that meaning is found by going further in, not up and out.

Can you locate which quadrant you lean toward?

So, the Direction Question

Is there a point — or is the soft animal of your body* just doing what it loves?

The materialist might say there is no point. The universe is indifferent, just a story the nervous system tells itself, and the animal body doing what it loves is biochemistry. In this view, anyone who feels otherwise is comforting themselves, and civilizations die by that comfort.

The teleologist says we have a purpose, a destination, an Omega the whole thing is converging toward. Often that is named as LOVE. But notice what that smuggles back in: the forward line, the arrow, the improvement-toward. A point out ahead with the halo of a utopian future, and how this too can become one more flight from the present, one more reason the body and the earth are merely the staging ground for something better, later, elsewhere.

Tantra breaks the question apart, saying there is no point out ahead, because nothing is on its way to becoming meaningful, it is already full as it is. The universe is Śiva’s play, līlā, consciousness delighting in its own forms for no reason past the delight. The animal body doing what it loves is the absolute enjoying itself in the only place it ever happens, which is here, in a body, now. This is the opposite of indifference: meaning needs no destination.

Only when we are pressed to our full development will we see whether what waits at the bottom is machinery, or a void, or an everpresent pure effulgent delight that needs no destination.

(Continues in Part 4)

* “The soft animal of your body” is Mary Oliver’s, from her poem “Wild Geese.”

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Hi everyone,

I’ve been writing about the core questions that frame our cosmology, beyond the god questions and the gratitude and the love and the lineage questions. The ones that go unexamined, but are at the core of the way we design our lives, our societies, even the future we expect or the breadth of what we might imagine. Whether we live in a sort of 1+1=2 flatness or a field of magic. People can answer “what is time” or “is earth home or obstacle” so differently that all choices that come from that split.

So let’s have a look.

Today: Part 2: Time, Mortality, Body, Relatedness.

Coming up: Part 3: Legitimacy, AI, Sacredness, Grief, The Feminine.

Part 4: Deeper Dives into the 4 Emergences

Time: Line or Spiral, Consquence or Resonance?

Many of us in the west grew up with an assumption of linear progressive time, or the idea that history moves forward toward improvement. That is no longer the default.

Consider how many conceptions of time people are actually living in: The physicists describe a block universe, past and future equally real and existing at once, the present moment no more privileged than here is privileged over there. Even Einstein called our division into past, present, and future a stubborn illusion.

Geologists live in deep time, where a single human life is a flicker and the felt unit is the eon, and they make decisions a person inside a news cycle cannot fathom.

The Greeks kept two words: chronos, the sequential time you can count, and kairos, the charged and opportune moment. A person living in kairos and a person living in chronos run different orientations. French philosopher Henri Bergson split durée — the continuous qualitative flow of time as we actually experience it — from the measured, spatialized time of clocks and physics. Durée is both the hour that vanishes and the minute that will not end.

In Hindu cosmology, you have the Yugas, the vast cycles of time. The current Kali Yuga descends, not rises, in a long cosmic darkening that makes the contemporary idea of “progress” simply a local weather pattern. Aboriginal Dreamtime, the everywhen, holds the ancestral past as also and always present.

Each represents a different relationship to sequence, cause, and meaning. In the field I practice within, classical Tantra, time (kāla) is a cloak the absolute draws over itself to forget that it is everything, to experience itself as sequential.

So the Western linear world of time runs on consequence (what follows), but a non-linear one on resonance (what fits, rhymes, comes round, restores balance). Consequence asks what follows; resonance asks what belongs.

If you have a direct experience of the resonant timeless, the present that never passes, it’s very difficult to explain it to someone for whom time is linear, and prone to run out, but here are some examples:

• A linear world has compound interest; the resonance world has the Jubilee, the periodic clean slate where debts cancel and land returns.

• A resonance world treats harm as a present tear in a web, not a past event earning a proportional sentence, asking “what’s out of balance and how does it come round,” rather than “what happened and who pays.”

• Institutions don’t default to a belief in progress; in a cyclical or degenerative age, the work is to preserve and transmit, through things such as seed banks, monasteries and lineages designed to last through collapse.

• In a resonance mindset, we heal the field instead of tracing the cause. Symptoms are treated as live present entanglements, where everything is here at once, not effects of an excavated past trauma.

• A sequential time view sees things as requiring diligence, sequencing, effort. A resonance mindset sees that everything can turn in a moment of grace, unpredictably.

Mortality: Feature or Bug?

I met researcher Aubrey de Grey at TED in 2005, when he was presenting the case that aging is a disease, and death an engineering problem. He was deep in mouse tests at the time. It read to me as a denial of the most organic fact there is: that we ripen and die and return, and that death is a feature, not a bug.

Now, more than two decades on, his bet is a mainstream and well-funded ambition. Life extension has become an industry. The transhumanist project, cryonics, and the upload of the brain into the cloud are its logical endpoints.

The everyday version of death avoidance is quieter: the West moved dying out of the home and into the hospital, handed the body to licensed professionals, and arranged never to see the dead. The corpse is washed and made up and sealed away by strangers. A person can now pass through an entire life without once witnessing death up close.

I remember standing at the burning ghats of Varanasi, where the pyres burn in the open, in the middle of the living city, day and night. The family carries the body down through the streets, lights the fire, stays with it, and the ash goes into the river the same city drinks and bathes and prays in. Death there is domestic and ordinary and on full view — the visible turn of the wheel. Children grow up knowing exactly what a body does when the breath leaves it.

On the other side of the divide are people for whom conscious relationship with mortality is the central practice, an aperture opener. These two camps cannot share a civilization in the deep sense. Their relationship to every single moment differs, because one is fleeing the end and the other is including it. And I will note that every contemplative practice includes death, the pondering of one’s own, a meditation on the fleeting life. )See Dream Mullick’s work on this, her beautiful death meditations .

The Body: Corrected or Consecrated?

The body splits run between ideas who treat the body as an object the self possesses and works on, and people who have had at least one experience of the body as the site of sovereign truth and intelligence.

The object side has many flavors. Body as tool, to be used. Body as problem, to be fixed. Body as project, to be optimized forever because it is never finished. Body as machine, the Cartesian body of pumps and levers, explicable by its parts and therefore, in principle, repairable and upgradable, which is the assumption sitting under both modern medicine and de Grey’s dream of aging as an engineering problem. Body as enemy, the ascetic flesh to be subdued, the obstacle between a person and spirit. The body as a noun you have, the thing acted upon. The body that can be sold, rented, and harvested.

The other side of this: the body as temple, consecrated rather than corrected, the dwelling of the divine. Body as archive, holding memory and ancestry in tissue, below the reach of language. Body as the lived ground, the medium through which there is any world at all. We do not perceive with the body. We perceive as it.

My mother’s tongue, German, keeps the divide in two words. Leib, the lived body felt from inside, the body you are, kin to Leben, to life. Körper, borrowed later from the Latin corpus (the same root that gives us corpse) the body as object seen from outside, the one on the examination table. The etymology already holds the split: one word grows from life, the other from the corpse. Most of medicine and optimization and every exit project assumes you are a Körper. The somatic and tantric work assumes you are a Leib. These two attitudes, if unintegrated, will build incompatible worlds, and the knowing side stays partly incomprehensible to the other no matter how well it is explained, because the only proof is the no in the gut that arrives before the mind has agreed to anything.

The two build opposite institutions wherever they touch ground. Körper medicine trusts the chart and tells a patient with a clean scan that the pain is not real; Leib medicine treats “something is wrong” as data the instruments missed. A managed birth is a monitored extraction on the clock; the other kind assumes the body knows how and the mind should step out of the way. At the end of life, one model counts success in days added, the other in presence. The executive who trusts the model overrides the gut as bias to be corrected; the one who trusts the body walks out of a deal that pencils out perfectly because something in the room said no. Talk therapy reasons you out through the mind; somatic work discharges what the nervous system is still bracing against, which insight alone never reaches.

Tantra holds the deepest version. The microcosmic body of tantra seats every world and every deity within it, the energy centers (cakras) and channels (nāḍīs) a map of the whole, the body the field where Śiva and Śakti play and therefore the actual site of liberation. The Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra never sends you out of the body to find the absolute. It sends you further in: into the breath, into the gap between two thoughts where the body shudders awake. The body is where the absolute is hiding.

Relatedness: Bounded or Porous?

This one is really a question about identity: what a self even is. At least three answers compete, and people rarely notice they have chosen one.

The first makes you a thing. A bounded unit, a sovereign individual, an atom of a self that exists complete and then chooses to enter relationships as a secondary move. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor called this the buffered self. The term comes from his 2007 book A Secular Age, where he contrasts it with the older porous self — the buffered self is bounded, sealed at the edge of the mind, master of the meanings it assigns to a disenchanted world; the porous self was open and permeable to forces, spirits, and meanings outside it. It is the self late capitalism requires. The consumer, the brand, the resume, the soul held as private property. Hyperindividualism is this self taken to its logical end.

The second makes you a crowd. A collection of organisms run by a controlling mind, or minds. The body that is more microbial cells than human ones, the psyche a parliament of parts with no one finally in the chair, in which the “I” becomes a story the committee tells about itself. This view dissolves the fortress, which is a relief. It can also deflate into pure mechanism, and at that edge it circles back and thingifies you again, only now as a colony of survival units rather than a single one.

The third makes you a relationship. The self as porous, co-arising, never finally bounded, constituted through others before it is anything on its own. Ubuntu, the communitarian ethic carried in the Nguni Bantu languages of southern Africa, says it plainly — umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other persons, I am because we are. The Bodhisattva vow lives here. So does worlding, the indigenous understanding of humans and land and species in constitutive relationship rather than contractual arrangement. So does polyvagal theory’s discovery that the nervous system is a social organ, regulated by other nervous systems, never private. This view sees the bounded self as a functional fiction.

Anyone who has chanted in a full room knows the moment the single voice stops being findable, when the I drops into the we and the boundary you guard all day simply is not there — and nothing was lost in its going. I write about this dissolve at length in my 2026 book, Mantra, Tantra, and Ayahuasca. That is the felt proof on the relational side. To a self that knows itself as a unit, it registers as a nice feeling and nothing more. These two are living in different selves, and each self builds the politics, the economics, the families, and the spiritual paths it requires.

(Continues in Part 3)

Thanks for being with me in this journey of inquiry, and welcome to all the new people from this week’s Coming Home summit and the Holomovement 2026. For those who don’t know me well, my work sits at the intersection of consciousness, embodiment, spirituality, feminine development, leadership, and cultural evolution. I am unusual in that I come from both the tech world and the contemplative/spiritual world, and much of my writing attempts to integrate those domains. I’m a mother and a yogi, and the founder of Rosebud Woman, with a deep love for beauty, for the exquisite wondrous, enchanting beauty of this given life. I circle around this idea in different ways: human flourishing comes through deeper embodiment, expanded consciousness, reverence for life, and the integration of spiritual insight with practical action in the world.

In this new series of essays, I ask: beneath today’s political, technological, and cultural conflicts, what is happening to human consciousness itself? I see four broad responses emerging. Some want to transcend biology through technology. Some want to return to land, embodiment, and traditional forms of life. Some continue to trust that existing institutions can restore stability. Others are exploring consciousness directly through contemplative practice, psychedelics, intuition, and altered states.

Though these movements appear unrelated, they may all be responding to the same underlying pressure: an increasingly mediated world in which reality reaches us through screens, algorithms, and abstractions rather than direct experience.

Drawing on Karl Jaspers’ idea of the Axial Age, I suggest we may be living through another civilizational threshold: not simply a political or technological transition, but a reorganization of consciousness itself. The growing fragmentation around us may be less a sign of collapse than of a system exploring multiple futures at once, searching for what comes next.

For those of you looking to dive deeper with me in the coming year, my next immersion dates have been set: November 1-22, 2026 Living Tantra Immersion on the Big Island of Hawai’i (come for all or part); March 10-22, 2027, Cambodia (Devotional adventure, ending on the Spring Equinox over Angkor Wat temple); March 26-29, 2027, Mystic Heart of Easter , in Southern California. Living Tantra level 1 and 2 will be held in September and October, 2026, and the sexuality and breathwork units are on the schedule for the Spring of 2027.

Sending my deepest love and looking forward to your comments on this new series,

Christine Marie

In my circles—global, varied, and unusually broad—the conversations people are having to make sense of the world have shifted dramatically over the past few years. I have a growing sense that something is reorganizing at the level of the human nervous system itself, beneath politics and deeper than culture. The surface arguments are different, but they orbit the same underlying question: what are we becoming?

One group is oriented toward leaving.

These are the people who have decided that Earth is a limitation: too slow, too biological, too constrained by death, gravity, and the inconvenient needs of bodies. They are headed toward space, brain-computer interfaces, digital consciousness, the singularity, whatever comes after the human. This is usually articulated in the language of progress and innovation, but its bones are older. The body as a carceral prison. Gnosticism with better funding, matter as the demiurge, and a sort of secular transcendence: consciousness uploaded into light, finally freed from the burden of its stinky farty body.

Another group is oriented toward return.

They are restoring, re-rooting, landing back in organic reality. They are rejecting screens, reducing their dependence on algorithms, learning to make things with their hands again. Growing food. Firing clay. Yet this, too, can harden into ideology, and a different kind of exit. Plus it lives inside the cage of the modern supply chain: the hand tools, solar generators, and Carhartts are still purchased online; the veggies artistically photographed for Instagram. They are running toward the past rather than toward the machine, while unable to fully escape the machine. It also has a whiff of escapism (and a little aesthetic cosplay).

A third group is neither leaving nor returning, it’s simply not looking.

This is the world of business as usual, where another election cycle, policy proposal, or fundraising campaign is expected to nudge the system back onto its familiar tracks. Yet increasingly, that confidence feels disconnected from reality. Many of the frameworks that organized the last century such as nation-states, economic models, political institutions, even shared narratives of progress are failing now, as the world they were built to manage for swiftly outpaces their capacity to regulate or respond.

And then there is a fourth movement, harder to name. It appears in conversations about consciousness, contemplative practice, psychedelics, intuition, remote viewing, nervous-system development, and what some describe as a species-level transition. It’s populated by people who report experiences that challenge conventional assumptions about mind and perception: moments of non-local knowing, unusual synchronicities, altered experiences of time, or a persistent sense that something previously hidden is becoming more visible.

It doesn’t matter whether every claim emerging from these spaces is true or verifiable Much of it almost certainly is not. What matters is that increasing numbers of people feel the standard model of mind, self, and consciousness is no longer sufficient to account for their experience. Something is changing in how people understand consciousness and in how they experience it.

The people drawn toward these explorations often speak with a peculiar mixture of conviction and hesitation. They sense a shift but lack a shared language for describing it. They understand how implausible many of their experiences sound within the dominant worldview, yet they continue because those experiences have become increasingly difficult to ignore. So people reach for provisional language: I have heard what’s happening described as a consciousness shift, a species threshold, a splitting, an awakening, an evolutionary leap.

The fracturing we are witnessing is what a system looks like under evolutionary pressure, exploring the edges of what its current form can hold, searching for the shape of whatever comes next.

People are building futures from deeply unexamined positions and assumption, with fundamentally different ontologies, such as:

• What is the body for?

• What counts as real?

• Is Earth a home or a constraint?

• Is the human form an endpoint or a beginning?

• What is time?

• Is death a problem, or the deepest teacher?

The conflicts exist at the level of first principles. Debate about what kind of a future we are creating assumes a shared worldview. Increasingly, that common ground no longer exists. In these next few weeks, I want to talk about some of these questions, and see what we might discover together.

A Pressure With a Name

We have been here before, though not here exactly. The philosopher Karl Jaspers called it the Axial Age: roughly 800 to 200 BCE, when human consciousness appeared to reorganize itself across multiple civilizations almost simultaneously. The Buddha. Socrates. The Hebrew prophets. Lao Tzu. Confucius. The seers of the Upanishads. Though separated by geography and culture, they arrived at a similar discovery: interiority. The individual moral self. The realization that there was an inner domain no bureaucracy could fully administer.

Why then? Because increasing civilizational complexity had generated unprecedented pressures. Cities, empires, writing systems, trade networks, abstraction, administration. Human beings were being asked to operate at a scale that exceeded the assumptions of older ways of life. Consciousness reorganized in response.

One of my professors at CIIS, Sean Kelly, whose work on integral ecology and the emerging planetary era has profoundly shaped my understanding of this moment, is among those who have suggested that we may be entering a second transformation of comparable magnitude. Not merely a cultural shift, but a reorganization of consciousness itself—one driven by pressures as unprecedented as those that gave rise to the first Axial Age.

This time the pressure is not empire, or literacy, but mediation. Nearly every layer of modern life now arrives filtered through technological systems: screens, algorithms, feeds, metrics, simulations, predictive models, representations of representations. Our experience of reality increasingly reaches us through layers of interpretation before it reaches us directly. Digital turtles all the way down.

Decades ago, Marshall McLuhan argued that media technologies do not simply deliver information; they reshape perception itself. More recently, has described how modern societies privilege modes of attention oriented toward abstraction, control, manipulation, and representation, often at the expense of more embodied, relational, and participatory ways of knowing. Whether or not one accepts these theories in full, the pattern is difficult to ignore.

As mediation expands, so does the hunger for immediacy.

This may be one reason so many people are turning toward practices centered on direct experience: meditation, somatic work, ecological immersion, contemplative traditions, ritual, psychedelics, and forms of consciousness exploration that sit uneasily within conventional frameworks. The specifics vary, but the impulse beneath them is remarkably consistent.

People are searching for contact. Not information about reality, but reality itself. Real encounters. The actual territory, taste, flavor.

Seen from this angle, many of the movements of our time come from the same underlying pressure: the technologist seeking transcendence, the homesteader seeking reconnection through land, the contemplative seeking direct awareness beneath thought. Tantra codes it this way: the deeper the veil of māyā, the stronger the pressure toward recognition. Concealment and revelation belong to the same movement. The contraction creates the conditions for the breakthrough. The pressure is not separate from the transformation.

In Part 2, I dive deeper into some of the core fracture points, or veins of thought, that underpin our worldviews, and invite inquiry into how malleable those are, including time, mortality, legitimacy, sacredness, relatedness, the feminine, grief, and even AI.

• Backstory: A rape-for-profit website called Motherless was recently exposed. The name is the logical outcome of removing the Divine Mother, alongside the Divine Father, from dominant world cosmologies.

• The war between men and women is manufactured. Sacred partnership — masculine and feminine in balance — is the actual architecture of reality. We were divided on purpose. We can choose otherwise.

• Every complaint against your mother traces back to a woman handed an impossible role inside a world that had already stripped her of her divinity. The inadequacy in many cases comes from the framework itself.

• The body is already sacred, and it became the target to wrest power. The wound and the doorway are in the same location.

• The way back is recognition not reconstruction. She was never absent from reality- she, still shining in all manifest reality- but she was often absent from the story we told about it.

• This invitation is for everyone to start again together.

The Lie That Made Us Enemies — and the Way Back

By way of introduction: A website called Motherless was recently exposed as a network organized around the sharing and monetization of rape — footage of men drugging and assaulting their partners, alongside the exchange of the substances used to do it. In February 2026 it received millions of visits, many from the United States. The name of the website is a confession. This is what you arrive at when you remove the Mother from the cosmos long enough.

wrote a great piece following the logic behind Motherless all the way back to the thousand-year+ systematic removal of the Mother from the cosmos and from the body. She traces it from the Babylonian creation myths through the burning of the midwives and the rewriting of Mary Magdalene, all the way to a camera pointed at drugged women.

When you remove the Divine Mother from her rightful place as partner to the Divine Father — when you corrupt the masculine-feminine balance that is the actual architecture of reality — every mother born into that world arrives already diminished. Her embodiment shamed. Her knowing dismissed. Her power stripped to whatever could be taken covertly, because the overt kind was never offered. From her, sons and daughters are born into the same diminishment. The sons lose access to the feminine in themselves. The daughters lose trust in the feminine as sacred. And then we turn around and blame the mother for not bringing more presence, more attunement, more capacity for love as if love is a private virtue rather than something that requires a cultural container to flourish.

By repressing the Divine Mother, the sons suffer. The daughters suffer. All those born are born sick from the same wound. It builds, generation after generation, into exactly what we are looking at now. We are also, via algorithm and social engineering, being handed a story that makes men and women enemies of each other. This war between the sexes isn’t a natural condition. It’s the inevitable result of a world that dismembered the sacred partnership and told each half the other half was the problem. That story is a weapon. It is further dividing us, making us extractable, and disabling from doing the one thing that would actually change anything: reach for each other across the wound and begin again.

Reject this lie.

The path forward runs through the restoration of the Mother in the interior life. Restore the balance, and we change what we are capable of, which changes what we build together.

Recognizing the Divine in the Holy Body

For women the story installation often runs like this: the body is the problem, the knowing or intuition that moves before you can explain it is unreliable. Or, she is inferior, she has to fight for her voice, sovereignty, body rights, rights in general. She must contain herself in countless ways.

For men the installation often runs: Softness is weakness. Need is shameful. The body is a tool for performance. A man told all of this long enough might lose access to the very faculties that would allow him to recognize the sacred in himself or in anyone else. He is not more powerful for it. He is amputated.

There is an exhausting incompleteness to not yet having integrated masculine and feminine energies in a person’s own heart. Our faculties are only partially online, dwelling in bodies that are shamed, guilty for existing, in argument with the other half of themselves. But these bodies are sacred ground, breathed by life, in completeness.

The sense of being whole — strong and supple, agentic and receptive, the inhale and the exhale in harmony — is the natural undefended state of the body. When the feminine is left out, the body becomes rigid, brittle, toxic. When the masculine is left out, there is watery dissipation. A healthy life, a healthy planet, needs it all in more balance.

The Biggest Invitation: Forgive Your Actual Mother.

Every complaint commonly carried about how we were mothered (the coldness, the criticism, the distraction, the rage, the absence even when she was in the room) deserves to be felt fully. And then seen clearly. Mothering in the deepest resonance requires a living matrix: other women, intergenerational wisdom, a cosmology that honors the feminine, a community that holds the mother while she holds the child. That matrix had been systematically dismantled long before she arrived, the culture in the west makes this kind of presence structurally improbable. She was handed a role stripped of every resource the role actually requires, inside a world that had removed the Mother from the cosmos itself, expected to perform it alone, perfectly, without complaint. What looked like individual shortcoming is the predictable outcome of an impossible set of conditions. The inadequacy was built into the framework.

Look back seven generations. Every mother in that line was born into a world where her own divinity was not respected, where her embodiment was second class, shamed, made vulnerable, disempowered. She managed herself the way she was taught. She swallowed what she was told to swallow and passed on the shape of that swallowing, as all of us do with what we have not yet metabolized. Imagine how different it would have been like to do this with the Great Mother enthroned the collective heart.

Forgive your father the same way.

A man who was never given access to his own depth cannot give what he does not have. He was also shaped by these conditions before you arrived. If there was harm, this insight doesn’t dissolve the harm. Yet, there is no single place to locate blame at the bottom of this. There is the wound, running back ten thousand years, and the choice available right now in this breath: stop passing it forward.

We can do so much better together.

The forgiveness is part of the ground that makes something new possible: men and women standing together in the actual architecture of what we are: partners in the oldest sense, the balance that was always meant to be. We make a new deal. We take responsibility for our own unfolding into sovereign, loving, mutual humans, in more alignment with the earth and with each other than the generations that came before us.

The Tantric Ground Starts With This Union: The Single Movement of Shiva and Shakti As One Movement

Classical tantra begins from a premise so different from the Western religious inheritance that it takes time to feel how different it is. The premise: the cosmos is the self-expression of a feminine divine in sacred partnership with the masculine. Not one force dominating another, but awareness and its power, presence and its pulse, in perpetual creative embrace. Everything that exists is that partnership moving at different frequencies. The grief in the chest. The hunger in millions of people clicking on a website because they have lost all contact with the sacred. All of it is Her, moving. And the masculine awareness She moves through. Never one without the other. That is what was taken. That is what we restore.

The Sanskrit word for the way back is pratyabhijñā, or recognition.

Yoga, in its original meaning, is that recognition in practice. The word means union, the body in direct relationship with the life moving through it. The sacred is what the body is made of. The heartbeat you did not start and cannot stop. The primal throb that can be forgotten but cannot be exiled. The pulse was going through every woman burned for knowing things in her body, and through every man who stood watching and felt something in himself extinguished alongside her. It is going through you right now.

The Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra, one of the foundational texts of classical tantra, offers one hundred and twelve doorways into direct recognition of the sacred, and it points to the body, to the pause between the inhale and the exhale. The warmth of a hand on the center of the chest. Each a place where the pulse becomes audible, where the body we have been managing reveals itself as the temple it has always been.

Forty thousand years ago, someone picked up a piece of limestone and carved Her. Wide-hipped and full-bellied, held in the palm like a prayer. We do not know if the hands that carved Her were a woman’s or a man’s. We know those hands needed to make Her visible and keep Her close. The oldest religious act we have evidence of, and it belongs to all of us.

That impulse never stopped. In the Catholic church of my childhood, She was everywhere, sanitized and set aside while men stood in the pulpits and regulated her body: the Black Madonna, the Pieta, the Marians.

And in the mystics, who point to the inward light in the body. Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century heard what she called the living light and wrote it all down with her eyes open. Julian of Norwich received sixteen visions in a single feverish night in 1373 and spent the next twenty years working out what they meant, producing one of the most precise and radical theological texts in the English language: at the ground of things is unconditional love, living right here in this material reality, nowhere else.

Official church traditions point away from the body, and upward. That directional difference matters enormously, for men as much as women. The Mother’s country has always been reached by going further in. Feel the pulse running through you since before you were born and recognize Her in exactly that.

Refuse the story that made you an enemy of the person standing across from you. Let the grief of the separation be as large as it actually is.

Let us clear the slate. We look back at the generations of mothers and the fathers who also lost the thread, who passed on the only shape they had, maybe we grieve. And then we turn toward each other — men and women, the masculine and the feminine in each of us — and we join hands and we begin again. The rethroning may already be happening in and as you, right now, as you read this. She has been here the whole time.

Elayne Kalila’s essay Motherless is essential reading. Find her work at [link].

Christine Marie Mason is a philosopher, author, and teacher with twenty-six years in yoga, eighteen in classical tantra, and doctoral work in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. A decade of somatic trauma healing and the founding of Rosebud Woman, an intimate wellness company grounded in the premise that a woman’s body is sacred ground, are the practicum behind this work. She is the author of The Nine Lives of Woman and many other books, including Mantra, Tantra, Ayahuasca: Ecstasy, Devotion and the Return of the Holy Body. Find her at christinemariemason.com, rosewoman.com and on Substack.

We are gathering June 5-10, 2026 in Tavira Portugal with Will Keepin, Cynthia Brix and Tiffany Gyatso to offer Body of Joy, a program on the Sacred in the Body, and the reconciliation of the separating ideas of male female alienation. If you’re interested, please reach out to Geneva@Rosewoman.com

On Spotify or Apple podcasts. Brought to you by Rosebud Woman.

Also: Karoline Algren’s free program Rewire with Pleasure has just started, with 20 very potent speakers. If more embodied pleasure is part of your expanding edge, this may be for you.

I am on retreat this week, and trying to feel more than think, so leaving it at this.

Wishing everyone deep presence, beauty, truth and joy.

XO, CMM

A few days ago, I was walking with my family through the Alhambra. Taking in the impossible delicate geometries, the light filtering through cut-out stars, and the vast terraced gardens. I commented to my daughter how my ex would have noticed and delighted in everything here, with more than a little longing in my voice. She simply took my hand and said,“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could only have the good parts of them? Just the magical bits where we see their soul light?” We walked on quietly. Yes, that. And also just feeling the love for all of our people, without having a place for it to land, and allowing it to be just so.

Maybe you also know this longing for one who can’t meet you. For a union or intimacy that stays just out of reach. Or maybe it is a longing for some permanency, imagined safety, or even for god(dess). The heart doesn’t distinguish between these, really: they are in many ways the same ache.

So today I am sharing the perspective of nondual Tantra on this matter, something that when I touch it in my personal experience brings true bliss in the being: There is another plane entirely, a love so permanent and deep, a way of being that isn’t tied to another’s choice to respond.

Also, I would love to hear from you, on what you are enjoying in the work, what’s resonating, what you would like more of.

Other Notes: Tomorrow is our monthly Good Community Gathering at 10 am Pacific time. Upcoming: The Yearn in Mexico, then 3 back to back programs in Portugal: Bhakti Immersion with Adam Bauer (one shared female room remaining), The Holomovement, and Body of Joy with Will Keepin and Cynthia Brix.

All Love, and see you tomorrow.

Christine

The TLDR for this week:

• The ache for a person, for union, for god — the heart doesn’t distinguish, it’s the same longing

• When we fall in love, we access a version of ourselves that’s more awake, more generous — and we grieve that self when it ends

• The beloved occasions the love, but doesn’t source it — what can be occasioned can be known directly

• Long-arc entanglements are curriculum: the soul selects exactly the mirror it needs

• Pratyabhijñā: consciousness moves freely, from itself, without requiring an object

• When you hold personal longing as universal human frequency, the sting drops out — only vast empathy remains

• Tirumular: love and Shiva are not two; abide as love, which is Shiva itself

• Love cannot be unrequited — it arises in you, whole, and moves outward

• Rest as love. Take no action but that.

When we fall in love, the ordinary film of habit and judgment lifts. We look at another person and notice everything: we see their particular genius, their specific beauty, the way their mind moves. We are generous without effort. We seem to see from a different place in ourselves, as if love cracks opens a capacity in us for more attention, delight, and presence. We feel more spacious inside and more awake.

And of course, there is the gift of being seen that way in return: received fully, held without condition, witnessed in the strange particular truth of who we are. Under this gaze, I find there is somehow more breathing room in myself.

So when the flush of relational “in-love-ness” ends, we grieve both the other person, and also the version of ourselves we were when we were with them.

Once, when I found myself longing to be met by a specific person who couldn’t return the affection, what I would have once called unrequited love, a friend gave me this jaw-dropping line: “How beautiful that you can generate that love inside of yourself.”

That is to say: the bliss of seeing, of loving, of being alive to beauty may be occasioned by another being. And what can be occasioned can be known directly, without the occasion.

Being in love is object independent: it arises in and as me.

So I started to explore this, and have found it to be both true in my own experience, and pointed to by the ancient texts of my tradition.

The beloved is the occasion, but they aren’t the source.

Those of us who have had the tendency to lean out for love (hat tip to Leonard Cohen), who learned to locate love outside the self, or perhaps learned that warmth had to be earned might disagree with this. We might say, “This is a nice idea, but my experience is painful, so take your spiritually bypassing ass and leave me with my romantic-erotic longing, I trust that, even with the pain it is bringing, it’s doing something for me.” Okay I get that. I sometimes feel that.

In that reaching, though, our attention, our energy and center of gravity tilt outward.

Long arc unresolved entanglements are a curriculum. Something in us (generously, the soul’s intelligence) selects for the person who mirrors exactly the pattern that most needs to be seen. The entanglement and repetition are trying to get through to a deeper layer of our soul work in this lifetime. And there are the grooves worn into consciousness by repeated experience, by the body’s memory, by lifetimes (samskaras). A single insight doesn’t erase a groove. The groove has to be met, again and again, until the charge releases. So we stay. Or we leave and return. Or we leave and find the same person in a different body.

The question to sit with is what is this entanglement trying to complete. What is wanting to be seen, metabolized, released. When that becomes clear, the entanglement either transforms or dissolves. Both are resolution.

AND, anytime we find ourselves over-extending away from our own center, chasing the feeling of being seen, outsourcing our own aliveness, we return. Come back to Aham Shakti. The recognition that the power is ours. That the quality of loving we found in their presence lives in us, not in them. Sit back. Be the love.

In a non-metaphorical and direct experience way I can report: there is another plane entirely.

Kṣemarāja opens the Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam with this: The absolute Consciousness — out of its own free will, is the cause of the arising of the universe. Everything, from the highest Sadasiva down to the earth itself, is its free expression.

Out of its own free will. Consciousness does not require an object to express itself. It moves freely, from itself, as itself. The relational plane lives fully inside that same consciousness. The personal and the universal are not two altitudes of experience. They are the same energy, expressing itself at every level of manifestation at once.

When I hold the longing for another not as my personal story but as a human frequency, it shifts. When I practice seeing my personal experiences as universal experiences, archetypal across time and space, something amazing happens. The self that is yearning becomes the Self that recognizes this ache in every human heart that has ever loved. All longing, all heartbreak across the planet echoes here in my heart. With this practice, there is no more sting, only gentleness. Only a vast empathy for all of us, reaching toward each other, trying to stay open.

Love is a frequency, a field, a quality of consciousness and we are already inside it. The one we long for is an occasion for that frequency to move through us. When we locate love in the relationship, in the story of the lover and the beloved, we make it conditional, small.

When we locate it in ourselves as a frequency field, it becomes the essence of our being.

So when the feeling arises in me, I enjoy it, I admire their beauty, I bask in the awe I feel, the chemicals coursing in my body, the flush of crush, and I take no action but to rest as love.

Tirumular said it in four lines:

அன்பு சிவம் இரண்டு என்பர் அறிவிலார், அன்பே சிவமாவது ஆரும் அறிகிலார், அன்பே சிவமாவது ஆரும் அறிந்தபின், அன்பே சிவமாய் அமர்ந்திருந் தாரே.

“Those without wisdom say love and Shiva are two. None know that love itself is Shiva. When one comes to know that love itself is Shiva, one simply abides as love, which is Shiva itself.”

In Bhakti, the yoga of devotion, we say that the lover who longs without trying to possess is practicing the purest form of love. The sacred longing is the heart of devotion. The bhakti traditions say the longing and the ache are real, and that this longing eventually burns through the story of the separate lover until what remains is love itself.

Love cannot be unrequited. It arises in us, whole, and moves outward. What the other does with it is their story.

Here, we rest.

Anbe Shiva.

Thank you to my dear colleague Deborah Zipser for the inquiry that led to this essay. In the face of accelerated change, what moves us out of action/reaction into attunement and creation of structures which are grounded in feeling one another?

In addition to today’s essay, this week we hosted the wonderful Amy Elizabeth Fox, CEO of Mobius Leadership, on The Rose Woman this week. She’s just released a new book, along with , Leading in Chaos. Enjoy Episode 181!

Please join me in one (or all) upcoming programs, listed below. I will send out the schedule of online classes for the summer later this month. We will offer the willingness teachings one more time and also a new unit on Rasa, the mood of beauty.

All Love,

Christine Marie

The TL;DR on this Week’s Essay

• The ability to hold intensity without collapsing is needed, but it can turn into over-helping.

• What feels like helping is often an attempt to regulate our own discomfort.

• This helping can interrupt the very experiences we (and others) need for growth.

• From a tantric/non-dual perspective, “helping another” is happening within a single shared field of awareness, not across separation.

• The helper/victim dynamic scales from personal relationships into the charitable industrial complex - the institutions and systems based on polarity.

• Real change comes less from intervening and more from removing blocks to what is already trying to unfold. Cease harm, and systems seek wholeness.

  ---

Many years ago, my teacher Thomas Hübl said something to me as we were walking that I didn’t know how to receive at the time. He told me there was something strong in me, at the core. I felt it as a compliment, but I didn’t press further on what he meant or why it mattered for healing trauma, but I think I understand now.

He was pointing to a capacity that is needed in the world: nervous systems that can hold intensity without collapsing, to stay present and not puddle when things get difficult, while at the same time staying supple, not rigid. From the inside, it feels like being able to remain in discomfort without immediately needing to resolve it. This is so much of what yoga and tantra teach us.

But that strength can have a shadow. If you can hold a lot, you often start holding for others. You give money, time, shelter, again and again, often to the same people or situations. At one time, I would have called it generosity, care, even love. Now I see how often soothing others is in fact, soothing myself.

My “helping,” and my discomfort in witnessing discomfort, especially when I was able to “fix” it, has sometimes kept me from letting situations unfold without me. In doing so, I often prolonged things that needed to happen without my intervention: their confrontation with consequence, their own bottom, their own soul work. I suppose I have been on both sides of this at times.

I started to see that from a tantric, non-dual perspective, the very idea of “helping another” contains a subtle error. It assumes two separate entities: one whole, one lacking; one agent, one recipient. But if experience is understood as a single field, and what we are is not separate selves but expressions of one continuous unfolding, then what we call “another’s suffering” is not actually elsewhere. It is a disturbance appearing within the same field we inhabit.

When I feel the contraction of seeing someone in pain, that contraction is not about them. It is the pain, registering here, in this body, in this heart.

When I move to alleviate the pain of that contraction, I’m not, fundamentally, a benevolent agent acting upon an external other. I am participating in the field’s movement toward its own coherence.

What appears as altruism is, at a deeper level, self-regulation, but at a scale that includes what I usually think of as “other people.”

What is really driving the action?

If helping is partly an attempt to soothe the disturbance that arises in me when I encounter suffering, then the form that help takes can easily be calibrated to my need to feel better rather than to what actually serves the other person’s unfolding.

By stepping in, I was routing around experiences that might have been necessary. The “bottoming out” I feared is often how life delivers information that can’t be absorbed any other way. And my interventions, however loving, delayed that contact.

All healing is done by the individual. The ground shifts beneath someone only when they are ready, not when pushed. I can’t want it for them any more than I can eat, breathe, or die for them. I have to trust the spark in another over the ache in myself.

This scales beyond the personal.

Much of what we call help at a societal level follows the same structure. The savior and the victim are not opposites; they are roles in the same story about where wholeness lives, each holding the other in place. The savior needs someone to remain lacking, while the person cast as victim organizes identity around the wound. Both operate from the same perception of separation, the belief that wholeness must be delivered across a gap.

Every institution built on the perception of polarity, helping, rescuing will reproduce it. Saviors will always find those needing saving.

The exit from this dynamic isn’t to transcend the polarity, because even that move is still organized by it. We have to move prior to it, to the perceptual ground before it divides into helper and helped.

You can see this clearly in large-scale philanthropy and development work, which often operate at a distance from the conditions they seek to address. That distance makes it more likely that interventions will be shaped by the emotional needs of the helper rather than the lived reality of those being “helped.” Charity can become a kind of anesthesia: something that manages the discomfort of witnessing suffering without necessarily transforming the conditions that produce it. Help at a distance is often a way of not having to feel. Galas and checks, bandaids not structural change.

This is one reason proximity matters. When you are close to a problem, feedback is immediate, and solutions that emerge from proximity tend to be less performative and more precise. Less about signaling care and more about actually changing conditions. People inside a condition know things that cannot be fully translated into reports or metrics, because the felt dimension of experience is part of the data, and that dimension is often lost at a distance. From this, a political principle begins to emerge: decision-making authority should sit as close as possible to where consequences are felt.

Collapse and overwhelm are also forms of distance. The person who puddles cannot remain in contact with what is difficult, and will reach quickly for solutions that reduce their own distress. So the ability to stay present with complexity, pain, and ambiguity becomes a political capacity. If we cannot remain in contact with suffering, we will design systems that allow us to avoid it.

There is another structural problem in charitable work: prevention has no image. Crisis is legible, but prevention is not. As a result, resources and attention flow toward the visible wound. Rescue, emergency, cleanup get the attention while the long, unglamorous middle goes unfunded and unseen. One reason for this is perceptual: we are far more comfortable responding to what is already broken than staying present with what has not yet become visible. Make preventive maintenance sexy again.

This cuts both ways. Traditions that emphasize transcendence (especially resting as witness) can increase stability, but they can also become another form of anesthesia if they aren’t paired with an equal capacity to descend into full contact with what is broken. The task isn’t to escape the world, but to move across a wider range from the most vast spaciousness, and into the unbearable, without losing coherence in either direction.

This reframes what counts as political action. The retreat where someone develops the capacity to sit with reality without fragmenting is doing structural prevention, and a story that makes us feel the realness of another is doing structural prevention as well. Contemplatives, artists, and teachers are attunement infrastructure.

That long middle is perceptual work. Every institution humans have built was preceded by a perception of who matters and what suffering is real. Legislation reflects this.

We tend to imagine change as something designed, implemented, and scaled—an intervention applied with enough force to produce an outcome. But this is just the helper logic at a larger scale, positioning change as something delivered from outside into a system that cannot generate it on its own.

What actually shifts culture is closer to how an ecosystem shifts. Remove the conditions that prevent health, and health moves, because it was trying to happen the whole time.

Justice, in this frame, becomes possible when obstructions to relational coherence are cleared. We align with what is already trying to organize itself, rather than substituting for it. In other words: We don’t need you to help. We need you to stop harming.

An institution built from this ground works toward its own obsolescence, continually asking what conditions would make it unnecessary and building toward those conditions, even at the cost of its own continuation. Most institutions, however well-intentioned, organize around their own perpetuation, because meaning, funding, and identity become tied to the ongoing presence of the problem. The institution that dissolves when the work is done is a different kind of organism entirely.

Such institutions also invest in expanding what people can feel and hold: the ability to sense consequence across distance, to register another’s reality as real, and to remain present with complexity rather than reaching for premature resolution. Every policy, every system, and every economy is downstream of perception. Change the perceptual ground, and you change what becomes possible.

From here, the question of helping shifts. It is no longer simply whether I should intervene, but what the nature of my intervention is. Am I midwifing what is already trying to emerge, or constructing a solution that centers me? Am I creating conditions for something to unfold, or inserting myself in a way that prevents that unfolding? Am I responding from clarity, or from my own need to reduce what I’m feeling?

We can act, and act fully, without building an identity around being the one who helps. We can participate without needing to position ourselves as the one who intervenes. We can tend without requiring the wound to remain.

The most just world isn’t built by the most ardent rescuers. It is built by people whose perception has widened enough that they can feel consequence before it becomes catastrophe, and who are willing to work in the long, invisible middle where real change happens.

-CMM

Frankfurt, Germany

4/10/26

April 17 – May 8 | Online | Free Rewire with Pleasure Summit A free multi-week online event with 20+ sexuality and embodiment experts. Christine is a featured speaker. Sessions run 9:30–10:30 am Pacific. Register: rewirewithpleasure.com/christinemarie-mason

Sunday, April 19 | 10:00–11:30 am Pacific | Online | Free Monthly Community Connection & Practice Group Good Community with Christine & Friends — free monthly gathering on the third Sunday of every month. Practice, conversation, and connection. Register: courses.christinemariemason.com/goodcommunity

Events

Wednesday, April 29 | 1:00–2:00 pm EDT | Online | Free (donation-based) Purpose Earth: A Celebration of Community Activators Live online celebration of Purpose Earth grant recipients — music, meditation, and the announcement of 2026 grantees. Ticket donations go directly to recipients. Register: givebutter.com/PurposeEarthCelebration2026

April 30 – May 3 | Playa del Carmen, Mexico The YEARN ‘26 at Palmaïa, The House of AïA A gathering for the conscious curious — purposeful connection, shared experience, and the stirring of souls. Christine offers sessions in Tantra on Parenting, Mata Yoga practice, and Erotic Storytelling. By application. New attendees: theyearn.org/yearn26

May 17–27 | Cascais, Portugal Bhakti House Immersion — with Adam Bauer Ten days of mantra, movement, meditation, ceremony, and devotion. Includes a Sacred Sites of Lisbon day on May 23 with Peter and Sarah. Former/ongoing students: 10% off with code COMMITTED. Payment plans via Klarna at checkout. Bhakti House participants receive 15% off of the Holomovement Wave, which follows, with code WaveCMM. Register: christinemariemason.com/bhakti-house-immersion

May 29 – June 2 | Cascais, Portugal Holomovement: The Wave 2026 Spiritual growth, collective synergy, and practical tools for planetary co-creation. Use code WaveCMM for 15% off. Tickets: holomovement.net/wave-tickets

June 5–10 | Tavira, Portugal Body of Joy — with Will Keepin, Cynthia Brix, and Tiffany Gyatso (Registration page forthcoming — stay tuned.)

Hosanna (Salvation, Now!) is a cry from inside occupation, from inside suffering, from inside the exhaustion of a world that has forgotten what beauty is possible. From the mystic lens it is a call to arrive home to union, to recognition to awareness, right here, right now.

Hello everyone, just a short note today as we are deep in the retreat prep. Whether you are post-Christian, Christian, tantric, Buddhist, Jewish, agnostic, atheist, animist, mystic, or none of the above, Easter contains all of the themes of every human life lived in a body- love, death, liminality, rebirth, justice, bravery, fear and more.

Any shared holiday opens something in the collective field. When billions of people enter into this time of year,and turn their attention toward the same questions at the same time, it becomes a portal. So, this week, I invite you into the Easter portal consciously: as a mystic doorway, a daily practice, with a guide for each day’s particular medicine.

And if you are celebrating in the traditional ways, Happy Easter, Happy Passover, infinite blessings.

Obtain the audiobook or the ebook of the Mystic Heart of Easter on Amazon- OR get the download of book, along with four long-form videos and practices sent out on each of these days:

• Thursday, 4/2: Love: what does it mean to stay in love through betrayal, through the moment an intimate becomes a stranger?

• Friday, 4/3: Death: how do we reckon honestly with injustice, with power, with the things done to us and the things we have done?

• Saturday, 4/4: Liminality: how do we hold the in-between, the womb that looks like a tomb, the chrysalis that feels like dissolution?

• Sunday, 4/5: And then rebirth— spring comes, the radiant soul walks out of what tried to extinguish it, something is reborn that could not have been predicted from inside the dark.

These are self paced, so join at anytime. You can sign up here, and will get the download immediately, and your first video will arrive Wednesday night, so that you can have access anytime on Thursday that you see fit.

Sign Up and Join

Why This Child, These Parents

The tantric traditions (Kashmir Shaivism, Tamil Siddhānta, and the broader Vedic understanding of karma) hold the specific view that one’s birth isn’t random, nor is it imposed. The soul arrives into a particular family because that family provides the precise karmic conditions needed for this lifetime’s soul work.¹

The teaching on prarabdha karma says that from the vast accumulated store of everything sown across many lifetimes (sanchita) a portion ripens and becomes active in each incarnation. This ripened portion shapes the circumstances of birth: the body, the time, the culture, the family. The soul enters into life through those parents whose karmic field matches what this soul needs to experience, resolve, and potentially transmute.²

Unfortunately, once we incarnate, we don’t have transparent access to the architecture of our own prarabdha, we infer it over time and with practices of self awareness. The teaching is to be held as a contemplative orientation, something to move toward as understanding opens, rather than a preemptive conclusion before the work (of grief, anger, and the clear-eyed accounting of what was genuinely harmful) have been done. The insights of prarabdha are a frame available after our reckoning, to help us understand things in our lives, not instead of it. And it is never a teaching to apply to someone else’s suffering. We don’t use it karmic understanding to bypass accountability or mercy.

Held rightly, this teaching offers us an understanding that the match between child and parent has a deeper coherence than accident. The child who needed to develop fierce self-reliance arrived where self-reliance would be required. The child who came to work through a particular pattern of love and distance arrived into exactly that field. The parent, too, is changed by the child they receive and called forward by this particular soul in ways no other could produce. There is a perfect precision in this.

The Unique Essence: The Divine Child

Each soul arrives with its own nature a specific frequency, a particular quality of intelligence, a way of attending to the world that belongs to it alone. In Kashmir Shaivism this is svābhāva: one’s own being, one’s inherent nature.³ It precedes the family and other social conditioning, and is what remains when the layers of adaptation are peeled back. As yogi Mark Whitwell puts it: every child is the natural beauty and intelligence of the cosmos arriving to form.⁴

Patrick Connor speaks of this innate nature as “The Divine Child” — the state of joy, curiosity, and openness that is the soul’s natural register. This is the dimension of the self wired for expansion, for discovery, for full aliveness. Learning in this state is effortless. The stillness this child inhabits is not the stillness of shutdown, but rather full, alive and open to wonder. Every child, every animal, knows the vibration of the people around them before they have words for it. They feel the field directly and respond to the energies they are immersed in.

Children show their svābhāva early and clearly, before the world has had much time to work on them. The one inexplicably drawn to music before anyone taught them to value it. The one who is tender with animals, or who asks the questions adults have learned to stop asking. The one whose joy, when fully expressed, has a quality unlike anyone else’s joy. This is the soul making itself known.

The work of a parent (and later, of the person themselves) is in large part to protect this essence, recognize it, and clear away whatever has accumulated over it. The svābhāva isn’t fragile. But it can go quiet, protected and wait in the wings.

The Usual Conditions: The Original Bargain

Patrick also describes this: the world most children arrive into is organized, to varying degrees, around conditions. Love is available but often tied to behavior, to achievement, to a shape that works for the adults in the room.

Some children, particularly those who are sensitive, develop what might be called psychic vigilance: they tune into the emotional field of their caregivers early and learn to adjust their own behavior to calm things down.⁶ The exuberant child learns the exuberance is too much. The child who grieves loudly learns to grieve in private. The one who is wildly joyful discovers that joy needs to be managed, contained, rationed.

Before conscious thought is possible, a bargain gets struck: connection requires self-diminishment. To be loved, I must be less. My fullness is too much for the people I need. This is the deep wiring of the original bargain⁷ : the belief that being fully oneself won’t bring connection, that connection is found on a different path, best reached by compromising one’s own essence.

There is often a current of loyalty embedded in this. A child who grows up around people who are suffering can absorb the sense that it is wrong, even cruel, to be joyful when those closest to them are in pain. The suffering gets equated with love. Ease begins to feel like a form of abandonment. This loyalty to the parent’s pain isn’t conscious, rather it is an act of love by a small person who had no other tools. But it travels.

The bargain also runs deeper than the personal. The wound moves through generations not because people are broken but because it was never brought to light. What the adults haven’t worked through, the children carry, often without knowing it belongs to someone else.⁸

The Alternative We Are Invited To

The invitation isn’t to be a perfect parent. The invitation is to be a conscious one. To be awake to the bargain you were given, willing to examine which parts of it are still running, and a parent who is genuinely interested in meeting the child in front of you rather than the child you expected or needed them to be.

Central to this is a question the tradition puts directly: what if connection could arise from being fully, unapologetically yourself? What if the Divine Child within you (yes YOU, Mom or Dad), was playful, authentic, fully alive and safe to be seen and celebrated? What if that fullness, rather than a threat to love, was actually the key to the deepest connections you seek?⁹

This is the unwinding of the original bargain. It runs in both directions: toward the child in front of you, and toward the child you once were.

To the degree that we are strict, narrow, and rigid with ourselves, we will be the same with those in our care. The spaciousness we cultivate inside becomes the spaciousness we offer.

This also means releasing the model of love as reward and punishment. This model gets absorbed early and often gets projected onto God or the universe: the sense that what I really want, some authority will decide I am too much for wanting. Children raised in spacious, unconditional love develop a different relationship to desire — they bring their wishes forward. They believe the world is basically hospitable to their aliveness.

Learning reflects this too. Learning is natural and joyful until we make it heavy by organizing it around evaluation and the threat of failure. The parent who frames life’s lessons as adventure, who meets a child’s curiosity with genuine delight rather than anxious assessment, keeps that natural love of discovery alive longer.

You Can’t Get It Wrong With Good Effort

Good news for the anxious parents among us! The child is resilient. The relationship is resilient. Repair is built into the architecture of close relationship, and children don’t need a flawless parent: they need a real one.

Developmental research on attachment is clear on this: it isn’t the ruptures that determine the outcome, it is the repairs.¹⁰ The parent who loses their temper and then returns, acknowledges, reconnects is teaching that rupture doesn’t end love. You can hurt someone and come back and be met.

The child who grows up watching a parent take genuine accountability (not self-flagellation, but honest acknowledgment and returning) learns that imperfection is workable. Humans make mistakes and the world holds. Effort, honesty, and the willingness to repair are more important than perfection.

Resonance and Your Own Work

The most important thing a parent can offer isn’t a method. It is a state. Children attune to the field around them before they process language. The nervous system reads safety and danger, love and its absence, genuine ease and performed ease. The internal state of the caregiver is the primary environment. Everything else is conducted within that field.

The parent’s own healing is therefore not separate from their parenting. It is parenting. Until we walk the path of our own self-understanding, we inadvertently transmit our hidden fears, prejudices, and unresolved emotions. That’s how fields work.¹¹ Every fear you face and release, every inherited pattern you bring to consciousness, every expansion of your own capacity for presence, reaches your child directly. They witness your courage and find permission to awaken their own.

Resonance is the word for this: the child’s system settles in the presence of a parent whose system is settled.

Imperfectly Perfect Presence: With Yourself, Your Co-Parent, and Your Child

With yourself:

• Know your own triggers and fears. When something your child does activates a strong reaction in you, pause and ask: is this about them, or is this older? Named fear can be worked with. Unnamed fear acts through you.

• Examine your relationship to joy. Notice where ease feels dangerous, where receiving good things produces guilt, where difficulty has become quietly equated with love or worthiness. These are places the original bargain is still running, and they will surface when you try to let your child be freely happy. Working them in yourself is working them for the line.

• Cultivate some practice that returns you to your own body and presence — breath, movement, contemplation, time in nature. Forgive yourself generously and often. The mistakes will come. The return is what matters.

With your co-parent:

• The co-parenting relationship is a field the child lives in. Children feel the tension between adults even when nothing is said. Genuine respect and a shared commitment to the child’s wellbeing gives the child a stable ground.

• Where there is real conflict, work to contain it away from the child. Find the areas of common ground and operate from there. Speak well of the other parent in the child’s presence wherever you honestly can. The child is made of both of you. What diminishes the other touches the child.

With your child:

• Give them your attention without an agenda. Regularly, simply, and without your phone: what are you making, thinking, wondering about? Where did you feel most yourself today? This quality of presence tells the child they are real, known, worth time.

• Let them feel the full range of what they feel, including the difficult emotions. Receive their anger without retaliation, their sadness without rushing to fix it, their fear without communicating that their fear is a problem for you. The child who discovers that their inner life is survivable develops a sense of inner safety that holds them through adulthood.

• Celebrate what they love — with genuine delight in who they specifically are. Let the Divine Child in them see that it is welcome. Give them room to be loud, exuberant, inconvenient, and free. Resist the impulse to manage the joy.

• When you get it wrong, say so simply and return. The repair is a vital modeling.

Know this: the soul who arrived in your care chose well. They came to a parent who is trying, paying attention, wanting to do right by them. Trust that intelligence.

Notes

1. The framework of soul incarnation into karmically fitted conditions is found across the Vedic traditions. For the Śiva view, see Kshmarāja, Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam (The Heart of Recognition) on the soul’s descent through the tattvas into individual embodiment. For Tamil Śiva Siddhānta, see Tirumular, Tirumantiram, verses on the soul (paśu), its bonds (pāśa), and the Lord’s grace (pati) as the structure of incarnate life.

2. The three-karma framework — sanchita, prarabdha, kriyāmāna — appears across the Upanishads and is systematized in the Yoga Vasistha. The formulation that prarabdha selects conditions “most suited to spiritual evolution at the time” appears in Swami Sivananda, Karma and Disease (Divine Life Society, 1952). For the soul’s entry into karmically fitted parents, see Sant Keshavadas in traditional commentaries on the soul’s entry into the womb.

• Sanchita Karma (Accumulated): The vast, stored warehouse of actions, good and bad, from all past lives. It remains dormant until “sown” and activated.

• Prarabdha Karma (Activated/Ripe): The specific portion of Sanchita karma assigned to be experienced in the present life, constituting one’s destiny, family, and major circumstances. It cannot be avoided, only experienced.

• Kriyāmāna Karma (Current/Actionable): The actions performed in the current life that generate new karma, shaping both the remainder of the current life and future lives. It is sometimes called Agami karma.

3. Svābhāva as the soul’s own irreducible nature appears throughout Sanskrit philosophical literature. In the Trika context, see Abhinavagupta, Tantrāloka, Chapter 1, on the individual soul as a contracted expression of Śiva-consciousness retaining its essential freedom (svātantrya). See also Swami Lakshmanjoo, Kashmir Shaivism: The Secret Supreme (Universal Shaiva Fellowship, 1985).

4. Mark Whitwell, oral teaching. Whitwell is a contemporary yoga teacher, student of T.K.V. Desikachar, and heir to the Krishnamacharya lineage. This formulation is drawn from his ongoing public teaching.

5. The Divine Child as a named teaching is synthesized from conversations with Patrick Connor, 2022–2025. The underlying principle has resonance with Trika teachings on śaktipatа (transmission of grace through field and contact) as discussed in the Tantrāloka, Chapter 13.

6. The concept of the child’s psychic vigilance — attuning to the caregiver’s emotional field and adjusting behavior to regulate the relational field — is drawn from the developmental literature and is consistent with contemporary attachment research (see footnote 10).

7. The “original bargain” is synthesized from conversations with Patrick Connor, 2022–2025. It is consistent with the Trika understanding of āṇavamala (the root contraction of the individuated self) and its expression in relational patterning. See Kshmarāja, Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam, Sutra 16.

8. The transgenerational transmission of unresolved emotional material is addressed in contemporary trauma research. See Mark Wolynn, It Didn’t Start with You (Viking, 2016), which synthesizes epigenetic and psychological research on inherited trauma patterns.

9. Synthesized from conversations with Patrick Connor, 2022–2025. This formulation — that authentic self-expression is the ground of genuine connection rather than its obstacle — is a core teaching of his lineage work.

10. John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1 (Basic Books, 1969); Mary Ainsworth et al., Patterns of Attachment (Erlbaum, 1978). For the emphasis on repair as the determinative factor in secure attachment, see Ed Tronick’s Still Face research and Daniel J. Siegel and Mary Hartzell, Parenting from the Inside Out (Tarcher/Penguin, 2003).

11. The principle that a parent’s own work is the primary transmission to their child draws on two streams: the Trika understanding of the teacher’s field as teaching (see Swami Lakshmanjoo, Kashmir Shaivism: The Secret Supreme, Chapter 6) and contemporary developmental science (Daniel Siegel, The Developing Mind, Guilford Press, 1999).

Sources and Lineage

Contemporary lineage teachings attributed to Patrick Connor are drawn from direct conversations and oral transmission, 2022–2025. Mark Whitwell’s teaching is cited from oral transmission within his ongoing public work in the Krishnamacharya lineage.

The tantric teachings referenced in this essay draw primarily from Kashmir Shaivism (Trika), transmitted through the line of Vasugupta (c. 800 CE), Abhinavagupta (c. 975–1025 CE), and Kshmarāja (c. 1000–1050 CE), and revived in the modern era through Swami Lakshmanjoo (1907–1991). The second is Tamil Śiva Siddhānta, whose primary scriptural source is Tirumular’s Tirumantiram (7th–8th century CE).

The treatment of the kañcukas (the five limiting conditions through which consciousness contracts into individuality) follows Abhinavagupta’s Tantrāloka and Sir John Woodroffe’s The Garland of Letters (Varṇamālā, Ganesh & Co., 1922) as a secondary exposition. The suggestion that the family environment is the medium through which the kañcukas take their specific personal form is a conceptual interpretation bridging classical ontology and contemporary application, it isn’t a direct textual claim and should be read as such.

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Hello everyone,

How are you doing out there? I’m waking up on the moutaintop in a foot of pristine powder and bluebird skies, in awe at the beauty of this planet and her ecosystems. and grateful for a warm welcome back to Sky Haven, my son’s perch. I’ve been on fire inside in these last weeks, so much is coming clear, and I’ve been writing from the storm.

One of the big themes is on our tendency to flatten: She is like this. They are like that. This is what men are. This is what women are. This is who we bomb and why. These verdicts foreclose further looking. In the foreclosure there can be a certain kind of relief and completion, but there is rarely intimacy. Rarely connection. What looks like conviction is often just the relief of no longer having to look. What looks like ideology is often anxiety finding a container. Classification is the flight from intimacy. And intimacy, full presence with what actually is, in its unresolved and ungovernable particularity, is both the most terrifying and the most alive thing available to us.

Flattening is the shortcut we take to make the world bearable. When reality becomes too much, we tidy it and remove its dimensions. Fix it in place until it becomes manageable, nameable, something we can hold without being undone. It’s kind of like objectifying, but flattening has a different quality: taking a rich multidimensional being moving through space and time, always changing, always evolving, and pinning it in place, collapsing into one facet, and making a cartoon of it for our own comfort.

Over the next few weeks I am following this thread through varying territories where I see it showing up right now. Today is on the flattening misguidance of gender essentialism, in the context of the men’s movement and the neo-goddess traditions.

The TLDR on today’s essay on gender and being all of you:

• The men’s movement and the neo-goddess world look like opposites. They’re the same instruction: become more of a fixed gendered essence.

• The Shiva-Shakti teaching they both draw from doesn’t actually say that. Shiva and Shakti are one movement, not two poles. Awareness isn’t masculine. Radiance isn’t feminine.

• Gender essentialism is, at root, a defense against contact — with the actual, specific, ungovernable person in front of you. The personal defense and the political project are the same anxiety running at different scales.

• The gods and goddesses of the original traditions were never this narrow. Shiva carries Sati’s body across the world undone by grief. Kali slays demons.

• Flattened archetypes get picked up and used by political movements.

• Your soul — your jiva — is the irreducible specific thing you are, containing the full range of expressions, not essential gender qualities.

• You can’t love an archetype. You can only love a jiva. Hiding behind gender essence blocks wholeness of expression.

• The invitation is to both joyful fullness and increased capacity for ambiguity.

Read the full essay below.

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3/26/26: The Willingness Teachings: Working with Resistance, Vasana and Karma Mala.

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Not Two: You Contain Multitudes

Every person wants the flow, the adornment, the beauty, the permission to be soft and luminous and tended. And every person wants the rawness, the potency, the self-responsibility, the clean ferocity of someone who knows what they stand for.

These are not gendered longings. They are human ones.

The tragedy of the polarity frame is that it splits this inheritance down a gender line and hands each side only half. The men’s movement — from David Deida to the broader and often quite toxic masculinity renaissance surging through culture and algorithm alike — teaches that men’s deepest nature is Shiva: sovereign, penetrating. The neo-goddess world teaches that women’s deepest nature is Shakti: flowing, receptive, embodied radiance. The cosmology suggests a map of what men are and what women are, presented as both spiritual truth and the solution to the current optionality and changing frames around gender, desire, and power.

The ancient and very profound teachings called Shiva-Shakti are deeply mischaracterized through these gender essentialist frames.

The role availability of the modern era can be exhausting in the breadth of its self-determination. In the effort of defining a self, it can be tempting to want to be handed a clearer shape to inhabit. Taking quizzes to know your type, or standing in the self-help aisle, reaching for something that will finally tell us who we are supposed to be. The old maps — oppressive as they were — were maps. Their dissolution left genuine disorientation amidst the freedom. How do I move through desire, through power, through relationship, without a script? When someone arrives with a framework, like the gendered teachings, that says here is your nature, here is how you move — that lands as relief. It lands as rest.

Here is what the tradition that originated this teaching actually says.

Notice something first, in your own experience right now: there is no moment when you are aware and then the awareness lights up. The knowing and its luminosity happen as one thing, with no interval between them. You cannot find the seam. The sheer seamlessness of consciousness and its own radiance, the way they are not two events but one: prakāśa-vimarśa, light-recognition. Not two qualities in relationship but the single nature of consciousness knowing itself.

Shiva and Shakti are not a polarity. They are a single movement of reality knowing itself. Shakti is not the feminine counterpart to a masculine Shiva. She is Shiva’s own self-luminosity, inseparable from what he already is. One nature, not two principles in relationship. Not the oscillation between two poles. The singular vibration of the one, present in everything, available to every nervous system, prior to every gender assignment.

Awareness is not masculine. Radiance is not feminine. These are appearances within consciousness, not properties of it. The full inheritance — the beauty and the rawness, the stillness and the ferocity, the flow and the structural power — belongs to every human being, because it is what every human being arises within.

The teaching can’t be conscripted to give you an identity to wear. It points through every image, every role, every fixed form, toward the singularity underneath.

Recently I watched a young man use the language of sacred masculine — the whole Shiva-Shakti polarity framework, the presence teaching, the idea of holding his edge before the feminine — to avoid feeling the specific woman in front of him. Her aliveness, her particularity, the sheer ungovernable realness of her was making him anxious in the way that actual presence always does. The masculinity framework gave him somewhere to stand that was not inside that anxiety. He could relate to the feminine — which is so much safer than relating to her.

The entire architecture of gender essentialism — the men’s movement, the goddess world, the polarity framework, the trad-wife aesthetic, the pronatalist agenda running beneath all of it — is, at the root, a defense against contact. Against the terrifying, ungovernable, annihilating experience of an actual other person. A specific other person who does not resolve into a type, who cannot be managed by a framework, who exceeds every category you bring to them and keeps exceeding it.

If she is Shakti and I am Shiva, I don’t have to feel her. Cosmology is a distance-making device.

And the political movement that needs women to be mothers and receivers and soft and tended is running the same operation at scale. Women who are legible — typed, categorized, assigned a nature — are women who can be managed and to whom others can hold a standard. Women who contain multitudes, who are specific and sovereign and unpredictable, who refuse to resolve into a type, are more challenging. Which is precisely what certain political projects cannot afford.

The personal defense and the political project are the same movement. The anxiety is the same anxiety. The framework is the same framework.

The content that thrives right now — algorithmically, commercially, and culturally — rewards fixed gender identity, complementary roles, and nostalgia for arrangements that delivered social stability at a specific cost. The men’s movement is extraordinarily algorithm-friendly: clear hierarchies, clear enemies, clear metrics of dominance. The trad-wife aesthetic photographs beautifully. The pronatalist agenda running through certain strands of both movements is not subtle if you look directly: return women to reproductive centrality, restore masculine authority as natural and sacred order. Add the insult that it’s a spiritual or godly project, and you even get to pull the human longings for meaning-making and belonging into the fuel tank.

The goddess world is more complicated, and I want to be precise because much of it is genuinely nourishing and politically conscious. But consider this: you do the retreat, you soften, you learn to receive, you regulate your nervous system, you become more beautiful and less threatening — and somehow, in the process, you have aligned to the market version of the sacred feminine and the political project of returning women to receptivity, the body, and the tending of immediate life, rather than the design of a world that works for all of life.

The gods and goddesses across all traditions are far more balanced than the contemporary market versions of either.

Artemis hunted alone in the mountains, wanting no company and no softness. Durga rode into battle. Kali danced on the chest of the defeated ego with her tongue out and her sword raised. The Morrígan — the Celtic goddess of fate and war — circled the battlefield as a crow, choosing who would live. Skadi strapped on her skis and moved through the winter mountains entirely on her own terms.

And the gods: Shiva himself is not only the sovereign — he is Nataraja, the cosmic dancer, and the ash-covered ascetic who sits in cremation grounds, and the one so undone by grief at Sati’s death that he carries her body across the world unable to put her down. Dionysus is ecstatic, boundary-dissolving, as likely to be found weeping as conquering. Osiris is dismembered. The Green Man dies into the earth every winter and is reborn. Coyote is a trickster who keeps getting it wrong. Apollo and Dionysus are not separate gods but the two faces of the same divine restlessness.

The original traditions held the full range in both directions — the fierce and the tender, the sovereign and the surrendered, the penetrating and the undone. What the contemporary market versions did, in both the men’s movement and the neo-goddess world, was curate. Each selected the expressions most useful for a particular identity product and left the rest on the shelf. Kali for your mad feelings but not your demon slaying. Shiva’s presence but not his grief.

When you fix an archetype — when you say this is what this energy means and this is who carries it — you make it available for capture, a flag carried by whoever picks it up. The warrior goddess energy was picked up by nationalism, by blood-and-soil rhetoric, by political machinery coopting the imagery of fierce feminine protection for its own ends. The men’s movement slides without friction into authoritarian aesthetics, sacred masculine as justification for hierarchy, for the strong man who restores order.

The tradition has a word for the individual soul in its full particularity: jiva. From the Sanskrit root meaning to live, to breathe — the living one. Not a type. Not an archetype. Not a gender assignment. This specific, irreducible, dynamic expression of the one consciousness — you, exactly as configured, with your complete and contradictory and magnificent range. The jiva is what remains when you subtract every category, every role, every inherited shape. And what remains is not emptiness but a startling aliveness. Particular. Unmistakable. Yours.

Walt Whitman knew it without the Sanskrit: I contain multitudes.

I was sitting in an airport recently, across from a collegiate women’s basketball team. Strong, spatially dominant, physically raw, regal. Fully Artemis. Definitely not simpering. Human variation within any gender is vastly greater than variation between genders. Essentialism takes the statistical tails and calls them the truth of the category. Everyone else becomes a deviation to correct. But the single movement of Shiva-Shakti produces infinite variation in form. Consciousness expressing in manifestation is not tending toward a type.

You contain multitudes. The warrior and the mystic. The one who weeps at beauty and the one who will not move. The architect and the dancer. The grandmother and the strategist. The woman in the floral crown drafting the legal brief. The man who tends the altar and holds the line. These are not integrations of opposites, not borrowings from the other gender’s column. They are the single movement expressing through the particular miracle of your jiva.

And here is what this means for love. You cannot love a Shakti or a Shiva. A Queen or a King. You cannot love an archetype. You can only love a jiva — this one, this specific impossible particular person, who contains multitudes you will spend a lifetime not fully knowing. The framework that types the beloved protects you from the overwhelming reality of them. It is a defense against the very contact that love requires.

Real intimacy — the kind that changes you, that asks everything — is only possible between two people who have stopped hiding behind their gender essence and shown up as the full, unresolved, excessive, sovereign thing they actually are. Two jivas meeting. Nothing managed. Nothing safely categorized.

What I want for all of us is the joy of the full story. The joy available right now, in this body, as this particular irreducible being — when you stop auditing yourself against a type and simply get curious about the whole of what is here.

In my own life, after decades as a productive asset in a system that valued output above almost everything else, the genuine and hard-won turn toward the sacred feminine was an amazing gift. The slowness, the beauty, the deep remembering of something that productivity culture had buried gave me back something essential. And still, my unique expression, even in the middle of all that beauty, is thoroughly sovereign and holds an energy that would cut you if you came close to harming those I was charged with caring for. This is jiva — the living, breathing, irreducible whole of what I actually am. The floral crown and the legal brief. The crystal bindi and the willingness to cut. The altar and the hunt. The capacity to be moved and the capacity to move unmovably. The softness and the sovereignty. The beauty and the rawness.

Facets of a jiva — a living, breathing, specific soul — so particular and alive that no system built on gender essence could have predicted you.

And the people who love you — who really love you — do not need you to be a type. They need you to be real. Overwhelmingly, dangerously, specifically real.

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A friend and I were texting before dawn, sharing Hubble images of this spectacularly vast, alive universe. OMFG the wonder. Earth alone is f*ing epic, much less the parade of galaxies. And the body is that too: the infinite, unutterably magnificent expression of creation. It’s astonishing that anyone could be confused about the divinity of reality at all scales when we’re standing here in and as THIS.

And yet many are confused about our cosmic sweetness, and choose to harm creation.

Standing for this beauty, even when for many people it seems invisible or immaterial, is our promise to life. Even when society’s miracle-blindness stuns us enough to drag us off course for a moment… we come back. We return to reverence.

Many of you are righteously rage posting right now and that’s fine. There’s a lot to be disgusted by. I implore you: ground the rage in love, not fear, and take care of your spirit. Put your head to the ground each day. Feel the beauty each day. Cook nourishing food. Protect a child, a forest, a pet, an elder. Create something. Be with your feelings. Find others and dance it out. Place your attention deliberately on what is beautiful—or you risk burning out, collapsing, or being pulled deeper into the polarity you oppose, and thus perpetuating the very cycles you’re resisting.

We can respond from alignment with the vastness, the beauty, the wonder, the life that cannot be harmed by the ignorance of the world... and witness not from inside the polarity, but from the frequency of the love that is creation.

We can hold our signs and signifiers grounded in the wonder of this living universe we’re standing inside.

Because: the Sombrero Galaxy (photo: NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration)

Hare Om Tat Sat.

All Love,

Christine Marie

Holarchy is the Only Way Forward

This post might surprise you (as I founded, funded and run a women’s health and sexuality company, and have written an entire library of content and books on women’s embodiment) but while I utterly celebrate the MAGNIFICENCE of women, I I think Holarchy is the only way forward.

A holarchy is not a world in which gender has no meaning or difference is erased in the name of equality. Mistaking sameness for justice creates its own distortions. A holarchy is a living system in which every part has genuine dignity, voice, and accountability, and in which differences are generative rather than hierarchical. Yin qualities—receptivity, relational intelligence, cyclical knowing, the capacity to hold paradox—are not subordinated but partnered with Yang qualities. Power moves from wholeness rather than dominance.

Men and women are no longer projections of fear, desire, or absence: they are actual people. The feminine and masculine, in whatever proportions, are not enemies but two great movements of a single life. Holarchy is the social and political form that emerges from this understanding: neither principle dominates, but each makes the other more fully itself.

I would like to see less polarization and more of the edge conversation that happen in encounter spaces to be held in mainstream environments: women and men sitting together safely, speaking the truth about what has been done and received across the long, tangled history of gender, and really listening, without defense, without counter-claim—to what lands on the other side. I want that act of repair, demanding and exacting, because it is only there that something new becomes possible.

In gender, harm is often inherited, enacted within a system neither party created. Reconciliation let’s us holding both accountability and pattern recognition: I did this, and I did this within a current that predates me. Men and women both speak and note the costs carried across generations. This can reach places personal apology alone just can’t.

Here’s what happens in gender reconciliation spaces:

Men Are Most Often Asked to Acknowledge:

• Violence and the threat of it: Women organize their lives around the presence or threat of male violence—street harassment, domestic spaces, war, systemic rape. Apology is for acts and the atmosphere created.

• Sexual violation and enabling culture: Centuries of treating women’s bodies as property or objects, blaming the victim, and institutional dismissal. Apology for systemic normalization of violation.

• Dismissal of women’s knowing: Women’s intelligence—embodied, relational, intuitive—was discredited. Apology for suppressing a whole register of knowledge.

• Appropriation of labor: Domestic, emotional, reproductive, creative, intellectual, and spiritual work taken or erased without recognition.

• Abandonment: Physical or emotional absence, or presence without engagement, leaving women and children to reorganize their lives.

• Failure to protect: Silence or inaction when harm was visible; loyalty to male solidarity over basic decency.

What Women Are Most Often Asked to Acknowledge:

• Policing other women: Judging or constraining other women, turning the instrument of oppression onto the nearest target.

• The queen bee/closed door: Using hard-won power to block others rather than change oppressive conditions.

• Passing conditioning to children: Raising boys and girls under inherited scripts that perpetuate gendered limitations and emotional suppression.

• Mother wound delivered to sons: Conditional love and emotional withdrawal that shapes boys’ sense of worth, affecting their future relationships.

• Indirect power and its cost: Using subtle influence—guilt, withdrawal, manipulation—because direct power was forbidden; causing real harm.

• Covering and enabling: Protecting men from consequences, often from confusion or self-interest, leaving others unprotected.

The world this work makes possible is not utopia, but a system operating closer to its actual nature. The historical hierarchy between masculine and feminine is not natural or inevitable; it is a constructed arrangement that has cost everyone something essential. Change requires more than legislation or institutional reform—it requires the willingness to look at each other, speak the truth of what has happened, and receive it without collapsing into defensiveness or despair. In rooms all over the world, women and men have arrived with decades of accumulated wound and left with an unexpected tenderness for the other side. That tenderness is the ground of holarchy. Everything else—structures, systems, policies—can be built on it.

We are each and all of us half our mother and half our father, it is a biological fact. In Hinduism, Shiva and Shakti are one, indivisible. This parallels the christian mystery, where the disembodied G*d and the embodied female Mary conspire to create the sons and daughters of the earth, as the christed consciousness: there is no creation, no material reality without both male and female in equal measure, acting as one. Let’s create the world from this knowing.

Last Call for Living Tantra, Spring 2026 Cohort Starts this Week.

Come be with me in practices, philosophies and invitations to feel and act from your truest deepest nature. Tuesdays from 5-7 pacific time. Live (with recordings for meetings you might miss).

Mantra, Tantra, Ayahuasca: Ecstasy, Devotion and the Return of the Holy Body

"So much wisdom and expression is pouring out from you — you're so much in a state of flow, in expansiveness."- MS

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