Come in Closer

2025 Ridiculous Gratitudes. Living Tantra as an Idea and Community.

Thank You for 2025

Thank you for being here with me this year. If you’re here, reading this long form and often nerdy stuff, then you’re a particular sort: thoughtful, nuanced, with a unique heart-mind drawn to ancient wisdom made alive and embodied for now. Your attention is valuable, and I aim to honor that with high signal work that is valuable to you. I’d love to hear from you on what has stayed with you this year. If you have any questions you want me to go deeper on, or real life topics you want to explore through this lens of classical tantra, ecospirituality and liberation theology, please let me know in the comments.

Musing and Memory

I sat down to write the thank yous for the year, and it became a gorgeous dance. Here it is, stream of consciousness. Once you start attending to the beauty, it is unending.

Remember being in Hampi with Adam Bauer singing the Hanuman Chalisa in that tiny temple on the hill? Remember getting the call from Connor that his beloved Rachel had said yes under a waterfall in the Oregon rain? Remember the canyonlands at the crest of dawn on the summer solstice with Colin? Rock climbing with Mason? Miso chocolate chips and bedtime tea in front of the fire, wrapped in a silky conversation with Samantha? Sitting in that jewelbox theater in Silver Lake, receiving Jarrett’s prodigious and moving musical de-armoring, and seeing Grace again in the flesh—oof, the tears there! Remember that day in May with DJ Taz Rashid, Adam, Samantha Sweetwater, and Amikaeyla Gaston, dropping into the Wonder Sunday experience? With Maya on the beach in San Francisco, with her wall of white roses and Florida water and the whales? The infinite signs from the divine when we are paying attention?

Remember floating under the big trees in the hot water, bodies slipping and sliding as if there was truly no separation? Remember that morning kriya for protection with Yasmeen? That late night pub in London with my oldest friend? The energy of the mother field entering the body and being completely in the stream? Sitting with John Shiva and Katie Roper and Kyle Buckley and Sam and Richard Bock over tea at the spa imagining Sundari’s future? Stadium seating, crying inexplicably while my niece sang the National Anthem at her graduation from Oregon—so proud of my brother and his beautiful family. Jumping in the river together, taking the communion of cold, the whole family baptizing together.

Remember holding the just-printed Nine Lives book in your hand, or getting those first reviews? Remember that spontaneous spoken word intro that came out of nowhere at the Holomovement—that was so fun. Remember touching the new products for the first time, the sense of satisfaction that they were this functional and this pretty? How about puttering around Sacred Ground after all the guests have left, and it’s just Elizabeth Arolyn Walsh and me comparing notes, with the light on the lily pond? Remember puja on the crystal mountain with Viraja Prema? The museum of illusions and the year-long conversation with Marc Cooper?

How about that morning in the gaze of the Sagrada Familia with Jill Purce and Rupert Sheldrake and Alessandro, talking consciousness, pilgrimage, and the mystic Christ? Remember the opening circle at Sundari Gardens Thanksgiving with 60 gorgeous souls praying in Hawaiian, praying with the french horn and the drums, praying with their dancing feet—babies and elders and flow artists all praying together? Or rolling around on John Shiva Gray’s silk rugs, laughing and singing and wrestling in the coqui-frog dense soundscape of Puna? Or sunrise, summiting alone at the ruins of Tepoztlán? How about dancing wild around the altar after the third cup with Billy and Kai and the whole beautiful assemblage in white and gold?

Remember the satisfaction of smacking the back of the truck, loaded up with furniture going to Montana, where everything just fit in perfectly? Cutting down a Christmas tree on Ky’s land and decorating it with his wonderful partner Stephanie and Colin and the dogs, just feeling like all is right with the world.

There was a moment just two weeks ago, in London, with Jonathan and Rita and Dorota—a Freemasonry ritual in a 500-year-old tower, where there was the felt presence of Sir Francis Bacon, the flame of Shiva and the frequency of Mary in the room with us.

I can’t even touch in words the magnitudes of beautiful moments and relations. And this isn’t even mentioning the infinite grace of the sangha and the time with Patrick, or the profound shift from giving and getting love to simply being it. Even the overhangs I am holding are resolving in the right timing.

Thus, I end 2025 like I started it: Thank you, life. Thank you for this embodiment, for radiant close connections with my children and family, friends and fellow travelers. Thank you for clarity of purpose, for a steady center of loving presence, and for the gift of nuanced and textured curiosity in a chaotic world.

In this moment of equilibrium, all of the pain and suffering that it took to get here seems completely logical in retrospect—like I wouldn’t change a thing. All of life has been pointing to greater resilience, trust, devotion, sovereignty.

The human and invisible supports to arrive here have been astonishing. And I know that this support is here for all of us, accessible to all of us, right now. External circumstances will undoubtedly change, but now I know this field of light is always here and always available.

And now, to you.

Thank you to all of you who joined for live teachings, retreats, and courses in 2025:

I am in awe of your presence, your sincerity, your courage to stay with sensation, truth, love, and not-knowing. I love seeing how the contacts you make here spin out into tighter practice groups and local friendships. Someone in Sweden connects with someone in Aspen going through a similar threshold. An older mother mentors a woman birthing for the first time. You are the vital body of community.

Together, we practice intimacy with life as it is—meeting what’s here with steadiness, strengthening our capacity to see clearly and stay with sensation. We merge the glorious easy joy of unity awareness with the sensorial explosions that come with this life in a body.

I want to call us back to the heart of the tantric pathway we are investigating together: Everything is included in the sacred. The body is the holy instrument of perception, the gateway to the one. Relationship is the path of awakening—in fact, all life is relationship. Presence is more transformative than force. Beauty, reverence, and attention are technologies of love. It’s all frequency.

Bowing to this living lineage, with its presence, depth, nuance, and aims for an unconditional and grounded love.

My prayer for this coming year is that it be a time of quiet miracles, of harmonics, of right relationship with our bodies, with one another, and with the earth and heavens. A time of perfect coherence, empathy, warmth, and truth from which we evolve the future into a more just and beautiful experience for more of us.

All love,

Christine Marie Mason

Come Closer in 2026

For those who have been walking with me, if you feel the pull to deepen in practice, in study, in the intimacy of this community, there are several pathways opening in the year ahead. And if you found your way here through one doorway or another—as a Rosebud customer, a Museletter reader, a Rose Woman podcast listener, or a reader of this year’s new books The Nine Lives of Woman or The Mystic Heart of Easter, I invite you to come in closer.

We will have our monthly free community calls through 2026—spaces to practice together, listen, inquire, and re-center. There are immersions and intensives for those wanting to go deeper in embodied practice and relational work (April Easter Intensive is now open in SoCal, and we have 2 spots open in Portugal in May). A new Living Tantra online cohort begins March 10, 2026 for those drawn to sustained, integrated study. And for some, it feels right to work more closely through private spiritual advisory and support, walking together with specific questions, thresholds, or transitions.

I would be overjoyed to have your company if you want to join everything and go as deep as possible into this study and worldview, so that together we create an ever-deepening, capacious practice community!

Do it all, or do nothing. Know that the field is already alive between us, this work continues, and I’m here with you.

Just Released:

“The Mystic Heart of Easter by Christine Marie Mason is a beautifully written, deeply insightful guide that reimagines the Easter story as a living, universal pattern of transformation. Rather than treating Holy Week as distant history, Mason shows how its arc—surrender, descent, uncertainty, and renewal—is unfolding in each of us right now. Holy Week is reframed as a universal cycle of transformation—one that repeats throughout our lives whenever we face loss, uncertainty, or rebirth.”- Amazon Review