Founder Letter: How's Your Walk? How's Your Practice?
Dear Rosies,
Many years ago, snowshoeing on the side of a mountain in Montana with my school friend Doug, he asked me, “How’s your walk?” Not your to-do list or the hustle, but the way you meet your own being. The way you walk through the world, moment by moment. The way you listen. The way you return to center. The way you speak to the Mystery in your heart, and answer the call of purpose.
With my closest friends, we hold a shared inquiry: “How’s your practice?” Not just whether you went to the mat, or journaled, or sat in the stillness of your own being today, rather, how is your relationship with your practice? Are you showing up for it like you would for someone you love? Is it growing you? Holding you? Disrupting you when needed? Are you feeling awake, or numb? Are you looking from the light, from the Self?
We all know the kind of learning that happens just by living. We notice what arises, try to stay open, let experience teach us. We learn from relationships, from breakdowns, from beauty. We get knocked out by life, we get inspired, we read a line of poetry and it opens something. We practice resilience. If we’re paying attention, we grow. We grow into varying degrees of wisdom from this casual response to life. And that can be a beautiful thing.
But sometimes another moment arrives, when casual spiritual contact doesn’t carry us anymore. When the flash of awareness, or peace, or joy, or the occasional peak experience, no longer satisfies. We feel a deeper longing, maybe a sense that we want to commit to creating a life that centers spiritual development. Especially when it’s not easy or beautiful to choose it, when old patterns of separation want to claim their dominance. This is even more profound if we have been poisoned by religious trauma or dogma, but somehow still know of the gorgeous ineffable mystery of the space in between the seen world.
When we choose this, we begin making more rhythmic space for the development of our inner scaffolding, to be a more helpful node on the network. We bow to life with a heart that doesn’t “know”. We actively create the conditions for awakening. We set aside time. We choose teachers. We develop tools, ways of listening and attuning. We speak more clearly and truthfully. We stay with our practices when they seem boring, or hard, or disruptive. We invite the kind of discipline that arises from devotion, not from obligation or pressure. Once that decision is made, it starts to re-pattern everything in our lives.
For me, the biggest decision we can make in this life is to choose to walk with clarity, devotion and intention, and to practice looking at the world as Love, to live from the joy, strength, suppleness and radiance of the one light that animates it all, to resting in that love that holds it all.
There is a giant awakening on the earth right now now. It can look like the world is more violent, louder, faster, more fractured than ever. My lens is different, though. I see this frenzy as a great revealing: it is actually the veil becoming thinner, we are seeing more of the world than we ever have- we are seeing what is behind the fractal of our blindness- what is alive in human consciousness. The conditions we’ve carried in our deepest hearts—violence and separation, yes, but also beauty and creation—are becoming more visible. The world is actually more alive than ever.
The subtle is also louder. So many more people coming into sovereignty and deep knowing of who they are and the world they want to see created. There’s more light pouring in. And we have to be home in ourselves to receive it. And what an amazement it is when we can let it flood us, allow the light come directly into the crown chakra, and all the way through the body to the base, from the core to the edges. Especially now, when the noise is high. Especially now. As the inner life clarifies, the outer actions also clarify.
You might also be surprised at the quality of the conversations that arise just by showing an interest in these questions. So, how’s your walk? How’s your practice?
With love and curiosity,
Christine Marie Mason
Founder, Rosebud Woman & Host, The Rose Woman Podcast
@rosebudwoman
If you are called to deepen the inquiry in your own body and being, the next cycle of my 6 week course, Living Tantra, is open for registration, which begins again September 16th. It's a live, intimate journey into embodied relational intelligence, sacred Eros, and the deep ethics of presence.
