The Prosperity Body

Dec 5

Hi all: If you’re holiday shopping, please consider the beautiful plant based-body products, aromatics, candles, soaps, books and all the good things from me, Rosebud Woman and Radiant Farms. If you’re gifting yourself, consider coming on retreat in 2026. Jan-May 2026 courses and retreats are up for registration, as is my newly released litle book on the Mystic Heart of Easter (#1 Release in Mysticism, thank you for the review and purchases- xoxoxoxox). This week I am continuing in the vein of the fully activated body as vessel. Enjoy! CMM

I’ve been working with the idea of the Prosperity Body, the body for thriving and creating, in my practices and teaching, and wanted to dive into that in today’s post. Please note that this is not the twisted idea of the prosperity gospel, which says that some external agent rewards the good with abundance and which is used to justify all manner of pastoral extraction, but rather prosperity as a body that is a platform for an abundant and thriving existence, that is honored, adored, adorned. One that is a shaktified potent transmission tower! There’s a reason you don’t see depressed goddesses in the iconography of awakening. Kali dances with wild energy. Lakshmi glows. Durga rides a tiger. Mary vibrates in luminous blue at the highest frequency. Chronic depletion is not the natural state of the awakened being.

On the surface “Prosperity Body” sounds like a wellness marketer’s dream, but what I mean by prosperity is a body that has enough rest, enough breath, enough nourishment, enough safety to stop bracing against life. Enough openness for energy to move. A body whose life force is not being siphoned off into chronic depletion, and therefore has enough vitality to carry what you are here to carry… to do all the things, feel all the feels, and to sense the world both acutely and accurately.

AND: a prosperity body is one we treat as the dwelling place of consciousness, of divine presence, a “temple of the Holy Spirit” in each and every cell. If that is true (or even if we pretend it is true for the sake of experiment) then the baseline of the Prosperity Body is the recognition that form, matter, body are sacred, and we act accordingly.

Maybe we don’t need to state this, maybe it’s obvious, but modernity isn’t helping this and can instead thieve our life force. We’re walking around at reduced capacity, eating food that inflames us, carrying tension we don’t even notice anymore. Deconditioned, sleep-deprived, running on stress hormones and caffeine. Many humans walk around with dozens of tiny tensions and aches and coping strategies that we have normalized. Our shoulders live a few inches higher than they need to and many of our nervous systems are stuck in a low hum of vigilance.

We have a certain amount of energy in a day, some of which will always go to digestion, circulation, immune function, or the basic housekeeping of being alive. But when we layer on chronic pain, unaddressed fatigue, inflammation, sleep debt, and old bracing patterns, a tremendous portion of vitality gets diverted toward managing distress. What’s left for everything else (for creative work, for relational presence, for clear seeing, for your sacred work in the world) is whatever remains after the ongoing emergency.

This is one of the reasons so many people feel like their life is smaller than their soul. The soul isn’t wrong about what it wants. Rather, the body is simply exhausted.

The body is a microcosm of the culture, of the planet. Tending to the body’s depletion is foundational, infrastructure level work for a conscious, awakened, thriving world.

The Body Shapes Consciousness

There’s a temptation in spiritual circles to imagine that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, sitting above it and peering down. But every tradition that has tracked this carefully ends up saying the same thing: the state of the body profoundly shapes the state of mind.

The Greeks had a word that braided these together: kalokagathia, the beautiful-good. Physical goodness and moral goodness were not separate categories. A tuned, vital, disciplined body created the conditions for clear thinking and right action. This is why philosophy was taught in the gymnasium as well as the academy. Plato and Aristotle both understood that the body was foundational.

We nourish life through alignment. By working with breath, food, movement, and environment and seasonality, by harmonizing, we can create the conditions for effortless action. We don’t push or grind; you act from a place of stored, well-directed energy. When energy flows freely, and our essence is preserved and refined, we work from overflow rather than depletion.

The yogic and tantric texts, particularly in the Shaiva traditions also say that the body is the only vehicle of awakening. My current favorite text, The Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, offers 112 meditation instructions that all rely on bodily experience: breath, heartbeat, sensual pleasure, grief, sound, light, even the moment before a sneeze. The doorway is always right here, in sensation.

The Tamil Siddhas mapped 72,000 nadis, channels through which energy flows, and said that blockages in those channels don’t only cause illness; they limit perception. A tangled river doesn’t know its own width. They understood the body as a transformer of energy, and invite the refinement of the body into a vessel so clear it becomes transparent to divine energy.

The Tamil sage Thirumoolar writes in the Tirumantiram: “The body is a temple, the mind is the devotee within it.” But he goes on to describe exactly how to purify that temple. Through breath. Through internal alchemy.

When the body is rested, nourished, unbraced, when the channels are relatively clear, consciousness simply has more bandwidth for other things. The camera lens of your awareness is not smeared with fatigue and pain. Your capacity to see what is true, to sense what is needed, to respond with love, all grows. The yogic text the Shiva Samhita describes how when the nadis are purified and prana flows without obstruction, the yogi experiences ananda—bliss—as the natural condition of an efficient, well-tended body.

The Prosperity Body is a consciousness project.

The Economy of Effort: Perfect Alert Non-Tension

There is another dimension here that fascinates me: the economy of effort.

If you have ever watched a master martial artist, a classical Indian dancer, a seasoned yogi, or a Zen monk simply walking, you can see it. There is this quality of perfect, alert non-tension. Every gesture is fully inhabited, and then it is gone. No extra tightening, no theatrics, no residue.

I see this in my own teacher, Patrick. When he’s sitting in front of the room—listening, dialoguing, fully present—he is completely relaxed. No extra muscle active anywhere. His shoulders aren’t braced. His jaw isn’t holding. He’s not performing presence; he’s simply there, available, at ease.

Then in a moment when something needs his attention (a question that requires him to move, a demonstration, a shift in the room) he can jump up instantly with full vitality. The energy is there, precise and complete. And then, just as quickly, he drops back into that effortless ease, to quiet readiness.

This isn’t a technique he’s applying. It’s what happens when you’ve trained the nervous system to trust itself. The body knows it will have what it needs when it needs it, so it doesn’t have to stay mobilized all the time.

A body in this state is neither limp nor rigid. It is awake, responsive, quietly powerful. There is a kind of trust in the design: the muscles will fire when they need to, and they will switch off when they don’t.

In yoga we call this sthira sukham (steadiness and ease). You’re training the body to find the exact amount of effort needed—no more, no less—and to release everything else. The cue I use in practice is “How might I find more precision and more pleasure in this posture?” I find that a good note for life.

The Siddhas would say that when you stop leaking energy into unnecessary tension, what you conserve becomes radiance, the luminosity of a clear channel.

I think of this as an ethical principle as much as a physical one: use no more force than is needed. Let go completely when it’s done. Don’t go on carrying what has already happened. Don’t hold your jaw over an email that is long finished.

This kind of precise, loving economy in the body is one face of prosperity. Nothing wasted. Nothing hoarded. Nothing clenched in fear.

The Frequency of a Prosperous Body

When you shift from treating the body as a problem to be solved into treating it as a beloved to be tended, something happens in your field. People feel it. Our nervous systems are exquisitely tuned instruments. We read each other’s posture, breath, facial tension, micro-movements constantly. When you are at war with your body, that war is legible. When you are quietly in love with your body, that love is legible too. This is a kind of resonance. Like tuning forks. Bodies in proximity begin to vibrate at similar frequencies.

When you inhabit your body with prosperity consciousness others unconsciously attune to that frequency and begin reflecting it back. That might look like moving through space as though you belong, dressing as though you’re worth beauty, nourishing yourself as though you’re precious.

A body that is rested, hydrated, fed, adorned, and allowed to unclench sends out a different kind of signal. It says: “It is safe to be here.” “There is room.” “There is enough.”

Other bodies tune to that.

You become what physicists call a strange attractor. People who resonate with that frequency naturally draw closer. Opportunities that match that vibration begin appearing. You’re not chasing or convincing. You’re radiating. And what matches finds you.

This is one way that prosperity works. It isn’t only about hustling for resources or pushing the boulder of your destiny up the hill. It’s about becoming a coherent point in the field. A place where energy can land and move.

When people feel safe in your presence, they want to collaborate. When you are well-rested, you notice opportunities you would have missed in a fog. When you’re not in chronic pain, you have more to give. The spiral is obvious once you see it.

Every time you choose the nourishing meal, the movement practice, the rest, the adornment, you’re reinforcing a pattern in your own nervous system and in the field around you, making radiance more available as a frequency others can access.

When you treat your body as worthy and others begin reflecting that back that external validation reinforces your internal pattern. The mirroring confirms you’re transmitting clearly. And that confirmation allows you to relax more deeply into the truth of it, which purifies the frequency further, which draws more coherent responses.

It’s an abundance spiral! I am whole. I show up as whole. Others perceive wholeness. I’m met with honor. I relax more fully into wholeness.

Prosperity in the body spills out into prosperity in relationship, in work, in creativity, in timing. Not in magical thinking, but in a very practical, nervous-system-based way.

“Dressing for God” Redux: The World is the Church

I grew up with the phrase “Sunday best.” You put on your good clothes to go to church or to a holiday dinner. There was something in it that felt fussy and rule-bound to me as a kid, but there was also another current that I only recognize now.

Every tradition has some form of bathing, clothing, and adorning before entering the sacred space. In Hindu puja, the deity is washed, anointed with oil, wrapped in fresh fabric, garlanded with flowers. It’s not vanity. It’s seva—devotional service. In Islam, there is wudu, ritual washing before prayer. In older Christian practice, you would never show up to the sanctuary unwashed and carelessly dressed.

On the surface this looks like dualism: the body is messy, God is holy, therefore you must tidy up to be allowed in. But if we take seriously the idea that the body itself is the temple, that the sacred has chosen this throat, these hands, this skin as a place to dwell, then “dressing for God” takes on an entirely different meaning.

In 2018, we were in Japan and learned this concept: ichi-go ichi-e (”one time, one meeting”). Every encounter is unique, unrepeatable, therefore precious. The world is the church, every day is the holy day, and your body is the altar.

Then getting dressed in the morning isn’t a superficial act. It’s an act of coherence. It’s you saying to life: “I know who arrives in this room with me. I will meet that with intention.”

The Western church created this devastating split. Spirit is holy, flesh is suspect. You dress up on Sunday to transcend your base nature for an hour, then spend the rest of the week in utilitarian relationship with the meat-suit.

The incarnational traditions, underneath all the noise, say that matter matters. That embodiment is the point. There is a radical holiness of flesh and matter. God/dess doesn’t just tolerate having a body, it chooses it as the medium of revelation. So if divinity is expressing as your body, then caring for its presentation isn’t vanity, it’s coherence, alignment, and conscious participation in the sacred showing up as you.

It doesn’t mean expensive clothing or rigid dress codes. It could be as simple as choosing a color that helps your nervous system settle, or a fabric that makes your skin feel deeply okay, or a ring that you touch when you want to remember your vows.

In the Tantric traditions, this is shringar, or beautification as spiritual practice. In the stories of Radha and Krishna, the gopis spend hours adorning themselves for the beloved. Not to attract: Krishna is already enchanted… but for the pleasure of the devotional act itself. And this isn’t just for women. The Maasai warriors have elaborate adornments, the samurai pays exquisite attention to his robes and grooming. When you dress with care, you’re communicating to yourself first: Today matters. I matter. What I’m doing is significant enough to warrant my own attention.

Adornment, in this sense, is a little daily puja. Dressing the deity that is you.

The Bhakti Turn: Make Your Body Right, Court Yourself

There is a risk, of course, that everything I’m describing could become just another thing to fail at. Another list of practices, another set of ideals.

This is where bhakti, the path of devotion, steps in.

Here the body is not a project at all, but a most intimate beloved. If that were true, how would you feed her? How would you let him rest? How would you speak to them when they were tired or hurting? How would you touch them as they age, as they change, as they carry you through grief and joy and long, ordinary days?

Bhakti says: treat the divine as the beloved and the beloved as the divine. If the divine is living as your body, then every small act of care becomes a love gesture.

In the bhakti traditions, especially the Radha-Krishna schools, the relationship between devotee and divine is utterly intimate. Sensual. Tender. The gopis bathe Krishna, adorn him, feed him, dance with him, from an intoxicated love, not a duty bound ritual.

The Kashmiri Shaiva texts speak of camatkara. In one sense, it is the wonder and aesthetic rapture that arises when you recognize the divine in the specific, sensory, embodied moment. Your prosperity body could be rooted there. In wonder at this astonishing form you get to inhabit. In devotional care for its flourishing. In pleasure at its aliveness.

The body knows how to thrive when it’s held in love rather than judgment. The nervous system knows how to regulate when it feels safe rather than constantly monitored. The Shakti knows how to flow when the channel is welcomed rather than critiqued.

You feed yourself with tenderness because you love, not because you’re trying to hit a macro ratio. You move in ways that feel alive because you love, not because your watch is tracking your steps. You rest because you love, not because you finally “earned” it. You adorn because you love, not because you’re proving anything.

When love is the organizing principle, the body moves toward its own version of prosperity almost on its own.

We don’t bully ourselves into health. We court ourselves. We let ourselves be loved by the world and it’s beauties.

The bhakti approach means you’re not white-knuckling discipline from a place of “I’m broken.” You’re lavishing care on what you already love. There’s pleasure in it. Tenderness. Playfulness even.

If your “clean eating” becomes orthorexia, if your fitness routine becomes compulsive, if your self-care becomes another source of anxiety, then you’ve lost the thread. The prosperity body is flexible. Forgiving. Adaptive. Some days it’s a green juice and a vigorous practice. Some days it’s rest and comfort food and gentle stretching.

The underlying frequency is kindness, respect, listening, responding to what the body is actually asking for.

A Prosperity Body for Every Body

I want to say explicitly that the Prosperity Body is not restricted to a narrow band of bodies. It is not a “look” or youth or ability. It’s not pain-free, trauma-free, or scar-free. A person living with chronic illness who learns to rest without guilt is embodying prosperity. An 82-year-old who moves slowly but with delight is embodying prosperity. A body marked by scar and rupture, when held with reverence instead of contempt, is embodying prosperity.

Prosperity, in this sense, is a frequency: a way of being with the body that says, “You belong. You are worthy of care. You are allowed to feel good.”

Why This Actually Generates Regular Ol’ “Prosperity”

Making the body’s flourishing a priority is a form of prayer. It’s an act of faith that you’re meant to thrive. That your fullest expression matters. That the divine wants to experience itself through your particular aliveness.

Neglect of the body is actually a form of hiding. Of playing small. The prosperity body says: I’m here to do sacred work, and I need to be capable of it. The preparation itself is devotional.

This creates the generative life. When you honor the body, you have clearer perception. No fog from poor sleep, inflammation, stagnation. You have sustained energy—not the crash and spike of degenerative habits. And you have the vitality to actually execute on your visions.

The offerings you can make—your teaching, your art, your presence with your children, your leadership in your work—are directly proportional to your energetic capacity. I think about this with my own life. When I’m vital, when I’m well-resourced in my body, I can be truly generous. I can meet people fully. I can access the clarity and creativity my work requires.

Living as a Walking Prayer

At the core of this concept of Prosperity Body is a simple faith:

That you are meant to thrive. That your fullest expression matters. That the divine, however you name it, is actually interested in experiencing itself through your particular aliveness. Making your body’s flourishing a priority is liturgy: the daily service you perform on behalf of life itself.

The body is the temple. The world is the church. Every day is the holy day. Tending the altar—feeding it, resting it, adorning it, allowing it to move and to soften—is how we say yes to being here. It is how we become walking prayers: shaktified, joyous, available, generous.

My hope, in all of this, is not that you adopt a new regime or add an item to your already endless list of self-improvement tasks. My hope is that, in some quiet moment today, you might place a hand on your own body—heart, belly, thigh, cheek—and feel, even for a breath, the sacred architecture there. This is the place where your Eden self still remembers what it is to belong.

This teaching has been emerging through everything I’ve created over decades—from The Nine Lives of Woman exploring the body’s journey from birth to 100, to the Body Love Journal with its invitation to daily intimate self-care, to Reverence and The Nine Gifts, to the entire Rose Woman line of intimate wellness products I developed to support women in honoring their bodies as sacred. My Living Tantra courses and retreats offer immersive experiences in embodied spirituality.

Find everything at rosewoman.com and christinemariemason.com.

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