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

PodcastHuman ConnectionYoga and Tantra
Written By Geneva Tolentino

Show Notes

In this special bonus episode, Christine Marie Mason offers an intimate preview of her new book, Mantra, Tantra, and Ayahuasca: Ecstasy, Devotion, and the Return of the Holy Body.

Drawing from her own journey through exhaustion, loss, and profound spiritual opening, Christine reads from the book’s introduction and shares how practices like Mantra and Kirtan, Tantra as a fully embodied spiritual worldview, entheogenic medicines such as Ayahuasca, and breathwork can reconnect us to ecstasy, belonging, and our innate holiness—without bypassing the hard work of healing.

This episode is an invitation to listen to the preview and feel into whether this path and these stories resonate with your own freedom journey, to pre-order the book to support its launch and help bring these conversations to more people, and to leave a review once you’ve read it so others can discover the work

Learn more, pre-order at christinemariemason.com/books, and share your reflections on Instagram @christinemariemason. Join Christine in this movement toward more love and more liberation.

In this episode, we cover so many topics, including:

  • Exploring Psychedelics and Tantra

  • The Concept of Enlightenment

  • The Book's Structure and Content

  • Taboos and Conformity in Authoritarian Cultures

  • The Risks and Benefits of Opening

  • The Importance of Community and Support

Helpful links:


Your host:



Brought to you by Rosebud Woman, Award Winning Intimate and Body Care:




Christine Marie Mason

+1-415-471-7010

@christinemariemason

@rosebudwoman

Founder, Rosebud Woman

Co-Founder, Radiant Farms and Sundari Gardens

Host, The Rose Woman on Love and Liberation: 

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Transcript

Christine Mason  0:01  

Hey everyone, it's Christine Marie Mason, your host for the rose woman Podcast. I'm doing a little bonus episode today because I have a book launch coming. And many of you know that in the years from 2008 to 2012 that I really was going through it, and that between the mortgage collapse and the state of California stopping paying people, and my husband getting stage four cancer, and a lot of other things that happened that I really hit, like, Oh, just a point of exhaustion. And I'm sure that many of you can relate. You've had these points of exhaustion in your life, and the world seems to be getting more and more demanding. And even though I've been practicing yoga for a long time, I had a meditation practice. I had a good family, a lot of things and resources to lean into, I still couldn't get out of this dark place. And during that window of time is when I started experimenting with psychedelics. I went deeper and deeper into my singing and mantra practices and the Tantra, and both the worldview Tantra and the Neo Tantra of sexuality that I'd started in the mid 2000s sort of took a deepening turn. And over the last decade plus, I have gone farther in all of those modalities than I ever expected. I've had amazing adventures, lots of joy, lots of freedom. And it was out of those experiences that both the farm on Hawaii was born, Rosebud woman was born, out of this insight to relieve suffering, body shame. And another company, radiant farms was born out of the insight that the plants, these sort of secondary psychoactive plants, that don't get a lot of attention, are wanting a spokesperson and an ally. And around 2016 when my first book indivisible was published, I started working on this one, and I wrote down stories and things like that, and then I set it aside for a long time. And I set it aside because the stories are vulnerable. I wasn't ready to come out of the closet, so to speak. You know, I still pretty normy, barely wanting to abide by the rules, but something changed. I realized that the rules weren't cut out to support my freedom or my well being. They were cut out in favor of the status quo and power structures that existed and that I couldn't go another day without finding that freedom. So it took me a while before I was courageous enough to continue to write, integrate capture. And in that time, I had many, many more experiences to report on. And someone told me once that if you write about or share something when you haven't yet sat with it, integrated it and gleaned its wisdom, then writing about it is therapy, but if you have sat with it and gleaned its wisdom, then writing about it is wise and sharing your knowledge. So when the time was right, I decided to complete the book to complete the work. It's called mantra, tantra and ayahuasca, ecstasy, devotion and the return of the holy body. It used to have a subtitle, sex drugs and rock and roll in search of the sacred. But I changed that. So I'm going to read some stuff and talk a little bit about the book, and I'm going to ask for your help. So please listen to the rest of this episode and reach out and touch me. Thank you. Okay, ha, all love and blessings. Imagine walking around in daily life easeful and light and joyful and shimmering. Imagine feeling transcendent while still being fully present in your body and fully related to other people. What if this was not a peak experience, but rather an ordinary state of consciousness. This feeling could be called being enlightened, literally walking around filled with the light, or more accurately, with an awareness that one is filled with the light, always connected and always belonging, where the umbilical cord to spirit is somehow still intact. But it might be hard to visualize this, especially if we are walking around in a traumatized, blunted shutdown reality, or on a treadmill of soul numbing work, small dramas and existential dread, grabbing for that tequila or chocolate or credit card swipe or that little dopamine hit of like and comment. Yet even these compulsions can be seen as intelligent adaptations. They help you feel good, at least for a moment, and they are pointing toward what you know deep in your soul, namely that life should feel good. All addictions are seeking after this ease. They are own wisdom at work, because we know our birthright is at. To see belonging and unselfconscious joy. We know we should feel better. We just might not know how to reliably and consistently get there. I was lucky to glimpse from a very young age this illuminated, shimmering reality. It's kind of like a backlit scrim, a light pervades and shines out from everything I see in the material world, it runs in and through and behind and around everything. Some forms are more dense and it's harder to perceive, but it's still there, and yet I often forgot when I was young, and as I grew older and gained more responsibility, I noticed I couldn't reliably get back home to this awareness in my daily work and family life. I tried very hard to get there inside of prescribed methods and contexts. I tried to access the feeling in mainline religion, and while there were moments of surrender and transmission and joy in churches, I even ran adult ed at a church and taught Sunday school, it just didn't work to make life feel reliably better. I still felt separate. So I knew that the promise made at the time of my birth, my soul's contract, was that I was to live in a body while fully conscious and aware of the presence of spirit all the time. So in my early 30s, I made a choice that I was going to find out how to live that way, no matter what it took. And that's also when yoga and meditation found me, by the way, but that wasn't a clear path, linear path. It turns out that there are millions and millions of people around the world who also hear the call to the sacred and who live with deep meaning, connection and ritual, without the violence of separation, identities and formal affiliations. They have been given or inherited or have developed reliable ways of getting to the shimmering state of being. Some of these modalities are 1000s of years old. Many are taboo or even illegal. In fact, many are illegal. I posit that this is because they are potent and because they work. They are tools and technologies that result in happy, sovereign, unafraid people and conspiracy theories aside, I believe that these methods are shamed and sidelined and targeted by religious and conservative hierarchies as well as any entrenched industry that profits off of our suffering and entrainment in unjust systems because of their potency, we need happy, healthy, awake people right now. Goddess knows. We need you remembering who you are, vibrated and dreamt into being. You a continuation of life's lineage, the culmination of evolution's intelligent up until now and the inspirer of the future. We don't need you playing small. We don't need you constricted. We don't need you holding back or afraid, but fully living the contract you made when your soul embodied. So that's from the beginning. The intro to mantra, tantra and ayahuasca, sex, drugs and rock and roll in search of the sacred. When I started working on that book in 2016 It was intended as a tour through American Vedanta, American bhakti, the Neo acid and microdosing cultures, festival culture, the neogayans, right handed Tantra, which is non sexual, left handed Tantra, which is sexual, polyamory, gender fluidity, radical honesty, ego, spirituality, unity, consciousness, really anything that was a liberation theology was an extension of the work that I was doing With indivisible but it's not where I ended in the book, I put this philosophical analysis on the shelf and headed out into the field instead writing down the experiments and meetings and experiences I had one at a time. So the book ended as a collection of stories where I stuck with the personal and with the direct encounter the deeper I went into the work, the more the whole world became that way. My life became more localized, more direct, less abstracted, less about big ideas, and more about authentic, direct Gnosis. So I'm going to tell some stories and share some things that I learned and what I've come to believe up until now, and if you read the book, I hope you will run them through the filter of your own sensibilities and inner knowing and find something of value for your freedom journey. Some things that I know now is that you can have the feeling of being an individual, but at the same time belonging to the whole you can live with the feeling of being completely playful and open, unselfconscious, not anxious, without confusion or doubt that you are not simply enough, but rather you are divine and essential. You're not just well or fine, but fluidly perfect. You can live in awakened, direct perception, vital, receptive, where your whole body is both antenna and transmitter, and you too can tap into the invisible, underlying ground of reality, and even have moments of experiencing yourself as only energy, only love, and more importantly, you can be sustainably happy. 


Christine Mason  9:56  

So I'm going to read a little bit from this. Part of the book that's also in the beginning sections. It's prescriptions on giving yourself permission. Now, look, I know that everything doesn't apply to everyone. I give that disclaimer in the intro. Let's just say this is targeted at the people who sort of grew up or were, you know, Norm core, like, right in the middle of the culture. And I want to return to the topic of taboos and conformity in authoritarian cultures. And that's what I kind of do in this section of the book, there are so many proscriptions and taboos among the righteous, what a good girl does, what a bad boy does, how an upstanding citizen behaves, some common ones, clean cut, monogamous, hardworking, follows tradition, doesn't step outside the norm too far. Has an acceptable quirk or two to give one personality something tame. Be a fan of old vinyl records, or an astronomy freak or a great ballroom dancer. One should drink enough to be socially fluid and not a stick in the mud, but don't be an alcoholic. Be Wealthy, but don't appear greedy. Be pretty, but don't appear vain. Be Christian, but be the kind of Christian that spends this weekend on a driving mower or golfing or coaching baseball, not the kind that pushes for radical social justice and turns the money changers away from the temple, not that kind that seeks to experience a direct, unmediated connection between oneself and God, and certainly not the kind that's into the black metaphysical Jesus, or the Jesus of the mystics, The Jesus of Meister Eckhart or Hildegarde von Bingen. If you do yoga, make sure it's just for exercise. Combine it with wrapped music or chocolate so you don't go too deep into the well of power you possess, so that you don't really wake up just down, modulate the stress chemicals and get some muscle tone. Get an education, but not too much. That is to say, get enough of an education to get a good paying job, but not enough to make you question the culture you live in. Especially don't question the following capitalism, structural systems in American democracy, the morality of guns or the ethics of the extensive use of taxes for military rather than humanitarian purposes. Don't question the pharmaceutical industry. Don't question your doctor. Don't question the chemical agriculture or fast food industries or the pain and suffering of factory farms that infuses your meat and cheese. Don't question the oil tit don't question the credit and consumer culture, as Bush said, Just go shopping. Don't question the cult of the individual or the self made man. Respect your elders, your teachers, elected representatives and the police, even if they have totally fucked up. What else? Don't do drugs show up like a traditional straight male or straight female have decidedly not kinky sex. Don't show too much emotion or vulnerability. Don't be too fat. Don't be too skinny. Don't be too loud, don't be too weak, don't be too dirty. All in all, the conformity that is requested of you is extensive. Toe the line, citizen, and teach your children to toe the fucking line. The actuality of this is that these are impossible and unneeded standards, but they keep us wiggling around, making micro adjustments to be just right according to some set of always shifting standards, instead of finding our own authenticity. And most of the people preaching these don't conform to them anyway, they just engender shame, which causes one to turn on oneself and self police, but also breeds judgment of others. So what I want to say is this, the cost of toeing the line in a deeply broken culture is no less than your own freedom, happiness, authenticity, soul, emancipation and enlightenment, and moreover, the denial of your own unique expression, your weirdness, your one pointed perspective. This holds all of humanity back, not just you, because we are evolving each other all the time. So becoming a conscious chooser, shaking off the implanted trance, is not just something you do for you, but for all of us. You move the needle for human evolution in the direction of authenticity. Collectively, the cost of toeing this line is perpetuated suffering, the suffering that is the fruit of the current system manifests in illness, anxiety, substance abuse, suicide, hatred and violence, poverty, planetary degradation, animal abuse, waste, of course, and the countless other ills of modern culture in the West, results in a feeling of separation from the interconnected web. Incidentally, the root word and true meaning of sin is separation, because only when we are separate can we behave in ways that harm others. When we see others as ourselves, harm is not possible. We have been taught that some things are off limits, that good people don't do them good people don't try them. Good people don't find out for themselves. They just take the words of experts, of their elders, pastors, lawmakers and other authorities to heart and fall in formation. These taboos may include things like trance states, energy play, somatics, meditation, sexual freedom and theogenic drugs, or even beliefs like socialism for some spiral leadership for others, holacracy, where there's no boss. We have been told that many of these acts, particularly when it comes to sex or drugs and or the practices that are associated with them, are dangerous for us as individuals, and that the state must protect us from ourselves. But I am here to bear witness almost everything that has been labeled as a taboo or transgression is instead a tool for waking up, for our own mental, physical and emotional liberation, and for ultimately, living a fearless life. These are the transgressive pathways to liberation. They are not the only ways. Of course, there are grace and practice and many more, but these are the ones we're going to focus on here. So after that, the rest of the book is divided into there's a lot more in the beginning on the risk of opening, like what happens when you start to open. But in the rest of the book, I really focus on being brought into the community of mantra kirtan and singing together, which I kind of, you know, jokingly refer to as the Rock and Roll part of the subtitle Tantra, which is, of course, not just sexuality. Sexuality is left handed or Neo Tantra. And I do include some of that, like there are definitely Unity Consciousness experiences in sexuality and profound opportunities for awakening. But Tantra as a worldview, is more about fully inhabiting your body while being aware of spirit all the time, tasting, touching, etc. So there's a whole section on Tantra with a lot of great stories about that. There's another section then on theogens ayahuasca, so the drugs part, and again, Ayahuasca is a very revered ceremonial plant, and I don't my humor to detract from the fact that it's a highly revered sacrament in many parts of the world, and we're very lucky that it's getting socialized into the West, because it's changing a lot of people's lives. So that section is much broader, and there are a lot of personal stories and tales of the underground in there of how these molecules are being used to heal people. I also have a section that's not in the title on breathwork and natural ways of getting to these unity consciousness and entrance experiences that can heal and bring you to that ecstasy belonging and non self consciousness that I was talking about in the introduction. So this book comes out very soon, and I would love for you to be part of its launch. I am inviting you to become part of the launch team to help me out on launch day, if you want to see a deeper understanding from me, like a Normie person who gradually became more open in midlife to the point of being a true advocate for liberation theologies of all kinds. So Mantra tonchard Ayahuasca will be releasing in November, and I would love for you to pre purchase if you're interested in being an early reviewer. That could be very helpful. I'll have socializing stories and graphics and things like that. I feel this message is ripe now that the tools for our great awakening are here. They are natural practices that we can do alone. They're practices we can do with others. They are ways of seeing the world that are different from the ways that we might have been entrained growing up. And they are also molecules that can give us a little bit of a temporary override before we go back into our normal way of being, and with that override, we see things in entirely new lights. So before I close this request for your support and for your pre-order at christinemariemason.com I think I'll read you just a little bit more from the intro, and that is called the benefits and the risks when opening


Christine Mason  18:54  

once you start having these direct experiences of the one, some predictable things will happen. You will begin to see the possibilities of a world that is structured on very different premises, and begin to live and work in ways that advance that new vision. You may cease to see the world in black and white. Your judgments will be suspended, and you will encounter an entirely new possibility set it will definitely shake up your life. You will probably change your job, your friends, the way you eat, the way you love, the level of excitement and energy with which you approach everyday life, and you will start diving directly into hard things with zeal, not avoiding them. Your passions will be rich and vital, fired out from your core, being curious and creative. Solutions will come to you. Discoveries and inventions may grace your notebooks. You might find yourself reading people's bodies, reading sadness and armoring from across the room. Synchronicities and serendipities will appear with startling frequency. You will begin to live from a direct present awareness of the gorgeous, wondrous, incalculably beautiful interconnect reality. Of the cosmos of which you are always an inseparable part, you will know its working by the fruits, by the quality of your daily experience of life, how unfazed you are by externalities, by the improved quality of your relationships, by the quality of your communication, by how you serve the world around you, by the manifestations of positive change in all domains you engage with in the presence of more love, peace, patience, kindness, clarity. In your daily life, you will feel yourself to be increasingly your own sovereign being living from your deep wisdom while being connected to the oversoul and acknowledge that in the beginning you may find it hard to talk to your existing friends, family and colleagues about the things you are trying in the things you discover, but eventually your direct experiences may give you a platform from which to share of this new reality, and you will also meet a network of new friends and allies who want to take the red pill, so to say, and not stay in the superficial dream of life. So are you ready for that? Psychologist Erich Fromm wrote way back in the 1940s about the fear of freedom, the anxiety of choice, the pull to authority, structures outside the self, just tell me what to do so I can feel less unsure. People seem to say. And so I'd see many people beginning to expand and then constricting right at the breakthrough point, losing their Moxie. But trust me, there's a whole other reality, a shadow reality inside of the existing culture that you will need when you begin to cross over, you will not be alone. You will not be excommunicated. This anxiety is unnecessary in the underground. I have met NIH researchers, Google executives, school teachers, construction workers, attorneys, rockstars, poets, mathematicians, all walks of life, all income levels, all having had it with the way things are. There were many more people there and many more normies than I ever imagined. So just don't worry. Just go play. I will say it's not all sunshine on this path. It will take you to some dark, confrontational places to resolve past traumas, and it will force your gaze onto things you might not like in yourself. On any healing path we accept this short term suffering to get to long term happiness, we have to go through this unprocessed emotion to the other side, not go around them or try to bypass them. And the molecules I write about in this book can really help with that, and sometimes, and this is what I think happened in the 60s and 70s that feels so good in these expanded states, that people who do these practices and take these molecules in particular might get stuck in a hedonistic Eddy. I mean singing and dancing and molecules that open your heart and make you love everyone, including yourself beautiful. Why not just do that? You could get stuck on that high and not ground back into the world, and we need that being grounded back in the world and transmitted to others, so that we can structure better realities for all in our human experience. So I want to urge you, as you read through these modalities, these stories and experiences, to not stop at a perception of hedonism. It is possible to get stuck in any modality which is selling these tools far short of their full potential. The difference, they say, between medicine and poison, literally and figuratively, is all about the dose and the context. All of the tools and experiences I'm going to share with you are for use with intention and conscientiousness, with aligned people in helpful environments. Otherwise, they are only about the party. And while the party can be great, everyone loves a good party, it can also be an escape, a numbing, as Colin says, an escape and a quest are not the same thing. As we progress in opening and the tools have served their purpose in helping us get underneath the conscious mind, to get below the ego layer, to pry open the plastic casing of train cultural conditioning and loosening that casing, then we will be able to set aside these tools, or at least hold them lightly, and be free within our own being with no external assists. So don't get stuck in the feel good or the numb out, because we are going to the next level here, and we are going there together. All right. Well, that's a little bit of a taste of the intro. Wow. I just have so many other things I want to tell you. Oh, let's see. Is there anything else that you would like to hear before I repeat my plea for support, my deep confidence that y'all are going to show up that this thing really wants to be born in a way that many people are benefited, and that it changes lives. So again, presence and ecstasy, the promise prescriptions, the risk of opening the hedonistic Eddy. Are we just borrowing the light? Then mantra? What is lunch or chant in Kirtan, a story from the Talas ashram, the sound of surrender, the ecstatic field. Adam shamdas, deep listening, the practice of japa Mala part three, tantra, pleasure, the three principles of Tantra, the left handed Tantra, sexuality as a unity, consciousness, experience and intima. See as a universal cure. Part Four, Ayahuasca ritual, ingestion, perception, altering sacraments, finding entheogens, the Native American church being always related the undercurrent of human suffering, turning that love on yourself. Math is the precise language of all material reality, angels and stigmata, sitting with the Santo Daime, harvesting the copy vine. And then part five, living by breath alone, which details some experiences with Stanislav Grof and Kundalini breathwork and how to make those things accessible for an altered state experience. And Part Six, How are we related the Neo gay and underground, the new ritual, non religious spirituality, the persistence of the unsold world, our response capacity, and then closing thoughts, which are around the avalanche on avalanche networks and the avalanche of awakening that I think, that we're all part of. It's just been released on Spotify audiobooks and on Amazon for print on demand and on Kindle. So I hope you enjoy it. It's really from the heart, and so far so good people seem to be loving it, and it's, you know, a little entertaining. So enjoy this preview, and please come and purchase the book and let me know your thoughts. So Mantra, Tantra, Ayahuasca, Christine Marie Mason, aka Tiger mouse, seeking your amazing support as part of this rose woman movement towards more love and more liberation. Thank you so much for allowing me to share more about the book. Christinemariemason.com, xtine.com. Is where it will redirect to, so don't get worried if it starts to redirect, and you can find me on Instagram at the christinemariemason, in all gratitude and in all Love and knowing that we are waking up together. 

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