Sister Mother Daughter Goddess: Unlocking the Divine Feminine in all People with Laura Swan
If you’ve ever wondered what it really means to tap into the power of the Divine Feminine, you’re going to love today’s episode. We’re joined by a truly special guest—Laura Swan. If you haven’t heard of Laura yet, she’s a healer, coach, ceremonialist, and the heart behind the Rise of the Rose movement. She spent years helping women reconnect with their power, creativity, and one another.
In our conversation, Laura opens up about her own journey—what it means to answer the call of the Divine Feminine, how she’s built communities of support and healing, and why sisterhood and creativity are so important right now. We discuss practical ways to bring more meaning, connection, and joy into your life, and how you can contribute to this growing movement.
So, if you’re looking for some inspiration or just want to hear from someone who’s walking the walk, you’re in the right place. Grab a cup of tea, get comfy, and join us for this beautiful conversation with Laura.
In this episode, we cover:
On Creating her own Support Systems by Gathering Women
Early Women's Empowerment and Spiritual Awakening
Thoughts on including the Masculine
Understanding the Deeper Spiritual Components of Eating Disorders
Discovering the Divine Feminine Lineage
The Concept of Indigeneity and Connection to the Earth
The Rise of the Rose Movement - a Feminine-led Non-Profit Spiritual Organization
The Importance of mutual upliftment and Creating Safe Spaces for Women to Heal
Women as a Caretaker to Creator
Laura shares her Personal Rituals and Devotional Practices
The Importance of Fluidity in movement and dance in her yoga practice
Impact of Women's Circles on Society
The Importance of Collaboration and Networking in the Movement
Helpful links:
Laura Swan - Contact Laura for coaching, speaking, or events. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram @laura_j_swan,
For upcoming events with Laura
Episode # 170: Walking Home: The Return of Pilgrimage with Christine and Guests
Episode # 160 Family Money | Wisdom Unlocked with Diana Chambers
Episode # 163: Building Power from The Bottom Up- Impact Circles
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Transcript
Laura Swan 0:00
A great she, you know, she's always been because I hungered for a mother. I found early on that she was the ultimate mother, and that no human mother could ever be what the Divine Mother is. And that that's true for even someone who grew up and had a great mothering experience, right? That there's just no way to find that in human form,
Christine Mason 0:21
hello everybody. It's Christine Marie Mason, and I am your host for the rose woman on love and liberation, where we talk about all kinds of things that can help us open and free our bodies, minds and spirits, to create more spaciousness, more joy and more choice in our lives. And first, before we get started this week, I want to thank you for making us number two in the relationships category according to good pods. I was unaware that we were even in the relationship category, but I take real delight in that designation in retrospect, because all of life is relationship or kinship, and when we do the things we aim for on this show like increase our awareness, our precision, our ability to see more of what is moving in us, we often get to an aha moment of kinship and relatedness that we are making our outer world, our relationships with everything through our conscious and our unconscious inner world. And if we want our relationships to be more joyful and satisfying, we need to search inside. So the show's main themes on love and liberation are essentially relational. So thank you, and thanks to goodpods for the little badge that we can show off. Today. We are talking with a really wonderful woman named Laura swan. She's a healer and a coach and a ceremonialist and a trained psychotherapist. 27 years ago, when she was just 16, she heard a deep calling from the Divine Feminine to step up and lead other women and girls, and has been facilitating circles and retreats and rites of passage and healing ceremonies ever since. She works in the corporate world, as well serving as what she calls a cultural Alchemist and a coach to impact driven companies and executives. She's a mama to two kids and a crew of rescue animals who she raises and tends to on an urban homestead in Southern California. She's really delightful in person. This episode follows beautifully on the last episode, where Kyle Buckley talked about her pilgrimage experience, going to visit the sites in Avalon, and where Rene Blodgett talked about the Magdalen Adam talked about the Magdalen, Lisa calvis talked about her journeys. And you know, we're interestingly picking up that thread of Divine Feminine Spirituality, or female led spirituality in this particular episode, but it takes some unusual turns. We do speak a little bit about the sister wound, and that's been coming up in many places that I've been in the last few months. I was at a women only medicine ceremony in Southern California a couple of weekends ago, and we really noted how beautiful it was to be in this space where all of the women were really uplifting each other, and how the sense of competition was gone, and it was just really about, how do we help each other free ourselves From these old stories and and just radiate the love that lives in our essential soul, strip away all the learned behaviors and stories that block that from shining, block our essential essence. So we talk a little bit about the sister wound and how to how to get around those betrayal stories and bring ourselves back to upliftment. We also talk a little bit about being motherless daughters. There was a book in the mid 90s called motherless daughters by a wonderful woman named Hope Edelman, for women who had lost their moms relatively early and and talking about what the legacy of that loss was like. And both Laura and I had that experience in our life, and it becomes a little bit of a driving factor that Edelman book spawned a lot of women's workshops and groups with such a beautiful invitation to finally talk about something that hadn't been named. But for Laura, as you'll hear, it really motivated some of her life's work. But it turns out that it wasn't really just a yearning for the human mother, but for a much deeper tradition of the divine feminine and and particularly the divine feminine as expressed in the indigenous Caucasian traditions of northern Europe, the ones that she came from. And many of you will recognize that like the Goddesses in the in the Gaelic and Celtic world, for example, Scandinavian world, so they're still around, and their energies can still be tapped into. We're going to hear more about that in the coming weeks. During the recording of the show, Laura asked me if I had heard of Judith Dwork and a book called A. Circle of stones, a woman's journey to herself, to which I replied, No, and she said, Oh, well, definitely go get that and have a look at a passage that goes, how might your life have been different? So I'm going to read that now as a way of intro. How might your life have been different if there had been a place for you, a place for you to go, a place of women to help you learn the ways of a woman, a place where you were nurtured from an ancient flow, sustaining you and steadying you as you sought to become yourself. A place of women to help you find and trust the ancient flow already there within yourself waiting to be released. She also writes, how might your life have been different if there had been a place for you, a place of women, where you were received and affirmed, a place where, after the fires were lighted and the drumming and the silence there would be a hush of expectancy, a knowing that each woman there was leaving old conformity to find herself, a sense that all womanhood stood on a threshold, and if during the hush the other women, slightly older, had helped you to trust your own becoming to trust it and quietly and prayerfully to nurture it, how might Your life be different? I don't want that to land in this particular context as wistful or that it's gone by and there's nothing that we can do about it. I will say that in the last decade, maybe the last 15 years, my experience of the depth and potency of friendships between women, the depth and potency of our ability to gather and support each other in becoming and to gather across all generations has deepened in a richness that I could never have imagined when I was younger. So with that in mind, how might it be different? Let's welcome the wonderful Laura swan. I'm so glad to see your gorgeous face and your gentle energy on the screen. I wish everybody else could see you, because you really do radiate the things you
Laura Swan 7:10
teach. Thank you. I'm honored to be here.
Christine Mason 7:13
I was hoping we could start with some story talk, a little story on how you first recognized your priestess calling and what eventually became a carrier of the rose
Laura Swan 7:25
codes. I think the story begins with really what created the hunger inside of me to the hunger for the feminine. I think that that's a hunger that many of us have, and we might not even know it right growing up in this culture and in this country, and the lack of like, feminine mentorship, and the lack of rites of passage, and the things that were informed us for so many 1000s of years are just missing, and also just the lack of women who have really come into their voice and their power, because our culture doesn't produce that, and our mothers And our grandmothers for the most part, unless you were really lucky, aren't, they didn't cultivate that because they didn't have it. And so I think there was a deep hunger, but that got really exacerbated for me because my mom left when I was very young, and I didn't have really any feminine influence in my life growing up from about age eight on, and it was a deep, deep wound and a trauma and a really difficult, painful experience in my life that made me so hungry for feminine mentorship and so hungry for the feminine that I created it in my life by gathering women and by Creating circles. And that started when I was 1616.
Christine Mason 8:43
What was, how did you do that? At 16, most girls are not in the collaborative girl circle mentality. They're still trying to figure it out themselves. I
Laura Swan 8:52
don't know it was just so deeply a part of my bones to in my DNA, to gather women and to to create experiences where we were supporting each other. I grew up without really women and feminine mentorship, and then I went through a pretty early phase of like, drugs and alcohol and sex, and really got into it quite young. And it was almost like I moved a lot of that things, that a lot of those things that people find later in their teens and in their college years. I went through it early, like 11 to 14 was really my, like, experimental, and it was my mom had left, so I was really in a lot of pain, and I was looking for comfort and for love and for really, you know, anything that would, that would fill that hole. And, you know, it was a blessing and a curse, but a blessing in that I got it out of my system pretty young, and by the time I hit my 1516 I was clear on what I was here to do, and that that was my my one of my important roles on the planet was to gather women together. And I saw the girls in my high school having catty fights and, you know, bullying each other. And I just knew in my. System, that that's not the way that we were really going to be at our best, and that we were going to thrive in the world if we came together. And so I created an organization in my high school called the Women's Advocacy Organization, and it was open to women and men. Everything I've done, you know, I've done a lot of women's circle and women's work, but I've really tried to include the masculine in this in this work. You know, it's not something that's done without them. We need them, and we are, we are partners on this planet, and that is one of the deepest, I think, wounds that needs to heal on the planet, is the divide between the masculine and the feminine. So even back then, in high school, we let men boys come to our women's empowerment circles in our groups, and it was beautiful. And we had empowerment workshops. And, you know, meditation and yoga and breath work. And you know, it was just something that I felt called to very young, was helping women find their own somatic healing and and physical, emotional, spiritual healing, but doing that through supporting each
Christine Mason 11:00
other. That was that was early for that, for breath work and all of that stuff. It was pretty early. I mean, there's so many things to double click on there, like the hunger for the feminine. I didn't realize, or maybe we, we chatted about this at one point, but our timeline is almost exactly the same. My mom left when I was 811, to 14, crazy. I walked home at 15, and like, by 16, I knew what I wanted. Wow, oh my gosh, that's amazing. And so the hunger for the feminine is like, I get that and after really living into a masculine story of success for a long time, and then the other thing that I love is this invitation to do it with the masculine from the very get go. That's beautiful.
Laura Swan 11:41
It's pretty critical. You know, we can't, like the feminist movement, where we went off and got angry and did our own thing and found our power was important and necessary in the whole evolution of, I think, women's empowerment. But it's not, it's only part, part of the picture. It's not, it's not what's actually going to bring us to a higher place of evolution. We need to be in this together, and we need to dignify men to be protectors and providers. And, you know, supporters of the feminine. They need to be trusted to do that, and even trained and supported to do that. You know, because they, just like women, don't really know what it means to be in our feminine. They don't really know what it means to be in their masculine and to be protectors, providers and supporters of of this precious, you know, gift of life on Earth. And I think that they can when they're treated with respect and dignity, they'll live into it, you know, when we actually expect it of them and treat them with that kind of love and dignity. Men are rising to that now like I've never seen before. I'm seeing a collective shift in that big time that is really beautiful. I'm
Christine Mason 12:46
seeing that also, and it's almost splitting. There's people who are doubling down on the old way, like holding on for dear life because, and I think that's because it's not clear what the new way is, and you're providing part of that. So, so you're doing these groups. How did you step into your spiritual lineage discovery
Laura Swan 13:03
Well, so, you know, doing these groups in high school was kind of more like support groups and like, it wasn't the spiritual type of circles that I'd came to discover later. That happened in my early 20s. Found a mentor who was a woman. I don't know if you've ever read the book eating in the light of the moon. Do you know of that book? No, highly recommend it. It was a book for really helping understand the energetic and spiritual components of eating disorders. And I struggled with that in college. I ended up in college once I got there, and a lot of the kind of, I think, pain and memories of childhood that I had suppressed and sort of, you know, done my best to get through in high school and step into, like, my leadership. I had a lot kind of creep up when I got into college and I developed exercise bulimia, which was, you know, it's basically a form of bulimia, but you just exercise and run to the point of exhaustion. You do that instead of purging, right? That's the form of purging is exercise. And so that was a thing that really became a coping mechanism for me. And I discovered this work. I found that doing any of the regular eating disorder type of treatments just did not resonate. They felt shaming, they felt more restrictive, they felt very clinical, and none of it was for me. I knew that there was a deeper hunger inside of me that needed to be fed, and that it wasn't some clinical like, you know, restrict and and way and these things that I think a lot of eating disorder treatments do that, that don't, they just didn't do it for me, right? And so this book, eating in the light of the moon was profound for me. It was using myth and metaphor and storytelling to really understand how women develop eating disorders in this culture. And the teacher, the writer, was a woman who grew up in Guam and she grew up in, you know. A matriarchal society, where there was circle, and she was surrounded by women that were all different sizes and beautiful bodies, and there was no such thing as eating disorder, where she grew up and she was in the Miss Universe pageant, and for the first time, discovered what eating disorders were and that women struggled with them, and she felt that her lineage and her culture of storytelling and women circling was actually what these women needed, and that's what the hunger, the deeper hunger was the not understanding and connecting to their own feminine energy in a very hyper masculine culture. And when I read that everything, everything made sense, I had a huge spiritual awakening. And it really kind of like set the direction and the tone of my work and my study moving forward, I knew that it was going to be equal parts, like psychological and psychology study, as well as Myth, Metaphor and divine feminine, you know, lineage understanding. And that's when I discovered that in my own DNA, once I had my 23andme done, that, I had a tremendous amount of Irish and Celtic background, and I started to do more research into my lineage. And, you know, as time evolved and I I just started to do all kinds of women's work and women's circles and retreats and workshops. And eventually started leading retreats to Ireland and went back there and had a full, I don't know if it was a past life memory or of my own DNA, of my lineage, and got really initiated into that there. And have a dear friend who's a Celtic priestess that I partner with, and we do women's sacred initiations and go to sacred sites, and we see women have this remembrance all the time of either a past life, remembrance of being in that lineage or being in that level of service and wisdom and power of their feminine and their priestess energy. We see it happen all the time, that people just wake up to it and remember it because it's so right there on the surface, just waiting to be ignited. So that's a big part of what was my initiation into it.
Christine Mason 17:04
I love to go from the hunger for the feminine to the deeper hunger and correlating the actual physical actions in the body to Feed me. Feed me I've got, or I've got to be perfect, to get love or all that stuff, and bring it right on through there is the understanding that even if it's not a trance lifetime story in the karma sense that your genetic inheritance, your epigene, everything that's ever been experienced in your own lineage up until now is remembered in your cells in some way. So like all humans, remember how to dance around a fire. So that's a very potent invitation for people to look and also to be inspired by indigeneity from other lands. And then remember that you too are indigenous and belong to land and belong to Earth, in some way
Laura Swan 17:52
that was huge for me. That part recognizing that that the Celtic people are my indigen Like, that's the indigenous that's my indigenous lineage. I was always drawn to all these different indigenous cultures, and I realized like that, is the indigenous culture that I come from, and I have so much that I can harvest and embody from my own lineage. And that was such a powerful realization. But you
Christine Mason 18:16
didn't, you didn't stop there. Your rose lineage work spans the Celtic and then the Magdalen, I think some ISIS, maybe even Lemuria. I'm not sure. How did you distill and transmit and sort of combine these ancient frequencies?
Laura Swan 18:33
You know, that's been like the past couple of years. My My spiritual work has just really deepened and my my visions. And you know through, I know you have had the experience of this too, but through breath, work through journey, work through being in circle and being in these sacred sites, I've had a series of different awakenings and visions come to me that showed me the integration of all of these lineages. And throughout, you know, the 25 years that I've been gathering with women, there was pieces of it all along that kept awakening, and pieces of the remembrance, the visions would come through when I would be in circle and when I would be leading, when I would be in my priestess energy, when I would be facilitating and creating experiences for women. That's when remembrances would come through for me and for the other women. And it didn't really all come together as to what I was remembering. I knew I was remembering ancient times like, of course, and I was just sort of, I want to say, wrote it off as normal, but just wrote it off as like, yeah, of course, I'm remembering this like women did this for 1000s and 1000s of years, like it's in our DNA. But then it started to really become clear that it was a particular frequency and a particular lineage that has been woven throughout many different priestess traditions that's trying to reawaken right now on the planet. And big time. She's really like, my boss is the divine feminine. That's who I work for. That's who I've always worked for. She's my guide. I do what she says.
Speaker 1 20:10
If she says, jump, I say, how high Jay Ma, JAMA, that's right.
Laura Swan 20:15
She's the one and the great she, you know, she's always been because I hungered for a mother, I found early on that she was the ultimate mother, and that no human mother could ever be what the Divine Mother is, and that that's true for even someone who grew up and had a great mothering experience, right? That there's just no way to find that in human form. We can find it through each other in beautiful ways. But I learned very young that that was my that was the one for me, and that's how I healed, and that's how I found my power. That's how I found my strength and my calling. And I am in complete service to her in this lifetime. And so like I know, I had pieces of that waking up throughout my whole journey in this work, but I really felt called in the past two to three years to this particular lineage and bringing it forth now in a new way that is accessible and is applicable to the times and what we're facing. And there's just never been a more important time ever in history than right now to be reawakening these codes and helping other women remember them, embody them and express them right now. So
Christine Mason 21:23
it's so beautiful, I feel like just, okay, great. We'll just do a little dance and end the show, because if you hear the bell ringing follow it, let's talk a little bit about what it looks like on the ground. You're doing this new, beautiful program, Rise of the rose, a movement, a church. I can't tell exactly what it is, but it seems to weave somatic healing, earth based ceremony, individual awakening, feminine leadership and collective awakening, community, all kinds of stuff. Can you? Can you talk a little bit about that?
Laura Swan 21:51
Yeah, we just really formally founded it about a month ago. It's basically a continuation of the work I've always done, but now under this organization and this really putting it what feels like in the proper place of a spiritual movement, right? A feminine led, non profit spiritual movement. I've done all of this as my business up to this time, and it just felt like it was time to make this more communal and more like owned by the many, and and enforced and really facilitated by many versus just me, because that's the that's the priestess way. It's not one person at the top. It is a collective of sisters working together. And so it just became clear that it needed to be founded as a non profit spiritual organization. Technically, that is a church, right? We are. We function as a church. We call ourselves a temple, though, and not a church. And it seemed like just the smartest way to do it, honestly, you know, with the the rights and the benefits and the and the the energetics of a temple, versus as a business. So that's the way that we founded it. And yes, like, it's a it's a combination of doing virtual services, virtual temple services, which will be online and available for anyone, anywhere, and also in person gatherings like you would go to a church, right? It's a women's women's temple services, and those are local here in San Diego, for now, the vision is that they become all over the world, and that there's a template, and there's a just similar to the way churches spread throughout the whole world, that there's a template that people will be able to adopt and train with us and work with us, train as priestesses, train as facilitators and and be able to start these all over the world, and have a support system to do that. And that's always been my vision. You know, the idea that the more circles that we seed, the more that the feminine is going to be uniting, supporting each other, rising and not doing it alone. You know, doing it alone is just such an old model, and doing it through martyrdom and exhaustion is such an old model. And we're really trying to create a different frequency of pleasure, of service that comes from abundance and not from exhaustion, right? And that is really rooted in sisterhood, so that we're we're helping and supporting and healing each other along the way. And so that's kind of the basis of it, and it's to create ceremonies that offer somatic frequency transmissions. I have a whole series of different rituals that we do with groups of women that really deep in safety with the feminine, because that's honestly like one of the biggest hurdles that we have to get over, is how women don't feel safe with each other, and that there's a very big wound, a sisterhood wound, that has to be addressed when we start to bring women together, that oftentimes they've been burned or hurt or, you know, abandoned by Friends or mothers or whoever, right that there's just a lot of pain between the feminine that has to be addressed first, and that's one of the main things that is always a part of the work I do, is creating sacred, safe sisterhood experiences so that we can start to actually, like, receive the benefits of being in sisterhood and the. Benefits of loving and supporting each other.
Christine Mason 25:02
How do you do that? How do you create a space for that to heal a lot of
Laura Swan 25:07
ways. But first of all, I name it every time as being really normal and Okay, right? I normalize it because it's so true for so many women. And I think that especially when women start to go to like Goddess work and feminine work, that it's an underlying unspoken thing in the room, that it's there, and I feel it every time. And if I name it and normalize it, it just sort of like sets everybody free to be like, Oh yeah, God. I was feeling, you know, super uncomfortable. I was I was feeling really judgmental about that woman, or I was feeling scared of that one. And it's just almost like inherent in when women get together that we're sizing each other up or scanning to see who's the prettiest girl in the room. Who do I have competition with? Right like, who am I? Who do I feel jealous of and competitive with? And it's all under the surface. It's happening unconsciously, and I just like to name it and really bring it to the forefront so that we can start to see each other through the eyes of love and trust. So there's there's naming it. There are lots of rituals that I do where women hold each other physically. It's done with a lot of care and a lot of preparation. You're not thrown into it assuming that it's, you know, right for you. It's really people have a lot of sovereignty and consent to participate in these things. They can just watch if they want to, until they feel safe, till they feel comfortable. But there's a lot of different ways that we use energies work somatics, you know, very safe Healing Touch, right of of only, like very respectful, boundaried areas of the body, and that creates a lot of safety and connection physically between women. And like for a woman that's never felt safe with women or never been really nurtured by women, it's incredibly healing to feel held physically, emotionally, spiritually, by other women that you actually feel trust and safe with. And so that's what I feel really committed to help creating that, to helping to create that for women. And to be honest, when it's not there and it's okay, you don't, you don't have to pretend, you know, and we just, we hold the space for people to have pretty big releases around these blocks that we have with each other. You know, we create a safe space. A big part of my training has been in trauma work. I'm trained as a psychotherapist, and I've done a lot of different trainings and trauma work and and somatic work, so it's all fused into the women's work that I do. I think it's really important if you're going to be guiding and leading women's work, that you have some trauma education. Because it's it's always there, it's always present. You know, when you're in a room full of women, likely in that room, a room full of women that come to do like healing work and spiritual work, it's going to be about 90 to 95% that have some that have some pretty significant trauma, whether it's sexual trauma, it's usually sexual trauma. And so I think it's important to be informed of that if you're going to be leading exercises and work that really opens up women to healing. And so it's a part of it. You
Christine Mason 28:05
know, I think there's this remediation that you're speaking to, like stepping in and fixing what is already accumulated. But I'm already noticing, particularly in women over 30. I can't speak to the younger women, but I have a feeling it's different. Already, a very strong sense of mutual upliftment is emerging in a way that I'd never seen in my life, particularly in the last five to seven years. I would say, Are you noticing that? What are you seeing?
Laura Swan 28:34
I've been in this space since 16, right? So years and years, I gathered a lot with older women when I first started gathering, because women my age weren't doing it, you know, like I was the youngest person in every circle. And I saw a lot of that with the older women all along. And then I've seen more and more and more of it, because it's kind of like the thing that I focus on and work on creating. I've seen it all along, right? Because it's kind of been, it's the focus of a lot of my circles and work that I do is mutual upliftment. And I find that when women are given the safety to process the wounds between them, the permission to mutually uplift, the like benefits, feel the benefits of it, that it just happens naturally, like it's such a natural it's such a natural thing women do is uplift and support each other when given the right circumstances and permission, right and so I feel like I've seen it all along, but I know what you're saying, that in the past five to six years, it's just so much more natural and effortless. And I think it's because of this collective, you know, feminine rising that's happening, that there's just an awakening that is deeper than we've ever experienced in this lifetime. For sure, you know, I think you know, back in priestess times and 1000s of years ago, much more normal, much more common, but here, in a world, in a in a culture where we've had such hyper masculine religious contexts and, you know, political context and. Societies in the world, that it's now, it's like we know deep inside, in our DNA that this is necessary for us to really be able to evolve to the next place that we need to be, or that we have the opportunity to be.
Christine Mason 30:14
What are some of the other shifts that you've seen in feminine leadership and collective awakening in the sisterhood. Through this long art course of work,
Laura Swan 30:24
I have seen a lot more partnering and mutual support, like you're saying, less competition. I think women are feeling exhausted by the competition, even like in business, where a lot of women became much more successful as like thought leaders and facilitators, but there was still a lot of individual businesses that were, you know, a lot of individual kind of, like marketing and branding. And I feel like there's more like, there's a job, some exhaustion around that, and a desire to come into more community and partnership. A lot of the women that I know that have been like influencers and like, been teaching courses and programs like, they're just so hungry for collaboration and a way of doing it that's less masculine, really honestly, like, because to be in that, to be in that field of like, marketing and teaching, and you still have to do a lot of quite aggressive business like tactics in order to be successful in it. And a lot of the women I know are just exhausted in that, and they're just hungry for a new way. So I'm seeing that, and I think it's really exciting, because there's such a you know, obviously in the movement I'm leading, it so collaborative, and it's like there's no one person at the top that's making millions of dollars. This is, this is a collaborative effort. And I think it's exciting that maybe even more and more women will take our model. Like, the difference between this model and doing it as a business is, I want other people to steal the idea. It's like, I want women to take what we're doing and go do it themselves, if they have or join us right? Like, I want them to take this idea of creating feminine led spiritual movements or churches, right? And go do it too, because it's what we need more of, and we need more and more women coming together, empowering each other. And to answer you said, What am I seeing happen? What I feel is being asked to happen, and what I feel guided to create is to support women going from caretakers to creators. And that's a very big
Christine Mason 32:27
shift, caretaker to creator. What do you mean by that?
Laura Swan 32:30
Ooh, I love this topic. This feels like such a big part of what our spiritual movement is gonna empower women to do is to step out of the role of service. That's exhausting, right? That so many of us are mothers and teachers and nurses, and, you know, in a lot of caregiving roles, the feminine has really been empowered, or I'd say, shaped and conditioned to become caretakers in our culture. And really what is expected, even if it's subconsciously or unconsciously, is that we serve and that we caretake. And that's a big part of what many women's experience is, is that we are, you know, we're mothers, and we're giving ourselves over, and we're even if we are in the role of like a healer or a facilitator, there's a tremendous amount of caretaking still happening and being normalized. And what I know is necessary is that this next wave of feminine leadership is that we're in our creativity and we are creating in the world. Versus caretaking. Our energy is not going into like getting people to come along and like trying to get them to get it or to raise them into the man we need to be. All the ways that our energy goes into caretaking, that our vitality, like the feminine just magic, is also in and equally, if not more, in our creative life force, energy and our ability to create art and poetry and books and movements and like the creation is so important right now that we saturate this earth with feminine creativity, through film, through transmitting the frequency that way, right? The old form of feminism, I believe that really got us to where we are was through fighting. It was through fighting and taking a stand and getting on the streets, and that was necessary, and it was a part of the part of the evolution. But this next phase of feminine evolution is that we're stepping into our creativity, and I see that happening, and I think it's really exciting that women are getting that their value is not just in caretaking, and that there's actually tremendous value in being in their creative energy and letting that be how they serve the world.
Christine Mason 34:46
Yeah, I'm noticing there was a lot of sensibility that it was either or caretaking or masculine performance in the world. I mean, there's so many who are on that track, and that creates. Creativity somehow is in the middle, yeah, and also creativity, for me, I don't know how you experience it, but is a requires a deep listening, like a quietude in the self, to allow what is really new to be received and born. And there's some lifestyle things that, in my experience, make that easier or harder, and I have the sense that they're deeply tied to what you're offering people.
Laura Swan 35:25
Yes, I think that it's hard to create from scarcity and lack, right? It's hard to create from exhaustion. It's hard to create from depletion. A big part of what we hope that these ceremonies, these gatherings, this community offers is abundance. You know, it offers an abundance of love and support and transmissions that uplift and that inspire and that helps us be more creative. You know, that's one thing I see in all of the women's groups that I've been a part of and the masterminds and the circles, is that the women get so much more creative in the circles together, because there's an abundance of love and support, there's an abundance of ideas, there's an abundance of seeing each other that gives you that juice to go and create, right? Whereas, when we're on our own and we're alone or we're exhausted or a single mother, right, it's it's harder, and I hope that this network provides like, a frequency of love, support, abundance and community, to really inspire women to be more creative and to permission women to be more creative. And it doesn't mean we give up being, you know, Divine Mother energy and and we give up being caretakers, because that's a beautiful part of who we are. It's just not the only part, and it's been kind of like a narrow archetype that women have felt like, you said, either, like, caretaker energy, or I'm going to be more hyper masculine, like, get into the career and get into that path. And it does feel like those have been kind of the options. And this idea of women also being able to be in their Creator archetype is is really important, and I think we're going to need some we're going to need to all figure that out together. It's not like a clear there's no clear playbook right now on how we transition this. I just know it's what's being called for, and I'm seeing it happen naturally, and we're going to be a part of empowering it to happen more and more.
Christine Mason 37:18
Tell me about the other women you're walking this way. There's some
Laura Swan 37:21
women who I've had in my life for many, many years, who have known my my work and been a part of my circles. I have women who a couple women who are highly skilled coaches and have been in kind of the therapeutic world, women who are highly attuned to somatic work and, you know, dance and movement, I have a woman who's an incredible medicine woman that has been in my life for a while, who is a big part of the the origins of this, and then another woman who is just incredible with the logistics. It's like she's kind of, I feel like the Divine Feminine has, like, given us all the different archetypes of women that are necessary to make this really, actually easeful, and we each have a different role that we're playing, and that's just like the core sort of team. I've got a network of 1000s of women that I've worked with over the years that are going to be invited into the movement and to become a part of it that is still growing, but the core team and the core people who are coming together really carry different frequencies of the feminine, and that was my goal, and also diversity, you know, like, this is not a white woman's movement. It's just not this includes women of all walks and background, and it's really important to me that it represent different races, different cultures and and it be something that is very inclusive and that we start to really discover how to do this together.
Christine Mason 38:48
Yeah, that's important to me. So let's talk about your personal rituals. How do you inculcate this feminine aspect in your own day to day life, and how do you speak to or engage with the goddess in the day to day? Are you engaging in a devotional practice, or is there? Is it less formal than that?
Laura Swan 39:11
I have a space in my home, even it's here. Listeners can't see it, but it's my temple space, and I it's my first I would call it the first temple of the rose. I built it a couple of years ago and filled it with Rose Quartz in the foundation of the room and all kinds of crystals. And, you know, sacred geometry. And this is my this is my sacred space. I knew I needed a temple. I think women can have beautiful practices without having a temple. But for me, I really knew that I needed a space that was set aside for that, and that was my own sacred space. It's where I do my work, it's where I do my spiritual work, and it's my private area that holds me, and I really designed it in such a way to hold me with a frequency where I will. And doing all the work. I wanted the space to also do some of the work.
Christine Mason 40:03
So have you always had that sort of ritual space? Yeah,
Laura Swan 40:07
I've always had a space in my home with that was, like, where my spiritual practice was. Sometimes it would have to share, like, as a guest room, or, you know, it have to be. But I always tried to have a separate space that was for my devotional practices, my somatic practices, my my regular kind of work that I do is is a combination of movement and meditation and breath work. And I trained as a yoga teacher. I was a yoga teacher for many years, but my yoga was always very different. It was much more fluid and like dance than I would say, traditional yoga. I just found that for women, especially, that fluidity and being able to move through the poses more like a dance felt very natural, and that was my own way of connecting with my body and with my intuition. The more fluid and circular and I think intuitive my movements got the more I connected into my own feminine energy. And when I would do kind of more rigid practices where I'd sit still and like, you know, try to be really still and meditate, it just it just wasn't the same for me. I found that movement, breath, sound and fluidity was my way of connecting to her and feeling her in my body and feeling guided by her. And so I developed a very intuitive kind of yoga breathwork practice, and I try to do it every day or at night after I get my kids to bed. It's not every day I do, but I really it's my goal, because I just feel, I feel completely aligned in my system when I do that and start my day like that. I have two children, I have a small farm. I have a large garden. So my life is busy, and I don't always. I don't always get a chance to do it, but I've also tried to create a life in which everything I do is my spiritual practice. You know that it's all a part of that embodiment, and I bring it into everything I do, to the best of my ability,
Christine Mason 42:02
every little bit of meditation in every moment, everything with a devotional, prayerful energy, at least aiming for that. Yeah, there's a quality of dynamic stillness even in meditation. And I was very intrigued to hear that the idea of a sitting still and not having desire and not having movement meditation was actually born in a time when the monasteries were the only place to send children to be fed, and the monks developed this practice that you're a good boy or girl if you sit still and don't want anything as basically a method of Crowd Control. Oh, wow.
Unknown Speaker 42:40
That makes sense.
Christine Mason 42:44
And that this idea, another misconception around meditation or stillness is that you're supposed to go to no thought, yeah, when actually all you're supposed to be doing is to be able to focus, direct and follow a train of thought at will, that you're the master of your thoughts. And so even sitting still isn't a forced imposition of uprightness. It has these micro motions in it, but I don't think that comes across when people are teaching it, yeah, and so you get this argument with the body's dynamism, yeah? I think a feminine Vedant or feminine yoga philosophy would, by its nature, have the things that you're talking about, movement, service, creating in all of that,
Laura Swan 43:26
I also have moments of stillness that are profound. You know, be in a place of like stillness really is a profound experience, and I find that for me when I balance it with movement and with fluidity and dance and self expression. And, you know, if I've got big emotions that need to move, or sadness or grief or anger, I bring it to my practice, and then I can actually sit still, and it feels more accessible, authentic and really possible for me. It's like, you know, and that's what I understand, too, with yoga, is like the postures and the poses were developed so that people could sit with more comfort and could be in stillness after they've expressed through the physical movement first, right? That's that in a lot of ashrams, the physical poses were developed so that you could sit and have comfortable sitting practice, and your body feels like it's been properly, sort of stretched and prepped to do that, and so I just kind of found my way of making that more feminine for myself. And I teach that, you know, in my circles and my gatherings, I'll teach movement and really empower women to find their own intuitive movement, which is such a spiritual practice in and of itself, right to find your body's own intuitive movement and to listen to that is sometimes totally foreign for people in general, but for women, and it's a deep, powerful practice of listening to ourselves and trusting ourselves when we can teach women how to do that.
Christine Mason 44:55
So we're not talking just about catalyzing a change in the self. Myself, you're really aiming for this rise of the rose movement to midwife a more beautiful world, in culture and in society and in global storylines. And how are you seeing the connection between what's happening in the individual home, in a person's practice or in this healing community, translate into action oriented outside world activity.
Laura Swan 45:24
Well, what I have witnessed, and what I have seen over time, is that when women have a network and a community and kind of like a almost like a well, that they can drink from, that they're more resourced to do all things, and they're more empowered to do all things and have more vitality and energy to do many different things. I see women come out of these circles and these gatherings, and they feel more inspired to get involved in leadership. They feel more inspired to start a company. So much of how we can lead is through our commerce, right and through the like you have a gorgeous, deeply feminine business that has, oh my gosh, your products are just like, they're so beautiful and they are so deeply feminine, and more women stepping into roles of businesses that create that kind of frequency is a way, right? It's one of the ways. And what I believe is that we just need we need more feminine energy in leadership in general. And I don't know if that means women stepping into politics. I don't know. It might be something entirely different that we're not even aware of how this is going to all play out. But I do know that the first step is mobilizing, connecting, supporting each other, healing together in circle, healing each other and and being willing to be emissaries of of her love and her light in the world. But we just can't do that alone. And so I think it's still to be seen how this is going to translate into collective like leadership, and I think it's going to look a lot different than maybe we've seen ever in the past, and we're only like right now at the beginning of a probably multi 100 year process that is really, really taking shape right now around of you know, feminine led spiritual movements, feminine led more in politics, feminine led authors, feminine led filmmakers, feminine billionaires. Like, imagine what the world would be like if there was as many women billionaires as there are men. You know, we know that when women have money and resources, that oftentimes it goes towards philanthropy and service and giving and so like, what would happen if the world's resources were more in the hands of the feminine, not even just women, but this feminine energy that is here to nurture and uplift and and really support humanity, versus extract and have power over which is quite a different frequency. Yeah, I
Christine Mason 47:58
was thinking about Mackenzie Bezos and how she gave away all that money. Yeah, so did Melinda Gates. And just basically saying, Look, we can get it into the hands of people who know what their own communities need. I think Melinda Gates' strategy. I forget which one of them, but one of them had a strategy where it was like, not even proof of don't even prove to me, I don't need you to document ROI and all that stuff. I trust you will know, and you will do the right thing with these resources. Such a different way of organizing. I think we talked about that on the money podcast with Diana, everybody. So you can go back and listen to that. I'll put it in the show, in the show notes. That's
Laura Swan 48:35
phenomenal. I mean that just just a quick that is, that's what we're talking about, more resources in the hands of people who delegate it and and put it into responsible hands. And what women do when they have resources. We just see it throughout, throughout many different case studies, and we see it. I was in Africa, and I was a part of something called the Girl Power Project in Uganda, and the whole basis of the project. As you go in and you empower and educate girls, and the entire culture and society changes. You give resources and education to girls, and everything changes. There's less pregnancy early pregnancy, there's less violence against women. There's less you know, even they raise better boys and boys who are more responsible and more respectful to the feminine, like it's it's a whole very real effect that happens when we empower and uplift women.
Christine Mason 49:31
Well, I for 1am, very excited about female led spirituality or or even mutually led like I always wondered what it would be like if you had a pope and a pope s like a husband and wife team holding court up there. You know how it would be amazing to see the half and half divinity represented, if we are to see a movement like that emerge, I think what you're also pointing to is that it can be very local and network. Impact instead of top down. So maybe we could speak a little bit about how you see this movement rising and collaborating among local groups.
Laura Swan 50:11
You know, I think that what what we know, and what new, lots of new research has shown, is that for movements to really be impactful, you should have lots of small groups and circles gathering. This is what our dear friend Lucy Caldwell, right, teaches from her impact circles. That the what we know is that the greatest impact happens when you see small circles of seven to 10 to 12 people that are that are oriented towards a philosophy, a goal, a movement, right? And that's what, that's really what the goal is, to get women circling all over the globe, and that we provide curriculum, we provide basic training and support for how women can start these, almost like Bible studies, right in their own home. And that you can attend our gatherings and our events. You can attend them virtually. You can be connected into this beautiful, you know, network all over the planet of women that are gathering from all over virtually. But you can also start your own local circle and really encouraging and empowering women how to do that on their own and just make it easy. You know, it just takes the courage and the decision to do it. And then we we provide curriculum and support that's a big part of kind of our nonprofit goal is to educate and offer circle support and circle leadership for women who want to do this in their own homes and all over the world.
Christine Mason 51:32
Yeah, that's beautiful. So people come to you to be trained and supported in doing it. So if you're feeling the call to have some kind of a feminine led spirituality, then people can come find you at Rise of the rose and learn more about that
Laura Swan 51:48
they can. Yes, it's it's all in the works, like you know, everything is growing slowly and steadily, and that's our goal, really. Is by this September, September, around the Fall Equinox, that we open up a lot of the resources for women, and it's going to be a membership model where women can become a member of the of the temple, and that's really in becoming a member, then they can get all kinds of training and resources and support. And it's a way that our movement is being supported and funded. We'll probably have a very, you know, very reasonable low membership fee for women, between like 30 and $45 somewhere in that range, and that will be the way that you get to access all of the resources and the support. And, you know, a big part of this movement, I've been a part of women's spirituality and and, you know, women's transformational work for many years, and I found that a lot of it is not accessible for women because of the cost. Women who don't have resources need this just as much. And we want to make this accessible for all different income levels, being able to be a member and really getting the community, the inspiration, the support, the guidance that women need.
Christine Mason 52:59
What would the goddess do? What would the goddess do? Well, when you're encountering a situation in your life and you are wondering, what would the goddess do, you could go into this community that you're building and get spiritual guidance from a feminine perspective. Yes, that's beautiful,
Laura Swan 53:17
yes. And you can live into the frequency of it, not just about it, but actually come into a community that we are embodying it, we are living it. We are expressing it or sharing it with each other.
Christine Mason 53:30
Well, I think that we're very aligned in our missions, and it's such a pleasure to know you.
Laura Swan 53:35
I am so excited to know more about you, and so grateful to be a part of this. Really appreciate it.
Christine Mason 53:43
Thank you so much for joining Laura and I in this conversation today. Please go and find her. All the links are in the show notes, and come and find me. I am having a beautiful set of retreats and courses this fall. I want you to come for detox and embodied renewal in Hawaii anytime in September, I want you to come for my bhakti Tantra week with Adam Bauer, which begins November 9 and goes till the 16th, a perfect prelude to the holidays in Kalapana, on the Big Island of Hawaii. You can also come early November 1 to the eighth. We're hosting a rest and restore week where you can do again, juicing, colonics, massages, swim in the pool, daily yoga, meditation, walks, all of that stuff. And my weekly class begins again on September 16, living Tantra. How do you step into full embodiment? And we have pretty good cohort forming. So come join me for that as well. Rosebud woman is the sponsor of this podcast, the best body care products you will find anywhere. Rosewoman.com Here's a little blessing as we sign off for the week, May the love of the earth be within you, and the light of the sun be within you, and the Song of the Sea be within you, and the blossom of. Womanhood, be within you and the voice of the Goddess, be within you now and forever, may you walk in love and beauty and truth all the days of this life. See you soon.
