What People Have
Said About Me

I work with people who have a deep desire for awakening, individuation, and contributing meaningfully to the world. A lot of the people I work with are teachers or aspire to be teachers themselves.

Here are some things people have said about me, the work we’ve done together, and the impact our work has had.

I have also created a practice, Shared Imaginal Practice, and people describe their experiences of it below.

“Rosa’s heartfelt way just makes me feel so welcome. With her genuine curiosity she helps me see facets of myself and the cosmos I had no clue existed.”

Konstantin

“All these questions, mysteries, and yearnings I have felt around the nature of awakening and the changes and transformations I’ve gone through over the years, I finally had someone I could trust to hear me about it. Rosa gets it, and it felt really good to be with someone who can so clearly demonstrate and emanate that understanding.”

Matthew Huff

“Rosa is a deep, insightful, and empathetic guide, and working with her has been a total joy. I never know where we are going to travel in a session, but her steady and encouraging presence has allowed me to go deeper and open up more to whatever experience or image awaits.”

Dustin

“Rosa has helped me, slowly, slowly, come more and more home to myself and to live in more of my own fullness. Our ‘work’ together has been exploring imaginal worlds. It’s been powerful, intuitive, playful, and innocent, even in darkness and intensity.

My whole being felt met, particularly those parts of me that longed to be met, like my soul, with its imagination, poetic sensibility, and mysticism.

Rosa helped me find faith in the movements of my heart, body, mind, and soul. I feel empowered to give my gifts in the ways I am called to do so. My life has more sovereignty, devotion, and melody.”

Mrinank Sharma

“Rosa has a really weird area of effect thing going on where my conversations with her, even when seemingly mundane, reliably have a much higher insight-density than my conversations with anyone else and I still don’t know how she does it. I can only assume energy wizard.”

River Kenna

“Working with Rosa gives you access to not only her keen listening and seeing below your words but her years of organizational and business ability. Her particular blend of compassionate presence and skill will access and unlock the deepest levels of you, infusing your project with those same qualities. Her method is deceptively simple and highly sophisticated”

Bree Greenberg

“Rosa draws a deep gratitude out of me when I ponder what it is we’ve uncovered through our time together.

Like most people in this age, I was a disembodied head-someone that had put on a suit, a persona, and had forgotten how to take it off, or that it could even be taken off.

My sessions with Rosa reminded me that I don’t need to try to have a body, and that the suit could come off. Her natural demeanour has drawn my own out, too, and she has encouraged me and made me feel seen in a way that I well up with gratitude to consider. I have come to understand that one can only meet the depths of another to the degree they have met their own depths, which Rosa has done.

Staying in the realm of not knowing, not needing well-defined answers, and holding multiple perspectives at once is also something that is rare and something I admire Rosa for. She has become a friend, not a hierarchical superior claiming to have all the answers. And because of that trust, I feel free to develop my own insights through direct perception.”

Dylan Giles

“When I connect with you and your work, your immediate and authentic way of talking about practice touches me deeply. When we talk I feel a deep sense of safety and feel empowered to share whatever comes up.

Your realization and clarity give me courage to go deeper myself. While your ease and humour keep things gently flowing. Having practiced in a couple of spiritual traditions your work sparked something fresh and almost forgotten in me. I feel great appreciation for your teachings.

Maybe the thing that I like most about your teaching is that you present possibilities to really practice with and care for our hearts.”

Nicolai Amrehn

Peer Feedback From Shadow Work Facilitator Training

“I see a really clear, deep water running through you that allows you to give people the space they need.”

“I see an incredible sense of space and a deep understanding of the spacial layout of people’s inner worlds.”

“You are always appearing like magic at the right place, in the right time, with the right thing.”

“I experience a tremendous amount of grace, humility and service. And your ability to radically hold space for other people in a way that makes them feel really seen and cared about.”

“You have the ability to explode the moment into truth. It’s incredible.”

Read more about Shadow Work here

Feedback from Retreatants

“This was my first work with the imaginal and it felt like it was exactly what I needed. I have seen how much my unconscious wants my attention, how much there is to see and to be felt. This is an eye (soul) opener.”

Attendant of our Imaginal Practice Day Retreat (more info)

“I felt properly guided and supported, by the teachers and by the group. I particularly enjoyed the combination of Vipassana with the heart-centred and inquiry practices, and the emphasis on compassion and playfulness. I feel excited and confident about my practice going forward.”

Attendant of one of our Dharmagarage retreats (more info)

Deepening Into Whole Being Awakening

“I contacted Rosa after a strong Insight experience during a meditation retreat. I was drawn to her model of whole-being awakening and various paths to navigate the experience. Most of my contemplative efforts have been heavy on sitting practice (Yang) and I wanted to approach it more from the angle of cultivation (Yin). I also wanted to connect to a source of motivational fuel that didn’t rely on force and self-coercion.

I appreciated Rosa’s ability to include the body, mind, heart, and soul into our exploration. Some problems required simple, pragmatic solutions, and some needed deeper introspective spelunking. Our work involved practical suggestions, excavating limiting beliefs, and imaginal journeying to connect more deeply to what was coming up for me and where I wanted to go next. As part of this path of cultivation, she helped me find an effective mantra, a feeling to evoke, and an image to hold throughout my day and in specific situations.

I often hesitate to bring my full self into an interaction for fear of being overwhelming. But with Rosa, there was an infinite capacity for all thoughts and feelings. Everything was welcome. Her intuition about unspoken or unrecognized feelings and beliefs is spot on. Every time she would start a sentence with “I’m also getting a sense of…” I knew I was gonna be blasted with some Truth I wasn’t admitting to myself.

For any challenge I faced that looked like a 3-dimensional winding road up a mountain, Rosa knew of a 4th dimension where that winding road is a direct line.

We worked together for 4 sessions over 2 months and we reached a natural conclusion where I felt like I had integrated all of my insights and unlocked a new capacity to go out into the world with more clarity, motivation, agency, and joy. I feel more grounded, more centered, and more myself than before.”

Kristijan Ivančić

An Imaginal Journey of the Heart

“Working with Rosa as a teacher means a lot more than just having a chat about meditation techniques. A LOT more. Rosa is a teacher of the heart, as the Leonard Cohen song goes. A teacher of being. We’re friends and co-adventurers. But also, and importantly, I think, she’s my teacher. Rosa’s depth of practice, or to describe it more accurately, depth of humanity and wisdom, is palpable. You can feel that she’s an open heart, born from great insight into suffering. Because of this, I feel like nothing is out of bounds for shared investigation – everything is welcome. Together, we are exploring the depths of suffering, the heights of joy and playfulness, and the furthest reaches of the imagination. All of this leads to great, embodied and lived-in openings and insights. Also, we spend a lot of time just laughing our asses off!

We’ve explored Rob Burbea’s notion of the imaginal in my meditation group the Dharmaragarage. Briefly stated, imaginal practice can be described as a kind of fully embodied engagement with story, with imagination, with archetype – from a stance of ‘creation-discovery’ – participation in creative processes where the imaginal is held more lightly than either ‘true or untrue’. The imaginal can be said to become ‘emotionally true’, like the truth of an intense dream perhaps. This imaginal practice has been extremely interesting to play around with. But Rosa really lives in the realm of the archetypical and imaginal, and she connects this with a deep understanding of heartful, embodied practice. As someone with a fairly long history of practice in zen and with techniques like vipassana and shamatha, diving into imaginal practice with Rosa has been an absolutely wonderful new direction.

For as long as I can remember, my imagination has been a very prominent force in my life. It’s what I use to do my job – as a researcher on how people imagine futures and how these imagined futures impact the present. I have also been a practicing meditator for around 20 years, with increasing depth and commitment to practice emerging over the years. However, I’d never really engaged imaginative forms of practice outside a few therapy sessions. To be able to use my rather overcharged imagination in practice, in an embodied, heartful manner to explore the full dimensionality of the human experience under Rosa’s guidance has been excellent and liberating in a number of new ways. It is transforming my relationships, the way I dream and sleep, and, in terms of practice, how I understand techniques like shamatha and the use of koans.

More generally, Rosa is able to listen, feel along with, and reflect on so many aspects of practice and life and emerging insights, and she always has interesting new ways of looking for me to experiment with. She’s honest about the difficult and dark sides of life and practice. With Rosa, I can really find the space for a kind of adventurous ‘everything is possible’ attitude. Right now, we’re discussing a number of directions in which to go to investigate and challenge my fundamental assumptions about and experiences of time. I can’t wait to see where this will take us.”

Joost Vervoort

Portal into the Depths

“My sessions with Rosa took on many different forms based on how my life and practice looked that week.

Future visioning and planning. Project management. Trauma healing in a variety of embodied and imaginative ways, like journeying. Mentoring for imaginal guiding, leadership, and general space-holding skills.

She can meet me right where I am and help me get to exactly where I want to go. Rosa once described herself as a portal and I really agree with that: I show up with my intentions and values and a willingness to go deep and she can steer me there.

I’ve been lucky to work with many incredible healers across many modalities and I’ve experienced a variety of therapeutic containers. It is fascinating to see what comes up for healing in these various settings — what my body deems is safe to surface at that moment and what it senses the therapist/mentor/etc has the capacity to witness.

Rosa’s presence and capacity are truly special; it’s a privilege to get to work with and be friends with someone who can hold such an absolutely expansive container.

Importantly, I feel very safe within that expansive place, never forced or rushed. My deepest core wounds surface in our sessions; the stuff that leaks out in negative and toxic ways in my life but has always been very hard to approach head-on, because I and others haven’t had the capacity to look it in the face and heal it thoroughly. As such, Rosa and I have evoked massive life shifts, quickly. The kind of progress that would have taken 10 times as long, if at all, with someone else.

So many of Rosa’s gifts, and those that we’ve co-created in these sessions, will live on in my own therapeutic practice and presence.”

Jane Miller

Shared Imaginal Practice Descriptions

Shared imaginal practice is a non-hierarchical relational practice that arose from the experiences in my awakening. It opens a doorway into a new way of relating and being that puts relational and embodied imagination front and centre.

The practice can unlock a brand new part of experience for people that is impossible to imagine before but was right under their nose the whole time. The soulful realm of experience opens up, as if before people were always looking at the surface of the water and suddenly they are given the capacity to be able to dive underwater and explore from a safe, rational and connected place.

Feedback From Running Imaginal Practice Sessions on a Peer Retreat

“It felt like a guided meditation that was opening my senses and through that opening up of the senses, I entered into an imaginal space.”

“The practice is like opening an artistic relationship with your interiority, it allows you to relate to your experience as a living art piece.”

“It invites a playfulness that creates an intimacy with the inside, you are not trying to fix anything.”

“The imaginal allows me to know the experience I’m connecting with from the inside; it imprints on my being.”

“The imaginal allows experience to be in coherence with all of me. I am looking through heart perception and the world drops away in a certain sense. It’s like presence and absence at the same time. A co-presence with full, deep, continual perception.”

“The simple, spatial reorganising that the practice opens up as a possibility is a game-changer. I didn’t know that it was an option and it meant I was able to release a stuckness.”

“The practice takes my ideas of myself and my world, and turns them on their head. I am being decentred from the primary identity.”

“The practice opens you to synaesthesia and senses beyond what people assume is possible.”

“Shared imaginal practice felt like diving deep into thoughts, fears and ideas. The particular sequence of questions is designed to lead to new discoveries. Each question moves you from the tip of the iceberg towards parts hidden below the water surface.”

Milica Zec

“I have a vivid imagination, but usually I don’t harness its powers and aim to ‘stay realistic’. In the shared practice I let my imagination run wild, while someone keeps me grounded and helps me direct my attention.

By sharing out loud about what is happening, the imagination gets a shape that is possible and very interesting to investigate from a rational standpoint, as well as being fun.”

Lena

“A surprising amount of things can arise and shift in such a short session, one that comes with no other goal than the exploration of a concept. Tears often flow, but some sessions are completely hilarious. Sometimes deep wounds reveal themselves, sometimes things connect in ways that now seem obvious but weren’t that way before, sometimes we discover nooks and corners in ourselves or the world that weren’t visible before. That’s the power of shared practices.”

Maija Haavisto, from her book ‘Loving Awakening’

Diving into the Flow of the Subconscious

“I genuinely keep being surprised by how effective this practice is. I think the newness each time is one of the reasons why it is so effective. Every practice is like an adventure into your subconscious and you never know where it will take you.

Shared imaginal practice combines multiple tools in one. It has elements of meditation, non-duality and dream analysis; similarities with psychedelics; and very importantly includes sharing in it together. The elements combine seamlessly to create a practice that has a very nice fluidity to it.

The practice is also a nice balance between sinking deeply into relaxation and activity; in a similar way that supplementing your sitting practice with movement can really help move stuck energy.

Before the practice you chose a theme that feels resonant for you in that moment, and then you get guided into the intimacy of your direct experience. Being asked things like what you feel, where you feel it, what pictures or thoughts come up, makes you very aware of your internal landscape and also receptive to the spontaneity of consciousness. Because of how the practice is setup and with the safety the guide provides, it becomes very easy to dive into the flow of what your subconsciousness is communicating to you so you can see clearly and get insight into your unique layers of reality. And most importantly: it is very fun!”

Hans van der Zanden

A Space of Intimate Encounter Between Unique Minds and Souls

“While Rosa was visiting as a teacher at The Alembic in Berkeley, California, I discovered that her approach to practice is rooted in a unique conception of the relation between body, heart, mind and soul—one that doesn’t strike me as copied from preexisting ideas and dogmas, but rather drawn from her own experience and rooted in her own profound spiritual journey.

Rosa’s approach to Shared Imaginal Practice powerfully reveals how sitting in the presence of a closely attuned partner can have a profoundly catalyzing effect on the unfolding of imaginal practice.

In solo imaginal practice, there is often an inherent tension between the psychological surrender required to open up to imaginal perception and the cognitive focus required to guide and direct the continual unfoldment of the visionary process. Too much directive mental activity can draw energy away from the open receptivity typically required to sustain imaginal sensitivity, especially when first beginning to explore imaginal practice.

Shared Imaginal Practice, when undertaken dyadically, offers an elegant means of easing this tension. By verbally reporting emergent imaginal material to a closely attuned partner as it arises in real time, one can allow their partner to take up the cognitively directive functions. Following their own curiosity and formulating questions (or choosing pre-created prompts), a partner can significantly assist in the process of drawing out unexplored features and dormant potentials in imaginal space. Following the directive lead of a partner, one can more easily sustain an openly receptive state toward what arises without disturbing imaginal attunement with too much directive thinking.

In addition to this, a partner’s curiosity and inclinations will flow from the uniqueness of their own personality, and can therefore generate questions and invitations resulting in an imaginal journey that one could never have experienced on one’s own. Shared Imaginal Practice is a thoroughly emergent and participatory process arising in the space of intimate encounter between unique minds and souls.

I feel moved to report one more crucial thing I learned from Rosa. My previous experience with imaginal practice had revealed how tuning into the subtle sensation of the energy body can lead to the blossoming of psychic images, which in turn can organically give rise to insights in the form of ideas and concepts. However, Rosa’s approach to Shared Imaginal Practice taught me that this can run rather easily in the other direction. A verbal prompt related to a concept or idea (e.g., “The spiritual path,” “An ocean of uncertainty,” “Flowing with life”) can serve as a doorway opening upon a rich depth of imagery and subtle sensation. One can, indeed, travel through logos into hidden depths of mythos. Various concepts and ideas, then, can be approached like flowers in bloom, and imaginal practice can become a way of landing on these flowers, entering into them, traveling down their stems, and sensing into the sprawling expense of roots and rich soil beneath the surface from which the flowers draw their life and sustenance. Recognizing this has considerably expanded my sense of possibilities for the way that imaginal practice can deepen, enrich, and re-enchant the commonplace and everyday aspects of lived experience.”

Sam Hinds

Read more about Shared Imaginal Practice >

What People Have Said About Me