I typically 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 working with me.
I have also created a practice – Shared Imaginal Practice – and there are some descriptions of it below.
“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.
You have become an important spiritual guide to me, even after the few meetings we had so far. Some of your ideas and teachings have become an important part of my spiritual repertoire, like the possibility to frame equanimity as inclusion just to name one example.
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
“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 Freiberg
‘Working With Rosa – 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
“On a practical level, the work we have done together has included elements of shamanic journeying, parts work and shadow work. And the real strength in what I see you offering is a sense of solidity and spaciousness and something in you feeling very unshakeable. There’s a sense that there’s nothing I can share that is going to alarm you, or cause you to contract or recoil.
My feeling in being with you more generally is you seem to be living in some version of a heart-state – a grounded, embodied, heartful place. There’s rarely ever a feeling of you being pulled out of your heart space and that to me feels like a tremendous gift and a remarkable quality in another human being.
It feels very easy for me to feel a sense of trust and to feel at home and at ease in our conversations.
You have a willingness to open up different portals and be very playful in your work, while also being very sincere and direct.
My meditation teachers in Nepal have taught me how to purify the mind with mindfulness and in contrast, I see you as my darkness teacher.
The feeling I had with you was one of welcoming the darkness – the absurdity, the ironies and the shadows. It feels like that darkness is very welcome with you and in a way, on a more real-life level, it feels more like home.
One of the biggest impacts of our work together over the last six months has been an encouragement to go really deeply into my truth. To speak deeply from the heart and to trust in that, even if what I find there is in some way confronting or challenging. And also a real encouragement to embrace the darkness, to not shy away from shadows – to really find them and feel them and to get to know them.
The way you frame awakening also feels very approachable and much more inclusive. It’s not this kind of far-out, distant, pristine landscape that is often depicted in traditional Buddhist and Hindu texts. It’s grubby and immediate and raw. It’s my personality and it’s my realness. And it’s a welcoming of that realness. That feels really core in how you’ve worked with me and how I’ve seen you work with others as well.
It feels like a downwards movement into the root, into my power and into the heart.
It’s becoming more of myself and opening my heart to more dimensions of myself, as opposed to becoming something different or transcending.”
David Lassiter
“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: intuitive, playful, innocent, even in darkness and intensity, and powerful.
My whole being felt met, particularly those parts of me that longed to be met: 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. Thank you.”
Mrinank Sharma
“Rosa has helped me unlock emotional, psychological and bodily/energetic knots that would be very difficult to reach on my own. The techniques she uses are very immediate – focused on the immediate sensations in the body and the immediate emotional sensations, helping me stay grounded and listened-to, in a shared safe space. She combines this with the imaginal/archetypal/psychological and energetic practices that help identify, work with and ultimately untie these emotional and bodily knots. This is a great way to get behind any non-accepted or non-integrated archetypes/energies or mental stories.
I am at a stage of my practice where this is a key focus – after the awakening on the perceptual non-duality front, there is the full embodiment, the “cleaning up” and “growing up” part of it to work on.
Rosa is a lovely person with a quality of understanding, spaciousness, safety and peace to her presence. She is also deeply sensitive and intuitive. Working with her is a blessing and a great pleasure for me. She has helped me experience emotions more clearly – full HD, head on. I am also increasingly able to bring spaciousness, allowing and love to some of the darkest emotions and psychological knots, ultimately untying these. This has so far brought tangible quality of life improvements but also valuable tools and perspectives I can employ on my own, or use to help others on their path.”
Kaloyan Stefanov
“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
“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. She’s also friendly, warm and has a great sense of humor, to boot!”
Dustin B
“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
“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
“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)
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.”