Testimonials

I typically work with people who have a deep desire for awakening, self-actualisation 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.

“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, the sexual fantasies 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 the sexual energy, into the power centre 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 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