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 who I have coached and collaborated with have said about me.
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
“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 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
“Being with Rosa is like a gift – it’s a relationship that I needed for so long but didn’t know where to look for or how to ask for. 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. Someone who has been where I’m at and could really see and hear me.
Rosa gets it, and it felt really good to be with someone who can so clearly demonstrate and emanate that understanding.
Through our sessions, we went on a journey. We went deep into untangling a big knot of meaning, narratives, perceptions, identity, the mystical and my relationship to the divine. We went all over the place – into time, sadness, mysticism, the nature of meaning and more.
Now I can drop into being the mystic I’ve always been. I can stop holding back and be more assertive and direct with what feels important.”
Anansi
“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
“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
“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
“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 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
“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 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.”