Sound Healing Trauma With Voice and Mantra of Christine Mason’s Journey

Christine Mason paints a picture of resilience through sound, voice, and mantra

Christine is the founder of Rosebud Woman. She has a deep interest in women's wellness and the liberation of all people. She hosts a weekly podcast, The Rose Woman, and writes weekly letters on love power and womanhood to more than 30,000 people. As a yogi, bhakta, tantrika and mystic Christian, Christine draws on ancient wisdom, while working with current modalities including neuroscience informed collective trauma healing. She's authored seven books, and is the co-founder of Sundari, an experimental community, meditation center and medicinal farm on Hawaii.

She has appeared on radio, tv, print and podcasts (from NPR to Vogue to TEDx), speaking on conscious entrepreneurship, freeing the mind and body, activism and sexual and intimate wellness. She's a mother of four and a grandmother. She's taught yoga and led chant, alongside Adam Bauer, all over the world, from Argentina to India.

The conversation with this multifaceted futurist, author, and entrepreneur paints a picture of resilience through sound, voice, and mantra. Profoundly inspiring, intellectually stimulating, and sprinkled with heart-opening song, Christine's voice is medicine you'll want to lean into. 

"We can weave together peace, pleasure, and polyvagal theory; it’s only when you’re in deep relaxation and not in a defended state that you can actually feel pleasure. Your peace is not just your key to walking in the world in an undefended state, it’s opening the doorway to enjoying your given embodied life."
-Christine Mason

Anandra had the great privilege to have talked with Christine Mason. The interview video below was for our Mantras for Peace: A Wisdom Gathering project.*

Conversation from the interview:

Anandra: Yay, hi! Welcome to our Mantras for Peace session today with Christine Marie Mason. I'm so glad you're here with us. It's such an honor, thank you.

I have to admit, I just feel delighted at the chance to sit and talk with you. Since the time I met you a couple of years ago in Rishikesh, I felt a sense of depth and mystery in you. As I’ve gotten to know you a bit more—just little tidbits of personal interaction, mostly observing what you're putting out into the world—I’ve felt a steadily growing admiration and respect. I'm so grateful you're willing to share your time with me today.

Christine Mason: I'm blushing. I literally just felt heat rise. I have to do that childlike response, like, “No, no, no—thank you.”

Anandra: Well, for me, when I get that too, it’s like this flirting-with-the-universe thing that happens in my body, where I blush. There’s a charm that's magnified. And the fact that you feel that too—I'm like, “Oh my God, I’m just going to love you.” So great.

So here we are. Let’s talk about that. My invitation to you was to have a conversation about all things visionary, healing, pleasure, and peace.

To which you responded: great topics—I love those topics.

Christine Mason: Yeah. Just today I started recording on polyvagal theory. It's so exciting. I can weave it in with how that relates to peacefulness. It basically says that the vagus nerve is not about overriding the body with your mind, like behavioral psychology would have us think. Instead, the vagus nerve leverages the same physiological pathways the mind does to bring us into deeper relaxation. It’s only when you're in that relaxed, undefended state that you can truly feel pleasure.

So peace is not just the key to walking through the world in an undefended way—it’s also the doorway to enjoying your embodied life even more. And I love that it’s being understood not just in the metaphysical realm, but as a physical, biological reality.

Anandra: So the connection between pleasure and peace—it’s not just a concept. It’s a physiological truth.

Christine Mason: I'll tell you a little bit about how I became interested in regulating my own nervous system, in peace in myself, and then peace in the world. I grew up in a super chaotic environment. We moved 17 times before I graduated from high school—and that was at 15. My mother was murdered in an act of violent crime by a stranger when I was 11. My life was pretty chaotic across three continents.

Even though I started my family young and was outwardly successful in business and all those things, I still had this strong pull toward the sacred—especially in nature when I was young. But it wasn’t until I reached a point of deep discomfort with the way things were that I turned inward. I was doing all the "right" things, but still felt so much stress inside. That’s when I found yoga and meditation.

It was unlike anything I’d encountered in a traditional Protestant church, which felt more like beseeching, petitioning prayer—always talking, very little listening. The invitation to silence, to feel my heart, and to tap into a deeper perception of subtle energies—that was a huge opening. I left the mainline church and started singing mantra.

That also drew me into understanding how my connection to peace was related to transformative justice. I started working in prisons for seven years, with people who had committed crimes similar to what happened to my mother. I became deeply interested in how we reclaim each individual in our culture—and even more broadly, how I and my children have a right to exist, free from violent systems that deny life. I wanted a legitimate, grounded, pro-life organizational structure on Earth—for the planet, for all beings.

Eventually, my spirituality and my politics, and even my business life, became completely intertwined. For the last four years, I’ve been running a women’s intimate wellness company. The whole mission is to unwind sexual and body shame so everyone—especially women—can stand in more peace, power, and pleasure.

And now, I really feel like the internal work of living my mantra, my wish for freedom and peace, is no longer something separate. I’m not compartmentalizing it from my business or daily work.

Anandra: Wow. We kind of skipped over your bio because we went right into the moment of the crush! But for those who don’t know Christine yet, you just got a brief sketch of a few of the powerful things you’ve done. We’ll link to her full bio in the show notes.

Your current project, Rosebud Woman, is such a beautiful example of how you integrate your personal journey as an embodied spirit with a very pragmatic business sense. That’s one of the things I’m most curious about—your process. What gave you the bandwidth and resilience to pursue that path of healing, rather than shutting down or seeking revenge or vindication? Because whenever we’re challenged, we always have choices.

So how did you move through that? What gave you that strength?

Christine Mason: I'm so fortunate to have Thomas Hübl as a teacher. He says the difference between children who survive trauma and thrive—building families, contributing to the world—and those who don’t, is whether they had even one place that was safe, magical, and where their essence could stay alive.

I had many of those places—especially in nature. I had a grandfather who was like a country mystic. He would show me the night sky, how plants grow, how to read tree bark, feel the wind, and read the sea. I also had a grandmother and great-grandmother in Germany who were deeply competent and resilient.

So even though my mother was gone, when I dropped in with those women, it was like: you get up and do it again. My grandfather’s mysticism and their Germanic competence gave me a grounding place of quiet.

Another place was movement. You might relate to this—it’s child’s pose. When I go into that space internally, it’s like a beautiful, alive, creative bubble—deeply connected to spirit and my imagination. That inner world was a total refuge.

Even though my immediate family life was chaos—banana-head level chaos—I somehow still had resilience, creativity, and a connection to spirit. I can remember being drawn to magic, art, and music from a young age, just having this big love. Maybe that’s grace.

And the more I trusted what was coming toward me, the more I could follow it. I wrote an essay to myself at 27 about the trajectory of my work life: “Is it business or business?” I wasn’t happy in the high-pressure, evaluative world of business, but being an entrepreneur is a creative path.

I think we can talk about how our gifts often develop in response to what we experienced—and were aware enough to recognize as incoherent. That’s what happened with me, with my work and so much more.

I’ll pause here to make sure I’m not rambling.

Anandra: No, I don’t think it’s a ramble at all. It’s really fascinating to hear you articulate what that process looks like.

Because I think all of us have various shades and levels of opportunities to have a traumatic response to life, which can cause us to go into fight, flight, freeze, or collapse. And that's a natural, protective response that we shouldn't shame ourselves for. But if we can somehow navigate our own nervous system to find that place of pause, resilience can spring forth.

What you're saying—you're calling it grace—you could also call it a blessing. It is a privilege to have even one tether to a healthy model or one safe space to cultivate resilience.

Christine Mason: One thing in the prison work, for example, is that responsiveness—not reaction—is the number one thing cultivated. And that's through mindfulness: being still and going slow enough to feel what you're feeling, rather than reacting through outbursts or autonomic defenses.

Another thing I learned in the collective trauma training is that there are two primary responses to a trigger: you either lean out of your center or contract and pull away from the other person. The job of maturing in relational presence is to hold your own center and be with the other person simultaneously—to feel what you're feeling and feel what they’re feeling in this beautiful, dynamic pulsation.

Noticing when you're starting to pull away or lean out—especially if you weren’t mirrored well as a child—is a skill you can develop as an adult. And it requires another person who’s willing to just be with you while you express your feelings. That’s part of the Polyvagal theory, but it’s also a core principle in collective trauma healing: we heal together. There’s collective trauma and there’s collective joy, and the healing is in the presence of others.

It’s a very hopeful idea. Before I did that work, I thought healing could only happen in therapeutic pairings—with a therapist or psychologist. But in the two-year container I did with Thomas, he had 140 people in a room, and if he worked with one person, anyone resonating with that issue was also being healed.

This idea of “one-to-many” or collective healing gives me hope. We don’t have to reach all 7 billion people individually to pivot to the next level of consciousness. I'm very excited about that protocol. I think it’s one reason that mantra and kirtan work so well—when you're creating a resonant field, it allows people to feel not just safe, but undefended and open to invite in grace.

Oh my God, I have so many ideas around this—I love it so much.

Anandra: Well, keep going! I love hearing your articulation of these concepts. Do you have more to say about the experience of collective healing? Because that’s really what this whole project is about—amplifying the frequency of a genuine wish for peace while becoming an instrument of peace.

So when you use your voice to intone the mantra, you’re embodying and expressing this. It’s a wish for collective healing—beyond a wish. It’s an invocation. A vibrational embodiment of collective healing when you’re in that Mantric consciousness.

Christine Mason: I was just talking to my friend, Sean Coleman, a ski instructor, and he said something like: he trains people to only go at the pace where they can enjoy every turn. I was at the grocery store afterward, putting things on the conveyor belt, and tried to go at the pace where I could enjoy it—or while brushing my teeth. That step is part of coming into presence with yourself.

Generally, when you're beginning to find peace within, you have to slow way down from the pace of common culture. That’s hard, especially if you’re addicted to being busy and getting things done. But once you slow down enough to feel what you feel, you realize—we need each other. We heal together. That really made a difference for me. I stopped trying to hold it all alone.

Even in the mantra we’re using for Mantras for Peace—Loka Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu—there are instructions for presence. "Samastah" conveys steadiness and presence in yourself. "Sukha"—that sweetness and pleasure, the pace where you can enjoy every turn—is part of what it means to be truly present. And "Shanti, Shanti, Shanti"—peace of the past (forgiveness), peace of the present (presence), and peace of the future (not worrying)—contains a whole narrative.

So, I noticed a progression from when I began this practice. At first, I just knew something was there. Now, 20 years later, the practice is for myself, for others, and for divinity or God. It’s no longer about performance or playing a role. I don’t have the jewelry or the outfits. I just sing my prayers.

I rarely go to class anymore. I do yoga on my mat, in my room, or with friends at home. I don’t charge for classes or teaching. People come to our place in Hawaii to practice. If they want to make a donation to one of the teachers, great. But the idea is that our joint experience—meditating, chanting, breathing together—is what we’re supposed to be doing as humans. If we did more of that, there’d be less conflict. I don’t want to monetize that. I’ll monetize things I create that have input costs, but I’m very drawn to building communities of shared practice, not commercialization of spiritual instruction.

Not that it can’t be a calling—it can, and should be supported—but that’s different from our daily practice.

Anandra: That’s an interesting and challenging idea. In India, shared spaces are often subsidized by big spiritual organizations with large donations. I was wondering if you have a vision for how that could work in the West—how we might decouple essential practices like yoga, breath, and meditation from capitalism.

Christine Mason: I have some ideas. I mean, we’re not even in capitalism anymore—it’s become abstraction upon abstraction. People don’t make things, grow things, touch each other. Everything is commodified.

There’s even someone trying to get a process patent on holding hands in therapy. Can you believe that? Trying to own the experience of being human.

But we do have some subsidization of sacred spaces in the U.S.—churches don’t pay taxes, for example. Libraries have gathering rooms. Public parks and recreation offer yoga and meditation. So, at a low level, we already have some subsidized spaces.

The home altar and home practice space is a lost art in the West. Growing up, I never saw an altar in someone’s house. But now, my friends do. People are reinviting the sacred into their homes—with altars to Mary, Ganesh, crystals, rocks, feathers, mementos. It becomes the center of the home.

That re-sacralization can start right there—in our homes.

And what I’m doing with our Hawaii property, with my partner John Shiva, is just that: creating a large space with multiple gathering areas, making it free or at cost, or subsidized by residents or shared work. We’re trying to learn from the 10,000 intentional communities, spiritual groups, and eco-villages around the world that are experimenting with different models. I’ve been reading a lot of sacred economics, like Charles Eisenstein. And I’m an old-time burner. And you go to Burning Man for the first time, and what they bring up is an economy of radical gifting and radical personal responsibility. You’re walking around in the world thinking, “What can I give today?”—not “What can I get?” That shift happens inside you.

With each subsequent joy or prosperity, your impulse is to pay it forward. That was a huge paradigm shift for me in 2003, the first time I went. How fun is it to prepare to go somewhere with the idea of delighting someone, being a love fairy, creating a gift? It’s a wonderful way to live.

I also want to talk a little about the economic models of business ownership. When I was coming up, it was clear you were there to serve the shareholders, and the people at the top deserved the most reward. It was difficult for those working at minimum wage, lower levels, or even middle management to find a way to gain freedom.

People ended up being wage slaves, economic slaves. Something like 30% of Americans don’t even have enough money to get through the month without a paycheck. That’s such a sad idea because it means there’s no space to inquire into who you are, no time for mantra, no room in daily life to be with your embodiment or experience the gift of being incarnated.

So, with this most recent company—since I’m the only one backing it—it’s just us. Everyone owns a piece. We honor women’s cycles. We ask each other, “How’s your week going?” We do culture calls on Fridays to check in on the whole person, so they’re not just transactional widgets. There’s profit sharing.

The idea is that we’re not utility objects for some profit-generating engine, but beings contributing our life energy to something meaningful. That deserves respect and deeper engagement. Many companies are trying to create models where people band together to bring a mission to life while honoring the space, time, and beauty of each person. It’s beautiful.

People talk about past jobs where being vulnerable or showing their full selves got weaponized against them. It was never a safe environment to just be. So they learned to shield. But I don’t think that’s a way to live. It’s definitely not how I want to build companies. Everything I’m saying is an experiment.

This company only has a few million in sales. It’s a couple of years old. Whether or not it becomes a global success, it’s already a huge success in terms of changing how work feels—for our team, and I hope for our customers.

Anandra: I had a student come up to me once and say, “Even if you change just one person—if one person has a radical reorientation—that’s enough.” Everything you’ve put together with Rosebud Woman, all the messaging and invitation, is a success. If it stops here, the collective healing you’ve radiated is a grand, successful experiment.

Christine Mason: This is part of the grace and trust conversation: What are you here to do? If I hadn’t lost my mother, or hadn’t had very little direct female contact until adulthood—even though I saw my grandmothers now and then—would I have realized I needed remedial education in tantric, yogic, sensual embodiment? No. I had to go look for it because of the absence in my life.

Coming into awareness, I realized so much of my suffering as a woman was tied to being in a woman’s body—sexual shame, unequal opportunities, lack of respect. I can still remember moments from adolescence that were mortifying. I thought something was wrong with me. But it was totally normal.

As I came into midlife, I saw those points of suffering as something that led me here. And I said, “I don’t want to pass this suffering on.” Not to my daughters, not to my friends, not through my messaging or imagery. I want to pass on joy. The moment that hit me, everything clicked.

No sexual shame. Talk about it like you would your elbow. “This is my vulva.” No different. No body shame. No flower apologizes for being different. Orchids and birds of paradise couldn’t be more different—and they’re beautiful. We need to see ourselves as nature.

Everything I’ve done—yoga, gardening—it all just clicked. If we apply that reverence in our daily lives as women, others will respond to that frequency. You call yourself into that relationship first.

So, back to peace. I can’t work for peace in the world effectively if I’m not experiencing it in my own being. That doesn’t mean you can’t work for justice, but it must be on multiple levels. My daily practice, self-care, and self-love feed every action I take.

I can go to a town council meeting and be peaceful, centered, and calm while discussing hard issues. What a different way to be.

Anandra: One of the qualities I admire most in a person is their ability to take the rot—the things we want to throw away—and be with them long enough for them to break down into compost gold. There’s something critical in how you speak as a woman, digesting your life experience to offer something to the world.

I’d love for all of us to have a path to turn pain into something beautiful—a vision. I see that in you and appreciate it. We do have a choice in how we be, if we can access that part in ourselves.

Christine Mason: My friend Karat calls it a “bedrock of fear” that people live on, dancing around it. Justified rage, political stances, certainty—all sitting on fear. Until you let it be porous, and drop into it, you can’t access healing.

Sometimes you need to sit with your trauma. Flood your brain with serotonin. Maybe through meditation, or other means. When you do, you can look at it without fear. That trauma loses its grip. Otherwise, it becomes a frozen part of you—a shadow. And less of you is available to be in love, in healing.

You go to the most painful place—or start smaller. Let it melt. Feel it. Hopefully someone is with you, witnessing. And it begins to dissolve. Warmth spreads. You go through the fear. On the other side is acceptance and love. That’s what’s true.

So, going through that layer of fear and anger is the only way. When I look at what’s happening politically, it feels like a bunch of children sitting on generations of transferred fear. It would be lovely if they could fall in love with their garden—and compost it. Realize it’s not a power play. This is life.

Anandra: If we’re going to evolve collectively, we have to be excited about deconstructing the past and re-educating ourselves. And feeling it. What you’re talking about is what I call tantric introspection—being willing to feel what we feel and know what we know.

As Bessel van der Kolk says, to heal trauma, you must feel what you feel and know what you know.

And what we see happening so often is that fear is the manifestation of being stuck in some old fear cycle that you don't even remember when it started because it didn’t start in your generation. It goes way, way back.

Christine Mason: I just watched Judas and the Black Messiah. It’s a story of Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party in the late 60s, and the FBI’s persecution of the organization and him—and how the carry-forward of 400 years of racial abuse had come to a head. It wanted not only a positive solution in creating care, but a revolution. And the white officers in the FBI were portrayed as equally being locked up in what they felt and were entrained in.

So I wanted to bring that up. It’s not just what you feel and what you know, because both sides felt and knew very clearly. It’s critical to have that. But in some way, the bridge has to happen where these guys feel what those guys feel and know what they know—and vice versa. That’s where collectivism has its highest potential. It’s not just like NVC or mediation; it’s actually being present with that long wound.

If we owned racism as a white community, you'd have to own doing all of that imagery over to so many people. Can you imagine the pain? I'm afraid to look at that. Boy, that's painful.

But I think we're waking up. The kids are definitely in a different spot from familiarity and empathy than my generation was. Heal Together is my hope and vision in our systems.

I will do my mantra. I will do my practice at home. I will do my sacred reading. Right now, I’m reading Ian Whicher’s Integrity of the Yoga Darśana. Then I’m going to take it out and build my company with those philosophies in mind. I’m going to try to create my home with those philosophies in mind and really pull the thread out and through.

While I'm waiting for new structures to be created, I'll put my time and resources into the amelioration of structural problems at the symptom level. You’ve got to work at the structural level and be more visionary, I suppose. But that doesn’t mean ignoring real suffering right now.

Anandra: You gave a number of little invitations to circle back to where you started with the Polyvagal idea. When I heard you say we have to have that listening and feeling of each other—yeah, that to me is a musical response. That is only available to us when we are in our social engagement system—the Polyvagal system—where we have the curious, open, empathetic listening ear.

Did you want to speak on that?

Christine Mason: I’m not an expert on it, but I will say you mentioned Bessel van der Kolk. I would highly recommend Thomas Hübl’s work on collective trauma. He just put out his first book after decades of work. And Stephen Porges—he’s the guy who sort of defined the Polyvagal Theory.

If anyone’s interested, these three authors really form a validation triad for what you’ve known all along to be true—a scientific basis that when you're held in good relation with family, tribe, parent—being able to be authentically yourself—you can live healthy, whole, and heal very quickly from trauma. And when you're not, you get stuck. Many of us weren’t, and our cultures weren’t designed that way. So we have to recreate that as adults for ourselves and others—and it’s totally possible.

They each give models and approaches to bring that forward. For me, being a mom, being a grandma, being a singer, being in the garden—all of these are tools you can use to self-regulate without needing all the academic background. I just did The Nine Gifts, and that came out of this exact idea. I didn’t even make the connection until now—but there had been so many pointers to why we have trauma and how broken everything is.

People are on opioids, they're numbing—but simple things like making art, making music, dancing, moving—those can change your physiology. Breathe. I put them together in that book to say: You are a self-healing organism. And when you do these things with others, it’s not a linear relationship. It’s exponential.

That’s that Bible verse—I think it’s Paul or Corinthians—where it says, “Wherever two or more are gathered in His name.” If you and I sit and sing together, it has an exponential effect—more than if I sing alone. Why is that? That amplification of the social organism. A healthy social organism amplifies love. An unhealthy one amplifies fear.

And we can be part of the former. We are doing that. I am here to amplify love and bring forward joy in all the things I touch. And I hope I get a few more years to do that.

I think I told you—I died. I had an NDE. And since then, it’s been so clear—death is not something to fear. But it’s also incredibly wonderful to get to live in a body. I'm not afraid to die, but I’m excited to get the chance to play and see what we can create here.

And there's something afoot—I feel it. Everywhere I look, people are trying to find new ways to live with the planet, invent new social structures. There’s a sense of waking up. The first wave is denial and grief and all the things that happen. But now we’re dealing and trying to unwind a couple hundred years of experimentation—

But maybe we’re not unwinding—we’re not going backwards. We’re going forward. We’re evolving and improving from where we were.

Anandra: On that note, this whole Mantras for Peace project—and you—are what gets me up in the morning. It’s that invitation to collective resonance and amplifying the peace channel. Having a practice where we tap into that and amplify it together.

In this Mantras for Peace community, there are thousands of people tapping their little taps on their mantra to keep that resonance alive. And I just want to say thank you, Christine, for adding your voice to the peace channel. And thanks also to the millions of souls who have caught on and kept the vibe alive throughout time—throughout recorded history, human life as we know it. There have always been yogis, saints, sages steadily pulsing their wisdom in every indigenous community, sacred mountain, and hidden place.

We are here to be an example—to be instruments of that.

Christine Mason: There’s a scholar, Erik Davis, who wrote High Weirdness. He said that while all this was happening in dominant culture, people at the fringes were pushing the edges of what it meant to be alive—technologically, metaphysically, everything.

Welcome that. Welcome those expressions from the fringe. There’s deep wisdom in what they bring. They’re like scavengers, harbingers, huntresses—pulling in things from the wilds of imagination and the future, bringing them here and connecting them with the long thread of deep knowing of who we are.

And it doesn’t have to live in a cave or monastery. I want to bring it back to that. Your mantra doesn’t live only inside of you—it resonates out. It’s in what you’re doing in the world, with your neighbors, at the gas station, everywhere.

I want it removed from special status. I can honor my teachers. I can say, “Mark, you’re amazing,” or “Nikki, thank you.” I can read Ramana Maharshi and be grateful. But I don’t want my yoga to become some rarefied thing, like now I’m spiritual and special. I want it to be normal. Like, of course I walk with the heart of a mystic—doesn’t everyone?

Of course I do prayers over my bills. I do that. “Oh, thank you for the electricity.” You know?

Yeah. So hopefully that’s helpful.

Anandra: I love that. Thank you for the language around it. As you’ve cultivated this visionary, creative sense within yourself, you’re able to articulate it in a way that’s really accessible—something people can chomp into and get. I could hear you talk all day. I love it.

Christine Mason: This has been a great interview.

Anandra: It’s a real gift. You hold that keynote of visionary, creative futurist. And those of us with other roles—we need to hear that.

Christine Mason: Thank you for a lovely afternoon conversation—from freezing Connecticut to your tropical beauty in Kauai.

Anandra: I know—even my dress is Brazilian today, so I’ve got the tropical vibe going.

Christine Mason: When I first got on the call, I was like this—and you were like, “Are we doing video?” Okay. I really appreciate the tropics, having come back to visit my family. I have a lot of empathy for people who aren’t warm right now. Hopefully we can develop better systems. Lots of love to you.

Anandra: Thank you so much. Let’s wave it out to our beautiful participants. Much love, everyone. Thank you.

Learn more about Christine Mason awesome work at: https://www.facebook.com/xtinem

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