Founder Letter: Waking Up and Waking Down
Dear Rosies,
I love the kitchen dance, when a song comes on while I'm stirring something and the hips answer instinctually, the shoulders roll back, a little stretch and groove enter in. Awareness drops from mind into the body, especially if there are great drums or a mean bass line, and there's sort of a new glow. We are harmonic beings! Ten minutes of dancing to some slinky song with the lights turned down low will out-arouse an hour of thinking about desire.
The research bears this out. A 2024 study in the BMJ pooled more than two hundred trials on depression, and dancing produced the largest reductions of any treatment compared, ahead of walking, running, yoga, and strength training. Something beyond effort is at work.
At Oxford, researchers found that even gentle movement raised pain tolerance, a marker of the body’s own endorphins, and deepened closeness when it was done in time with others. Twenty minutes of hard exercise significantly increases genital blood flow even fifteen minutes later. Dance gives you that heat, with the gestural expansion and feeling of self to travel into all the crevices of the body.
Wake Down sessions open with thirty minutes of movement and no talking. A woman who walked in brisk and polite is growling and feral by the third track, and the breath is coming in long and deep, into softened receptive hips and bellies. The music lifts, the tension drops. A little more life force, a little more light, comes down into the body. Grief and wanting often come. The woman who lets herself be furious through a whole song is often the one who leaves flushed and joyful.
If you'd like to join us, our October and November sessions are full, but we would love to see you online for Wake Down on December 6.
Or if you are really really excited about getting back in your body through Dance, our friend Katie Roper is organizing Hawai'i Dance Camp from December 11-16.
If you want to bring some more sensation to add fuel to your new dance driven fire, please consider Arouse, featuring the miracle botanical Buzz Button, which does exactly what it sounds like it does.
To more dancing, and to your biggest and most joyful life, at every age and stage.
Christine
Christine Marie Mason
Founder, Rosebud Woman
Host, The Rose Woman podcast
To Use Arouse
Put a few drops on the clitoris and along the labia. The Szechuan pepper and buzz button arrive first as a bright prickle, then a warmth that spreads and keeps your attention there. Underneath sits damiana, which grows wild on Mexican hillsides and has been steeped there as a love tea for generations, and maca from the high Andes, and essence of jasmine on the air. Oh and yes, all food grade ingredients, in case that matters to you.
Enjoy!
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