Warm Welcome
To
The Path of the 12 Petalled Lotus
A journey of learning that begins in the body.
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The path most of us are seeking before we ever reach purpose, is coherence . . .
It can feel painfully ordinary, and deeply human.
It begins with noticing the body: where tension hides, how breath shortens.
Then comes the work of softening; earning safety, trust, and emotional rhythm.
Only through that grounding can the heart begin to steady,
and life start to move with you, rather than against you.
When the heart and breath find each other, everything else follows.
It’s a sense of the body exhaling before the mind does.
Time loosens. Edges blur a little. You feel more in life than at it.
I would say it feels like a deep alignment where you’re both steady and porous, rather than a sense of enlightenment or euphoria.
The noise inside quiets enough to sense the rhythm beneath everything. It's more like a heightened awareness of the pulse of the moment, your own heartbeat and the air of the room all swaying together.Â
~ Cindy Butler ~
From that quiet beginning, the Lotus unfolds
12 petals mapping the ways the heart learns to live
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What is the '12 Petalled Lotus'?Â
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The Heart Chakra
Across traditions, this same understanding takes form as the twelve-petalled lotus — the symbol of the heart.
 The heart chakra, Anahata, is known in ancient traditions as the twelve-petalled lotus — the energetic and spiritual centre of human life.
It serves as both metaphor and map: the meeting place of coherence, compassion, and resonance.
From this understanding, our work takes its name.
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 12 Petals, 12 Qualities of the Heart
 Studying the qualities of the heart is a return to the centre of being. They shape how we live, love, and make sense of the world. Each quality is both a practice and a mirror, revealing where we are open, where we guard, and how we move toward coherence.
This becomes a lifelong conversation between inner and outer life — the heart learning to express itself through thought, word, and action. In tending these qualities, we remember what it means to be fully human.
These twelve qualities form our shared language and the pulse of our community practice, guiding reflection and growth through each season of the year.
These twelve qualities form the living rhythm of 12 Petalled Lotus....
Purity
the clear, unclouded essence within
Clarity
the ability to see truth without distortion
Love
unconditional regard for self and othersÂ
Peace
calm presence amid changeÂ
Bliss
joy that arises from alignmentÂ
Kindness
gentle strength in actionÂ
EmpathyÂ
attunement to the feeling world of others
Forgiveness
release of resistance and re-opening of flow.
Understanding
wisdom gained through experienceÂ
Unity
awareness of shared humanityÂ
Harmony
balanced relationship between all partsÂ
Compassion
love in motion
Each quality finds its form in practice.
The pathways are how the teachings move from idea to embodiment
Walking these paths becomes the practice itself
steady, human, imperfect, alive
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THE PRACTICE
The Path of the 12 Petalled Lotus is a new body of work that is both ancient and new.
It is an integrated body of learning drawn from lived practice, contemporary science, and the subtle intelligence of the heart.
 We honour the wisdom traditions that have long understood coherence as a state of wholeness, and more modern research that reveals how the heart’s field of energy and emotion shapes human experience.
 Together they form the full architecture of Cindy’s vision: a curriculum of human development.
Every aspect of 12 Petalled Lotus is designed to move learning toward integration and embodiment. Without that final step, knowledge remains theory; with it, the teachings come alive in daily practice.
'This Human' series emerges from that same vision — a public conversation and storytelling project exploring how these teachings live in real life.
Learn More About 'This Human' SeriesBeneath every practice is a structure that holds it
a framework built from experience, reflection, and care
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Our Framework
Teaching Ethos
Our approach begins with safety, pacing, and presence.
We teach through the body, the heart, and lived experience—creating spaces where learning feels honest and humane.
Rather than pushing for outcomes, we hold a field that allows curiosity, rest, and integration to arise naturally.
Every learner, mentor, and facilitator is invited to meet themselves and others with compassion and accountability.
f you’d like to explore how this teaching field unfolds through mentors, facilitators, and coaches, (click here to view the Pathway Roles)
Read Our Full Teaching EthosOur Teaching Ethos
We teach the way the heart learns—through rhythm, resonance, and relationship.
Every course and gathering is built on psychological safety, clear pacing, and embodied learning.
We meet learners where they are, trusting process more than performance.
Learning here is a relational art.
The mind might grasp ideas, but the heart and body need time to absorb them.
Each pathway is designed to move from understanding to embodiment, from embodiment to integration, until knowledge becomes presence.
We teach slowly.
Each stage—introduction, immersion, integration—includes reflection, practice, and guided support.
Mentor anchors hold the learning field, helping participants feel both contained and free.
This rhythm keeps the framework coherent no matter where someone enters.
Language shapes the field.
Every word in our courses is chosen to slow the nervous system, invite curiosity, and build coherence.
We use language as a living practice—words that hold the body steady enough for meaning to land.
Teaching is not instruction; it’s transmission.
Facilitators and mentors don’t stand apart from learners—they move with them, modeling regulation, humility, and steadiness.
The work deepens through shared presence, not hierarchy.
This is how study becomes life.
We teach through example, through conversation, through the steady return to what’s real in the body.
The goal is not mastery but coherence—the ability to stay connected in the midst of learning, unlearning, and becoming.
Teaching here is a continuum, not a title.
Those who feel called may move from learner to mentor, from mentor to facilitator, and in time to coach or collaborator.
Each layer carries the same pulse: safety, pacing, and coherence.
The deeper the embodiment, the more naturally teaching emerges.
Our teaching field is alive.
It grows through people, not programs—humans who live these principles and bring them into their families, communities, and practices.
In that way, education becomes a living ecosystem of care.
[Button → Explore Pathway Roles]
(opens Pathway Roles Modal)
Pathway Essentials Guide
This guide is an introduction and orientation to the 12 Petalled Lotus framework, our Living Language, and the rhythm of monthly heart qualities.
It prepares learners for deeper study while giving anyone—new or experienced—a sense of how the pathways unfold in practice.
The Essentials course includes reflection prompts, downloadable resources, and community access for shared exploration.
Living Language
The Living Language is the vocabulary of this work: words we use to describe safety, coherence, and transformation.
It evolves through dialogue and shared experience, reminding us that language can harm or heal.
By naming carefully, we create a culture of understanding—one that holds difference without division and honours the ongoing unfolding of what it means to be human.
 The PathwaysÂ
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The work unfolds through three interwoven rhythms:
exploration, expression, and community.
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Exploration
This is where the study begins — the twelve signature pathways that mirror the twelve petals of the Lotus.
Each pathway unfolds through a Heart Quality such as compassion, steadiness, courage, or clarity.
Learners move through guided study, embodied practice, and reflection, discovering coherence as a felt experience rather than an idea.
Expression
What’s understood inwardly begins to move outward.
Here, participants give shape to their learning — through story, art, teaching, writing, and conversation.
Expression turns the personal into something shared, allowing the heart’s work to ripple into the world.
Community
The circle that holds it all.
In community, we practice coherence together — listening, witnessing, and staying in rhythm with one another as growth unfolds.
It’s where learning becomes belonging, and the work of one becomes nourishment for many.
Each Pathway returns us to the same centre—the heart as teacher, coherence as practice.
January opens the circle.Â
Learn More About the Pathways Roles
The Origin of The Path of the 12 Petalled Lotus
I didn’t know the heart chakra was called the twelve-petalled lotus until someone mentioned it — and something inside me lit up. As I read about what those twelve petals represent — purity, clarity, love, peace, compassion, and more — I realized they’re qualities to be lived, not just understood. I began to wonder: could each of these qualities emerge naturally through the stages of a human life?
That question joined an idea I was already shaping — community classes exploring life from birth through death. When I set those thoughts side by side, the framework appeared: the petals as the heart’s teachings, the stages of life as the path we walk to learn them.
Around that time, my own life was shifting. I was ending a relationship — one of those partings filled with both grief and clarity. In one of our last conversations, I said it felt as though my skin were opening and my heart completely bare. I could feel how much love I had to give, even as he was closing down. In that moment, I knew my heart wasn’t meant to shrink back but to stay open — to be available for many. The sensation came first, the message after: this love is meant to move through you, not stop with you.
Over the following months, that experience poured itself onto paper — journals, sketches, long reflections. I realized this was the same heart the twelve-petalled lotus describes. Later, through Joe Dispenza’s work on heart coherence, I understood: I had experienced a spontaneous heart-chakra opening.
That moment gave me both direction and responsibility. I couldn’t keep it to myself; it needed to become something others could walk. It also mirrored everything I’d been called to my whole life — each role a thread leading here.
Then came a kind of life review — a clear view of the path that had formed me. Every piece of education, work, and heartbreak had been preparation. I knew it deeply — not as ambition, but as recognition.
That’s when the Path of the 12 Petalled Lotus began to take form: the understanding that these twelve heart qualities could guide a whole life, not just a single healing. I began asking: if these twelve petals describe the heart’s language, how might a human life — from first breath to last — meet and be shaped by them?
That question seeded the Pathways. One by one, they revealed themselves: trust through early attachment, compassion through parenting, forgiveness through loss. I mapped them not as a hierarchy but a circle — birth and bonding, individuation and purpose, leadership, belonging, creativity, grief, dying, legacy.
I saw why my life had moved through so many fields — birth and death work, trauma recovery, bodywork — and through thousands of conversations with people sharing their stories. What once seemed separate began to weave together.
When I stepped back, I saw the pattern: every experience had been teaching me how humans move through change, loss, and becoming. Talking about life — and how to live a good one — had always been the constant.
Bringing those threads together, I began shaping a single body of work — a way to teach what I’ve lived and witnessed. That weaving became The Path of the 12 Petalled Lotus.
Once the pieces came together, I knew it couldn’t stay as theory. It needed to be lived and shared. The work grew into mentorship, community practice, and learning pathways that help people reconnect with safety, attachment, parenting, grief, neurodivergence, and legacy — each a doorway into one of the twelve Pathways.
At its core, 12 Petalled Lotus is about learning to live with an open heart. The teachings weave body, mind, and energy, inviting both personal repair and collective coherence. Every offering circles back to the same truth: as one person becomes more whole, the field around them steadies too.
This work is my life’s purpose. The last few years have been a long remembering — of why I’m here, why this human life matters, and how much the heart can hold.
The Path of the 12 Petalled Lotus is my way of offering that remembering back — for anyone ready to live with an open heart, to walk through their own stages of becoming, and to meet the world with a little more compassion than before.
I see it as part of a larger movement: humanity waking up to itself — learning that healing is collective, and that coherence in one heart changes the field for us all.
From the roots of one woman’s lifelong devotion grew a body of work for a more compassionate world.
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At the centre of every human life is a heart wanting coherence and craving resonance.
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12 Petalled Lotus is a living framework for human development, pathways of unfolding that begin in the body and ripple through every phase of human life, from the first stirrings to the last breath.
This is the foundation of our work: a lifelong map for remembering what it means to be human.
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Every offering, every pathway, leads back here—to coherence, to belonging, to the shared work of becoming better humans together.Â
Every path begins with one uncertain step. The heart steadies what the mind cannot.
Every path begins with one uncertain step. The heart steadies what the mind cannot
Every path begins with one uncertain step. The heart steadies what the mind cannot.
