In a world addicted to quick fixes, bandaid solutions and “love and light,” the idea of root healing may feel heavy, intangible or even a little vague.
However, human beings have been exploring and tending the roots of our existence for thousands of years-the ancient Yogis understood Muladhara, the root chakra, as the foundation of the energetic body, associated with our relationship to survival, stability and the physical world. Indigenous and earth-based traditions across cultures have held practices connecting people to land, lineage, ancestors, community and the natural world. Shamanic traditions have their own ways of journeying into the unseen, tending what has been lost, fragmented or carried through generations. And today, psychology, attachment theory and nervous system science give us another language for understanding some of this terrain.
There are different maps and diifferent cosmologies. But all of them, in their own ways, are pointing us downward. Back into the body, towards what lives beneath the surface, to our roots.
What is Root Healing
Root healing means tending to the most primal layers of our human experience. Our sense of safety, belonging, connection and survival. And our relationship with our bodies, the Earth and the people around us. Root healing asks us to look beyond the individual self, towards the family systems, ancestral lineages and cultures that have shaped the way we experience ourselves and the world.
This work can take many forms – from shadow work to ancestral healing- but all of these pathways support the reclamation of parts of ourselves we learned to suppress, exile or abandon.
If we want to experience the full spectrum of being human, the joy, pleasure, sensuality, creativity, connection and deep aliveness available to us, we cannot only reach for the light. We also have to be willing to descend. To meet what is underneath. To remember what we belong to. And to tend the roots from which our aliveness grows. This is what Root Healing is all about.
The importance of the descent
Remembering our roots begins with acknowledging the patterns, protections and inherited ways of being that may no longer be supporting who we are becoming.
It takes a healthy dose of grace and compassion, and even some lightness, to hold the complexity of our human experience. The Descent is a spiritual journey back to the Source of who we truly are beneath the conditioning, protection and stories we have accumulated along the way.
Root healing asks us to develop the capacity to be with what we feel, including the parts of ourselves we may have learned to suppress, protect or abandon in order to feel safe and belong.It is a journey through shadow and darkness, not because darkness is something to fear, but because our roots have always grown there.
There are many doorways into the roots
Root healing does not belong to one tradition, modality or practice. Sometimes root healing is profound and confronting, and sometimes it is remarkably ordinary.
For some, it might look like working with the nervous system or receiving support from a trusted therapist or somatic practitioner. For others, the doorway might be ancestral healing, bodywork, breath, ceremony or time spent in deep relationship with the natural world.
It might mean tending to the womb and pelvic space, exploring our relationship with sexuality and pleasure, or simply learning how to feel safe enough to inhabit our bodies again.
There are several pathways in, and you can choose your flavour. Here, I’m sharing some of our favourite practitioners, experiences and events coming up this Fall to support Root healing. After all, autumn is the season of death and decay, so if you’ve been wanting to take the journey of descent, this is a great time and here are some incredible supports to tap into.
Root Healing Practitioners & Experiences this Fall
Prakashini Ji / Akhanda Yoga
Ancestral Healing Full Moon Satsang
September 26 marks Purnima Shraddha, the opening observance of Pitru Paksha. A sacred and powerful period in the Yogic calendar dedicated to releasing ancestral programming that no longer serves us while welcoming with gratitude the gifts left behind.
Ancestral Healing Workshop: Completing the Circle
A guided workshop to honour your ancestors, release what no longer needs to be carried, and move forward with greater peace.
Jane Hardwicke Collings – The Womancraft Way
The Womancraft Way supports women to develop a lived relationship with feminine knowledge, not as theory, but as something practiced and applied within the realities of daily life. Through ongoing teaching, reflection, and practice, women deepen their capacity to meet life’s changes, cycles, and thresholds with clarity, skill, and inner authority
Aine Wilder (Tania Clark) – Walking the Ember
Waking the Ember – A 90-minute online somatic body-led workshop designed to re-ignite your creative fire. In this 90-minute live online workshop, you’ll be guided through a small taste of her Sacred Repatterning Practice, designed to help you stoke your embers and reclaim your inner fire.
Anna Dorian – The Midlife Molt Mystery School
For women traversing the midlife passage. A six week series exploring the messy, tumultuous, tender, funny, baffling, painful, purposeful, strong, sweet aspects of midlife. Ceremony, shamantic journeying, art.
Shae Savage – The Descent Method
A body-based, ceremonial approach to the death-rebirth cycles that show up at every real threshold. Grief, separation, identity collapse, the ending of a version of yourself that no longer fits.
Meghan Lee – The BOW Network
For women in business the BOW (Body of Work) Network is a space to connect to the intelligence of your Body. Access body-based strategy, monthly accountability and a network of embodied women birthing Bodies of Work of meaning and substance.
Zoey Sky – The Somatic Way
Rewire your nervous system. Reclaim your body’s wisdom. Live, love, and lead from your core Self — without chasing quick fixes, losing yourself in endless strategies, or sacrificing joy. A self-paced or group journey to understand the language of the nervous system.
Sharaya Friesen – The Prism Workshop series by The Lumina Method
An educational and experiential workshop series for high-impact, curious practitioners who value root-level changes for their clients. Those practitioners who are intuitive and ready to deepen their understanding of the language of their body for faster client results with more impact. This series runs online during the Fall season.
