Root to Rise

Here at Wylder Roots, we ground into the belief that to heal we “root to rise”. We believe that within our psyche/somas lives the blueprint of our innate wholeness. Our practitioners are stewards in service to cultivating the soil and sorting the seeds.

We believe that “the root in” requires that we go down into the origin story of our lives to tend our healing from the ground up. The work is as much about composting where you’ve been as much as it is planting and tending where you seek to grow. We are each and together committed to tending our own healing, so we have the lay of the land to support you in yours.

As we heal ourselves, we recognize each other. As we reweave with each other, we repair our communities. As we restore our communities, we remember that there is more in this world than us. As we expand in our awareness to include everything, we begin to remember that we are here to participate in a bigger mythos and unfolding than our own. 

“We have this strange notion on this planet that are fates are not tied. If it were not so, we would not be here together. It’s that simple”

-Luisah Teish

Roots are what tethers us to the Earth. Our gravity grounds us into direct relationship to this living ecology of which we are a part of, nourished by and are ultimately the steward of. My time on the land through vision quest/rites of passage work guided me home to the deepest remembering of our innate belonging. The first time I hit my solo spot out in the Inyo National Forest, I fell to my knees and wept for how far I had come in life while forgetting where I started. It was the first step of many on the path that began my apprenticeship of learning to see myself in the “family of things.”

For all the ways psychology talks about attachment wounding, loss of identity, and feeling disconnected and estranged, the field is often focused on this through a human-centric lens, as if we humans are living in isolation from the ecology of our lives. As therapists we talk about the causes and conditions that have shaped who we are and have influenced our becoming, spanning the gamut of pain to possibility. Yet rarely do we acknowledge where we come from and all the “more than human” influences that shape the context of our world. When we begin to reweave and remember the tendrils of our awareness to include everything around us in the natural world, we are stitching ourselves back into the Web of Life. 

“Joanna Macy writes that until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health.. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again.Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair.Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.” ― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

The consequences of this foundational rupture and severing from our core attachment, is evident in how we are living in climate chaos and extraordinary division on this planet right now. Our living world is demanding that we remember our connection so we can begin to repair the relationship that leaves us feeling “at the mercy” vs. “at cause”. I believe we are initiating into a new paradigm and the living breathing world shows us how to heal and become whole again. Both within our inner ecology and how that shapes how we see the living world around us. If we want to steward and reshape the landscape of our lives, it starts with our choices. Our choices come from our beliefs and often our beliefs come from our conditioning.  Only when we do the deep root work of remediation- tilling the soil, unearthing the myth of separation and composting the pain of what we’ve been cut off from, can we find a new way of grounding into our lives. We are here to support you in the sorting the seeds of what’s possible.

As above, so below. As within, so without. It is all a relationship. 

And it starts here, at the threshold of change.

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How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing --
each stone, blossom, child --
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God's heart;
they have never left.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

— Rainer Marie Rilke, Book of Hours