Rootedness through Change
What does it mean to be rooted in times of change?
Rootedness through change
Recently, my friend and fellow facilitator Kelly Scott and I gathered a small group of women for our first Rooted Woman Circle - a half-day of meditation, movement, art, good food, conversation and time around the fire.
The whole day was exploring one question: What does it mean to experience rootedness within seasons of change?
We often imagine being rooted as being steady, settled, certain, and grounded. Maybe even standing still. And we think of change as the opposite of that. So how does one integrate these two seemingly contradictory experiences?
But what if rootedness isn't about avoiding movement; it is about maintaining some relationship with our centre while we move?
The Essence of Change
The fact is, life is change. And we are built to grow. Change happens in iterations and cycles, not a straight line. And like all circles there is a centre point from which we move out from. One way to look at it is that the energy of change is a contraction and expansion out from a centre point. That centre point represents our rootedness, that connection to ourselves.
If you look around you, nothing in nature stays permanently still. The leaves sprout in the spring and die back in the fall. After winter’s dormancy, summer brings life again. For us, the breath is our biggest reminder of this. Each inhalation and exhalation is an expansion and contraction of life. Breath, like change, is meant to move through us.
Like nature, we also move through seasons - times in our lives where we are more contracted and others where we are more expanded. One is not inherently better than the other. Constant expansion is not the goal. When we expand, naturally we meet the edges of that growth cycle and find ourselves needing to contract back down again. Contraction is not necessarily teh opposite of growth; it can be part of its natural rhythm.
If you think of an inchworm, it bunches itself up before it releases and bounds forward. One step forward and two steps back still gets us where we want to go. This is a natural part of how we move through change. The problem is when we get stuck along that cycle. Either in this constant need to move and keep expanding or getting stuck in a contracted state.
Where the Mind Comes In
And this is where the mind comes in. Because change isn't only about what is happening to us. There is also what we make what is happening mean about us. Our minds are meaning-making machines. Our thoughts and beliefs shape the meaning we make of our experiences and what we begin to notice around us.
So if the underlying thought is:
I’m behind.
I’ve failed.
I should be further along by now.
Then every setback, delay or comparison can become more evidence that this is true.
It seems some of the difficulty can come not from change itself but from our perception of change. Part of this evolves from this illusion that change equates only to forward movement, exponential growth and linear progress. And with that comes a lot of evaluation.
In fact, when most of us think we are experiencing change, we are often also evaluating our experience.
A fellow perinatal support practitioner studying Compassionate Inquiry recently shared something that really stayed with me. She had been revisiting an old feeling of being trapped and contained - one that seemed to keep coming back and echoing through different experiences in her life. At the end of our session she said, she saw something that she hadn’t realized before - that each time she was going back, she was unscrewing the screws of the box.
I loved that image. I’ve felt this in my own life too. There have been things I have sat with seemingly a hundred times. Parts of me I thought I had already worked with. And then suddenly, one time, something shifts. There is a loosening. A willingness to let go of some holding or inner protection that wasn’t ready to move before.
Part of me could judge that return and think, Why am I back here when I’ve worked with this already so much? But maybe it isn’t backwards. Maybe each time going back was another opportunity to loosen the screws.
Ultimately the goal is to be in the experiencer role. Some people call this equanimity, or non-judgement, non-attachment. For me, the distinction is useful because the evaluator is asking: What does this say about me? Is this good or bad? Am I moving forward or backwards? Whereas, the experiencer asks: What is actually happening here? What am I feeling? What is this asking of me?
It’s allowing movement and change, while staying ‘In’ the journey. Not getting swept up into the evaluator seat but allowing the experience and directing the flow of attention, rather than being pushed around by it. The important part is feeling what is there and having choice guided from within.
How you can work with this in your own life?
There are many ways to work with these ideas, but for the purposes of this post, I want to leave you with three entry points - I’d recommend going in the following order:
body:
First, get into the body.
How do you know you are in a contracted state? What’s happening in the body?
When you are moving through a contraction, what do you notice? What is happening in your body? In your heart? In your mind? In your energy?
meaning:
Then ask:
What is this contraction asking of me?
What are you making it mean that you are here?
reframe:
And finally:
Is there an alternative meaning for this?
If this is part of the path rather than proof you’ve gone off it - what happens in your body? In your heart? In your mind? In your energy?
Maybe the idea that you are exactly where you need to be right now, could offer a way to explore what we make our own periods of contraction or change mean about us - without attaching to the material or getting dragged down by it. Making those underlying thought patterns or beliefs conscious can create the conditions for release.
Release
Which brings me to an important question - how do we move between contraction and expansion?
Well, we need to release.
We need to release from our contraction before we can expand again. So contraction, release and expansion are all important parts of this cycle of change.
This is where choice comes in. And we all have the power to change. Agency doesn’t mean that we have to control over every change that happens to us. It means that we have enough connection to ourselves that we can choose where to direct some of our energy. I believe that when that change is fueled by self love, kindness and a groundedness, that’s true power.
When working with release, we don’t have to be forceful. This is where I like to bring in the elements. Fire is a great one for working with release. I often work with clients on a Navel Fire Empowerment, which I learned from Lisa Erickson’s Chakra Empowerment for Women, a body of work I’m trained in as a practitioner. But one can also use water. Cleansing physically (like in the shower), with an added intentionality of release, can be a very gentle but powerful way of ‘untightening’ the screws. You can also work with a practitioner who can support you in slowing down, noticing what is there, and bringing some of those patterns into awareness without needing to force them to change.
Unearthing
But in order to release, we first have to bring things into consciousness. We have to unearth the things that are holding us back. Not digging around for problems - but becoming conscious without attachment to what is already there. I think a lot of us get scared in this idea of looking inward / back, because we worry that it’ll somehow make things feel bigger or steamroll us. But the thing is, looking at it isn’t what makes it real, it’s what helps it come to the surface so it can be transformed.
Holding on or avoiding is sometimes what is keeping us from moving through the natural cycle. But movement isn’t necessarily the same thing as change. Sometimes change asks us to stop, turn toward something, or even revisit what we thought we had already moved beyond.
If you’re curious to read more about this from another angle check out this post.
We can do that through becoming conscious of our thought patterns, questioning and reframing, and also nourishing ourselves through the experience. This is where unearthing, to me, is also about finding ourselves and being in the earth of bodies - the soils of our experience, so we can project the fullness of ourselves out in the world.
What emerged from this circle day, was less about “being grounded” in the conventional sense, and more about how we move through change without completely losing contact with ourselves. Ultimately having a sense of being rooted through change requires a relationship to our centre, agency and nourishment. Not just finding nourishment in our body but also in our intentions and in our surroundings.
Because when you connect to your own sense of rootedness - you also connect to everything else that is rooted. We don’t live in isolation of our environment. There is a web of relationships that supports us. Imagine you are a tree, amongst a stand of trees in your community. Each individual is a part of a whole ecosystem. As you root deep, you flourish, and so do others.