Welcome. We’d like to introduce you to…

The Rooted Global Village

From within cultures of fragmentation and separation, we’re curating ways to defy barriers and tend relationship.

Slow work.

Un/learning.

Kin-making.

Tending.

Register NOW through September 14th

We are Moving at the Speed of Relationship

Inside Rooted we…

Embrace practices that promote both personal and collective liberation.

Foster collaborative and curious environments!

Create ecologies of care through which change happens.

Engage thewisdom of our bodies, beyond intellectual understanding.

We are NOT about leaders and followers. This ain’t that.

What is Rooted?

How can you be part of it?

We are a online membership(with various offline connection possibilities) full of people of various backgrounds, faith traditions, & cultural perspectives.
This is a collective of people who un/learn, co-create and play together, because we recognize that thriving beyond our personal and collective wounds doesn't happen alone.
Rooted is a place for us to unpack the ways we and our worlds, creativity, and imaginations have become flattened through the lenses of dominant culture — and see what exists beyond it.

Here, you’ll find ...

...places to deepen awareness, share stories, un/learn “schoolishness” (Akilah Richards), engage in somatic experimentation, world-music exploration, & play through art-making, poetry, and re/imagination. Mingled with spaces of quiet co-being, small group connection, and more.

In a culture marked by hyper-individualism and separation

We’re forming Constellations of Connection.

Rooted emerged from a collective longing. Many of us were drawn to a space like Rooted because of our own personal experiences. It was a journey for me, Karine (founder & co-dreamer) to realize that the personal obstacles I faced weren't just my own but (many were) shared obstacles that couldn’t be confronted and carried alone.

We have a number of ways we make space for relationship building and tending in Rooted.
We have affinity-based spaces (Contact Zones) wherein we can deepen in our understanding of how culture and history have shaped experience, share stories, and build community. We also have a newer play-space (Kaleidoscope) wherein we can experiment our multiplicity and other constellations of connection beyond the identities we hold.

Rooted is a space of experimentation.
We are experimenting with our response to cultures of separation and alienation. Within this disrupted landscape of relationship, we are keen to nurture possibilities for connection and, even that radical act of friendship to ultimately recognize our interconnected nature and shared destinies.

What perpetuates feelings of separation and fragmentation in your life?

“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”
- Audre Lorde

Rooted has the task of tending relationship; of experimental kin-making. That is, finding our way out of the fog and trance of separation to re/member our belonging to ourselves, each other, and our world; through the thickets and brambles of harmful philosophies and imposed hierarchies, like that of White body supremacy.

There is nothing more radical, it’s been said, than friendship. This is the slow work of building our capacity to connect, to experience intimacy and build trust.  Our approach is slow and continuous so that we do not bypass the ongoing and very real harm that oppression does to keep these hierarchies in place.

''I see love present between
and within the team…''

- Erica Reyes

''ReSounding JOY interrupts my daily monotony and brings me into my body.''

- Elizabeth Woodson

Our villagers find re/minders to re/member themselves as creative, imaginative and multi-dimensional beings.

We are insatiably curious about what keeps us from experiencing the totality of who we and others are, and could be/come. We are curious to experiment with our response to anything that binds us to a static narrative and cuts us off from the flow of our creative life energy.

Doing this requires a break from our habituated ways of being.

Doing this brings us to the edges of what has been known.

Doing this can feel risky, uncertain, and uncomfortable.

And yet we recognize that its at the edges between worlds where diversity is most vibrant and life is at its most creative.

Until we learn to embrace the difference - multiplicity, contradiction and paradox - within ourselves, it will be difficult to embrace it in each other.

From September 2024  - January 2025
in the Village we’re stepping

Through the Kaleidoscope

On a journey of Play, Creativity and Imagining Futures.

The way we allow ourselves to move around an idea is often pre-determined.

If you’re curious to confront the societal compulsion to get things “right”… join us in the village where we create wildly open spaces of play with our ‘imaginative potential"— this requires experimentation and failure — and we’re inviting in months of Guest Lecturers, Artists, Creatives and Scholar-Activists dedicated to just that.

Play is liberatory because it is a practice in not pre-determining what our experience is going to be.

What does a focus on  PLAY offer us?

A chance to embody RADICALLY NEW perspectives.
An opportunity to EMBRACE FAILURE and experiment.
A vehicle to explore
THE EDGE-PLACES
of our discomfort and illuminate shadows.
A reclamation of the energy of DESIRE in service of our liberation.
A big F-OFF to a culture that says that play is…lazy, self-indulgent and unproductive.

This isn't just a course; it's a journey to unlearn, reorient, and tap into your body’s, and our collective capacity for expansion and change. Engage with somatics, dramatic play, and profound imaginative futuring.

Why does Your Relationship to Play, Creativity & Imagination matter?

Many of us move in worlds troubled by polarization and divisiveness.

Responding to the crises in our world(s) often feels like the an impossible task, and the heaviness of these realities are dense in our bodies; restricting access to creativity and imagination to reworld the world otherwise.

It shows up for many interpersonally, intra-personally, and collectively. These deep-seated divisions and polarizations not only challenge our collective ability to address complex global issues but also strain the very fabric of communities and relationships.
We need to cultivate the capacity for deep shadow work and not lose our sense of possiblity  along the way.

Play invites us to venture beyond the known...

Into the 'edge-places' of our understanding and experiences, much like the mythical ‘map’ monsters that signified the unexplored territories. Just as these creatures embodied the dual nature of fear and fascination, play invites us into the liminal spaces of our personal and collective psyches; beckoning us to experiment, risk, and fail.

If we only give our attention to the spiritual and material realities in our lives and in the world that need remediation, without the levity that brings in air, movement, and other nutrients that sustain us, we can become immobilized by what feels too big to shift.

And, in turn, our narratives, postures and behavior can become rigid and calcified.Play shifts us away from trauma-narratives and into liberation and desire-focused narratives that ask: what happens to the life force that flows within and between us when it is liberated from the limitations that harmful cultural structures and forms have placed on it?

Meet us online One Sunday a month...

In this ‘3rd place’ away from home and work, make space to be with something else. We will explore by:

Focusing on capacity building through the arts, play, and communal practice and ritual.
Engaging with our unique edges, personally and collectively.
Using somatic movement and the dramatic arts as portals to what is repressed and (un)desirable.
Integrating simple yet powerful creative and ritual practices to engage with new visions of desire, pleasure, longing and liberation.
Actively practicing failing! Falling! Laughing! Getting it wrong!
Making space for the kind of slow imaginative work that births, well, all there is and all their could be.

AND You’re Invited into a ‘Research Project’

This will be an entirely optional pathway for those who want to take it. And it’s based on this question: What does this inspire in my life?

Bridge what we do online, with what’s present for you. See how your project is shaped by what you find and what your observe arising within and around you.
 Inviting in space and time (of any length!) to follow the inspirations that come to you through this work can have profound impact.

There will be space made in October 2024, and January 2025 for us to gather and share with each other what we’ve found with one another!

What’s Coming Up:

SEPTEMBER 2024
Sunday, September 15th - 1-3pm EST

Entering the Home of Imagination: A Liberatory Practice for Just & Thriving Worlds

with Alixa Garcia, Part I

Learn more about this module

Working towards just and thriving worlds requires profound imagination. To have a strong liberatory practice, we need to diligently exercise our visionary and somatic muscles.

In this two-part workshop, we will use creative writing, communal creation, visualization, art-making, and what I call Creative Somatics to make a home for intuition and coax the artist within so that it can play with full permission to fail, explore, and reinvent, eventually finding homeostasis within us.

Because joy shares its palms with sorrow, in our second session, we will be with grief as a ceremony to create more space within our particular portal for the visions wanting to come through.

Learn about your teacher

Alixa García is a distinguished artist, award-winning poet, visionary thinker, published author, social and environmental justice leader, and organizational strategist. Her groundbreaking work with Climbing Potree set the tone for years of art for movement building that has had significant ripple effects throughout the world.

With a 23-year background in social and environmental justice organizing, a lead thinker in creative strategies for social movements, curriculum developer, facilitator, and international speaker, Alixa's expertise has been instrumental in supporting justice leaders, scholars and students, community activists, environmental and social justice organizations, state representatives, and the nonprofit sector to realize their potential in the areas of creative blueprinting, trans-local and global organizing, and environmental education. Her unique approach centralizes art for movement building and the role of imagination as an essential tool for liberation.

Alixa is a sought-after public speaker, visual artist, and facilitator. Her work has been published by Whit Press, AK Press, Hatchett, & Daraja Press. She is an editorial board member of ERA Coalition & Fund for Women's Equality and lead curriculum developer and facilitator for the CS Fund Just Transitions Fellowship Cohort.

Her latest offering, a Course on the Imaginal: Cultivating the Visionary Self, uses what she calls Creative Somatics and Attention Intensive Practices to help move trauma and grief through and out of the body so that we may wholy begin to unearth the visionary within.

OCTOBER 2024
Sunday, October 6th - 1-3pm EST

Entering the Home of Imagination: A Liberatory Practice for Just & Thriving Worlds

with Alixa Garcia, Part II

Learn more about this module

October will be the second part of our two-part gathering with Alixa Garcia within the program curriculum.  As imagination is such an integral part of what we are doing throughout the program arc, we invited Alixa to a two-part workshop experience.

Learn about your teacher

Alixa García is a distinguished artist, award-winning poet, visionary thinker, published author, social and environmental justice leader, and organizational strategist. Her groundbreaking work with Climbing Potree set the tone for years of art for movement building that has had significant ripple effects throughout the world.

With a 23-year background in social and environmental justice organizing, a lead thinker in creative strategies for social movements, curriculum developer, facilitator, and international speaker, Alixa's expertise has been instrumental in supporting justice leaders, scholars and students, community activists, environmental and social justice organizations, state representatives, and the nonprofit sector to realize their potential in the areas of creative blueprinting, trans-local and global organizing, and environmental education. Her unique approach centralizes art for movement building and the role of imagination as an essential tool for liberation.

Alixa is a sought-after public speaker, visual artist, and facilitator. Her work has been published by Whit Press, AK Press, Hatchett, & Daraja Press. She is an editorial board member of ERA Coalition & Fund for Women's Equality and lead curriculum developer and facilitator for the CS Fund Just Transitions Fellowship Cohort.

Her latest offering, a Course on the Imaginal: Cultivating the Visionary Self, uses what she calls Creative Somatics and Attention Intensive Practices to help move trauma and grief through and out of the body so that we may wholy begin to unearth the visionary within.

NOVEMBER 2024
Sunday, October 27th, 11am - 1pm ET

Trickster Makes the World

with Bayo Akomolafe

Learn more about this module

Bayo Akomolafe will be joining us for a special guest playspace - welcoming in the energies of the trickster for making and re/making the world.

He is an author, celebrated speaker, teacher, and self-styled trans-public intellectual (a concept imagined together with and inspired by the shamanic priesthood of the Yoruba healer-trickster)- whose vocation goes beyond justice and speaking truth to power to opening up other spaces of power-with, and queering fond formulations and configurations of hope.

Learn about your teacher


Bayo Akomolafe is the grateful life-partner to ‘EJ’, father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi, son of Olufunmilayo Ibidapo Akomolafe and Ignatius Abayomi Akomolafe, and descendant of Yoruba fields of archetypal becomings and mythopoeic landscapes. He is an author, celebrated speaker, teacher, and self-styled trans-public intellectual (a concept imagined together with and inspired by the shamanic priesthood of the Yoruba healer-trickster)- whose vocation goes beyond justice and speaking truth to power to opening up other spaces of power-with, and queering fond formulations and configurations of hope.

As Visionary Founder and Elder of The Emergence Network and Chief Host of the widely popular online-offline course/festival series, We Will Dance with Mountains, Bayo curates an earth-wide project for the re-calibration of our ability to respond to civilizational crisis – a project framed within a material feminist/posthumanist/postactivist ethos and inspired by Yoruba indigenous cosmologies. He considers this a shared art – exploring the edges of the intelligible, dancing with posthumanist ideas, dabbling in the mysteries of quantum mechanics and the liberating sermon of an ecofeminism text, and talking with others about how to host a festival of radical silence on a street in London – and part of his inner struggle to regain a sense of rootedness to his community.

DECEMBER 2024
Sunday, December 8th - 1-4pm EST

Social Transformation through Embodied Performance

with Rebecca Struch

Learn more about this module

This workshop invites participants to experience play and performance as critical methods that contribute to social transformation. Together, we will consider how ongoing coloniality (and its many modes of domination) strives to delegitimize the body as an expressive site of knowledge and a resource for cultivating liberatory relations in community. We will then turn toward embodied practices that seek to counter these delegitimizing logics, with an emphasis on praxes rooted in critical Black and Indigenous feminisms, anti and decolonial justice, working class liberation and anti-capitalist critique, and collective healing.

The session will combine mini lectures, interactive discussions, and embodied practice to support a variety of learning styles and to encourage participants to build understanding together as a temporary ensemble. Participants will leave the workshop with a deepened sense of how to shift from being cultural consumers to being cultural producers – those who skillfully and collaboratively contribute to making the world(s) otherwise through the power of play and performance.My work begins from the premise that play and performance belong to everyone! Therefore, no prior experience with theatre or performance is needed. Please wear comfortable clothes that allow you to move your body (no special clothing needed), and, if possible, please join from a location that will allow you to move beyond the frame of your screen. Please also bring a notebook and writing utensil for workshop notes and reflections.

Learn about your teacher

Scholar · educator · community-engaged artist.

Rebecca (she/her) is a theatre maker, educator, and performance studies scholar focused on the politics of race and space in performances both on and off the stage. Her work is driven by a passion for community engagement and a commitment to social and cultural transformation. Rebecca takes every opportunity to create vibrant, accessible, and inclusive learning spaces that center performance and facilitate collective visioning for more just futures. She holds an MA in Applied Theatre Arts and is currently completing a PhD in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley.

JANUARY 2024
Date & Time TBD

WE DIGEST + INTEGRATE

hosted by the Rooted Co-Dreaming Team

Our gathering this month will be focused on coming together to celebrate our time within the framework of play, and to digest and share what’s come about in our individual lives and research projects.

And you’ll have immediate access to these recorded PLAY workshops:

MAY 2024
Immediate Access Upon Registration

Introduction to Play, Creativity and Imagination

with Karine Bell & Weena Pauly-Tarr

Learn more about this module

What is play and how does it connect to a liberatory praxis? What are the somatic steps in our entry into Play?

In the first session, we’ll whet our appetite for creativity & imagination as liberatory practice. We'll discuss why and how the 8 month curriculum works, establish group guidelines together, and kick off with our first skill: somatic expression and authentic movement.Somatic Experiencing©, guided by Weena Pauly Tarr, helps untangle survival responses in the nervous system, enabling personal growth by completing incomplete motor reactions and integrating traumatic events. Somatic expression strengthens the connection to one's embodied self, reducing the alienation caused by trauma and oppression.

Authentic Movement, also guided by Weena Pauly Tarr, is an improvisational practice involving a mover and a witness. Through relating to bodily impulses, the mover explores spontaneous movements while the witness observes and reflects.

This practice expands beyond basic identification of embodied blocks, fostering experimentation, exploration, and emergence—a vital state for imagination, creativity, and play.

By engaging in these practices, you will develop a deeper understanding of your bodily and emotional landscape, enhancing your ability to express yourself authentically and engage creatively .

Learn about your teacher

Karine Bell makes her home with her two kids, her partner and chickens. She's a somatics teacher and abolitionist, dedicated to embodied trauma alchemy. A bi-cultural black woman, she’s also a culturally reflexive anthropologist exploring the intersection of where our bodies/psyches/experiences meet our collective histories. She believes in the healing made possible at the personal and collective level by the work we do through transforming experience in our bodies today. She combines continued study in somatics with studies in depth psychology with a focus on community, liberation, indigenous and eco-psychologies at Pacifica.

Weena Pauly-Tarr has been working and playing in the worlds of dance, movement education and somatic therapy in NYC since 1998. Currently, Weena is a co-founder of Duvet (a group of movement artists and researchers), has a private somatic therapy practice called ReConnect, and is a team member and facilitator for Rooted Global Village. She lives in Queens with her husband, four kids and bunny.

JUNE 2024
Immediate Access Upon Registration

The Right to Play

with Amrita Dhaliwal

Learn more about this module

Play is a state that has been discouraged throughout life based on our identities, and for social and economical reasons as well. In this workshop, we will explore our beliefs and conditionings around play. To be in a state of play, is to be in touch with your pleasure and joy. However, when that has been discouraged, to then dive into our play can provoke a fear response. In this workshop, we will further explore how to increase our capacity for play by regulating our nervous system. Our identities (visible and invisible), play a role in our sense of safety. So we will work with an understanding that power dynamics are always at play and different bodies have different stress responses. This workshop is designed for seasoned performers, as well as folx just beginning.

Learn about your teacher

Amrita Dhaliwal (she/her) is an award-winning Punjabi American comedian, arts leader, educator and devising artist based in Los Angeles, whose work spans multiple mediums, from stage to TV & Film. Her work explores the core themes of humanity, like death and love, through a lens of the current social-political climate.

JULY 2024
Immediate Access Upon Registration

Perspectives At Play: Puppetry Of Objects

with Caroline Reck & Gricelda Silva

Learn more about this module

PERSPECTIVES AT PLAY: PUPPETRY OF OBJECTS

In our work at Glass Half Full Theatre, we have found that imaginative reenvisioning of objects is key to breaking open the complex work that must be done to recognize and upset power dynamics.  We use the puppetry of human-made objects as a tool to re-envision a sustainable, equitable future.  There is great joy and healing to be found in helping an object reject its human-intended purpose and become the protagonist in its own story.

The workshop will use empathy and imagination to re-envision everyday objects as characters with breath, life force, focus, and intent. We will bring objects to life and unlock their stories through desire, intention, and action.  Participants will want to join us from a space that would have a few objects at hand. These objects are easily found in your kitchen, garden supplies, household tools, office, bathroom, and most often, in the trash! We will provide further suggestions and instructions closer to the date.

Learn about your teacher

Caroline Reck (she/they) is a Co-Producing Artistic Director of Glass Half Full Theatre, an Austin, Texas-based company that creates multilingual devised works that highlight themes of social & environmental justice. Caroline’s work as a creator, director, and designer focuses on strategies to open the hearts and minds of audiences to difficult topics using light-hearted, imaginative, and interactive puppet-based performance.  A fluent speaker of English, French, and Spanish, Caroline blends multilingualism with visual narratives in their works, which have been presented by over 40 national Performing Arts Centers. Caroline is a graduate of the Lecoq School for Physical Theatre in Paris, and has an MFA in Theatre for Self-Producing Artists from Towson University in Baltimore. She is an Adjunct Professor of Puppetry and Movement at St Edward's University and Austin Community College.

Gricelda Silva (she/ella) is a Co-Producing Artistic Director of Glass Half Full Theatre, an Austin, Texas-based company that creates multilingual devised works featuring puppets and humans that highlight themes of social & environmental justice.  Gricelda is a native Spanish-speaking Mexican-American originally from Laredo, Texas. Her BAs are in Psychology and Philosophy from St. Edward’s University. Gricelda has devised and performed numerous roles for Glass Half Full Theatre since 2012, including the role of Belinda in the currently touring production of Cenicienta, and the title roles in 2017-2018's touring production Petra and the Wolf and 2022’s Yamel Cucuy.

“It is time for us to stop looking down and look up into our mind’s sky. “

— Loretta Johnson

How can we expand our window of transformation —
in ways that invites in a fuller picture of life in all it’s nuance?

This course embraces the Slow Philosophy Inherent in Deep Earth Activism…as we acknowledge our individual and collective bodies as potent portals for alchemy and transformation of not just our personal lives, but of the worlds we inhabit and help shape.

''I love the intentionality of
how love is held here...''

- Heather Meeks

''It’s been vital for my capacity
to remain hopeful in this world…'

- Antonella Russo-Ball

In addition, there are regular events in Rooted that anchor us.

When you register you’ll have access to: Month(s) long thematic journeys that shake up entrenched ways of knowing, expanding our sense of belonging and widening our capacity for change. We have many offerings each month that you can drop-in to as time and space allows. Our anchor workshops are always recorded.

You can be as involved as you want to be in Rooted.

Some people find value in our workshop recordings. Others attend live, or re-watch with a small group in their living rooms. Others contribute to the space with an offering. Others rotate the events they drop into, and trust they are finding what they need to find. We trust that however you participate, your participation is felt.

Each person who enters the space matters on this journey of culture creation, and we each bring our own gifts and contributions that help foster the soil in which new and reclaimed knowledges/ experiences/ imaginings can take root.

Like ripples on water, we trust that even small moments of encounter can have seen and unseen impacts on our relationships and worlds that are impossible to measure. This space has impacted so many of us in it - is it for you?

Inside Rooted, we accompany each other.
Practically speaking, this means we…

Work with the
impact of supremacies

We contend with the ways relationship has been distorted, wherein human peoples are regarded as superior to more-than-human life. White-bodied humans are regarded as superior to brown and black-bodied and other Bodies of Culture. Science is supreme, and Spirit is often forgotten.

Practice ‘making-kin’

People occupying different social locations are inside of Rooted. We host people from around the globe, young and old, with the ability to find each other in local geographies in small groups we call Care Pods. We aspire to exceed the limitations placed on relationship, while not bypassing difficult realities we all contend with.

Center Somatics & Body-Based Culture Change

In Rooted, the body is the locus for transformation. We offer space to metabolize experience through body-based practices and grief circles. We offer somatic tools, study guides called Home explorations, and small groups called Care Pods to support your own questioning.

Take an un/schooling lens around knowledge-making

Un/schooling is an orientation and philosophy that embraces multiple forms of learning and knowledge as valid. We support each other to discover the wisdom we each hold and have access to. We do not believe in a model of learning that divides the space into "experts" and "students". We are in this together.

Offer a video and audio unlearning library for Slow Digestion

We house an extensive and growing un/learning library of inspirational teachers, wisdom keepers and scholar-activist teachings, workshops, and live experiences. The library is an ongoing resource to our villagers.

Develop our trust in Art-Making and Play!

The thread that runs through all the Rooted offerings and events, is an engagement with art-making, play, creativity and imagination. Your creative voice matters here! And the ways that we individual learn through PLAY are delightful to witness.

Nothing that touches our lives is solely ours. The trauma and the joy.

The difficult, even traumatic, moments of life can be a crucible out of which desire is born. These moments can become the openings to sites of longing for an otherwise way of being and experiencing ourselves and our relationships.

Rooted continually asks the question:

What exists within us and through us that is more ancient, more durable, than the crises of our personal and collective timelines?

In Rooted, Experiment with what Unflattens Us.

Trauma can flatten and bind our creative life force causing us to collapse ourselves and each other as we move from and form behaviors rooted in our survival intelligences.

In Rooted, we re/connect with what is indestructible within us: our inherent wisdom and birthright connection to creativity and imagination.We are an assemblage of people actively questioning and experimenting with what makes an experience of relationship and belonging possible inside everyday life. And how this experimentation might serve to transform us into active co-creators of the worlds we inhabit.

Rooted recognizes ‘repetition & returning’ as key ingredients of new culture creation.We’re re/worlding together. And to create the world anew we need to “tie our roots to other roots” (Sophie Strand) and play with the technologies of LIBERATION available to us.

What is the gift? What wants to come through? That is yours to discover in Rooted.

The essence of how we move, we...

  • Plant seeds that embody a commitment to the world(s) to come while embracing the nourishment of what we have inherited - resilience, creativity, imagination.
  • Move away from a disposability culture that replicates systems of harm through alienation.
  • Embrace an ‘unschooling’ orientation that seeks to reclaim other intelligences we hold, other ways of knowing and ways of being in the world as valid.
  • Make room for the new, the not-yet-known and the mystery through play, movement, art-making and self-expression.
  • Move beyond individually-focused ‘fixes’ to embracing the uncertainty that comes from choosing new directions and new experiences.
  • Replace cycles of hope and despair with ‘the way things are’ - with a curiosity for what could be and our creative potential to shape futures.
  • Slow down the cycles of urgency and distraction that keep us locked in unhelpful cycles of harm, and cultivate choice within an attention economy.

''Rooted supports emergent structure
and allows access to so much more of us. ''

- Akilah Richards

''This work is groundbreaking,
heart-opening, and I love it...''

- Heidi Junkersfeld

When you register you’ll be able to access:

Come travel with us on month(s) long thematic journeys that shake up entrenched ways of knowing, expand our sense of belonging and widen our capacity for change. We have many offerings each month that you can drop-in to as time allows.

ReSounding JOY! Afrohizymatic Dance!

Each month, you can enter a space of music, dance, and cultural dexterity through song with our resident DJ, Cliff Berrien.

Afrorhyzymatic Dance is an opportunity for your somatic self to explore music from all over the the African Diasporic time-space continuum. Be ready to DANCE! It is inspired by the VUNJA gatherings put on by Bayo Akomolafe and Geci Karuri Sebina.

ReSounding Joy is a playful celebration, transformative somatic education andcultural dexterity practice that explores the world’s diversity through music. The question this practice presents is “can we increase love by promoting an embrace of the worlds diversity so all beings can thrive.”

SE+AM BODYING

SE+AM happens monthly. This space is truly unique.  It is about reverence for impulse… and Impulse’s intelligence in keeping us alive, and its creative force for becoming more than just living. SE+AM stitches together the principles and physiological frames of Somatic Experiencing with the movement practice of Authentic Movement.

Each session is 90 minutes, and exploring the crossovers and distinctions between Somatic Experiencing and Authentic Movement.  All bodies and all movement is welcome. Moving your finger or sliding your eyelid over your eyeball is just as valuable as standing on your head. This is in an experiential workshop.

Each month, you can enter a space of music, dance, and cultural dexterity through song with our resident DJ, Cliff Berrien.

Afrorhyzymatic Dance is an opportunity for your somatic self to explore music from all over the the African Diasporic time-space continuum. Be ready to DANCE! It is inspired by the VUNJA gatherings put on by Bayo Akomolafe and Geci Karuri Sebina.

ReSounding Joy is a playful celebration, transformative somatic education andcultural dexterity practice that explores the world’s diversity through music. The question this practice presents is “can we increase love by promoting an embrace of the worlds diversity so all beings can thrive.”

Monthly Sunday Anchor

On the 2nd Sunday of every month, from 1-3pm EST we host an anchoring workshop space. Sometime this is hosted by a special guest, and other times by villagers themselves. It happens monthly Live (and is also recorded).

The purpose of the monthly workshops is to bring us into conversation with different perspectives and ideas that can challenge us, and lovingly agitate and disrupt entrenched ways of thinking and being; opening us up for new experiences. This is playful exploration. We intentionally move slowly through each theme, sometimes spending several months on just one focus.

Each month, you can enter a space of music, dance, and cultural dexterity through song with our resident DJ, Cliff Berrien.

Afrorhyzymatic Dance is an opportunity for your somatic self to explore music from all over the the African Diasporic time-space continuum. Be ready to DANCE! It is inspired by the VUNJA gatherings put on by Bayo Akomolafe and Geci Karuri Sebina.

ReSounding Joy is a playful celebration, transformative somatic education andcultural dexterity practice that explores the world’s diversity through music. The question this practice presents is “can we increase love by promoting an embrace of the worlds diversity so all beings can thrive.”

Villager Offerings

Each month, on the first or second Friday of the month, there is the opportunity to attend an offering or space held by a Rooted Villager. You are more than welcome to submit a workshop idea and offer to hold space is this manner too if you join us!

Each month, you can enter a space of music, dance, and cultural dexterity through song with our resident DJ, Cliff Berrien.

Afrorhyzymatic Dance is an opportunity for your somatic self to explore music from all over the the African Diasporic time-space continuum. Be ready to DANCE! It is inspired by the VUNJA gatherings put on by Bayo Akomolafe and Geci Karuri Sebina.

ReSounding Joy is a playful celebration, transformative somatic education andcultural dexterity practice that explores the world’s diversity through music. The question this practice presents is “can we increase love by promoting an embrace of the worlds diversity so all beings can thrive.”

Each month, you can enter a space of music, dance, and cultural dexterity through song with our resident DJ, Cliff Berrien.

Afrorhyzymatic Dance is an opportunity for your somatic self to explore music from all over the the African Diasporic time-space continuum. Be ready to DANCE! It is inspired by the VUNJA gatherings put on by Bayo Akomolafe and Geci Karuri Sebina.

ReSounding Joy is a playful celebration, transformative somatic education andcultural dexterity practice that explores the world’s diversity through music. The question this practice presents is “can we increase love by promoting an embrace of the worlds diversity so all beings can thrive.”

Diasporic Hush Harbor

Within the Rooted Global Village, a very intentional space has been made for people of the African diaspora. Out here in the Borderlands is a blazing fire just a bit further on from the main camp. We’ve been tending it for over a year now, and we’ve space for you. Come join us in the Diasporic Hush (H)arbor.

During antebellum years, enslaved Africans gathered in acts of courage and agency, in hollows and wooded places called Hush Harbors (or arbors), where they could create community and worship the Divine in their own way.

These liminal spaces encouraged those gathered to seek unmediated and intentional interaction with the sacred with practices that included: divination, ring shout, interaction with nature, healing and cleansing rituals, rituals of transition, interpretation of signs, sacred dance,  and communication with elders/ancestors.

Each month, you can enter a space of music, dance, and cultural dexterity through song with our resident DJ, Cliff Berrien.

Afrorhyzymatic Dance is an opportunity for your somatic self to explore music from all over the the African Diasporic time-space continuum. Be ready to DANCE! It is inspired by the VUNJA gatherings put on by Bayo Akomolafe and Geci Karuri Sebina.

ReSounding Joy is a playful celebration, transformative somatic education andcultural dexterity practice that explores the world’s diversity through music. The question this practice presents is “can we increase love by promoting an embrace of the worlds diversity so all beings can thrive.”

Care Pods (Small groups)

You can join a small group of others who are in the same geographic location as you are or who share common interests! One of the dreams we’ve had in Rooted since the beginning is the formation of small groups composed of members of our global village who can meet in virtual or physical space to support each other and explore ways in which the un/learnings and themes we explore might be translated into everyday life and local practice. We’ve had anecdotal reports from many Rooted members of ways they have brought what they experienced within Rooted to local groups or community support projects.

Given that Rooted began during a pandemic, it created a place wherein people from disparate backgrounds in various global locations could come together in communal space with others, some of whom had been cut off from local connection opportunities. We’re excited now to nourish local connection opportunities, where possible. This is deeply meaningful to us and is currently in development.

Contact Zones

‍This is a monthly space held for gathering and conversation and connection It’s focused on embodied anti-racism, decolonial work and culture building, we’re presented with the challenge of understanding the impact of racialization on experience and relationship, and un/learning the ways we’ve embodied coloniality in its many forms.

The Contact Zones offer spaces based on affinity (racialized experience) and other experiences that feel important to our lived experience, while also offering opportunities for other constellations of coming together around a variety of juicy topics. This space is in continual development.

We’re curious about the portals and the openings of possibility into new ways of experiencing ourselves and each other and our world.

Online fireside chat space

This is our primary hub for online discussion. This is a place to go deeper, sideways. To be silly, laugh, and share resources. You can direct message with other villagers, communicate and post images, projects, ideas, and converse!

Bi-monthly Grief Tending

We offer a bi-monthly grief space. These are open-hearted spaces intended to be intimate and of the moment, and as such cannot be viewed, only experienced.

In this space we will be tending grief as many of our ancestors have done before us: around a fire with music, movement, memory excavation, vocalization and as much or as little wailing required to be with our losses well enough that there is a bit of space to dream some new dreams.

Unlearning Library of Video And Audio Workshops

We’ve curated an extensive learning library that you can dip into in your own time, and at your own pace. It’s a beautifully designed and searchable library. We are also in the process of creating learning bundles based on the areas you’re curious to explore. You can share this information with us when you join Rooted to help in this process.

Our learning library also includes our previous virtual events, the Embodied Trauma Conference, Tending the Roots 2021, and the Embodied Social Justice Summit (2021). Please note: the Tending the Roots event collection from 2022 will (over the next few months) become available to view as a member of the Rooted Global Village.

Meet the Rooted Co-Dreamers

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Our platform acts as a bridge between the thinkers, wisdom keepers, and modern day explorers of our time, and the grounded experience of seeing what those big ideas can bring forth inside our everyday lived experience, both individually and as a collective body.

Some of our past anchor workshop guests include:

Pricing & Enrollment

We created a pricing structure we hope will make Rooted accessible to everyone with monthly and quarterly options.

All plans have the same access to rooted.

Rooted Original

$47 USD
monthly payments
$141 USD
quarterly payments

Rooted Sponsor

The below rates INCLUDE a sponsorship option.  Through this option you can sponsor BIPOC folks, those who identify with the LGBTQIA+ community , and those from around the world where the cost of Rooted may be prohibitive. (see below). Thank you in advance if you're able to do this.

$67 USD
monthly payments
$201 USD
quarterly payments

Rooted International
& Financial Need


We realize that US currency can make it difficult for some to join us. If you live in a country where the exchange rate makes it prohibitive to join Rooted, you can use this option to apply for a Rooted International Rate of membership.

**Please keep in mind the green bottle graphic below before submitting a request to join us at an international rate.

Now sure which Plan to choose?

We deeply appreciate that people will assess their level of contribution here based on what they are able to pay.  We trust you to know what you can afford to contribute for something like this, though there are some considerations we would offer to help you make your decision. Alexis Cunningfolk from wortsandcunning.com, offers guidance on making this decision based on a number of factors.

''It’s been food for my body and my soul and my mind.''

- Leny Strobel

Rooted goes deep and reaches high into the heart…

- Curtis Robertson Jr.

''There are many invitations to connect with all of life…'

- Sherry Paris

FAQ

What's the cancelation policy?

If you sign up for the monthly plans, you can cancel at any point. Your subscription will last until the end of that month at which point you will no longer be billed. For the quarterly plans, your subscription will last until the end of that quarter and will renew until you choose to cancel. You can cancel anytime easily on your own, but enrolment only happens at specific times each year.

I’m not sure how it will all work? Will there be an orientation of some kind?

Absolutely. We’ll send you details for where to access the members dashboard and include information there you need to know to get ready for the next workshop. We send weekly emails providing an overview of what's coming up, too, so you won't miss anything.

I don’t want to be overwhelmed. What happens if I can’t attend the workshops or community sessions?

Your pace is perfect and there is no "behind” here. This is not a course you have to work through from beginning to end. You’ll be able to revisit previous workshops while your membership is current, so there’s no rush to take in the materials. You also don’t need to attend “live” to benefit from this experience. Each month will have a dedicated space where you’ll find the workshop recordings and other relevant information/materials/links. This is exploratory space for you to consume at your pace.

Will I be able to work with someone 1-1 if I join?

No, Rooted is a communal experience. No individual coaching/therapy sessions are offered. However, we have opportunities to connect in smaller groups in various spaces within Rooted.

Can I earn CEUs for my participation?

At this particular point in time, no, but we are looking into it, so it could well be possible in the near future.

What are the dates & times for the live workshops?

The core of Rooted are the monthly workshops, which will take place on the second Sunday each month. Most workshops are held at 1pm EST. The workshop recordings will also be available within 24/48 hours after the workshop. Our other workshops are held at various times throughout the month. All event information is housed on the Circle platform, where you can add events to your calendar so you won't miss them.

It seems like there is a lot to explore here. What if I can’t do it all?

You are NOT required to do it all. In fact, we highly discourage it. The point here is to feel into what you most need and desire from this space, and then use your autonomy and personal curiosity to carve out the path that works for you.

Karine Bell makes her home with her two kids, her partner and chickens. She's a somatics teacher and abolitionist, dedicated to embodied trauma alchemy. A bi-cultural black woman, she’s also a culturally reflexive anthropologist exploring the intersection of where our bodies/psyches/experiences meet our collective histories. She believes in the healing made possible at the personal and collective level by the work we do through transforming experience in our bodies today. She combines continued study in somatics with studies in depth psychology with a focus on community, liberation, indigenous and eco-psychologies at Pacifica.

As an End of Life (EOL) Doula, Oceana Sawyer specializes in the liminal spaces of active dying and grief. She is currently researching the intersection of embodied grief and somatic abolitionism as well as developing and holding space for healing through a sensual (all the senses) lens.

A certified home funeral celebrant, living funeral ceremony facilitator, and Conscious Dying Educator, Oceana also holds graduate degrees in counseling psychology and organizational development.

Oceana draws upon her meditation practice, experience as a sensuality educator, earth-based spirituality, and intensive study in the expressive arts and integral counseling psychology to bring a grounded, compassionate presence and holistic approach to her work. Through Death Cafes, EOL vision mapping, EOL doula training, and virtual grief events and workshops, Oceana has enjoyed working with a variety of groups and individuals, and primarily focuses on People of the Globl Majority.

You can follow her on Instagram and participate in her online community on Patreon.

Weena Pauly-Tarr has been working and playing in the worlds of dance, movement education and somatic therapy in NYC since 1998. Currently, Weena is a co-founder of Duvet (a group of movement artists and researchers), has a private somatic therapy practice called ReConnect, and is a team member and facilitator for Rooted Global Village. She lives in Queens with her husband, four kids and bunny.

Liz Deligio is a community psychologist with over ten years of experience in the psycho-social accompaniment of impacted communities.

Liz has worked with communities throughout Chicago and internationally. She began her career accompanying communities impacted by the loss of public housing. As she pursued a Masters of Divinity and then later a Ph.D. in community psychology, her work became more expansive, focusing on state violence, memory, and collective healing.

Cliff has 35-years experience as a percussion student and teacher of several music traditions, including drumming styles from Brazil, the Caribbean, Africa and India. He has combined his music studies, degree in psychology and years of experience as a professional DJ to develop practices that promote collective joy, cultural dexterity and global healing. Cliff has had the honor of using these practices for the past 5 years co-facilitating workshops with his mentor, Dr. Barbara Holmes, author of Race and the Cosmos and Joy Unspeakable.

Mickey Vranic, our lead for the Rooted support team.Mickey is a gifted writer and poet, who also happens to provide incredible support services through her virtual assistance company. Mickey has a passion for continued learning around who we are as human beings, and what we can do to heal ourselves and our world. We’re excited to have her here as part of the team, and we think you’ll love her, too!

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