Welcome.
We’d like to introduce you to…
The Rooted Global Village Gathering Space
“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion."
— bell hooks
Over the last century, the locus for change has been situated firmly within the body of the ‘individual’, as if transformation had a singular trajectory. What this forgets is the web of life in which we are entangled. Rooted helps you re/member.
As a caretaker, a parent, sibling, neighbor, friend, and global citizen, you embody and face complex realities in your life…
...and your story is deeply interconnected with our collective, historical, and cultural stories. Rooted acknowledges this threshold moment of reckoning with the legacies of structurally harmful systems and culture on both personal and communal experience. We recognize that our personal experiences and our journeys of liberation are bound to those of others.
We’re a communal space of response to forces that have distorted a sense of connection and belonging.
Consider Rooted, if
you long for a space to...
- Reclaim an experience of interconnection to life. (We see this as a critical step in becoming more available to accountability and response-ability to inequity).
- Embrace an ‘unschooling’ orientation in how we respond to personal and communal issues.
- Re/gain (self)trust and a sense of connection to self and others.
- Re/gain a connection to ancestral lineages, land and place.
- Embrace the new (and the strange), play, movement and self-expression.
- Move beyond addictive patterns and individually-focused ‘fixes’.
- Replace cycles of hope and disappointment in ‘the way things are’ - with a curiosity for what might not yet be….
- Slow down cycles of urgency and distraction, and cultivate choice in an attention economy.
- Shift from a desire for perfection and frustration with wanting change RIGHT NOW — into an orientation towards a broader lens on generational cultural change.
'' I've felt held by the Rooted global village and the intention to create something that evolves us together. I need to imagine that it is possible at present, to put faith in the fact that just making the commitment to taking up my place in its co-creation is a move away from the disconnection of trauma. ''
— Rachel Keen, Rooted Villager
In a world marked by experiences of hyper-individualism and separation...
It took a long time to learn how the personal struggles that I had for so long didn’t belong to me alone. I grew up within an environment of dysfunction and chaos, experiencing abuse from an early age.
As a bi-cultural Black woman, I had experiences in early life that contributed to feelings of ‘less-than’. I lived for many years with the belief that I was defective. The therapists and healing modalities available to me only seemed to reinforce the idea that it was me who needed to be fixed or changed so that I could fit in, be ‘normal’, and find my place in the world.
What I didn’t realize then that I do now, is that my story and experience were a mere reflection of the culture in which I was born and conditioned. That is, the problem was in the soil in which I was planted. My experience, a peculiar fruit.
"[If] you plant lettuce [and] it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun."
— Thich Nhat Hanh
Where did our disconnection & non-belonging come from?
Voluntary flight, or involuntary displacement through the slave trade, led to disconnection from relationship to their ways of knowing and being in the world. That displacement impacted MY relationship to land and place, and to the more-than-human world.
I’ve inherited a disconnection to my body. To land. To other human and non-human peoples. To Spirit and to a sense of belonging to Creation.
I've also come to learn that none of us are alone in this experience. The disturbance in experiences of relationship and belonging contribute to a host of suffering (which I know intimately) - trauma, loneliness, depression, addictions, and more. The fragility of the nervous systems that surrounded me reflected this disconnection.
This disconnection is nourished by the culture I was shaped by, and, in many ways, it thrives on our separation.
In Response,
This coming September Rooted is launching an ongoing series called:
Re/imagining Relationship, Re/imagining Belonging.
You are invited to join us in this experimental and experiential virtual space of suspended knowing. We will unpack the narratives, origin stories, and orientations that have shaped your belonging.
In that suspension you’re invited to map new tracks of belonging through engagement with paradigm-shifting themes, and the transformational power of body-centered praxis, creative arts, poetry, earth-spirit and other-than-human encounters.
This form of ‘play’ has transformed my life and experience. Is it for you?
We un/learn and co/create from a place of...
This isn’t an online community. We don’t use that term and here’s why. We realized that what we’re tending are those elements of culture that have distorted our relationship to each other (like white body supremacy and other ideologies born from colonialism). We are tending the soil that nourishes us.
So, we are an assemblage of people actively questioning and experimenting with the foundations that make an experience of community and belonging possible in everyday life.We do this in an ongoing way that recognizes ‘repetition’ as a key ingredient 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.
Inside Rooted, you’ll find:
impact of racialization
We use Resmaa Menakem’s somatic abolitionism as our foundation for making sense of, and working with, how culture has distorted relationship to self and others. We make use of both affinity and mixed spaces.
A whole host of people occupying different social locations are inside of Rooted. You will be among people from around the globe, young and old.
A growing unlearning library of inspirational teachers, wisdom keepers and scholar-activist teachings, workshops, and live experiences.
Anunschooling lens as an embodied way of being. We support you in choosing how/what to explore, but the decision for how far to go is yours. Autonomy, stepping back when you need it, and self-led exploration are celebrated.
A place to support you in, and remind you (repeatedly) of, your ability to metabolize experience to make way for something new.
for deeper work
We offer somatic tools, study guides, and small groups to support your own questioning.
When you register you’ll be able to access:
Click on each to explore.
The purpose of the monthly workshops is to expose us to different perspectives and ideas related to topics we’re grappling with in our lives and in the world at large.
This is a content-rich place of expansion. They challenge us with ideas that can lovingly agitate and disrupt the habitual to create openings for new experiences.
This is playful exploration in a mixed space (this means all bodies). We intentionally move slowly through each them, devoting a month to a different, but connected theme of focus.
We’re illuminating what disrupts the entrenched grooves of our personal historical and cultural conditioning. To suspend the stories that keep us stuck in habitual ways of being, and make it possible to create new personal and cultural grooves.
Deepening a body-centered process of personal and communal transformation means building the capacity for self (and other) awareness, becoming intimate with our bodies in ways that foster acceptance, call upon our maturation, and make us more available for transformation.
We offer explorations in experiences like SE+AM (Somatic Experiencing + Authentic Movement), ReSounding Joy, Drumming Circles, AfroRhizomatic Dance, Grief Circles, Diasporic Hush (H)arbor, Dance Church, and more. These are offered several times per year.
As a space that welcomes all bodies, which is 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 in mixed spaces. This space is in continual development. We invite moments of intimacy, connection and relationship (in ways that can surprise us); through cultivating curiosity, creativity and connection, and in ways that challenge otherwise legitimate sites of anti-racist work.
We’re curious about the portals and the openings of possibility into new ways of experiencing ourselves and each other and our world.
“The Contact Zones, “...describe those spaces where “cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths...”.
- Mary Louise Pratt
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.
In their book, A Tradition That Has No No Name, Mary Field Belenky, Lynne A. Bond, and Jacqueline S. Weinstock followed the unfolding of a project linking local women’s organizations in disparate locations into a rhizome-like multi-centered movement of consciousness-raising and empowerment of these groups by linking their efforts in a network of mutual support. 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.
Understanding of how our bodies retain the orientations rooted in trauma, oppression, and resilience (!) (and how it shapes worlds), are some of the foundational elements that make way for our ability to be present with ‘what is’ with an orientation of curiosity and acceptance.
The body-centered nature of what we do means that this is a thread that is woven in and through all that we do, and dream of doing, in Rooted. It is about re/sensitizing and awakening to a world alive.
In 2020, Rooted embarked on a year-long book+body study of MGH to engage with the anti-racist practice of Somatic Abolitionism, made known through the work of trauma specialist and best selling author, Resmaa Menakem. The program brought in thousands of learners who were new to this work.
We have since archived the year-long program so that you can go through it at any time, and with others inside Rooted, if you choose.
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.
"I spend a lot of time and energy nourishing and facilitating healing for others but there are very few spaces where I obtain nourishment, healing and am held. Rooted is definitely one of those spaces."
— Zoe Arp, Rooted Villager
I'm Karine...
I'm a bi-cultural Black woman, a mother, somatic abolitionist and educator, and a PhD candidate at Pacifica Graduate Institute. My life’s work has been devoted to a kind of rebellion and disobedience that has made it possible for me to re/imagine my life situation, that of my people, and the world(s) I inherited and co/create. I’m a wayfinder, whose traumas are the coordinates. My mother’s suffering was one of my greatest teachers, and my children are firestarters that keep the fire-in-my-belly for this work alight.
The simple story of Rooted begins with an online event I organized and hosted in February of 2020 called the Embodied Trauma Conference.This 5-day event attracted more than 27,000 people from around the globe interested in understanding the context out of which trauma experiences can happen. What stood out from that event was the ground of community that we touched.
How do we keep this going? That was the prevailing question.
What began as an attempt to carry on from that event a fledgling sense of connection, longing for community, and co/learning birthed this online communal space we’ve called the Rooted Global Village.
In support of this journey in Rooted, I’m currently a graduate student in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Depth Psychology program, with a specialization in Community, Liberation, Indigenous and Ecopsychologies. The deeply nourishing ground of exploration offered through this program informs many of our explorations in Rooted. I am doing it not for the degree, but for how what I take there can be in service of the world(s) I co-create.
And I don’t do this alone! We have a brilliant team of scholar-activists, body-centered and movement educators, artists, musicians, parents, queer folx, and others who make this space what it is.
Learn more about us right here:
We're a global village with...
Members all over the world and growing.
This is about relational healing and cultivating practices for our shared liberation.
This is not about leaders and followers, but true collaboration.
Expanding perspectives....
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 hosts: (all of which are available in our unlearning library!)
Some of our past anchor workshop hosts:
If you are willing to engage in un/learning experiences that prompt you to explore the borderlands of possibility between where you are now and where your heart desires to go…
This is for you.
If you want to explore the dimensions of embodied experience and cultivate your bodies’ ability to hold the discomfort that is often part of change-work, and expand your capacity for enthusiasm and joy.
This is for you.
If you want to engage with others in a space focused on personal and communal transformation - beyond a cancel or disposability culture that makes us fearful of rejection…
This is for you.
If you’re interested in sharing communal space that both explores the impact of racialization, and other harmful systems of dominance, AND the possibilities that exist beyond them…
This is for you.
To build capacity within our bodies to experience transformation.
Join the waitlist
FAQ
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 not renew again. You can cancel anytime, but enrolment only happens at specific times each year.
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'll also provide support in the form of a welcome ceremony! We send weekly emails providing an overview of what's coming up, too, so you won't miss anything.
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.
No, Rooted is a communal experience. No individual coaching/therapy sessions are offered. However, we have opportunities to connect in smaller groups during some of the sessions.
At this particular point in time, no, but we are looking into it, so it could well be possible in the near future.
The core of Rooted are the monthly workshops, which will take place on the second Sunday or Monday of each month. 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 - and our co-being hours happen every Friday from 11am-1pm EST.
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.
This September...
What we’re attempting to capture here is rich, nuanced and complex. We’re attempting to make accessible ideas that can take a long time to not only understand, but also embody, and that have deep roots in liberation psychologies, philosophies, cultural cosmologies, traditions and technologies.
And we will fail to capture the breadth and scope of what we’re trying to do in Rooted.
That said, what we offer here is a snapshot and a working framework that we continually reshape as our (collective) understanding deepens or is uprooted entirely.
This work is for the curious-minded, and for those available to (and hungry for) wonder and awe as a pathway.Those who seek to play in the spaces between the tangible and the intangible, and who are not afraid to be afraid of the dark (unknown). It is the soil of creation in which we’re invited into another kind of relationship.
Come join the Rooted Global Village!
