There is a foundation upon which our availability for transformation rests. Cultivating body awareness, self-awareness, awareness of the dimensions of embodied experience, the landscape of our emotional and sensational worlds, and having a basis in some understanding of how our bodies retain the orientations rooted in trauma 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.
Related to this, we contextualize our culture’s relationship to the body as a framework for making way for new ways of making sense of and relating to experience; introducing what it might be like to reclaim some of what has been historically shamed or disallowed in our experience of and expression through the body.
To know the landscape of our bodies, our experience, with intimacy and acceptance is to render us available to meet other bodies with compassion and empathy. It’s to make available again our creativity and imagination to dream a new dream.
The kind of revolutionary change at the heart of what many of us personally and communally long for, requires a confrontation with what we think we know; what has become embodied and what is created and recreated through the body. To do this, we create opportunities to disrupt what has become conditioned and habitual.
Neuroscience has a corollary here in how we create experiences through the disruption of the neural networks established around experiences we repeat. In Rooted, we’re illuminating what helps us disrupt the entrenched grooves of our personal historical and cultural conditioning, and make way for new personal and cultural grooves.
What helps us move beyond the entrenched grooves of our conditioning to make way for an orientation towards deep curiosity about ourselves, others, and the conditions (and systems) that have shaped us and our experience?
We’re root in a body-centered process of personal and communal transformation — which means building that 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…and we’re reclaiming the animal body (and what is primal and primary to experience).
We’re challenging a culturally conditioned model of learning which undermines our own agency and embodied wisdom. We respect the linages of wisdom coming from the many teachers, elders, and scholars (scholar-activists) coming through Rooted, while at the same time tending the flame of our own wisdom and the medicine we have to contribute to the world.
We’re building from resource, resilience and strength. We’re center the body in the Village, which means that we’re building awareness of the body in the process of creating greater personal and communal capacity for relationship, and for coming to the edges of what’s known in the process of building (and dismantling simultaneously), and cultivating critical consciousness as we go.