Time and again I see on my own journey and in the healing space there is a way of being on this earth that feels both rooted and expansive, star-open and just right.
It’s a sense of homecoming and feeling completely held and good enough right here - there’s safety and mystery, a profoundly rooted soothing freedom in Beingness.
The metaphor I feel drawn to convey all of this is that of a tree, any really - I love many - with roots long immersed and leaves up high, profoundly sky-open yet deeply in land.
And if we were to compare this to the human energy chakra/hormonal system it looks similar - the root (adrenal) chakra that anchors and registers core safety - tribe, hearth, earth above the pelvic floor - and the opposite upward knowing of the crown chakra - the spiritual disseminator of the pineal gland nestled in the brain, melatonin-alert to the immediate natural environment (emotional and physical) and beyond to infinite skies, spiritual inspiration, a different kind of potential beyond the five senses.
But which stars and angels? The beautiful stability of trees have long felt like a guiding force for me and strengthen my own solar plexus, the engine of pancreatic power and will in the abdomen that helps us to know what is truly sustaining our flame. It’s gut instinct, a balanced (blood sugar) discretion, the sturdy trunk of our healthy boundaries and inner knowing.
Until you’ve experienced a sense of being held and welcomed by the whole of earth, to land so deeply in your ancestral knowing bones that you wonder how you lived so long in disassociated shadows, this missing rootedness can remain invisible to our psyche.
And my nervous system knew it!
The safety of the oxytocin ventral vagus nerve state - connected, healthily attached, “anchored” as Deb Dana terms it - is the foundational tree-house of healing.
The human body requires the alert button of imminent survival risk to be turned off when necessary. The tiger is gone and the chronically stressful work day done too.
In that still point of true self acceptance your heart feels safe enough to allow in any new positive thought form or heart-hope. This has been my own experience after a sensitively guided massage or a real deep heart-centred hug. My horizons of possibility both expand but also feel content with what is.
It’s a feeling of being born in your own body for some glorious unpressured reason.
Something I realised on my journey to becoming an intuitive healer (and an actual emotionally stable person :-) was this grounded and safely-rooted state was a hurdle for many, including myself.
But what I am increasingly observing in my work is the hope and magic that is available when we start with the roots of our being first. It’s as if our essential DNA knows we have a tremendous latent potential waiting to be activated but survival fear prevents us from accessing it.
During an insight healing I began to incorporate an openness to say certain phrases and sounds that I intuitively sensed my client needed to hear to fully relax and Be in the healing space.
Like an intuitive hypnotherapist I help them visualise and imagine a felt sense of arrival, to send an umbilical cord of a kind, deep down into the earth….like a tree.
And placing my hands on the back, often near the kidneys, or holding their feet gently if facing upwards, using safe touch acts as a reassuring rooted anchor.
Touch is often underestimated as a tool to change your emotions or frequency - the level of harmony or coherence in your energy field - but as a key component in our nervous system wiring as children, part of our essential primitive reflexes to feel connected and safe with another human and earth itself, it’s essential.
Touch is a rooting activity. The mycorrhiza fungi of trees reaches out through the soil, illustrating the tangible physicality of a tree in community.
When the roots are torn up after a violent storm they are vulnerable and other trees sense this. They send water, essential nutrients and messages through to a weakened stump so the root structure remains strong enough to survive.
Trees seem like great teachers for there is a physical wisdom in their old tangible stability, a sturdy quiet inner-ness that also encourages an expanded consciousness that clearly worked for Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha, who according to Buddhist scriptures achieved enlightenment by the base of the Bodhi fig tree in Bodh Gaya, India.
Trees sense interdependently and it’s this grounded evolutionary knowing and sharing that I love to imagine and help my client visualise at the beginning of a healing.
When our roots to safety feel weakened and wavering it helps to lean into the idea of a tree and feel what our own spine - our inner tree - is telling us.
Thanks for reading ✨
(image on Unsplash by Dave Hoefler)