Welcome.
We’d like to introduce you to…
The Rooted Global Village
Re/imagining Relationship. Re/imagining Belonging.
Rooted is a online/offline (local and translocal) membership that recognizes that thriving beyond our personal and collective wounds doesn't happen alone. We accompany each other.
Each person who enters the space matters on this journey of new culture creation, and we each bring our own gifts and contributions that help foster the soil in which the new can take root. This is about relational healing and cultivating practices for our shared liberation. This is not about leaders and followers, but collaboration and curiosity. Our stories are entangled with others, and with what is historical, communal, and cultural.
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 our experiences of relationship and belonging.
In that suspension you’re invited to map new tracks of belonging through engagement with paradigm-shifting themes, the transformational power of body-centered praxis, creative arts, spontaneity + play, poetry, earth-spirit and more-than-human encounters.
This space has impacted so many of us in it - is it for you?
In a culture marked by experiences of hyper-individualism and separation...
As a bi/multi-cultural Black woman, with West African, European, Ashkenazi Jewish, and some indigenous to Turtle island, ancestry, I am connected to lineages that experienced forms of displacement, and enslavement. I lived for years with the belief that I was defective; an experience of shame I could feel the presence of in many in my family. The therapies and healing modalities available to me only seemed to reinforce an idea that "I" needed to be changed or fixed, 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 was a reflection of the culture in which I was born and conditioned. A culture with historical and cultural roots in harmful paradigms. That is, I realized that the problem was in the soil. My experience, a peculiar fruit.
'' 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
We un/learn and co/create from a place of...
We do not yet use the term "community, and here’s why. We are tending the elements of culture that have distorted our relationship to each other (like white body supremacy and other ideologies born from harmful systems). We are tending the soil.
We are an assemblage of people actively questioning and experimenting with what makes 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.
The essence of how we move, we...
- 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.
- Embrace the new (and the strange), play, movement and self-expression.
- Move beyond individually-focused ‘fixes’, to embrace uncertainty.
- Replace cycles of hope and disappointment in ‘the way things are’ - with a curiosity for what could be. We plant seeds that may not bear fruit in our life times, but become a commitment to world(s) to come.
- Slow down the cycles of urgency and distraction that keep us locked in cycles of harm, and cultivate choice in an attention economy.
- We move away from a disposability culture that replicates systems of harm.
Inside Rooted, we...
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.
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 Care Pods. We aspire to exceed the limitations placed on relationship, while not bypassing difficult realities related to systems of harm.
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.
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.
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.
Contact Zones are unique spaces that offer an opportunity outside of our main workshops to gather in more intimate space, go deeper in connection, and grapple with the complexities of our lived experience. They are affinity based spaces that are in the process of expansion to include other loci for gathering.
'' Rooted, for me, has become a touchstone.
As the winds of daily life shift this way and that, it is the thread that weaves through it all. It tethers me to something bigger than a moment, bigger, even, than this life. As a mother, this anchors me in all that I do in some of my most cherished relationships. ''
— Karine Bell (Rooted founder)
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.
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 in a mixed space (this means all bodies). We intentionally move slowly through each theme, 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
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.
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.
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
Meet the Rooted Co-Dreamers
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:
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 will renew until you choose to cancel. You can cancel anytime easily on your own, 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 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 in various spaces within Rooted.
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 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.
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.
