Healing your roots: aim, Intent and Spirit of the work

1. What does it mean to heal your roots?

It means to consciously go back to that moment in this life, when incarnation on this earth took place, when everything began. Childhood is the foundation of the entire life. Your family, whether you like or not, represents your roots.

A human being resembles a tree. And exactly like a plant you can thrive, rise, grow strong, produce flowers and fruits, flow with the natural life cycles, when your roots are healthy. Exactly like a tree, if your roots are ill, superficial, incomplete, you won’t develop and flower according to your potential, but you will remain fragile, weak, needy, exposed to adversities and to the possibility of being wiped away by stormy circumstances.

The origin of life on this earth is your root. What you are now, what you are endowed with and that characterizes your life, originates with you as a child, in your family: which is not casually called family of origin. Therefore if now something is missing, if you notice that your development on this earth is not going the right way, it is necessary then to go back to that time and space when it started. It is the only way to take back what you miss. If your childhood, like for many of us, has gone into oblivion, if it looks like you can’t remember anything, this is not a good reason to give up the endeavor. If anything, such resistance proves how much it is needed, how disconnected from your adult perception the inner child is, that, if healthy, by facing the possibility of a new adventure would have said “yes” without hesitation!

2. The illusory duality

“Trying to cut off the lower, to destroy it, and just to remain with the higher, is sheer stupidity. It is as if you destroy the foundation and you want the higher part of the building to remain. It is as if you cut off the feet and you want the man to be really alive and walking.

The lower is a necessity, the lower is the foundation. Look at the economy of life. The lower can exist without the higher but the higher cannot exist without the lower, that’s why it is higher. I am not creating a paradox, it is simple: the foundation of a building can exist without the building, but the building cannot exist without the foundation. A man can exist in darkness, but a man cannot exist in light alone. A man can live the life of a sinner because it is lower, but a man cannot live only the life of a saint.

The higher needs the lower. It is lower because it can exist without the higher – the higher is not a necessity for it – but the higher cannot exist without the lower. The roots can exist without the tree, that is nothing impossible. If you cut the tree, the roots will still exist and a new tree will be born; but try the other way – cut the roots – new roots will not be born. The lower is essential, the higher is a luxury; it comes only when the lower is fulfilled. It is possible only when the lower has been transcended, not destroyed.

A man of totality allows the lower to be there because that is the only way for the higher to be there also; then he creates a harmony between the lower and the higher. In that harmony lower is lower no more, higher is higher no more, they have become one, one unity.”

– Osho – “The three threasures”, Vol. 2, Chapter 9.

In this teaching, the inferior refers to the child, the superior to the adult.

Trying to destroy the inferior then, is what we do as adults when we are unbalanced, when we don’t consider the inner child because we lost connection with it, and therefore we got into the habit to only follow the adult in us, thinking it as superior because it is the aspect that knows, believing itself able to solve problems by fighting, rationalizing, acting. But our every day life shows that something is missing, especially when our adult efforts, obstructed by a deviated inner vision, fails. We are not rooted in our being, energy and wholeness: therefore we can reach out only up to a certain point, to partial solutions, when we are lucky. To proceed in adult life overlooking the inner child, it’s like wanting to walk without legs and feet. To harmonically move in the world and in life in such condition it’s impossible.

3. Life orders

The teaching mentioned above, can also be viewed as such: the inferior is the parent, who came before us, and the superior is the child who came after. Thus the roots come first and the external part of the tree comes afterwards.

The adult that repudiates its origin, maybe by concealing where he comes from, or maybe wanting to behave in a way that goes in the opposite direction from the one followed by his parents, does not honor his own roots. Trying to forget is a reaction acted out unconsciously and in vain, since to cut out his own roots from his life, does only create pain for himself. There are high possibilities he will meet difficulties, life will not support him, because life flows through the roots. If the child is not satisfied by what he didn’t get from his parents, as adult the problem cannot be solved by simply behaving willingly opposite to the way his father and mother behaved; rebellion alone in itself does not bring resolution, maybe it gives a temporary solace, but it leaves us uprooted.

On the other hand, even those who renounce to rebel by staying attached to mother’s lap or to father’s house, are not connected to their roots. This type of behavior often hides a lurking resentment, masked by a pleasing and submissive attitude.

The resolution lies by going the whole way: the phase of merging with the parents leads to a separation which is necessary for self-growth and recognition, followed by a reunion, but this time caused by a personal healing process resulting out of the integration between the inner child and the adult we’ve become: sons and daughters reconnected to mother and father.

To take a distance from the parents in order to go one’s own way its fruitful when the whole movement has been completed. It won’t be rebellion anymore, but individuation. Rebelliousness is part of adolescence; if we want to become adults fully, attachment to rebellion needs to be dropped, since it is the destructive expression of inadequacy and un-fulfillment of the inner child. We need to go beyond it.

4. The roots, darkness and unconscious

Childhood is the inferior, it’s all that takes us back to unresolved issues concerning us as children and our parents.

The root, being the inferior side, is underground, it lies in darkness, it’s not visible, or it emerges here and there. In the same way, the inner child, our parents, the family we grew up with, our youth: by becoming adults, everything remains invisible, or emerges partially, because it is buried in the unconscious. We are not aware of it, but it is what runs our adulthood. Therefore, if we don’t like our present life, it means we have to take care of the roots: that is looking where we come from, what has happened in our childhood that it was so terrible that it needs to be kept hidden in our inner darkness. Because, attached to what has been painful, lies the nourishment, the vital sap of which roots are drenched.

Such action is useful in order to reconsider our life, to understand it with a new vision, healing it therefore laying the foundation for a new present.

The darkness of the roots it’s also your depth. Transformation means bringing light in that darkness so that being rooted can take place without fear.

5. Towards unity

How to create harmony between inferior and superior?

The retreat “Healing your roots” is an intense and complete opportunity to re-harmonize the inner child with the adult, the parents and the child, above all within yourself. It consequently will be reflected in your family and social relationships. You will look in the darkness of your roots, you will confront and melt away what the child within you could not accept; you’ll re-discover where you come from, feeling the strength and the nourishment it gives, as a vital thriving flow.

The teaching above quoted it as the solution to erase duality: fulfill the inferior, let it be. With the healing of your roots, you fulfill the inner child and also the parents within you. In simple words, you fix your childhood. Therefore, the various inner parts, adult and child, inner parent and inner child, mother and child, father and child, get finally the opportunity to meet and understand each other, becoming one.

Your roots are reinforced. This unity makes you feel stable in occupying your place in the world.

6. “Healing your roots”: a grounding experience

To heal your roots, as the word suggests, it’s a grounding experience.

Being rooted has many aspects:

physical grounding: you feel you can stand on your own, your feet touch the ground completely in a more natural and relaxed way; more presence is felt in the lower part of the body, including the genital area and, consequently, in the upper part as well; you can stand without having to compensate the physical posture, with no effort or tensions; you perceive the body symptoms with immediacy and trust that what is felt it’s true.
emotional grounding: you feel you can trust yourself, your energy stays with you, it’s not wasted in compensatory relationships; which means, not having to depend on the external presence of a partner to feel complete. It is autonomy not in the autocratic sense of the closed adult, but it’s a new, more conscious capacity to relate.
spiritual grounding: humility, not as an idea or a moral concept, not as a built attitude, but as a joyous spontaneity, is achieved when the inner child is not any longer suffocated by the arrogance of inner parent (superego), but it feels supported in its growth process, like a tree which is nourished by the humus, word from which humility derives. This is what is meant in the above quote “let the inferior exists”: it’s not to polarize the attention on that part of our being considered superior, the rational adult, but to flow in the achieved integration.

7. Motivations and Intents

From what has been said, it is clear that healing the inner child by unblocking the memories from the past and re-harmonizing with the family of origin, are fundamental passages for those who want to bring a decisive turn in their life.

One might be motivated by different reasons:

because of a deep dissatisfaction about the present life situation;
because of emotional issues: stress, anxiety, fear, impatience, depression, insecurity, unmotivated worry, etc…;
for relationship issues: difficult and conflictual relationships, fear to love and to be loved, repetition of the mistake of choosing the wrong partner;
for family problems: difficult relationship with parents, attachment, inability to forgive, feeling under their thumb;
for psychological reasons: if one has already done or he’s doing a process of analysis, which reveals the need to bring greater clarity to the ego constituents: inner child, superego, I adult;
to sustain oneself in a time of great change: a sudden bereavement, loss, an exceptional situation;
for economic reasons: difficulty in earning or administering one’s own money, ordeals apparently unjustified when compared with objective good skills, reversals of fortune, absurd situations;
for physical reasons related to health: a repetitive symptom keeps on erupting, cornering us because the origin is difficult to trace and to understand, or the energy level is low and all our attempts to rise it, fail.
for reasons related to employment, professional achievement, exploration and manifestation of one’s own talents, dissatisfaction for the current work and inability to change it, or not being able to get a job at all;
for spiritual reasons: to realize that old wounds are still there, affecting one’s perception, wanting to work on oneself more deeply, to clear and transform the root of the ego.For all the reasons listed above, and for many others “Healing your roots” is recommended – because each of us has an exquisitely personal history -.

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