Root Down to Rise Up

“Peace. It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart." --Unknown

Peace and happiness have been lifelong pursuits of mine, or at least it feels that way. I imagine like most young children I didn’t think too much about it. I simply accepted my feelings in the moment and then left them there when my feelings changed. But like most people I’ve met, at some point peace and happiness became more complicated. They became something I had to think about, something I had to pursue, and something I felt I didn’t have enough of.

I’ve often felt happy, at peace. Each period of time I have when those are the prevailing experiences I think, “Finally, I’m happy.” Then something happens to change that, and there is a period of time when I feel something else and I think, “What is wrong with me, why can’t I just be happy?” Or I think “If only I can do this, have that, or be there, THEN I will be happy.” I know I'm not alone, I've worked professionally with countless people struggling with the same issues.

We all want to be happy, to feel at peace. In our busy, overstimulated lives this seems to become more and more elusive, harder to hold on to. What is it about our human-ness, our culture, this time in history, etc.--aside from the obvious technological issues--that seems to make it so much harder to be happy?

I have several answers to this question. The broadest is that I believe we are trying to "Rise Up" and be or have something without first "Rooting Down" and doing the work to allow that to happen. We are trying to achieve something, accomplish something. We tend to focus too much on the endpoint or goal, our expectation being that peace and happiness are things that will happen “if”, or should just happen to us, or should just be there. We make the mistake of believing that if we don't have them that something is wrong with us, or with other people, or with circumstances of our lives. The "problem", however, is actually more about how we are approaching our daily life than anything else.

In our current culture, quite simply, we have lost track of our roots and the need to feed them, to cultivate them, to grow them.

One of my guiding principles is the Root to Rise principle, borrowed from yoga. Don't worry, you don't have to practice yoga to benefit from this. Yogis teach that in order to Rise up we must first Root down. In yoga practice this essentially means that we must first ground down in our foundation, very often our feet, planting them firmly on the ground and stabilizing them, before our bodies can lengthen and rise up into a pose for flexibility, strength, and/or balancing. Yoga teaches us that there is an energetic exchange such that it is the action of grounding down that allows us to lengthen and rise.

I love this principle, not only for my yoga practice, but for life in general: for our sense of peace, happiness, wellbeing; for our relationships; for our health; for parenting; for work. For everything. As people we want to rise up. We want to do the best we can, to get it right. So we go off searching for the ways we can rise up effectively. Self-help books and programs are filled with amazingly helpful ways to rise up. We read them and do our best to apply them so that we, too, can rise. Psychotherapy is often focused on similar things--what can we DO that will help us change our lives. That's what I've done for years, even decades. I've read books, used strategies, gone to therapy, provided therapy to others, always with the expectation that the peace and happiness I thought we were all supposed to JUST HAVE would be attained through some sort of doing.

The problem is that our focus is often solely on the rising up part, and on the "doing" part. We want the strategy, the solution, the thing we can "do" that will work. We overlook, forget about, or neglect the rooting down part and the "being" part. We are trying to do it backwards, from the top down instead of from the bottom up.

Let's take it back to yoga for a moment. In yoga practice, if we do not ground down into our foundation and allow ourselves to be completely there, when we attempt to rise up we often lack balance, strength, and/or flexibility, all because we are not set in our foundation. We may wobble or fall, we may fatigue and come out of a pose, or not be able to go as far or as deep into the pose. It is the rooting down that allows us to access the pose, have flexibility within the pose, and hold the pose over time. Without the root, there is no consistent, maintainable rise.

Just like life. Strategies can work, but often temporarily and/or inconsistently, unless they are starting from a solid foundation. If they aren't, ultimately our inattention to our roots will take over and make it difficult, if not impossible, to use the strategies effectively. Our egos become tied up in our success or failure at using the strategies, so our sense of ourselves becomes affected by how well we used a strategy or how well something worked. This can actually work against our efforts to find peace and happiness, and we end up on the same roller coaster that prompted us to search for strategies in the first place.

So what do we do? We focus on our roots, on developing and strengthening and nurturing them. Only through developing the habit of practice--practice focused on these roots-- can we rise up and experience the greater peace and happiness we are so often chasing in less effective and even less healthy ways.

Join us here at Roots First as we learn what our roots are, how to plant the seeds and cultivate those roots through simple practices, making them stronger and providing us a foundation from which to rise.