Get to the Root

Hello all,

Welcome back to our beautiful, chaotic, and messy shores. Thank you so much for taking your time and energy to sail these violent seas back here to me this week…I appreciate it more than I could ever truly express. I hope you are doing well this week and feeling happy, peaceful, and present. I, personally, have had a very relaxing week as I went on a cruise to Ensenada, Baja California, with my family for a couple days. However, before leaving for vacation, I began a new writing exercise from, Rupi Kaur’s book, “Healing Through Words”, and never really finished it… For this weeks journal I’d like to do something a little bit different. Usually I always have our journals planned out, however, this week I’d like to really take the time to sit here and finish this exercise with you in present time. (By present time I mean the few hours it will take me to type this this morning hahaha)

The exercise we’re going to be looking at this week from, Rupi Kaur’s self workbook, “Healing Through Words”, is called “Get to the Root”, and it has to do with figuring out the root of some of our personal problems or why some of our personal problems are so deeply rooted in us. If I am being honest, this is a topic I struggle very much with…I do know how some of my roots have formed, but I can’t figure out why they are so deep in my grounds… To further help with this exercise, it is broken up into 4 labels: center, petal, stem, and root. Each label has its own question and it’s my responsibility to break ground in the forest of my emotional wounds.

Center: What is a physical, or emotional wound you carry?

I would say an emotional wound I carry is not knowing how to move on… Truthfully, it’s very hard for me to move on from people, situations, relationships, etc… Imagine walking through a garden and finding your favorite flower. For myself, I always seem to find meadows of my favorite flower, however, instead of leaving them in the ground to flourish and grow, I pick them all. Maybe I do this because I get overexcited, or because I just want to protect them and love them all so hard with everything in me…but truthfully…I believe I do this because I believe I can give them a better home…a better environment to be taken care of in. However, it’s always a hard lesson for me to learn that once you uproot a flower, it begins to die…I’m now understanding why all I have are vases of blackened stems.

Petal: In your day-to-day, how do you hide this wound from the world?

I don’t have much to say about what I go through anymore. In a way, I’ve learned how to turn most of my heartaches, my troubles, or the problems that bring tears, into seeds… I hold them in my hand and feel their energy as I carry them into my garden to spend all day planting them…burying them so deep in the empty pits of me. The only issue is… I nurture each and every seed until it grows and bloom into full trees, to where their fruits seeds fall into any ground opening that I forgot to cover and now there are more and more tree’s blooming. I have a garden of wounds that I can’t keep up with harvesting…sometimes it gets too big that everyone around me has to help me…

Stem: How far back does the wound extend?

Truthfully, some of my wounds extend all the way back to the time where I learned how to stretch and tangle my roots…I would plant myself in people’s hearts and become wrapped in their gardens vines…however I quickly learned that sometimes tree’s can’t be planted right next to each other…one of them always strangles the others roots so that it can live to it’s fullest and thrive.

Root: At its inception, how do you think the wound formed?

I believe I make myself too available as a person… available to time, experiences, feelings, overall available to everything I have to offer… Which truthfully, isn’t a bad way to be or a bad trait to have, but I’m slowly living that the giving tree isn’t always full of apples… Sometimes you have to give people only what you can and let them do as they please with the seeds…

Answering these 4 questions was very eye-opening for me… I have always known that letting go is one of my biggest self-problems and, honestly one of my biggest self-inflicted wounds…but I’ve never been ready to face it, to talk about it, and to even admit it until last week. I had a very long and emotional conversation with my mom last week about how I’ve been feeling lately and she also opened my eyes to seeing that my main issue in life is myself, and the way I keep open every door I’ve ever walked through. Ironically, a few days after I had this conversation with my mom, I opened, Rupi Kaur’s, self work book to a random exercise…which was this exercise…it’s so ironic (yet unironic) how things connect like this…

Thank you so much for sailing along with me through the emotional sea that is my mind this week. I truly cannot express how grateful I am for you, your heart, your mind, and your time. I hope you have a peaceful, happy, and mindful rest of your week. Make sure to sail back here next week for more.

With great love always,

M.H. John