Get Rooted

Author’s Note

Some names and details have been changed out of consideration for friends and loved ones. Sacred practices have been shared with permission from my maestras and ancestors. Curanderismo means “a way of healing” in Spanish and broadly describes the varied healing practices used throughout Latin America. In this book, when I refer to Curanderismo, I am referring to the traditional medicine of Mexico because as a Mexican American from the Southwest, that is the tradition I grew up with and practice.

Though this book shares teachings from Curanderismo, it does not initiate you as a curandera. If you’re interested in the beautiful medicine of Curanderismo, take the time to study with a teacher who is knowledgeable and integrous. More than anything, this is a book about spiritual reclamation, and I hope it inspires you to rediscover, learn about, and practice medicine from your own sacred lineage.

Introduction

“You’re so rooted!” gushed Roma, a bubbly energy healer—and hairstylist—from Seattle. Her business card promised, “Healing from Hair to Heart!”

“Yeah, you’re the only one here that’s actually in your body,” echoed her sister, Antonette, a laid-back wildlife biologist/curandera who was leading our retreat in Belize.

Our group had just finished an intense meditation where we journeyed down into a cave (real) to ride a jaguar (imagined) to help us break through mental and spiritual blocks. I was feeling a lot after flying on my fictitious jaguar, but grounded wasn’t topping the charts. So when these spiritual hermanas zeroed in on my rootedness, I stopped and looked at them curiously—because for most of my life I have felt really unanchored.

As a Gemini, I have a natural airiness that I like to think of as easygoing but can present as dreamy or forgetful. And because busy can be a default mode, I’ve been called a tormenta and a spinning top since I was always whirling and moving. But if we are really going to get into it—which is why we’re here, right?—the truth is I’ve also had my fair share of life trauma, which had unleashed a wrecking ball right through my emotional foundation.

So to say I was working on getting rooted was an understatement. I had been healing, purging, praying, rooting, and retrieving for the past 240 days as if my life depended on it—because, well, it had. Just one year before arriving in this remote farm in Western Belize with these soulful sisters and a circle of curanderas, I’d had a full-on midlife meltdown.

For the most part, it was that familiar working-mom tightrope walk of trying to do it all that so many of my comadres around the world face. Most of the rom-com elements were there:

But the circumstances, the pressure, and the consequences made it all feel deeper—and darker—than the usual Bad Moms comedy. Like that time I received an urgent call from my mom in the middle of a meeting to inform me that my older sister, Lety, had set out on a cross-country road trip with her dog. It seemed that in the midst of a crystal meth high she’d heard the president of the United States tell her through the television that her poodle, Jack, had been chosen for presidential dog duty—and he was to report for service immediately to an airbase in Nevada.

(Although listening to this lunacy—during a work meeting, no less—might seem startling, the sad truth is we’d become numb to Lety’s erratic behavior caused by her decade-long drug use, so much so that even her more shocking episodes had lost their sting.)

So back in that conference room, I sat unsure whether to call the cops yet again on Lety or maybe just send her—and special pup agent Jack—a letter of congratulations. In the end, I became so distracted with work, all I could do was mentally wish her and Jack a bon voyage!

There was also that other memorable time I hid in the bathroom during our work Christmas party so I could watch my older daughter’s preschool holiday recital via FaceTime. I had chosen work over family—again—so there I sat on the toilet watching Lucia sweetly sing “Let It Snow,” feeling guilty as I gulped a glass of white wine that I was balancing on the toilet paper dispenser, wondering what I was doing with my life.

So many signs, and so many slips, and yet I kept running forcefully right through them all—until that night I ended up on the floor.

I had been co-organizing an important leadership conference for the media company I ran, and because budgets were limited, we all took on an overwhelming amount of extra work with me acting as producer, host, and emcee all at once. Our small, but mighty, team busted our asses, and the event was a rousing success. We had somehow pulled it off—again. High on a stage in front of a crowd of three hundred people, I closed the conference by giving an inspiring speech.

After I got off the stage and took a train ride back to my riverfront town in the Hudson Valley of New York, I met up with a group of friends at a beautiful waterside restaurant to celebrate and decompress with many crisp bottles of Sancerre. It was a festive and well-deserved revelry, and after holding it together for everyone else, all I wanted was to drink myself silly and just fall apart.

Which is just what I did five hours and three bars later, when I drunkenly fell off my stool trying to take a group selfie and smashed my nose on a table. I blurrily remember people looking down at me: friends, my husband, and even my daughters, because somewhere in the merriment I had convinced my husband, Lars, and our kids to join me.

Recognizing that that was the end of the party, we quickly left and went home, and I faintly remember sloppily hugging the girls good night before I staggered to our bed and passed out.

The next morning, I woke up with a pounding headache and crusted blood on the front of the beautiful boho dress I was still wearing from the day before. It wasn’t even my own dress; I had borrowed it for the event. Panicked, I took it off and ran it under cold water. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” I kept saying to myself like a mantra to calm the rising horror in my chest as I watched rusty blood spiral down the drain.

“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” I repeated as I reached into the cabinet to grab some aspirin and put on fresh clothes, leaving last night’s shame in a heap on the floor.

I had mostly convinced myself by the time I came downstairs to my family eating breakfast at our kitchen island, the streaming sun helping to erase all evidence of mess and disorder from the night before.

I unsteadily poured myself a steaming cup of coffee and sat down. As I ate fresh waffles with a gash on my nose, I relaxed with the hopeful thought that this all might turn out to be a really funny story I could share one day with my fellow stressed and stretched moms over happy hour—when something in my younger daughter’s, Astrid’s, hair caught my eye.

It was blood.

My blood.

Caked pink on her front baby tendril like some horrific hair dye.

Either in the commotion at the bar or during our clumsy, drunken good-night cuddles, I had bled onto my baby from the cut on my nose. And as I stared at my youngest and her pink streak while she stared sweetly back at me, I had a thought as firm as the kitchen counter I was gripping on to: “I’m not okay.”

The Aztecs called the world “slippery slick.”

They believed the world was an unstable place, a place where you could trip and fall, either from your poor judgments or from the inherent slipperiness of life. In the Florentine Codex, an account of Aztec life compiled by the Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún, a mother warns her daughter, “The Earth is not a place of contentment… it is a place of joy with fatigue, of joy with pain.”

This concept might be new to you, but I bet it feels familiar. We are happily walking along in our lives when—bam!—curveballs come from every corner. We lose our jobs, loved ones betray us, and we surprise ourselves with our weaknesses, our ugly anger, our scary ability to hurt and be hurt. We’ve all experienced the world’s slickness in our own different ways: it’s our friend who senselessly cheats on her loving husband, the neighbor who’s abusing Adderall to keep up with her busy life, or the cousin who’s overdrawn her account because of the shopping addiction she just can’t seem to quit.

Slippery slick is that “Fuck! Here we go again”–ness that heaves you over the edge of a cliff, propelled by your own internal pain, broken promises—or other outside forces, like, say, a global pandemic that strikes out of nowhere and drop-kicks all of our perfectly laid out and sweat-drenched dreams right into the dirt.

Yup, the world is slippery, all right. Yet as gruesome as that kitchen moment was for me, when fear and shame kept pummeling me in waves, I grasped on to something rooted deep within me.

I didn’t know what it was called then. I just felt its pulsing, hopeful signal sent from somewhere ancient and far below that whispered there could be another way: another way to work, another way to mother, another way to walk on this slippery slick path.

So clinging on to that life raft of a possibility, I began to Get Rooted.

I have always been a spiritual seeker, lighting candles to La Virgen de Guadalupe while simultaneously studying Eastern religions and philosophies. In my thirties, I became a yoga teacher and life coach. My shelves are lined with self-help books with wisdom from women I love and admire—from Iyanla Vanzant to Brené Brown. But something in that kitchen moment screamed out an urgent SOS, and mercifully something closer to home answered back.

In that Cosmic Big Brother way that you might just think, “My kid is growing out of her shorts,” and suddenly ads for Target start popping up everywhere, I started to see messages, and people, and books all centered around Curanderismo—a Mesoamerican earth-based healing practice that utilizes energetic cleansings, herbs, heart-to-heart conversations, touch, prayer, and much more to help balance your emotions, spirit, and body.

A year prior, my cousin Patty, who was studying to be a curandera, had asked one of her instructors to come to New York to teach a small group of people, including me, the basic art and science of Curanderismo. Even though I was dizzy with the stresses of work and home, something unclenched in me during the session. I had felt at home with the teachings and the tools because my great-grandmother had been a practicing curandera.

Now I began to feel that call coming from deep inside: “Can I heal whatever is going on with my family by learning the medicine of my grandmothers?” I wondered.

And with that guiding question in mind, I set out.

Eventually I resigned from my job and began to study Curanderismo with a sixty-five-year-old chingona—badass—reverend. Among the many things she taught me, including some stellar Spanish curse words, was the concept of Ser: your true essence, the whole and unbreakable you.

When I emerged from my journey nearly nine months later, staring down my forty-sixth birthday—the age my father was when he died—I can honestly say that I was reborn. Traumas had been healed, my Ser, and life purpose, reclaimed.

I got rooted.

And now, as a coach and curandera, I help myself and others get—and stay—rooted; healing isn’t a destination so much as a lifelong remembering, where we release, reclaim, and root back—again and again.

And getting rooted is not a journey we walk alone. I believe in collective healing because I have been healed, and cradled, and nurtured back to root by my circle. The group of people who saw me flat on that floor are also the same ones who extended their hands to pick me up. It is in circle, in community, and in connection that we root. Those are the ways of the ancestors. Those are the ways we need now.

Getting rooted means living the life you’re meant to live while letting go of who you think you should be. Getting rooted means making your own map instead of following the one that society gave you. Getting rooted means finding your way home to that holy place of peace where you can receive, and retrieve, your gifts because you got rooted into trusting yourself.

If you’re struggling, like so many of us, repeating the same patterns, feeling painfully anxious, woefully stuck, and finding that the same well-worn ways we try to handle our lives just aren’t working anymore, then I share my own story here in the hopes that you might see a sliver of yourself reflected back in these pages and know that you are not alone. My 260-day healing journey is broken up into five parts—the east, north, west, south, and center—because I was guided by each direction to find my way home. I also offer you some of the tools I’ve collected in my medicine bag to help you feel lifted and steadied until you find yourself rooted and ready to walk again on this all-too-short, slippery slick thing we call life.

The book you hold in your hands is my ofrenda to you. It is an invitation to call your power back. It’s a beacon to find your way home. And it’s a reminder to get rooted and reclaim what has always been yours.

Your Ser.