The Good mEdicine Roadmap
The embodiment of true health is when body, mind and spirit are working together in harmony and in balance. When you address and heal the nervous system you are also healing the emotional body, when you heal the emotional body you are also healing the psychic body. When you heal the psychic body you heal and elevate your vibration. Once you have healed your vibration realities shift..
Reclaiming Your Sovereignty
Turtle Medicine
Before we begin the work of reclaiming space within your home, I want to introduce you to a teaching that will accompany us through this part of your Root work: Turtle Medicine.
When I use the word medicine here, I am not speaking in the clinical sense, and I am not referring to the modern, often simplified idea of a “spirit animal.” Across many Indigenous cultures throughout the world, animals have long been recognized as teachers. Our ancestors watched how they moved through the land, how they protected themselves, how they raised their young, how they survived difficult conditions, how they rested, how they responded to danger, and how they remained in relationship with the world around them. From those observations came teachings. Not because we were pretending to become the animal, but because the natural world has always offered patterns of wisdom for those willing to pay attention.
Animal medicine, in its truest form, invites us to ask a simple question: What does this animal understand about being alive that I may need to remember?
For the work you are stepping into now, the medicine of Turtle is especially profound.
Turtle carries her home on her back. She does not have to search outside herself for the place where she belongs, because shelter, protection, retreat, and containment are already part of how she moves through the world. In my Cherokee heritage, Turtle carries deep sacred significance and is closely connected with Mother Earth herself. Other Indigenous peoples hold their own teachings and stories around Turtle, but across cultures she is often associated with steadiness, protection, endurance, groundedness, and an ancient kind of wisdom that does not hurry.
There is something deeply important in that for the work of reclaiming space.
As humans, we often learn to outsource our sense of safety and stability without even realizing we are doing it. We place it in other people, in relationships, in friendships, in family, in parents, in therapists, doctors, coaches, careers, money, accomplishment, approval, or the hope that once the outside world arranges itself correctly, we will finally feel secure. There is nothing wrong with receiving support from others. In fact, healthy relationships and good support systems matter tremendously. But there is a difference between being supported by something outside of ourselves and requiring that thing to become the sole keeper of our safety.
Anything outside of us can change. People leave. Relationships evolve. Homes change. Careers shift. Bodies change. Family systems change. Circumstances move in ways we cannot always control. If our entire sense of home has been placed outside of ourselves, those changes can leave us feeling untethered.
Turtle Medicine teaches us something quieter and more enduring. It asks us to begin cultivating a sense of home that can travel with us.
That does not mean forcing yourself to feel safe in every environment. It does not mean tolerating people or situations that are harmful. It does not mean overriding your instincts or convincing yourself that discomfort is imaginary. It means learning how to remain in relationship with yourself, even when something around you feels uncertain, activating, unfamiliar, or difficult.
The shell becomes a metaphor for that inner place of return.
It is the place within you that can notice what you are feeling without immediately abandoning yourself. It is the part of you that can recognize what you need, discern what belongs to you and what does not, create a boundary, ask for support, choose to stay, choose to leave, and remember that your own presence is something you can come home to.
This is especially important in Root work because Root is not only about the physical house we live in. It is about belonging, stability, safety, family, attachment, history, and our relationship to the ground beneath us. When those areas of life have carried grief, responsibility, trauma, caregiving, conflict, or instability, it can become very easy for “home” to feel like something conditional. A particular room may feel safe while another does not. A particular person may feel regulating while another feels activating. We begin to organize our lives around the places where our system can exhale.
There is wisdom in that. The body is always trying to protect us.
But over time, the deeper invitation is to expand the places where you can remain connected to yourself.
The goal is not to take away the comfort of your bedroom or your office. The goal is to gently begin teaching your system that those are not the only places where home exists.
Home can also be the feeling of your feet on the floor. It can be the moment you notice your breath and realize you are here. It can be the boundary you choose to set. It can be the decision to leave a room before you become overwhelmed. It can be the recognition that someone else’s mood does not have to become your own. It can be the awareness that you can feel discomfort and still remain connected to yourself.
This is why Turtle comes forward here.
As we begin reclaiming space in your physical home, we are also beginning to explore something larger: your right to occupy space within your own life, your relationships, your family system, and your own inner world.
You do not need to make Turtle mystical for this teaching to matter. You do not need to imagine yourself as anything other than exactly who you are. You are simply allowing the natural world to remind you of something that is easy to forget.
Turtle carries her home with her.
And little by little, we are going to practice remembering that you can too.
Wherever I go, I carry home with me.
Reclaiming Physical Space
There are rooms in our lives that become more than rooms.
A space can begin to carry the emotional imprint of what has happened there, not because the walls themselves are holding something mystical or dangerous, but because our nervous system remembers place. It remembers where we have felt responsible, where we have been overwhelmed, where we have witnessed illness, where we have had to stay vigilant, where grief has lived, and where our own needs may have repeatedly been pushed to the side. When enough difficult experiences become associated with a particular environment, the body can begin responding to that environment before the thinking mind has even caught up. You can walk into a room and feel your shoulders rise, your chest tighten, your stomach turn, or an immediate urge to leave without consciously deciding that anything is wrong.
That response is not weakness. It is not irrationality. It is not failure. It is a nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems are designed to do: remember patterns and attempt to protect us from what once felt difficult.
The work here is not to force yourself to love the living room. It is not to sit there until you stop feeling anxious. It is not to convince yourself that the past did not happen or that your body should simply “get over it.” We are doing something much more respectful than that. We are beginning to give your body new information; a new receipt.
Every time you enter the living room by choice, stay connected to yourself, make one small decision within the space, and leave when you are ready, you begin adding another experience to the room’s history. The room may still hold memories but it does not have to hold only those memories. Little by little, you begin adding yourself back into the space. This is where Turtle Medicine becomes lived practice rather than simply a beautiful idea. The teaching is not, I should feel at home everywhere. The teaching is, wherever I go, I can practice remaining in relationship with myself.
For now, I want this practice to remain intentionally small. Five minutes is enough. On a difficult day, two minutes may be enough. We are not trying to overwhelm your nervous system in the name of healing. We are creating repeated experiences of choice, orientation, and agency. I would like you to begin practicing this once each day, ideally as a gentle transition into your evening.
Begin at the Threshold
Walk into the living room and stop for a moment near the doorway. Before trying to calm yourself, change anything, or make the room feel different, simply notice where you are. Allow your eyes to move slowly around the space. Notice the ordinary details of the room as it exists today: the window, the floor, a piece of furniture, a lamp, the doorway behind you. Let yourself take in present-time information. Then notice your feet. Feel where they meet the floor. Feel the weight of your body being held. Notice that you are standing here now, in this moment, and that you have the ability to move.
Quietly remind yourself: I am here now, and I am allowed to take up space here. You do not have to believe the words perfectly. You are simply offering them to your system.
Let Your Body Tell the Truth
Before doing anything else, notice what happens inside you. You may feel your body become tense. You may feel anxious, irritated, sad, restless, numb, or uncomfortable. You may immediately want to leave. You may notice very little at all. There is no correct response. You are not grading yourself on how calm you can become. This practice begins with curiosity rather than correction. If activation shows up, see if you can name it gently without making it mean something larger than what it is.
My chest feels tight.
My shoulders are tense.
I want to leave.
I feel unsettled here.
And then perhaps ask: Can this feeling be here without becoming an instruction? That question matters. Sometimes discomfort is important information. Sometimes it is the body remembering. Sometimes it is both. You do not have to argue with what you feel, and you do not have to immediately obey every sensation either. You are learning to stay in conversation with yourself.
Change One Small Thing
Now choose one small thing in the room that you can make your own. Turn on a lamp. Move a pillow. Open the curtains. Bring in your tea. Place a blanket somewhere you like. Set down a book. Move a chair slightly. Eventually, perhaps you bring in a plant, an object from nature, a photograph, a small piece of art, or something else that feels unmistakably like you. This is not about redecorating the room. It is about authorship. For a long time, a room can become associated with other people’s needs, other people’s habits, other people’s memories, and other people’s emotional weight. Changing one small thing begins to communicate something different: I exist here too. You are leaving evidence of yourself in the room.
Sit Without Requiring Yourself to Feel Better
Choose a place to sit for a few minutes. You do not need to relax. You do not need to meditate. You do not need to make the room sacred or peaceful. Simply allow yourself to be there. Every so often, feel your feet again. Notice where your body meets the chair. Look around and remind yourself of the present moment. If your system becomes activated, you might quietly say: Something in me remembers this place as difficult. I can listen to that without abandoning myself. This is the heart of the practice. You are not trying to silence the part of you that learned to protect itself. You are showing that part of you that it does not have to carry the entire responsibility alone anymore. There is an adult version of you here now. There is choice here now. There are boundaries here now. There is awareness here now.
Gather Your Energy Back Toward Yourself
When you feel ready, place one hand over your chest and one hand low on your abdomen if that feels comfortable. There is nothing complicated you need to visualize. Simply imagine your attention gathering back toward your own body. We give pieces of our attention away constantly. We track other people’s moods. We anticipate what they need. We replay conversations. We scan for tension. We carry concerns that may not actually belong to us.
So here, for just a moment, practice returning your attention home.
You might say:
What belongs to another person may remain theirs. What belongs to the past may remain in the past. I return my attention to myself.
This is where the energetic work and the nervous system work meet. You are not pushing anyone away. You are not erasing history. You are simply remembering the boundary between what you can perceive and what you are responsible for carrying.
Then return to Turtle Medicine: I carry home with me. Let that sentence settle wherever it settles.
Leave Because You Choose To
When your few minutes are complete, stand up. Walk toward the doorway. If it feels natural, place your hand against the doorframe for a moment before leaving and say: That is enough for today. And then leave the room. This part is just as important as entering it. You are not staying until you prove something. You are not waiting until your body becomes calm enough to earn permission to leave. You entered by choice. You remained by choice. You leave by choice. That experience of agency is part of the reclamation.
Over time, you may notice that five minutes becomes easier. Perhaps you begin drinking tea there. Perhaps you read a few pages of a book. Perhaps one evening you sit down and realize you have been there for ten minutes without thinking about the room at all.
Or perhaps some days still feel difficult.
Both can be true.
Progress does not have to look dramatic. Sometimes reclamation looks like leaving a blanket on the couch. Sometimes it looks like noticing your shoulders tense and consciously softening them. Sometimes it is sitting for ninety seconds longer than you thought you could. Sometimes it is deciding that today two minutes is enough. The goal is not to erase what this room has represented. The goal is to allow the room to become large enough to hold another story too. Your story. Your presence. Your choices. Your life as it exists now. And each time you practice, you are reminding your system of something Turtle has known all along:
Home is not only the place around you. It is also the relationship you are learning to build within yourself.
Connecting With your warrior Ancestors
There is a point in healing work where we have to stop looking only at what has wounded us and begin looking, with equal seriousness, at what has carried us.
This is part of Root work too.
When we talk about ancestry, lineage, and the people we come from, I am not asking you to believe in one particular spiritual system. You may understand the unseen through God, Creator, angels, ancestors, Great Spirit, prayer, memory, intuition, or simply the enduring influence of the people who came before you. The language matters less to me than the relationship you build with the idea.
What matters is remembering that your life did not begin with you.
You belong to a long human story.
And somewhere in that story are people who endured, adapted, survived, protected, created, loved, fought, prayed, built families, crossed thresholds, lost things, found things, and kept going long enough for you to eventually be here.
When you told me about the warrior lineage within your family, something immediately made sense to me. I had already called you a warrior before I knew that story. Not because I think being a warrior means never struggling, never becoming overwhelmed, or somehow being able to tolerate endless hardship without consequence. In fact, I think we have sometimes misunderstood the word entirely.
A warrior is not someone who never says, I cannot do this.
A warrior is someone who has said it many times and is somehow still here.
You have moved through extraordinary physical, medical, emotional, and relational difficulty. There have been circumstances in your life that required enormous amounts of adaptation from your body and your nervous system. There have been moments when simply continuing forward asked more of you than most people around you could probably see.
And yet you continue to show up. You continue to ask questions. You continue to seek support. You continue to invest time, effort, energy, and resources into understanding yourself more deeply. You continue to make changes when something is not working. You continue to want something different for your life.
That is not a small thing.
That is a receipt. That is a Warrior
Your nervous system can become extraordinarily skilled at keeping records of everything that went wrong. This is part of how humans survive. We remember danger because remembering danger may help us avoid it in the future. But if we are not intentional, our internal record keeping can become terribly one-sided. The body remembers the nights you were terrified, but forgets that morning still came. It remembers when you thought you could not handle another thing, but forgets that somehow you did. It remembers the medical crisis, the difficult relationship, the fear, the exhaustion, and the moments when everything felt impossible.
Healing asks us to begin collecting another category of evidence. The evidence that you survived.
Not as an invitation to minimize what happened to you, but as a way of giving your system the full story. You have won one hundred percent of the worst days that have already happened.
You are still here.
Your heart is still beating.
There is still a part of you reaching toward healing.
And that deserves to be included in the record.
Root Work Is Also Lineage Work
There is also a biological reason that ancestry belongs in this conversation.
You may have heard the word epigenetics before. Your DNA can be thought of as the underlying biological instructions you inherit. Epigenetics refers, broadly, to some of the ways those instructions can be regulated: how genes may become more or less active in response to development, environment, nutrition, stress, hormones, behavior, and other biological influences.
In other words, inheritance is more complicated than simply receiving a fixed genetic blueprint.
Bodies are responsive. They adapt to the environments they live inside. Some research also suggests that certain biological effects of stress and environment can echo across generations, although the science in humans is complex and we should be careful not to reduce every family pattern to a single inherited biological mechanism. But we do know something very clearly: families transmit far more than eye color. Families transmit behaviors, coping strategies, beliefs, relational patterns, cultural traditions, ways of responding to stress, stories about survival, expectations, fears, rituals, food, language, values, and ideas about what it means to be strong. Some of those inheritances need to be examined and changed. Others deserve to be reclaimed. This is why ancestral work is not only about asking, What did my family pass down that hurt me?
It is also about asking: What did they pass down that helped me survive?
Strength can be part of the inheritance too. Adaptability can be part of the inheritance. Courage can be part of the inheritance. Resourcefulness, devotion, intelligence, humor, spiritual depth, persistence, protection, and the ability to rebuild after loss can all travel through a family in their own ways. Root work invites us to become more discerning about what we carry forward. We do not have to inherit everything simply because it came before us. And we do not have to reject everything simply because parts of the family story were painful.
We can become the place where the lineage is sorted.
This I keep.
This I honor.
This I understand differently now.
This ends with me.
This strength comes forward with me.
That is reclamation.
Meeting the Warrior Line
I want you to begin becoming curious about the warrior lineage you described to me. You do not have to turn this into anything elaborate, and there is no correct spiritual experience you are supposed to have. You may never feel an ancestor standing beside you or receive some dramatic message from the unseen. That is not the goal. The goal is relationship. It is simply beginning to remember that you come from somewhere. You might sit with these questions in your journal, bring them into prayer, pull an oracle card before writing, take them on a walk, or simply allow one question to sit with you for several days.
When your father told you, “You come from warrior blood,” what did I believe he was asking me to be?
What does the word warrior mean to me now, as an adult?
What parts of that definition do I want to keep, and what parts am I ready to release?
Where in my life have I already demonstrated courage that I rarely give myself credit for?
What are the receipts that prove I know how to survive difficult things?
What strength do I imagine the women and men before me needed in order for my family line to continue?
Which of those strengths can I recognize in myself?
What qualities from my ancestry do I want to consciously bring forward into my own life?
What family patterns am I willing to honor without continuing?
If the wisest, healthiest members of my lineage could speak to me now, what might they remind me about who I am?
And perhaps the most important question:
What if being a warrior no longer has to mean enduring everything?
Maybe this chapter of warriorhood looks different. Perhaps the warrior in you is the woman who rests before collapse. The woman who asks for help. The woman who chooses herself. The woman who recognizes when something is not hers to carry. The woman who creates boundaries rather than simply surviving boundary violations. The woman who learns how to feel safe instead of only learning how to function while afraid. The woman who allows softness to become part of strength. You do not have to reenact the battles of the people who came before you in order to honor them.
Sometimes the greatest honor we can offer a lineage is to take the strength that helped them survive and use it to build a life that requires less survival.
A Simple Ancestral Practice
When you feel alone in the work, place your feet on the ground and allow yourself to remember the human line behind you.
You might place a hand over your heart and say: I remember that I come from people who survived. I honor the strength that brought me here, and I choose carefully what I carry forward. If prayer is part of your worldview, you may ask God, Creator, your ancestors, or whatever language feels true to you for support. If that language does not resonate, simply imagine the long line of lives that existed before yours and recognize that your presence here is evidence of continuity.
Then ask yourself: What would the healthiest expression of my warrior spirit choose today? Not what would the most frightened version of you choose. Not what would the part trained to endure indefinitely choose. The healthiest warrior. Perhaps she chooses to rest. Perhaps she speaks. Perhaps she says no. Perhaps she asks for help. Perhaps she walks into the living room for five minutes and reminds herself that she belongs there too. Perhaps she does something very ordinary and very brave: she makes one choice that tells her nervous system, I am no longer only surviving my life. I am learning how to live inside it.
Your ancestry is not a sentence you are required to repeat. It is a root system. Some roots nourish us. Some have become tangled. Some need tending.
Some stories are ready to end. And some ancient strengths have been waiting quietly beneath the surface for you to recognize them as your own.
