The Foundational Quality of Rootedness

Your test results suggest that your focus right now is on foundational values like safety, security, certainty, a return to the familiar. This may be an aspect of your long-term personality or it may reflect a current issue that is drawing you into reflecting on what it means to feel secure in the world, in your physicality, in your home and work.

If your work has been so demanding that you’ve forgotten the feel of your feet on the bare earth, the warmth of sun on your face, the smell of grass on your hands - maybe you need to take a deep breath and get grounded for awhile.

Does your work help or hinder you in living out the value of Rootedness?

Rootedness In the Workplace

Extending this quality beyond the body, people who are masters of this aspect seem very comfortable dealing with material reality. They’re not afraid of getting into things and working with their hands. They can envision big material projects like building a house and knowing how things should be put together.

At high levels of mastery in this aspect you will find birth doulas and death midwives, people who are not afraid of standing in those liminal places when bodies are at their most vulnerable. People drawn to the health professions are often those who place a high value on this Quality within the human spectrum of experience. Those who work in housing are also expressing the qualities of rootedness, especially those who connect the craft of building to the end result of providing haven, rest and shelter to those in need.

To imagine the Quality of Rootedness behind the work you do may be a way to bring new meaning to tasks that have come to feel merely routine. A job that has becoming a burden can feel lighter when you keep in mind the value of the outcome, and upholding the value of the Quality of Rootedness is one way to do just that.

It’s easy for work that’s too repetitive to make us feel either as if we’re being crushed into the earth and numbed by boredom, or pumped so full of abstract words and numbers that we’re floating away from reality. Whichever extreme it is, the result is a lack of the Quality of Rootedness - that healthy feeling that you’ve got your feet on the ground and your dreams around a star and you’re standing tall between them. It’s a symptom of burnout to feel that you’re crushed or that you’re floating away, so pay attention to this aspect of your wellbeing.