The Healing Root

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The Healing Root

Healing of the mind, body and spirit through a creative & ancient lifestyle practices ✨🫶

I've started The Healing Root blog's page as a way to create a collective space for support, love, encouragement, openness and connection :) I am sharing my passion of health and wellness as a plant based chef and yoga teacher and would like to create a space where people can talk, ask questions, interact and inspire one another.

22/05/2026

LETS GET OLD & FERAL IN PEACE 3/3

As we encounter more of life (with time, age & experience) we are gifted many challenging opportunities, which help us to redefine our relationship to truth & authenticity.

In this, we are given the chance to be stripped of all that is not true. What is left is a more distilled expression of our true nature. This refinement of the essential Self is what makes AGING SO BEAUTIFUL & IMPORTANT. It also why aging should be more honoured, respected & revered in our society.

A “well aged person” is not about how few wrinkles someone has. Aging well is more about how receptive a person has been (and remains) to life. How willing they are to be changed by experience & created anew. How well someone has been able to retain a tether to joy, and the innocence thereof, while still holding some of life’s deepest sadnesses, depravity & heartache.

Someone who is awake to the miracle & fragility of life. Someone alive to emotional motility & range. You can see this quality in a persons eyes: the depths to which they have really felt life & been changed by it. This way of being demands a certain degree of responsiveness, a deep listening to the world around you. A listening that supersedes will.

The mark of a well aged person, is someone whose spirit is rich and awake to life. Someone who faces mortality and change head on; with honesty and courage. And to face mortality, in part, means to accept aging.

A well aged person is someone who has an expanded capacity to hold more of life through having established a relationship to receiving & digesting life, as an ongoing cycle.

The most integrated, interesting, capacious people I know are the ones who have this pattern close to their heart and live according to its rhythm, not their own. This kind of responsiveness to life is where so much subtle magic happens. A subtle listening, a subtle noticing, a subtle joy. Really, an engaged relationship with life that does not require your face to be wrinkle-less & your body to be a certain shape.

Without these qualities, life does get awfully serious. It also gets seriously warped & we easily lose sight of what’s truly important.

19/04/2026

INTEGRATION & DIGESTION PART 2/3

Emotional/psychic digestion of life helps to facilitate and lead us towards integration. It is also a prerequisite of integration, because how are we supposed to integrate what hasn’t yet been digested?

This digestion I speak of also allows us to be spacious enough to receive more of life. Because we can’t fully receive more of life when we haven’t done the work of appropriately “placing” past experience.

Digestion & integration also allows the lessons that life presents us with take root - informing who we become in a more enduring and meaningful way.

Digestion & integration are both on going, continual processes. Processes that cannot & should not be rushed.

No matter how much integration work one does, there is no singular arrival point, more a continuous relationship of directionality towards integration.

There is also no arrival point of digestion either because life is persistent & keeps giving us more to digest & assimilate. This is good as it stretches our (hopefully) ever-expanding capacity to hold more of life. But to expand our capacity for life we need to consciously keep up with the demands of digestion as more life comes in to avoid that bottleneck (refer to previous post).

If we are wise, we let life change us as we live it. This is true & balanced dynamism. And because of this aliveness to life, even that which we have integrated needs to sometimes find new places of belonging as life rearranges us and redirects our life force.

Part of the integration equation is also simply, TIME. Integration needs time. But because life CONTINUES (even when we are still trying to integrate things) we need to establish a familiarity with this rhythm created by the artful practise of responsiveness to life: taking in life, digesting it, taking in life, digesting it, taking in life, digesting it etc.

Social media actually robs us of the necessary experience of spaciousness and boredom; two of the places from which reflection & placement of experiences (integration) occurs.

I would love to know, what are some of your integration rituals?
✨

14/04/2026

Boredom is essential to the creativity of the human spirit.

When I refer to boredom it’s a state of less somatic clutter, less busy-ness, less distraction. Less doing and more being.

A state of spaciousness.

We tend to immediately create more busy-ness when space arrives because we don’t know how to sit in spaciousness. And there are ALWAYS things to do on our ever on-going to do lists that accompany human-ing.

But, when we can create an intimate relationship to the mind and self-intimacy, the door to curiosity opens and when it opens and we walk through it we might find that those pockets of space end up being some of the most valuable to our ability to engage with creative impulse itself.

How do we create ways of sitting with spaciousness in a way that generates, perceives openly and receives life?

I believe it starts with acknowledging the importance of these moments. Already in acknowledging them as important we become more receptive to them instead of immediately turning to the next dopamine-giving stimulus.

🔥 What I’ve observed in my own relationship to the subtle energies that underpin creativity is that ‘will’ energy moves outwards into the world through will power. This is an important energetic as it brings things into manifestation. Action is the result of will, and action brings creative impulse to life.

💨 Spaciousness energy allows us to receive the world and from there, be moved and inspired by it.

Receptive energy and will energy move in different directions, though. We cannot *fully* receive inspiration, creativity and attunement to life when we operate only in will energy.

✨ To create requires will. But to receive the creative impulse that precedes creation requires receptivity. ✨

So this is a gentle reminder to create little pockets of receptivity energy by creating pockets of stillness, quiet, spaciousness or boredom. Not only is it medicinal to the nervous system, but it is essential to the thriving of the human spirit.

📷: Katinka Bester

29/03/2026

An ode to the mountains.

Stillness.
Perspective.
Deep grounding presence.

All that needs to be witnessed, seen & felt surfaces in the mountains’ holding presence.

Immensely grateful for a healthy body that allows me to traverse and explore the mountains (& to consequently move energy through my system as I go).

Grateful for the way physical challenge takes me to the edges of my emotional certainties, leading me to new places within.

Grateful to live in a country that offers so many accessible places to wander in, run along and receive, in all their beauty and silence.

⛰️💛⛰️

08/03/2026

INTEGRATION & ENERGETIC DIGESTION
(PART 1)

Integration: to make whole.

Integration is one of the most underrated aspects of wellbeing - of being a healthy, whole, balanced individual.

Ayurveda believes that we need to create the time & space to do the psychic digesting of our life experiences. The byproduct of this mental digestion is integration. When we do not create intentional space for integration we experience an energetic “bottleneck”; a backlog of experiences that we need to sieve through, make sense of & find a rightful place for in our somas.

Signs & symptoms of this bottleneck are: overwhelm, anxiety, lack of receptivity to life & new experiential input, emotional & nervous system dysregulation, over-sensitivity to stimulus & fatigue. Over time, if this emotional constipation is not attended to, eventual sickness or injury occur as the body SCREAMS, “PLEASE STOP & DIGEST YOUR LIFE.”

🍯 Conscious digestion/integration is where we make time to actively contemplate & reflect. By doing things like walking with no distractions, being in nature, creating an internal space of no urgency (because it’s hard to process anything when in survival mode), writing, talking, expressing, yoga (or anything that helps you have space to actively engage with the content of your life).

🍯 Unconscious digestion/integration happens in the background with no active or intentional participation. This happens through our dreams or through doing physical things that we are so familiar with (or in flow with) that the body can be in “automation” mode which gives the mind the space to unconsciously process in the background. Create time of no distraction, do “flow state” things (yoga, dancing, gardening), create pockets of stillness, meditate, spend time alone. This background digestion occurs thanks to the incredible infrastructure of consciousness - if it wasn’t for this background digestion we would move through life with little to no capacity for novel experience, adversity or stress.

A simple way to support both forms of digestion is to create pockets of STRESS-FREE time. Stress is an immediate opponent to digestion (physically as well as mentally).

TBC. 🫶

27/02/2026

“The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living.” ~ Maria Popova

Your Friday reminder to make conscious, intentional time for:

🍯 PLAY (gifts: integrates inner child, activates wonder, awakens us to awe & allows us to connect to the heart & experience the felt sense of gratitude)

🍯 BOREDOM (gifts: the necessary space for reflection, medicinal stillness wherein integration silently rearranges us, creates the space for creative impulses to emerge and hopefully be explored)

🍯 FEELING (gifts: hones & refines our relationship to our body, our intuition and our senses, helps us to understand/catch up to where the locus of our embodied reality is & helps us in processing our human experience in all its pain, joy, despair, longing, loving and connectedness)

📸 Katinka Bester

16/07/2025

Some joyous snippets from the last month and a half.

For those who have asked, l have been baby sitting and cooking for a dear friend of mine who I met 8 years ago at Uni.

It was so incredible to reunite after such a long time. Re-meeting each other as the new women we’ve become after many moons of change, growth, healing, expansion and newness.

It is definitely safe to say that baby sitting this precious bean ramped up my own broodiness ten fold.

Seeing such a unique side to Ibiza (not just the party place you think it might be) was just glorious. We lived on her boat for most of the time and while there were MANY challenges of living on the boat while taking care of a toddler, a kitten and a dog (divine chaos!) there was so much beauty in it.

We rescued a little kitty, who we named Winnie. I went full mama bear mode on her, trying to coax her from the edge of death back into life. And seeing her spring forth into sassy feistiness was a potent reminder of what love, a nurturing environment & care have the power to do.

Now, I am heading to Greece to do another stint as a chef on the yacht that I worked on last year before heading home to my place and my people who I miss so dearly and who I hold in my heart with immense love & gratitude. Knowing that I get to go home to such a wholesome experience of life fills me with a joy like no other.

17/05/2025

SPICED AYURVEDIC PUMPKIN SOUP W. TOASTED PECANS & COCONUT DRIZZLE (✨🔔 recipe🔔✨)

I’m always down for a good soup, especially as seasons change and we move into colder months. There is something so comforting & nourishing about a warm bowl of homemade goodness 🥹.

According to Ayurveda, soup is an ideal dinner meal because it is easy to digest, meaning that we get to reap more of the benefits of our sleep-time detox processes if our tummies aren’t too busy still digesting denser foods/meals (the energy that would be used to break down more complex meals is then freed up to instead restore, release & rejuvenate the body & mind). This helps us to wake up feeling more energized, clear-minded & balanced (a state referred to in Ayurveda as Sattvic: a state that is characterised by internal & external harmony and peacefulness).

There are so many things that we can actively do/change/incorporate into our daily routines that can help us to live more Sattvic lives, but food is definitely a primary and very direct one (impacting our mood, energy & mental states quickly & potently) 🍯.

This is my new favourite soup recipe. It’s a super simple, cinnamon, ginger, chilli roasted pumpkin soup with toasted pecans & a generous coconut cream drizz 😍

DM FOR THE RECIPE & i’ll send it right to your inbox 🫶

03/01/2025

Words have always been a great comfort to me: reading them, writing them, speaking them.

In reading, our deepest feeling spaces can be activated, our imaginations stirred into activity. In writing, our minds are clarified & our emotions alchemised. In speaking, our internal experiences of life are honoured by trusting & expressing them.

Words offer me as much of a safe space as my yoga practice. A place to reflect and feel with no judgement, a place to digest, assimilate, contemplate life. A place to nourish the meaning making of life and being human.

Writing is the most exquisite balance of the intellect & the feeling realms. It is the penetrating art of self-inquiry and self-honesty. It gives us a great insight into how we process life and offers us a medium for integrating it all into the psyche and soma.

Words give form to perception.

And when we share words, we create connection. They become strings that bind our mental and emotional selves to another in a moment of giving & receiving.

I understand the formula from perceiving to writing to be as follows:

Perception leads to a felt sense in the soma, which leads to a feeling which leads to an emotion, which leads to a thought (or a jumbled string of thoughts) that through a consciously articulated pathway create clarity from symbolism & meaning from articulation.

A lot can become clarified when we spend time writing. Writing can give rise to undercurrent, unprocessed emotions, inspirations & hopes. It can offer us a medium to grapple with the charge of grief or anger (in a way that honours the emotion and externalises it through practical application of the self in a gentle way). It also gives breathing space for the creative impulse.

Writing can be a form of therapy with yourself, through yourself.

By writing, you are gifting yourself the space & freedom to sit with the processes of your own mind. Making writing one of the truest practices of self-intimacy. Through the self-understanding that arises when we write, we build self-trust in our own perceptions of the world.

This delicate translation of the personal, interior experience of a life to the external world, is ART.

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