When the Root Remembers

I did not get sick "by accident".

After weeks of being with my father - now post-stroke and his dementia greatly accelerated - I returned home and collapsed with the flu. Fever and body aches. Exhaustion. And then, just as it has in years past on the heels of an illness, a deep pain ignited at the base of my spine. A familiar aching burning traveled from my coccyx, around my hips, down my legs, and across the tops of my feet.

On the surface, this looks like biology: stress, lowered immunity, a dormant virus reactivating. But beneath that, something far more ancient was moving.

The truth is - I had just stepped out of a living archetype.

My father, once powerful, controlling, and a physically abusive alcoholic is now childlike, helpless, and confused.
My sister - recently surviving a traumatic brain injury with ongoing treatments is now his full-time caretaker.
And me, the witness, as the bridge, the one who sees the pattern.

Always in the wrong place

My father became us - the little girls who were always in the wrong place, complicating the scene, didn’t know what was happening, who spoke in fragments, who wanted to please but never did it quite right.

My sister became him - the exasperated tired adult, patience worn thin, feeling unappreciated, irritated by the repetition of continuous needs and incomprehensible logic- the dependent being a burden.

The roles had reversed, but the emotional choreography was identical.

Forgiveness frees, however...

Trauma does not disappear.
It waits.
It changes costumes.
It passes through time until someone becomes conscious enough to see it.

And the body, always listening, records every layer. After another week of disrupted sleep, I decided to dig in and research metaphysical anatomy to link what all of this might reveal.

The Root of the Body is the Root of the Story

Across metaphysical systems such as Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, Hermeticism, and Indigenous traditions, base of the spine is not merely anatomical. It is symbolic. It is the root:

• The seat of survival

• The storehouse of ancestral memory

• The interface between spirit and matter

• The place where we decide whether it is safe to be here

In Chinese medicine, this region is governed by the Kidneys, which hold Jing—our core vitality and ancestral essence.
In yogic traditions, it is Muladhara, where Kundalini sleeps.
In Hermetic language, it is the base of the alchemical furnace.

This is where the body stores what was never resolved.

When life destabilizes us, like through illness, exhaustion, or emotional immersion in old family fields, our defenses soften. And what has been buried in the root rises. The nervous system becomes the messenger:

Burning
Aching
Electrical sensations
Pain that travels downward into the feet

This is not just pathology. It is memory moving. It is the body saying:

“Something ancient is ready to be reorganized.”

Trauma Lives in Roles, Not Just Events

We often think trauma is about what happened. But Dr. Gabor Mate’ says, “Trauma is not ‘what happened’ – Trauma is what happens in the body as a result of what happened”.

It is about the roles we were forced to occupy in order to survive:

• The child who had to stay alert

• The one who mediated chaos

• The one who learned to read moods to survive

• The one who became “the responsible one”

And when aging parents regress, those roles reappear. The psyche recognizes the terrain before the mind does.

Your body steps back into a field it knows.

And the root, which is the place that governs safety and belonging - tightens.

The body has remembered what it felt like to not be protected.

Illness, then, is not failure.

It is a threshold.

A pause in the forward momentum that says:

“You cannot carry this forward in the old way anymore.”

Alchemy Happens in the Body

Alchemy is not metaphorical. It is biological. It is the process by which raw material becomes gold.

In the human being, that raw material is:

• Ancestral trauma

• Childhood survival patterns

• Unexpressed fear

• The memory of not being safe

When you step into awareness, the body begins to reorganize these layers. For one who is not otherwise understanding how energy is stored and moves in the body, this can be alarming. Being in pain AND confused is disempowering. So, information empowers one to grasp the meaning behind the symptoms, thereby making them more manageable with compassion.

Transformation creates heat.

In the alchemical texts, the base of the vessel is where the fire burns hottest. In the human being, that vessel is the root.

Pain here is not punishment. It is friction between what was and what is becoming.

In these traditions, the body is not “malfunctioning.” It is remembering how to hold more life.

Pain is the friction of that remembering.

Working With the Body Instead of Against It

Healing at this level is not about suppression. It is about relationship.

You cannot shame the body into safety. You cannot medicate memory into silence. But you can meet it.

Some principles that support this work:

1. Re-establish safety in the nervous system
   Warmth at the low back. Slow breathing. Rest. Grounding.
   Let the body feel that it is no longer in the old house.

2. Hydrate the root
   Trauma is dry.
   Safety is moist.
   Water, minerals, and gentle nourishment rebuild what depletion erodes.

3. Name what the body is holding
   “This is not just pain. This is history moving.”

4. Release the role, not just the symptom
   You are no longer the child who must stabilize the field.
   You are the adult who can choose when to enter and when to step away.

5. Invite re-patterning
   Speak to the root:
   “You are safe now. You belong here. You no longer have to carry this alone.”

This is not bypassing medicine. It is expanding medicine.

The Body as Oracle

Symptoms are not enemies. They are language. They arise when the psyche has outgrown the structures that once kept it alive.

Your body does not flare because you are broken.

It flares because you are evolving beyond what it once had to become.

The root remembers.

And now, it is learning something new:

That safety can be internal.
That belonging can be self-generated.
That the story does not have to repeat.

This is how trauma becomes gold.

Not by erasing it - but by allowing it to reorganize into wisdom.