As Deep as my Root

What I’m about to share was inspired by an unpleasant experience at the dentist today.

As a child, I was never really taught how to take care of my teeth. They were white, I never had braces, and yet dentist visits almost always ended the same way: inflammation, infections, teeth being pulled out. I was terrified. No one held space for me afterward. There was no comfort, no integration. I learned very early how to shut down my sadness.

Alongside those dentist experiences, I spent a lot of time in hospitals as a child—for many different reasons. I remember the flashlights above hospital beds, the feeling of being small, overwhelmed, and powerless. My body remembers more than my mind does. Some of those memories are fragmented, some dissociated entirely. What I do remember is the fear—and men holding me still, because my body couldn’t comply on its own.

Today, years later, I felt brave enough to confront one of the deepest areas of distrust I carry: trusting my body to someone else. Allowing temporary discomfort to serve me in the long term. I went to my dentist appointment knowing it wouldn’t be easy.

What struck me immediately was that all of the doctors in the room were men. Four of them, doing their best to remove a long, deep root that was lodged so far inside my body. As they worked, I didn’t have a flashback exactly—but I had a knowing. This must be what it felt like back then.

And then something new happened. I cried

I cried while they were still working. For the first time in my life, I cried in front of a doctor. When I walked outside afterward, something landed in me with quiet clarity:

Life is not against me. Life is not against us.

Life doesn’t give us painful or uncomfortable situations to punish us. It gives us these moments when we are finally ready to feel them. When our nervous system has enough capacity. When our body has enough safety now to integrate what was impossible then.

If my tooth hadn’t become infected, I wouldn’t have gone to the dentist. I wouldn’t have faced this fear. I wouldn’t have been placed in a situation that mirrored—so precisely—an old traumatic imprint from my childhood. This experience wasn’t random. It was timed.

It wasn’t that my tooth got infected. It was that my body and my soul were ready.

Ready to face one of my deepest fears: trusting my body to other people, being vulnerable in the presence of others, the fear of doctors, the fear of being hurt, restrained, or overpowered. This moment showed me that I’ve entered a part of my life where I can finally heal this wound—not intellectually, but somatically.

Life unfolds like a spiral.

We are born open, clear, sensitive. Then we receive imprints—through our bloodlines, our ancestors, our early childhood experiences. Trauma, fear, adaptation. We spiral outward and downward, collecting layers, learning how to survive. And if we choose to walk the path of awareness, the spiral turns again. We revisit the same themes, but from a wider, more resourced place.

We don’t go back to the same pain to suffer again—we go back to integrate it deeper.

Breakups. Firings. Difficult conversations. Illness. Medical procedures.

The emotions that arise in these moments aren’t about the present situation alone. They carry the same emotional signature as something much older, something that once had no space to be felt. And when these moments arrive, it’s because we are finally capable of meeting them.

Today wasn’t just a dentist appointment. It was a healing. A reclamation. I stayed with myself. I felt fear, grief, sadness—and gratitude all at once.

Gratitude that I can feel my body.

Gratitude that I am connected to my emotions.

Gratitude that I can now be there for myself in a way no one ever was.

This experience reminded me that wholeness doesn’t come from avoiding pain. It comes from meeting it when we’re ready, riding the spiral back with consciousness, and claiming ownership of our lives.

Today, I healed something very old.

As deep as my root.