A Reflection on the Significance of Relationship in the Healing the Roots Work
by Sharon Groves
People say it all the time: it’s all about relationships. Whether you’re steeped in movement organizing, moving to a new town, or doing corporate sales, relationships are given mantra status—as the secret ingredient to meaningful, effective work.
What we’ve experienced in our work with Healing the Roots is something different. Yes, the five of us have become deep friends, but our relationship moves at a different pace than friendship—one shaped more by focused attention than by social closeness.
Our group doesn’t often connect around fun or casual things. We don’t typically go to shows or dinners together. We probably wouldn’t be the first person each of us would call in an emergency. And yet, we know each other’s inner workings in ways that even intimate partners often don’t.
I think the quality of our relationships has a lot to do with the intentionality of our gatherings. In our meetings whether through zoom check-ins, planning sessions, or monthly retreats we always return to the same center: our individual growth, and how that growth ripples into our wider communities and to our shared offerings.
As we work with each other we don’t just offer advice—we coach each other in ways that can at times look surprisingly formal for a very informal and familiar group. And, we stay curious–not only about what someone is struggling with, but also about the process of being coached. When someone shares a challenge, we pay close attention to how they tell the story, knowing it often reveals as much about where they are on their growth path as the story itself.
We use the Enneagram as a shared language for understanding patterns, gently naming blind spots and celebrating aha moments for one another. We interview each other to go deeper, point out moments of growth that might be missed, and lovingly call attention to where someone may be slipping backward. We know each other’s styles and strengths, and we lean into those gifts—without fetishizing them or locking each other into the same roles. We try not to ask people to keep performing what they do well just because it’s useful to the group. Instead, we give each other room to experiment, to risk, and to stretch into new ways of being.
Our time together is an active practice for how to be the kind of people we want to be in all our relationships.
There’s a kind of weird resonance that happens when we gather—and it doesn’t always go smoothly. We know each other so well that we can get thrown off balance by things that might not affect us in a different kind of group. One person didn’t feel like she presented well at a public gathering and wondered why the group hadn’t anticipated her struggle. Another felt unsteady beside someone else’s certainty. Someone else wanted to speak more but didn’t ask for space—and felt hurt afterward. The list goes on.
It’s all the messy stuff that makes us human—but we almost never sweep it under the rug. Because the practice of deep growth work in relationship is the whole point of the group, everything becomes information. We examine the discomfort, the hurt feelings, the anger, the disappointment. We learn from it all. And, as we do, we become more attuned to just how sensitive our human instruments really are.
Like a well-tuned musician, the more familiar you are with the qualities of a sound, the more acutely you notice when the sound is even slightly off. But then sometimes, something miraculous happens: the off-notes begin to enrich the music. We stop fixating on smooth, careful, melodious tones—and we learn to play with the dissonance, to explore the unfamiliar, and to return again. And in that movement, we find new registers we didn’t know existed.
One of us said something that resonated deeply with me—that the depth of our connection was moving us away from a reliance on the uniqueness of each person and toward a recognition of the interchangeable nature of the group. It felt paradoxical, but it landed. The deeper we go in the work, the more we tap into the universal—and the more we tap into the universal, the less we need to cling to the specialness of our personalities, even the specialness of our group. I genuinely believe someone could leave and someone new could join, and the group would still hold. Not because our connections are shallow, but because they’re so deep they point us beyond ourselves—toward something like universal love. And when we’re able to move beyond personality, something powerful—something we couldn’t plan or control—has space to emerge.
Our relationship is special and at the same time it’s not. We found each other at the right moment for our exploration and growth but the method of growing in relationship is not about the specialness of the individuals but about the practice of living into our deepest longings with others. It’s all about finding the places to practice being human together. I long to see more experiments in intentional relationship building around individual and collective growth. I think it’s our path to liberation.
