Rootwork was a collaboration between Lumos Transforms and Healing Justice Ldn, supported through the Joseph Rowntree Foundation Emerging Futures programme.
Created in response to rising instability, polarization, burnout, and fragmentation across social change ecosystems, Rootwork explored a simple but consequential premise: systems do not transform themselves, people do. If we hope to build more just, liberatory futures, we must attend not only to strategies, structures, and institutions, but also to the internal and relational conditions from which those futures are imagined, organized, and sustained.
This series brings together reflections from participants, partners, and collaborators across the UK who engaged with Rootwork. Together, these pieces explore what becomes possible when embodied practice is brought into the work of social change, collective resilience, and the long project of liberation.
Learning designer and community weaver Nasim Forootan reflects on how simple embodied practices reshaped her relationship to stress, imagination, collaboration, and futures work.
Who would have thought that moving my wrists and tapping my legs or chest with opposite hands could create such a big shift in the way I respond to everyday experiences? Life over the last few months, with family and personal health issues, two small kids, and navigating PTSD was taking a toll on my body and mind. If someone had told me before I started Rootwork that these small actions could strengthen my resilience, reduce my heart rate and improve my mental clarity, I would have laughed. The truth is that the practices found in the Resilience Toolkit are slowly re-shaping entirely how I operate in life.
Nkem, our guide and facilitator, invited us to come back into our bodies and experience the surprising power of simple, small movements, while learning how to avoid becoming stuck in the same regressive loops and patterns that we are ultimately trying to re-design.
When we grow up in a context where the familiarity of rest, relaxation and joy are not the default for our nervous system, we default to urgency, denial, and hyper-independence. I see and feel this vividly from both Persian and Latin American backgrounds, where conditions of injustice and inequality are lived daily.
Nkem offered powerful framing to understand the role of these practices and their impact on our nervous systems, especially in the context we are living in today. Many communities are navigating ongoing trauma, systemic injustice, and deep uncertainty, making the ability to create even small conditions of safety within our bodies not a luxury, but foundational. In a world that has taught us to separate body from mind, we forget that how we feel shapes how we respond, think, imagine, and design. When we operate from urgency or survival, we risk recreating the very systems we want to change, limiting our imagination to familiar patterns. But when we experience even a small sense of regulation, something shifts. Our imagination opens, becoming more expansive, creative, and rooted in trust and possibility. We begin to design not just from problems, but from connection, curiosity, and even joy.
Being together in Glasgow for the Rootwork workshop grounded the practices in a shared experience, allowing us to connect not only intellectually, but physically, spiritually, and relationally. As we practiced, the room visibly softened, shoulders dropped, people yawned, the pace slowed. It wasn’t dramatic, but it was undeniable. In that space, it became clear that if we are serious about reimagining the future, we must include the body, not just the mind. A deeper presence emerged, more grounded, connected, and collective, gently loosening the grip of hyper-independence and making space for trust and interdependence.
It also felt deeply empowering. In many communities affected by injustice and trauma, there are few accessible spaces for self-regulation and healing. We are often taught, explicitly or implicitly, to ignore what is happening in our bodies, to push through, and to externalise or suppress our responses in order to survive. Over time, this creates disconnection, not only from ourselves but from each other. What I experienced here was different. By normalising simple practices and creating small rituals of stabilisation, we began to relate to ourselves and each other in new ways.
What surprised me most was how lasting the impact felt. Even after returning home and to work, many of us carried a greater sense of grounding and calm. There was less reactivity and more choice in how we responded. It created space to build awareness and expand our capacity to respond from a deeper place, one of intuition and embodied knowing.
Since then, I have started to integrate these practices into my daily life. Using Nkem’s recommendation, I have built this through micro-habits, linking these practices to things I already do, like brushing my teeth or in between tasks. This has helped me build a steady baseline of resilience in a very simple and straightforward way. I also return to these practices in moments when I feel dysregulated, taking a pause to stabilize before moving forward. The more I practice them in calmness, the easier it is to access that feeling in my body when things are unexpected or difficult. Over time, I can feel that sense of safety staying with me for longer.
I began to bring this into my work and community spaces. In one work setting, where things felt rushed and reactive, I invited the group to pause, take a few breaths, and do a butterfly tapping exercise and stroking our arms while breathing slowly. The shift was immediate. We all showed up differently, with more presence, more calm, and more openness to each other. The effect was so obvious that we then incorporated these into other meeting spaces, especially before moments that require deeper thinking and imagination.
In community spaces, I have been inviting small moments of arrival, especially when people are coming in from busy or stressful environments. Taking just a few minutes to land in our bodies changes the quality of how we are together. It creates a different foundation for connection, conversation, and collective imagination, and my hope is that we can all build on those skills and apply them to our daily practices. Sharing these insights with friends and communities has sparked beautiful conversations.
After a few months of practice, it’s clear this work has the potential to fundamentally shift how we relate to the present and imagine the future, rooted in mindful response and connection. But for it to reach more people, it requires time, funding, and sustained support. What we experienced feels like just the beginning. There is so much more to explore in somatic work, not only for individual wellbeing, but for creating the conditions for communities to feel more connected, trusting, and fully present with one another.
What started as small, almost too simple to take seriously movements has become something much bigger, a different way of being in my body, my work, and my relationships. And maybe that’s the point: the future doesn’t start with something grand, but with something small we can feel and experience. If we are serious about reimagining the future, this is not optional work. Regulation, presence, and safety in the body are where that future begins.
About the author
Nasim Forootan (she/her) is a Community Weaver, Learning Designer, and Facilitator working at the intersection of futures, democracy, enterprise, and systems change. She designs participatory spaces that build trust, unlock collective power, and help people imagine and create more regenerative futures. She is passionate about designing from a lens of hope, love and joy as mechanisms of resistance in a polarised society. Nasim is a Landecker Democracy and Humanity in Action Senior Fellow. She currently works with Soul.com as a Community Builder and Facilitator.
