It Takes A Village

The Three Villages The story behind Rooted Living 

I've been thinking a lot about a simple phrase we hear all the time: "It takes a village."

The more I experience loss of the elders in my family and the more I study ancient cultures, longevity, nervous system health, and human connection, the more I believe it's one of the deepest truths about being human. I've also realized that there are similar key principles of flourishing communities throughout history and that most of us connect with three village phases throughout our lives.

The First is The Village We Inherited.

For me, that village was both beautiful and deeply complicated. My grandfather lived through immense childhood trauma and carried much of that pain into the family he later created. It was very difficult for him to feel safe, to trust and to share and receive love easily. As I grew older, I began to see that what happened to him wasn't his fault, but it profoundly shaped the emotional climate our family experienced. 

By the time he was grown, the wiring that lets a person feel safe to easily receive love, and repair after conflict had been formed under conditions of danger and a nervous system shaped that way learns to survive, not to connect. 

That reality fills me with compassion. It also doesn’t erase what happened next. He carried that unhealed pain into the family he made and it profoundly shaped the emotional climate all of us grew up inside. It was difficult for him to feel safe enough to be able to easily trust and receive love; he offered it mostly as a reward that had to be earned. He built, for the most part, an alternate family out of friends. 

 I’m sharing this because looking at it clearly is the only way anything changes. What happened to him was not his fault. What he passed on was still real. Both of those are true at once, and learning to hold them together without collapsing one into the other may be the most important thing I’ve ever learned. 

That realization didn't leave me with resentment. It left me with compassion. And a Question that Quietly Changed My Life and Inspired my Work with Rooted Living Retreats:  Can Restoration be Passed Down Just as Pain Can?? 

The Second Village is the One Many of us Quietly Long For.

A place where we feel deeply seen, safe, accepted, supported and loved. A place where we don't have to earn belonging.

Years later, after navigating my own journey with chronic autoimmune illnesses, burnout, and searching for answers, I Stopped feeling the Overwhelm of it all and asking, "What's wrong with me?" and Started Asking Something Different:

What conditions help people naturally return to harmony where they can flourish individually and together?"  That question became the foundation of Rooted Living.

I've come to believe that while pain may be inherited, so can restoration. 

We create it through the conditions we cultivate every day: meaningful relationships with ourselves, God and others, nourishing food, movement, daily rituals, time in nature, laughter, creativity, rest, shared meals, healthy stress regulation, and communities where people feel safe enough to simply be themselves.

That's the Third Village. The One we Get to Lead in and Tend. 

The one we create for ourselves, our families, friends, our neighbors, and one another.

The village we longed for Underneath the village we inherit, most of us carry a quiet ache for a different one  a place where we’d feel deeply seen, genuinely loved, safe enough to Rooted Living Retreat to simply be. Where peace could quiet the mind and presence could steady the body. Where we could belong without having to earn it. I felt that ache long before I understood it. And for years I chased it the way many of us do by trying to do everything right. 

I studied health and wellness for as long as I can remember, even in high school and college. I ate well, practiced yoga worked out, spent most my time outdoors. I read every book and article on healthy living that I could find.

I believed that the way so many of us are taught to believe, that wholeness was only ever one good decision, one prescription, one discipline away. And then my body began telling a different story. 

Fifteen years ago I was diagnosed with Lyme disease. Over time the list grew Hashimoto’s, a mixed connective-tissue picture, celiac, the effects of toxic mold, chronic inflammation, mast-cell and histamine issues, mitochondrial and digestive struggles. 

I went from being a healthy, active woman who prided herself on doing it all “right” to, at my lowest, being unable to fully care for my own child. I lived with chronic pain for years and couldn’t figure out how to simply feel good again. If you’ve lived some version of this, you know the particular loneliness of it. 

The tests that come back “normal.” The specialists who hand you a different answer each visit. The word autoimmune, which I learned often just means we don’t yet know the cause. The quiet exhaustion of managing something no one can quite explain. 

What I slowly came to understand, is the state of a healthy life I was seeking, didn’t come from finding the perfect treatment. It came from a change in the question I was asking.

I stopped asking “what is wrong with me, and how do I fix it?” and started asking something I’d spent my whole career asking about people, teams, and communities: “what are the conditions that would let this system come back into balance?”

 Because here’s what I kept noticing. A body held in fight-or-flight long enough stops being able to repair. Stress physical, emotional, social accumulates as a kind of load, and without enough restoration to meet it, the whole system frays. This isn’t the only cause of illness, and it never replaces good medical care. 

But it was the piece no one had named for me: that so much of what I was carrying eased when I stopped fighting my body and started tending the conditions around it. 

Meditation, slow movement and breathwork became as essential as bathing a way to wash off the day’s stress instead of carrying it. I learned that calm, safety, and joy aren’t soft extras; they’re biological and a natural harmonious state the mind and body can sustain. I learned that emotions we never process don’t disappear; they settle into the body and wait. 

And I learned, maybe most of all, that we restore far better held by others than we ever do alone. None of this meant abandoning medicine all together, certain treatments were crucial for my Lyme.

It meant Rooted Living Retreat needed to tend the whole person alongside it: body, mind, emotion, nervous system, and the environment we live inside every day. 

Most people don’t need fixing. They need the conditions where they can return to with more ease and frequency to what’s already whole in them. They flourish when the best conditions for growth are restored, and then life does the rest. That’s what I mean by restoration. Not returning to some perfect past, and not pretending nothing was hard. 

Restoration is the practice of creating the conditions where people naturally return to their truest nature, to nature's natural rhythms and where families and communities naturally become more connected, creative, compassionate, and wise. Rooted Living grew directly out of that.

 I kept meeting women in the middle of their lives quietly carrying some version of what I had carried:

• depleted and Burt out

• inflamed

• wired and tired

• foggy

• gaining weight

• a loss of sense of self and passion for life they once had

• overwhelmed and overstimulated

  
  

Doing everything right and still not feeling well, often at a crossroads they didn’t choose. I built this for them.

For us. It rests on one thing I had to learn the hard way: there is calm before creativity and your greatest work, and safety before healing. You cannot mend from a nervous system that believes it’s under threat. 

So we begin there, with presence, with rest, with coming back into the body and everything else becomes possible from that ground. The village isn’t a place. It’s a way of living. It is something we practice as a daily part of our lives. We aren’t here to become someone new. 

We’re here to remember who we’ve always been, and to tend the conditions for ourselves, our families, and one another that let us just be, live, love, create, and belong more fully. That’s the village I choose to tend now. Some of the elders in my family couldn’t pass it on, because it was never given to them. 

I get to now, for my family. And, in your own way, do you too. Pain may be inherited. So can restoration. 

Thank you for being part of the village we're building together!   We have online and in person RLR events to tend our village and would love to see you soon!

I'd love to leave you with one here?

What's one small way you can tend your village or become part of someone else's today?

With gratitude,

Cat Licavoli, Founder, Rooted Living