Episode 3: Your Values Are A Portal

In this episode of Root + Rise, host Rohini Walker explores the liberating power of aligning with your authentic, soul-rooted values — the kind that often ask you to step beyond cultural conditioning, familial expectations, and the comfort of approval.

Our true values, like everything in Nature, are alive and evolving. When we choose to live in alignment with them, we’re not just “being true to ourselves” — we’re participating in a larger, sacred act of soul reclamation. We begin to heal the deep rupture of self-alienation that the dominant culture depends on.

Rohini shares how our values can act as portals to the soul — grounding us in our essence, clarifying our intuition, and resourcing us from within. You’ll also get a deeper look into her online membership space, Root + Rise, and the values of biodiversity and liberation that guide its community culture.

This is an episode about sovereignty, decolonization, and the radical act of living a life that flows from the truth of who you really are — not who you’ve been told to be.

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Transcript

Welcome to episode three of Root + Rise, the space where we slow down, and attune to the deeper, vaster rhythms that move through and govern life.. I’m your host, Rohini Walker and I’m so happy that you’re tuning in.

If you’re familiar with my work, you’ll know that I place a lot of emphasis on aligning with our values - our authentic or soul values, our core values, which, like everything in Nature, organically evolve over time. They’re values that often go against the grain of societal, cultural and familial conditioning. They’re values that may garner disapproval or even rejection from others, especially if these core values don’t adhere to other people’s perception of you and how they think you should be living. Our authentic values may not always make “sense” to the logical, left-brained mind. They may ask us to step out of comfort zones and familiar ways that have been calcified within us as our personas. But I know from extensive experience, that they inevitably and unfailingly bring us into more intimacy with the soul, with the True Self. They bring more meaning and depth into our lives, and heal and repair that rupture of Self alienation that is so endemic in our dominant culture. 

And when we’re alienated from our True Self, we have little to no capacity to feel and know our unbreakable connection to the whole, to feel and know ourselves as Nature. We become alienated from our larger ecological and spiritual identities - and we can see how much harm this dominant culture, built on the wound of alienation, has caused in this world.

Meanwhile, our authentic soul-based values are a relatively easily accessed portal towards healing this rupture. Especially when we can access a felt-sense, somatic experience of them in the body, they empower us to remain centered, rooted and grounded in ourselves - to not be swayed or manipulated by external agendas.

A core focus of what I do is decolonizing and liberating the soul-body. In the process, we become increasingly curious about living in more embodied alignment with the essence of who and what we really are. 

And as we do this, it's beneficial to have navigational tools. 

Often, it can be confusing to discern our soul and our intuition from our unintegrated ego and its overthinking ways. Living life and making decisions from a soul-aligned place can sometimes feel vague and awkward, especially in a culture that's so invested in keeping us distracted and disconnected from, and downright mistrustful of, our essence.

This is where our values come in.

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Our values are a portal to the soul, our greater, capital ‘S’ Self.

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When we root ourselves in our evolving, authentic values, we’re in devotion to, and in communion with, our soul.

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By crafting our big and small intentions - or goals - from our values, we’re tuning into the frequency of our soul.

Allowing our doing and living to flow from our authentic values is embodying our soul.

Living a life aligned to our essential values means gently, incrementally, releasing the fear-based addiction to external validation, to seeking approval and avoiding disapproval. Because the Truth is, our souls didn’t come here to be liked and approved of. Conforming to the mandates of the dominant culture stifles our essence as we orient towards external validation, towards the insatiable hunger of more "likes" and "followers," - this culture’s soulless metrics for measuring worth and value. Getting more external approval, so that we can attune to a false and flimsy version of safety, all while allowing our true power to be siphoned away.

​Meanwhile, living a soul-aligned life means gently learning to orient our sense of safety within, of resourcing ourselves from the nourishing soil of our authentic values. We’re also better able to discern the voice of our intuition, which doesn’t ever guide us towards violating our authentic values, from the voice of the unintegrated and wounded ego. And we become more willing to feel compassion for this wounded, unintegrated ego (which brings about integration over time) and we become less willing to be led by it.

And as I mentioned earlier, like Nature, we’re not static but a non-linear, multi-dimensional process. As such, our values also evolve and change and shift over time. To keep ourselves rooted in the animated life force moving through our values means becoming willing to relinquish the rigid constructs of our externally defined personas. It means becoming available to deeply listen and attune to the guidance that’s always available to us. It means willing to pause and surrender to the silent wisdom and guidance that’s waiting for our sacred, undistracted attention. Even 5 minutes of regularly doing this throughout the day is enough.

Making the commitment to live in alignment with our values naturally infuses our lives with life-affirming meaning. It is living in our dharma - the Sanskrit word for our soul-aligned, Nature-aligned purpose. We also start seeing and feeling more clearly when and where we’ve been living according to the dictates of generational, cultural, societal and ideological conditioning. We start to feel how much of a toll being in our not-Self takes on us, and we stop overriding the body and nervous system's signals of malaise. 

One of the Foundational Practices in my online membership space, also called Root + Rise, is Your Soul’s Code. It’s an invitation to make space and time to consciously connect with your authentic values, and to align, design and re-story your life in coherence with these. Members who have been in the group for multiple seasons are encouraged to revisit the practice once or twice a year, or as often as they choose, to reconnect, recalibrate, and realize where their values may have changed and evolved. It allows us to track the ways in which we may be organically changing and evolving on a soul level.

Once we’re rooted in our authentic values, the explorations we take during the season of re-storying our own lives can take on more depth and resonance. We’re not attuning to anyone else’s script. 

And while we're on the topic, two of Root + Rise’s core values are biodiversity and liberation. And the following points are some elaborations on these two core values, on how they’re expressed in the membership space, so you can feel into whether it’s aligned for you:

So, Root + Rise the membership space is a place where:

• it’s safe to have different perspectives and points of view
• not only is difference safe, the respectful expression of diverse and diverging viewpoints is encouraged, because this is how we can all grow, change and evolve
• crucially, we learn how to feel safe in our own bodies, and resourcefully engage with and tend to any triggers that arise, instead of projecting them onto others, and expecting the world to bend to their demands
• we get to evolve out of the limited and limiting experience of safety as sameness, where everyone always agrees with us and our worldview, and has the same filters through which we experience the world
• the monoculture of groupthink and dogma, and the dulling weaponization of the rich and subtle nuances of ethnicity, race and identity politics are not a good fit in the membership space.
• we cultivate the capacity and discernment to recognize groupthink, dogma and the  weaponization of subjective human experience as veiled expressions of colonial oppression and manipulation
• we remember that the ontological roots of colonialism and empire demand a rigid homogeneity and submission to the supremacy of one dominant narrative, and the silencing, cancelling and censorship of anything that differs from that. We learn to dissolve and compost this same energy within our own psyches, bodies + nervous systems
• we remember that the work of decolonization in the external can’t be done with integrity if the fear-based psychological structures of colonialism within us are not dismantled first; we remember that liberation is an inside job
• we’re enthusiastic about co-creating a world where choice on all matters is Queen, and where we have way more to choose from than this vs. that, left vs. right, good vs. bad, etc. We’re enthusiastic about embodying the truth that we all deserve way better; we’re enthusiastic about being the alchemical space in which these polarities get to unify and birth new ways
• we know that each of us is here to sing our individual soul’s song in the world, in our own way, and to thrive doing that, and that it’s perfectly safe and natural for some to feel a dissonance to that, just as it is for some to have a resonance to it - without any of it meaning anything about us or them
• we learn to cultivate the safety and capacity in our bodies to sing our soul’s song in our own way and in our own time, knowing that as we do this, we are attuning to the World Soul, to the Anima Mundi, which requires the nourishment of biodiversity in all forms, just as our soul-bodies do.

So any of this feels heretically yummy to you, come play and deepen into rooting down and rising up in the membership space, where, in coherence and in alignment with our soul’s values, we re-story our lives through embodied imagination. Where we can start being the antidote to this culture of Self alienation. 

The link to find out more about the membership space and to register is in the show notes, or you can go to rohiniwalker.com/root-rise.

Summer registration closes at midnight Pacific time on June 30th.

And if you have any questions or comments about today’s episode, I’d love to hear from you. Email me at rohini@rohiniwalker.com or message me on Substack, the link is in the show notes and my email address is also in the show notes.

That’s all for today, my friend. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for your sacred attention. 

Until next time. Here’s to alignment.