The Root They Are Not Teaching: Earth, Spirit, and the Theft of True Genius

I was planning to get so much done Friday – work, home, all the little and big things that are falling off my plate. Instead, I got the flu. So I laid in bed and watched a movie. But I didn’t expect Sarah’s Oil to make me reflect the way it did. I sat with it long after it ended, not processing a plot but sitting inside something I have long recognized as truth, but that the film itself seemed to embody. What I witnessed on screen was not a story about race, gender or the law, though all of those things were present. What I witnessed was something older and quieter: human beings trusting the intelligence of the earth, tending to the soul, and finding wholeness in one another across every line that modern culture insists should divide us.

Sarah’s family was black. They trusted God. Sara could hear what I would call Gaia, the living intelligence of the land beneath their feet, and they did not experience any contradiction between those two things. There was no separation between the spiritual and the practical, between faith and earth-knowing, between the personal wound and the ground that held it. That seamlessness is what moved me most, and it is precisely what I believe we are failing to pass on.

The attorney who represented Sarah was, by every measure of her era, a radical. She was a feminist in the truest sense of the word: a woman who operated from sovereign intelligence, who did not wait for permission to inhabit her own capability. She forged her access to the system that did not recognize her, and she used it. She did not require the culture’s validation to know what she knew or do what she came to do.

I find myself asking what has become of that movement. The original impulse of feminism was grounded in something real: the recognition that women possessed equal intelligence, equal capacity, and equal right to participate fully in the life of their communities. That impulse was born from a genuine encounter with injustice, and it changed things that needed to change. Something has shifted, though, in how that inheritance is being carried. The framework that once invited women to locate their power in their own genius has, in too many spaces, been replaced by one that trains them to locate their identity in their suffering. Grievance has become the organizing principle where capability once was, and that is a profound loss for women and for everyone who loves them.

Sarah’s family heard something that most people in our current moment have been conditioned to tune out. Call it God, call it Gaia, call it the body’s oldest intelligence; the name matters far less than the fact that they trusted it, and that their trust was the source of their resilience. They did not need a framework handed to them from the outside in order to know how to stand. They were rooted, and that rootedness held them through everything the external world brought against them.

This is the dimension of human experience that I work with every day in somatic healing: the intelligence that lives below the level of thought, in the body’s tissues and the nervous system’s ancient wiring, in the part of us that knows without being told. That intelligence is not separate from spiritual life; it is spiritual life, expressed through the organism we inhabit. Sarah’s family did not divide these things. They lived the wholeness that so many of my clients are working to recover, and watching that wholeness onscreen felt like a remembering.

I say this with care, because I hold genuine compassion for the young people navigating the current cultural moment. I’ve raised for kids, 25 to 18, two boys and two girls and I’ve seen and lived a lot. They are not foolish; but they are being sold something that looks like liberation and functions, in practice, like a cage. The map being handed to them teaches them to identify primarily as victims of systems, to seek external validation for their internal experience, and to understand their most intimate qualities, their sexuality, their gender, their body, as the totality of who they are rather than as one beautiful facet of a vastly complex human being.

The tragedy is not that these conversations are happening; many of them are long overdue. The tragedy is the suppression that follows: the suppression of curiosity, of critical thinking, of the wild instinct to ask questions that do not have approved answers. When a young person’s sense of self is organized primarily around their wounds and their membership in an aggrieved group, the spirit inside them, the part that is curious and creative and capable of genuine genius, goes underground and fails to arrive at their true wisdom. The human spirit does not flourish in a sea of victimhood; it needs something to move toward, something to build, some encounter with its own capacity that does not require an audience to be real.

Here is something I believe with my whole nervous system, having spent years sitting with people in deep process: every “liberal” impulse in our cultural history arose because something genuinely needed to change. Something was broken, or unjust, or simply smaller than human beings deserved, and someone had the courage to say so. Simultaneously, every “conservative” instinct is an attempt to hold onto something genuinely worth preserving; a way of life, a relational structure, a quality of meaning that people have found sustaining across generations. Neither side has a monopoly on wisdom. Both are responding to real things.

The problem is not the impulse. The problem is what happens when either impulse hardens into certainty and demands full adoption without the friction of critical thought. The moment a political or social framework says you may not question this; it has stopped being a tool for human flourishing and started being a mechanism of control. That is as true of conservative orthodoxy as it is of progressive ideology. Humanity’s deepest growth has always happened in the creative tension between what needs to change and what deserves to be kept. When we eliminate the tension by demanding unanimous agreement, we eliminate the very process by which wisdom is generated.

Let me be plain about what is happening. There are forces, both algorithmic and ideological, that profit from keeping the next generation in a state of managed reactivity. A nervous system that is perpetually activated, perpetually scanning for threat, perpetually seeking the validation of the group, is a nervous system that cannot access its own deeper intelligence. It is, neurologically speaking, cut off from the prefrontal capacities that allow for nuanced thinking, creative problem-solving, and the kind of interior listening that Sarah’s family modeled so beautifully. That cut-off state is not an accident; it is a product, and someone is selling it.

The antidote is not the opposite political position. Swapping one dogma for another does not restore a person to themselves; it only relocates the cage. The antidote is the capacity to go inward, to drop below the noise of the culture and find something older, indigenous to humans, and steadier, the same capacity that allowed Sarah’s family to stand when the world came against them. This is not mysticism for its own sake; it is practical. A regulated nervous system is a thinking nervous system. A person who has learned to hear their own interior signal is not easily manipulated by whoever controls the external ones. That is the skill the next generation most desperately needs, and it is the skill least likely to be handed to them by anyone who benefits from their confusion.

I keep returning to the image of Sarah’s family’s home – strong faithful mother, strong protective father, trusting and tending the land. The way they moved through it with familiarity and reverence, as if the earth were a member of the household rather than a resource to be managed. There was a quality of presence in that tending that I recognize as the thing most missing from the way we are raising the next generation: the sense that there is something here worth listening to, something that does not need to be argued with or validated or performed for an audience, something that will hold you if you let it.

The healing the next generation needs is not a better argument. It is not the right social media framework, the most sophisticated critical theory or even the most compelling political movement. It is a regulated nervous system. It is a quiet enough interior to hear the earth, to hear God within you, and the body’s own knowing, whatever language makes that real for them. It is the courage to trust what they find there, even when the culture tells them the only trustworthy authority is external.

Sarah’s family knew something we have been working hard to forget. The intelligence of the earth is available to all of us; it does not sort by race, gender, political affiliation or sexual orientation. It asks only that we stop moving long enough to feel it. That is the invitation I want to extend to every person reading this, and most urgently, to every young person who has been told that their wound is their identity, and their group is their home. There is a home older and larger than any of that, and it is waiting, as it has always waited, underneath the noise.

I felt led to add a song to this one.

With love & optimism,

Wendy

Wendy Jones is the founder of Healing Home, a somatic wellness brand dedicated to nervous system healing. She works with individuals and practitioners through the Healing Home Method, retreats, and licensing. Learn more at healing-home.co