Root Grow Thrive

24/10/2025

It happened again. A friend told me with rolling eyes her workplace was putting on a "self care seminar." She is a spiritual care provider in an organization with a history of underpaying and not giving leave packages that were reflective of the needs of their workers.

It was another loud reminder: burnout prevention means nothing without top-down, systemic change.

It makes me bristle:

--School districts putting on teacher appreciation burnout prevention seminars that teachers are required to attend, when the same school districts don’t fund classrooms or student resources.

--Healthcare systems giving a mindfulness moment when they are taking away mental health insurance benefits for their workers

--Therapy practices giving “time off” but not paying therapists for that time and expecting them to make up the lost income

--New moms encouraged to share any struggles they may have with postpartum emotional fatigue, but then being referred to a therapist who is booked out for months.

It’s a real fact of life that systems can only do so much, and we can’t rely on them to do the work of our recovery. While so much lies on these systems to totally overhaul themselves in order to prevent worker burnout in the first place, we have to deal with this stuff on a personal level if we have a chance at least in the short term to have a sustainable, fulfilling life.

Yes, we can advocate for changes in these systems—and should, if we are resourced to do so—but we must also begin by assessing our ability to identify ways to have true sustainable and integrative—personalized—recovery.

-excerpt from blog Beyond Coping: 3 Pathways for Integrative Burnout Recovery, link in comments

20/10/2025

Seeking seekers!

Spiritual direction is a practice of deepening your connection to the divine--and developing a practice to understand what that means for you. I companion healers in finding their center--grounded in earth-based wisdom and cosmic cycles.

I'm trained in spiritual direction in the Jungian mystical tradition with earth-based, Celtic shamanic roots. In my spiritual direction/soul care sessions, we practice embodied listening. That can look like dreamwork, pulling cards and exploring tarot, creative practice including music, drumming, automatic writing, and journeying, and finding nuances and guidance from astrology using your unique cosmic imprint of your natal chart.

Spiritual direction sessions move at the pace of soul--usually are monthly and are an hour to two hour-long sessions for recentering on your inner compass, grounded in the sacred.

Many helpers and healers and seekers I work with are feeling spiritually worn out and crave accountability and guidance on the path, but may feel they don't need therapy or desire personalized spiritual care in addition to their established therapist.

Limited spots currently open. Learn more: www.rootgrowthrive.com

13/10/2025

It's the Saturdays filled with soccer.

It's the lines of geese in the sky.

It's the scent of the fallen leaves underfoot, the angled light that begins earlier and earlier.

Every fall, it may be the Libra part of me, but I come alive in October.

Dropping in to let you know that registrations close soon:

Cultivating the Soil of the Soul: 3 Week MiniRetreat Series

A guided experiential workshop series, for spiritual renewal in times of real challenge, for those of us who struggle with the moral injury of living in unjust, harming systems and collective division.

Low cost registration now open--recordings are available but we encourage everyone to attend who can in order to share space and be present together as we practice psychospiritual resiliency practices that incorporate embodied presence grounded in nature's rhythms. Beginning Oct 22.

Learn more and register: https://www.spiritrivercommunity.org/event-details-registration/cultivating-soil-of-the-soul-a-3-week-mini-retreat-with-allie-kochert-2025-11-05-10-00

06/10/2025

Aching with the state of things? Craving time and space to reconnect with your soul, or to simply take time in your week to do some spiritual self care?

I got you:

💚3 week online miniRetreat for healers and seekers

💕Embodied, spiritually integrated strategies for nourishing resilience and reducing burnout.

🍂Reestablish your connection to what matters, so you can move with deeper groundedness and firm hope

🌈 fully inclusive, supportive space for folks who seek trauma informed practices to explore and renew

3 weeks of mini retreat style workshops, starting Oct 22:

Learn more:
https://www.spiritrivercommunity.org/courses/cultivating-soil-of-the-soul

04/10/2025

“Moral distress lands in our muscles and breath before our mind even names it. Powerlessness doesn’t live in the intellect — it freezes the nervous system.”
On the Oct Blog:

Refind your resourcing when the world feels like it is too much (because it is). Soul renewal tips and strategies for healing professionals, therapists, and spiritual seekers.

01/10/2025

I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to share my full 3 part miniretreat series—Cultivating the Soil of the Soul—where I host space for you to deepen even more into creative, embodied, soul care practices and postures that will resource, ground, and inspire.

It’s coming up starting Wednesday, Oct 22 (recordings available).

What I love most is the community that is built into and through these miniretreats—especially over weeks—where we can lean into our soul, at the pace of soul, and with witness and support, we reorient and nourish from the inside out, bottom-up.

If you’re craving this kind of soul care and space, join us, and bring a friend! The price is deliberately kept affordable so that it’s accessible to more folks than ever before. Link in bio or https://www.spiritrivercommunity.org/courses/cultivating-soil-of-the-soul

25/09/2025

When I see news headlines, when I witness the real effects of hate and division from my neighbors and within my community, when I see the worried look on my teenagers' faces when they ask questions about the state of their q***r friends or our immigrant neighbors or autistic besties--I am heartsick.

I know that feeling well.

It is grief and fear, mixed in a pallet within my heart, swirling there, insistent on my attention to it. It will not let me go, and for this, I've learned to be grateful.

Looking away serves none of us.

I have walked grief before, I know heartsickness, yet I haven't lived in such discordant times in our national climate before.

But I do know this: my soul deserves to rest, to feel connection, and to have purpose. Because only within that stillness, can I truly listen to what mine is to do, how I am to be, and where I am needed.

We need spaces that aren't asking us to fix others, ourselves, or the world around us. We need spaces to create, connect, and be with ourselves and each other.

Spaces that remember the wisdom of ritual, reflection, and collective holding.

Spaces that orient ourselves back to our center, to that place within, out of which all connection and creation is borne.

Spaces from which we can be birthed back into the world with the fierceness for love that the world desperately needs.

Will you join me?

Oct 1, 12-2p Zoom
https://www.spiritrivercommunity.org/courses/nourishing-inner-stillness%3A-psychospiritual-resilience-in-times-of-change

*in all my hosted spaces, I aim towards fierce love through inclusivity: trauma conscious, anti-ablest, anti-racist, decolonizing, and LGBTQIA2S+ allied.

22/09/2025

I’m offering a workshop Oct 1 for spiritual seekers, healing and helping professionals, empaths and caregivers, and those who desire connection in these times of discord and revolution.

This is a 2 hour online retreat to reorient back to your inner compass and reclaim your sense of psychospiritual resiliency. This is an inclusive, trauma-informed space, hosted by an LGBTQIA2S+ allied practitioner in an online space with active intention in anti-racist and decolonizing practice.

https://www.spiritrivercommunity.org/courses/nourishing-inner-stillness%3A-psychospiritual-resilience-in-times-of-change

When: Oct 1 12-2pm
Zoom
$50

Questions? Email me at allie @ rootgrowthrive . com

About me: I’m a licensed therapist and certified spiritual director in the Jungian mystical tradition with over 20 years experience holding space and hosting groups and integrative healing retreats. Learn more about me at www.rootgrowthrive.com

Generously hosted by Spirit River Community, Saskatchewan, Canada https://www.spiritrivercommunity.org/

Resilience is the ability to rebound from adversity - and when we have connection to our psychospiritual wellness, we can feel more hopeful and strong as we face the challenges of fear, worry, and anger. In this workshop, we'll have a time of poetry for presence and guided mindfulness meditation as....

19/09/2025

Since I opened my practice in 2018, I’ve sat with this question every day: What does it really take to move through burnout—not just patch it over, but actually find a way to sustainably recover?

After years of walking alongside helpers and healers, and having journeyed through my own burnout, I know it’s not as simple as adding “more self-care” to your list.

Burnout recovery is deeper than that. It’s body-based and soul-centered. It’s often about tending to the nervous system, honoring grief and loss, reclaiming your true power, your true sovereignty, even in toxic or broken systems.

You deserve care that is personalized, trauma informed, and doesn’t spiritually bypass. Your path is yours and yours alone. Claiming it is your choice.

—
A few ways forward:

💻Check out Sept blog on sustainable burnout recovery.

🎧Learn about soul burnout on my YouTube channel.

✔️ Subscribe to my email list for updates and support, and receive a renewal kit in the process.

All of this in my link in bio.

17/09/2025

Some scenes from my last solo retreat in August. Altar space, tarot and creative practice, journaling, journeying, omen walking in nature.

Living a full life, with teens and schedules and sports and more schedules—it sometimes causes me forget the forest for the trees.
It takes a village when I go away, just like it takes a village when I’m home.

Inner listening sometimes looks like detaching from my roles and moving into stillness with intention and focus.

Part of my own burnout care is the retreat cycle I commit to. This month I am grateful to be able to take time off work and am attending a shamanic retreat with a colleague bestie that will promise to be transformative in all the ways spirit has in store for me.

In the meantime,
we rest.
We pause, we listen.
We connect, we commit.
And we dance.

07/09/2025

Finding resourcing is sometimes not easy, but it is simple. We can make things more complicated than they need to be.

Where are your supports?

Who is in your corner?

What or who is your sacred community?

We don’t need many, we just need one person (pets count!) to help us bring us back to ourselves.

Sustainable recovery from burnout is about rejecting the need to do it all yourself. We deserve and desperately need community.

Feeling disconnection is a symptom of letting these broken systems into your soul.

Reconnection is solidifying your sovereignty from systems that don’t deserve your heart.

Workshops now enrolling for Sept and Oct. Find your people, and connect, together. Link in bio.

02/09/2025

So many helpers and healers tell me:
💬 “I wake up heavy with dread and feel so exhausted.”
💬 “I wish I felt joy in my work again.”
💬 “I’ve been working on myself for years, do all the things and read all the books and even go on retreats, but nothing seems to change.”

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone—and there is another way. Burnout recovery isn’t about pushing harder or trying to figure out anything. It’s about body-based, soul-centered renewal that brings you back to your wholeness.

I wrote a new blog this month on three pathways of burnout—and the first steps toward integrative recovery (including a piece of my own story).

Link in bio to read ✨