RETURN TO THE ROOTS

Why Root Work Matters

Root work is about returning to what is most true before we were shaped by expectation, survival, or silence.

There is a core self in each of us — a place of wisdom, dignity, and belonging that exists beneath storylines of shame, productivity, or disconnection. When we reconnect to this place, healing is not something we “fix,” but something we remember.

Root work invites us back into relationship:
with our bodies,
with the land beneath our feet,
with the stories that live inside of us,
and with the larger web of life we belong to.

In a world that teaches us to harden, perform, or disconnect, root work is a quiet return to softness, truth, and wholeness.

How I Work

I work at the meeting point of art, body, land, and justice.

My approach is not about imposing answers, but creating conditions where truth can surface and be held with care.

This work is shaped through:

• Art as medicine
  Using movement, story, + creative expression to access wisdom that lives at the core.

• Embodied practice
  Honoring the body as a keeper of memory, intuition, and healing.

• Nature connection
  Guiding people back into relationship with the living world as a source of regulation, renewal, and belonging.

• Transformative justice as a mindset
  Centering dignity, accountability, repair, and the belief that no one is disposable and no story is insignificant.

Brighid O’Shaughnessy

Brighid O’Shaughnessy creates spaces for healing through movement, nature connection, creative expression, and the honoring of voices that have long been silenced. Guided by the principles of transformative justice, her work weaves together the arts and embodied practice to help individuals and communities reconnect to themselves, each other, and the living world. Every offering, story, and space is crafted to foster deeper truth-telling, wholeness, and reconnection.

Rooted Influences

Brighid’s work has been shaped by many intersecting roots. She has been a Nia practitioner for nearly 20 years and a teacher for over a decade, sharing the power of dance, martial arts, and the healing arts with people of all ages and backgrounds.

She was the long-time founder and artistic director of the nationally recognized nonprofit Erasing the Distance, where she used documentary theatre to bring mental health stories into the light. Her productions reached more than 55,000 people across the country, and her innovative approach to storytelling and stigma reduction led to teaching and collaborative work with institutions such as the University of Illinois at Chicago and The Chicago School of Professional Psychology.

Over the last six years, she worked in Chicago-area public schools providing social work support and sharing trauma- and neuroscience-informed practice alongside transformative justice frameworks. She holds a particular passion for working with students of color and with those navigating mental health challenges, complex trauma histories, disabilities, and neurodivergence.

Relationship with the Living World

Brighid is currently completing her certification in Nature and Forest Therapy with the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy (ANFT). This work deepens her practice of guiding people back into relationship with the land and the more-than-human world as pathways to healing, nervous system regulation, reciprocity, and belonging.

A Personal Root

Among all of her experiences, nothing has shaped her more deeply than raising her transracially adopted son as a single parent. This relationship has transformed her understanding of story, justice, and the human nervous system, and has fueled her commitment to lifting up the hidden, complicated, and often silenced truths of adoption and family life.

Current Focus: Story as Justice

Brighid is currently focused on disrupting adoption mythology through storytelling, theatre, and writing. She is writing a book with Lived Places Press that uplifts the often-hidden stories of adoptive mothers and will be placed in university libraries worldwide to better prepare future doctors, clinicians, social workers, educators, hospital and residential staff, and juvenile justice professionals.

She is also bringing these stories to life through documentary theatre as a form of professional development and collective witnessing. Her upcoming project, presented through the Fresh Produce Festival at Rivendell Theatre in Chicago, centers one transracial adoptive family’s experience of love, loss, shared motherhood, and relationship across distance, race, and privilege.

Recognition & Artistic Lineage

Her work has been recognized through numerous grants and awards, including the 3Arts Vision Award, and she was named one of the United States’ Top 200 Heroic Leaders by Extra Mile America. Her work has been featured on WBEZ, ABC News, the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, New City, and more.

She has received support from organizations such as:
The Chicago Community Trust, The Driehaus Foundation, Rebecca’s Dream, The Chicago Cultural Center, and the Illinois Arts Council.

She has also created theatrical work exploring women’s health and racial segregation through her collaboration with MacArthur Fellow Tonika Lewis Johnson and the Folded Map Project.

Embodied Practice Today

Brighid currently teaches Nia twice a week to a longstanding and dedicated community of dancers. She finds deep meaning in creating spaces where people can return to their bodies, listen to their intuition, and reconnect their physical and emotional lives.

She is also a certified Qoya teacher, offering monthly classes through ALTAR in Chicago, and believes deeply that the body is a gateway to wisdom and inner knowing.

For her resume click here.

Brighid O'Shaughnessy, LSW
Founder, Return to the Roots

Who I Am

What This Means for You / Us

This work is not about fixing what is broken.

It is about remembering what has always been whole.

It is an invitation to:

• Walk back toward the parts of yourself that were silenced or forgotten

• Listen to the intelligence of your body

• Feel the ground beneath you again

• Reclaim your story in your own voice

What light is waiting to be uncovered in you?
What truth has been waiting for a safe place to land?

You don’t have to figure that out alone.