August 12, 2025

80 - Keeping Heart: The Spiritual Root System (Part 2)

42 minutes

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The "Living with Heart" Podcast is brought to you by Chip Dodd Resources (www.chipdodd.com) and The Voice of the Heart Center (vothcenter.com). You can connect with Dr. Chip Dodd at [email protected]. Contact Bryan Barley for coaching at [email protected].

Keeping Heart by Dr Chip Dodd is written in short sections. Each section focuses on some dimension of living fully, loving deeply, and leading well a life that leaves a legacy of goodness. It can be used as a daily form of orienting yourself for the day ahead of you or a book to read cover to cover.

Please visit chipdodd.com to download the free resource, The Spiritual Root System. This resource describes and illustrates the specifics of each “root” of how we are created as feeling, needing, desiring, longing, hoping people who seek to live fully in relationship with ourselves, with others, and with God.

Spiritual Rot System (SRS) = Feelings - Needs - Desire - Longings - Hope

Basic premise of The Spiritual Root System:

Feed the roots of a tree, it will grow to produce much fruit.

Moving the metaphor to human behavior, a child reaches out to be affirmed as belonging and mattering by connecting to his/her caregivers.

The need to belong and matter is met by his/her caregiver responding by reaching back and affirming and attending to the child’s heart, made up of feelings, needs, desire, longings, and hope.

This process grows the child’s confidence in being created as a feeling, needing, desiring, longing, and hoping creature.

Through the confidence of being able to depend on connection, the child grows into a competent human being, who can use his/her mind to express their heart’s makeup as they grow into their giftedness.

Every human being is gifted and the world is in need of the “fruits” of those developed gifts.

Understanding the connections of the roots:

Reading the “roots” from left to right:

Feelings awaken a person to needs.

Needs connect to desire within the heart

Desire moves a person to longings

Longings draw a person toward hope.

Hope will return a person to feelings; hope is wishing or planning to achieve something a person doesn’t know for sure will happen. Hope requires the action of risk, which circles back to the need to deal with feelings.

The Voice of the Heart and Needs of the Heart offer specific details about The Spiritual Root System, as does this podcast Living with Heart: From Birth to Death.

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By Dr. Chip Dodd & Bryan Barley

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