Exposing Roots Is Going Underground
On body-led deconstruction, reciprocity, and building a community beyond the feed.
When I started Exposing Roots, I did not know exactly what this publication was going to become. I came here because I had been carrying a body of work underground for years, and it was ready to start finding language in public. I have spent more than a decade tracking patterns through my own life, my psychotherapy practice, doing somatic depth work with clients inside Embodied Rebellion, and stacks of journals full of fragments I did not yet know were part of something larger. I have always been able to see what moves beneath the dominant story. It is a gift I carry with great responsibility. This first year on Substack has been about bringing that work above ground and learning what shape it wants to take.
Part of that was reach. I was finding my voice in public, letting the work spread and letting people find me, fine tuning my signal, and learning what wanted to come through. I have been generous with what I have shared, and I am grateful for what that opened. I am also grateful for the conversations, the comments, the private messages, the paid subscribers who joined before there was much of a paid structure at all, and the people who have told me this writing helped them name something they could feel but could not yet say.
And now I can feel the work asking for a different container.
Exposing Roots is becoming more intentional.
I care about access. That has been true from the beginning. I wanted people to be able to find the work, sit with it, and feel whether something here was for them. I still want the work to have open doors.
I also care about reciprocity. And I am becoming much more honest with myself about how much labor, precision, lived experience, attention, and life-force go into this publication.
My long-form essays often take weeks to write and sculpt. They are not casual pieces. They come through lived experience, cultural critique, body-level tracking, relational observation, memory, many revisions, political analysis, and whatever strange current keeps moving through me and saying, there, look there.
And my Notes are often not really Notes.
A lot of them are mini essays. I can spend an hour or two sometimes shaping one sentence by sentence, listening for the heat, the rhythm, the place where the piece finally clicks into its own body. These are part of my body of work, have real weight, and I want to start treating them that way instead of letting them vanish into a feed designed to keep moving.
The structure around this work needs to reflect its value. I have loved offering so much for free, and I also feel how easily access without reciprocity can turn into extraction.
That is the honest truth.
I am deeply moved when people tell me this work gave language to something they had been carrying alone, or helped them question a pattern, feel something in the body, or see their life from a new angle. Truly.
And I also know that being fed by the work and supporting the work need to come into better relationship.
This is also part of a larger transition in my life and work.
I have spent more than a decade inside the psychotherapy field, close enough to be shaped by it and close enough to know that I am trying to move beyond the licensed clinical system. My goal over the next two years is to build enough structure around this work that I can leave that poisonous system and put my attention where it actually wants to go: writing, teaching, community, live group offerings, and the deeper body of work that is forming here.
Paid subscriptions help make that possible.
When you support Exposing Roots, you are supporting more than the writing already on the page. You are helping me build the conditions for this work to keep growing, to go deeper, and to move into rooms, conversations, and offerings beyond one-on-one therapy containers.
So I am shifting the structure of Exposing Roots.
The first year was about going wide — letting the work reach people, giving the publication room to breathe, and discovering its shape by allowing it to move.
Now it’s time to go deep.
There are a little over 2,100 people subscribed here now. That tells me the signal has landed. The field exists. People are here, reading, and responding. And at this stage, I am less interested in chasing more reach and more interested in building with the people who are serious about what this work is asking.
I want to build with the people who want more than a quick hit of resonance before the scroll swallows the whole thing alive. The ones who feel this work in their bodies and want to keep going, who know that naming the systems outside of us is only the beginning because the real work asks where those systems still live in us.
That is what Exposing Roots is about. Full stop.
I am a body-led deconstructionist. That is the clearest language I have for what I do here and with the people I serve in my 1:1 work through Embodied Rebellion (my non-therapeutic private practice).
I do not mean deconstruction as an intellectual exercise or a clever way to take things apart from a safe distance. I mean the kind of deconstruction that has to move through the body, because the mind can understand a system and still repeat it.
Understanding patriarchy does not automatically interrupt how it moves through us. The same is true of white supremacy, with its urgency, innocence, perfectionism, exceptionalism, and control. Cisheteronormativity keeps moving through the scripts we inherit around love, family, gender, and belonging, teaching the body which roles it must perform to be recognized, desired, or safe. Capitalism keeps showing up in the places where aliveness becomes productivity, rest becomes guilt, and worth becomes output.
This is the part I care about — the distance between what we can name and what our bodies still know how to do. A body under pressure will move from its conditioning before it moves from its politics, its values, or its vision for who it wants to be. Everyone keeps talking about building a new world. Beautiful. Yes. Let’s build one. And if our reflexes keep reaching for the old one, still defending, collapsing, performing, consuming, avoiding repair, and calling it growth, we will keep recreating the same shit with better language.
Ahh, no thanks.
That is where this work lives.
Culture changes when we stop only naming the systems outside of us and begin dismantling the ways those systems live through us.
I do not want to hand people a clean framework and say, here, follow these six steps and you will become liberated by Thursday. That would be easier to market, sure, and it would also be a lie.
This work does not move that way.
There is no single map because the systems did not shape us in one uniform way. They moved through our families, bodies, identities, privileges, losses, protections, and survival strategies, leaving each of us with a different place to begin.
That is why it has to be body-led.
The body shows us where the theory has not yet reached. It shows us where the old world is still living as a contraction, a defense, a hunger, a performance, a collapse, a refusal, a need to be good, a reach for control, a fear of repair, a way of disappearing, a way of consuming, a way of playing innocent, a way of calling ourselves free while still waiting for permission.
That is the root.
And this is underground work.
I have always been drawn to the underground. Underground music, underground artists, underground rooms, underground frequencies. The places where the work still has force because nobody has polished it into deadness yet, before the strange, alive, dangerous, necessary, and true thing gets dragged into the mainstream and turned into a brand, a method, a certification, a retreat package, or a trend.
Mainstream culture has a terrible gift for defanging whatever it touches. It sands things down for easier consumption, turns living work into content, strips out the heat, and sells the aesthetic back to us.
Gross. I have no interest in building Exposing Roots in that direction.
The deeper work belongs underground, under the sanitized story and acceptable language, past the performance of knowing, straight into the part of us that wants to look liberated while avoiding the cost of becoming free.
So that is what I am calling the paid space.
The Underground.
When you become a paid subscriber, you enter The Underground.
The Underground is the subterranean room inside Exposing Roots. It is where the work gets closer to the fire through voice notes, post-essay Zoom salons, reader questions, archive pieces, and more experimental threads. It is where I will be putting more of my attention, because I want to build community with the people who are actually hungry for this work.
The phrase embodied vigilantes came to me years ago on a dance floor in Berlin, and I have carried it around ever since without fully knowing what it meant. Now I do.
It is what I am calling the people who enter The Underground: the ones taking the work of liberation into their own bodies, relationships, choices, and daily lives.
That phrase makes me laugh, which is part of why I trust it. An embodied vigilante is someone who has stopped waiting for permission to become free. Someone who knows oppressive systems are real and also knows those systems shape instinct, desire, fear, identity, defense, habit, and the way we relate. Someone willing to take the work into their own hands without using it to prove they are one of the good ones and are ready to be a part of creating a new world.
That is who I want to build with now.
When you enter The Underground as a paid subscriber, you receive:
Essays and archive pieces: Subscriber-only essays, additional pieces beyond the monthly public essay, and selected archive pieces as I revise, restore, or move them into The Underground.
Mini essays. Many of the longer Notes I have written here are really mini essays. Some new mini essays will remain free as entry points into the work, but the juicier ones, along with older pieces I revise and restore, will begin living inside The Underground.
Audio reflections and readings. I want to bring more voice into the work. Some pieces want to be spoken before they become essays. I may read a short piece aloud, riff for five or ten minutes on something moving through me (cackling included), or record a reflection that feels better in voice than on the page. Paid subscribers will receive those pieces as they come.
Post-essay Zoom salons. After long-form essays, I will offer live Zoom gatherings for paid subscribers. These will be spaces to bring questions, reflections, friction, resonance, and whatever the essay stirred. I want actual faces and voices, a room I can feel, even through a screen. Substack Live feels too disembodied, and boring, for what I am building, so when I gather people, I want it to be in a space where we can actually see each other.
Early pieces of my work with underground techno and embodiment. For the past four years, I have been consciously working with the intelligence of underground techno as more than music. Techno has given me a direct experience of self without identity scaffolding. I have been working with this in my own body and slowly bringing parts of it into my client work. This is not something I want to throw into the public feed. It belongs underground while it is still alive and forming, and I will begin sharing small pieces of it with paid subscribers over time.
A way to shape the conversation. I want paid subscribers to be able to bring questions and themes into the field of the work. Sometimes I may respond through a mini essay, sometimes through audio, sometimes through a longer piece. This will not become an advice column or an endless access point to me. It will be a way for the community to help shape what we are tracking together. If it stirs something in me, making contact with my body, I can work with it. The responses will only be for embodied vigilantes.
For annual subscribers: one 30-minute Zoom call with me. Annual subscribers receive all of the above and will continue to receive a one-on-one call where you can ask me anything about the work, the writing, or share what it opens in you. I have loved these calls. They have been alive, tender, clarifying, and very human.
Free subscribers will still have ways into the work. I will continue one long form essay per month and leave some pieces of the archive available. I still want Exposing Roots to have open doors.
And the more intimate room is becoming paid, where more of my time and care will go as this community takes shape.
Because I am done pretending the deepest work can keep living inside a structure that mostly rewards speed, consumption, and endless free access. I want to build something more intentional than a feed, a place where my attention can move toward the people who are actually in the work: willing to be changed by what they keep saying they believe, drawn to the underground, hungry for force, honesty, and the work with its teeth still in its mouth, ready to bite.
If this writing has been feeding you, challenging you, irritating something awake in you, helping you name what you could feel but could not yet say, or supporting you in living differently in your body, I invite you to become a paid subscriber.
If you are benefiting from this work regularly, paid subscription is the way to support it. That is reciprocity.
This is the next shape of Exposing Roots.
The first year was about reach.
Now we go underground.
Hope to see you there.
With love from below,
Alexandra Winteraven 🖤
If you want to move from reading about body-led deconstruction into being in a live room with it, this is the next door.
Join me for the next Difficult Bitch Salon
After the first two salons, many of you asked for a regular room for this work. So I’ve created one.
The next salon is The Voice Beneath the Script, a Gemini season and New Moon gathering on internalized patriarchy, voice, sovereignty, and the places we learned to soften, silence, explain, perform, or translate our truth.
This is an affinity space for women (cis and trans), femmes, and thems impacted by misogyny. Trans affirming space. No TERFS welcome.
June 13, 2026 from 11am-12:30pm PDT. 10 spots max. Held live on Zoom. Not recorded to allow for an honest room.
Don’t want to commit to a subscription, but still want to support the work?
Alexandra Winteraven (they/them) is a queer, agender body-led deconstructionist, writer, teacher, and facilitator working at the intersection of inherited systems, structural analysis, cultural emergence, and tracking pattern at the level of the body.
With more than a decade of experience as a somatic depth psychotherapist, Alexandra brings a trained eye for body, relationship, and the deeper structures shaping human experience.
They are known for naming incongruence with clarity and care, and for working with people who are no longer able to live inside familiar shapes that no longer fit. Their approach is relational, no bullshit, and uninterested in performance or bypass. Alexandra’s work is about what actually changes when insight becomes embodied, relational, and lived. It is oriented toward honesty, responsibility, the cost of real change, and collective transformation.
Curious about working with Alexandra? Check out their current offerings here.
Well spoken dear friend!
The roots live underground!
I feel the integrity in this move.
Yes yes yes. I'm in.