serving individuals + organizations across mission-driven sectors
mapping pathways back to conscience, care + sustainable service
writing | speaking | moral mapping | duty of care
a map can show us the terrain, but the season shapes how we move through it.
our moral landscapes are no different.
the pain many of us are carrying is so much more than just burnout. it’s moral injury. it’s vicarious trauma. it’s collective grief.
it’s the legacy of working inside traumatized, industrialized systems that equate exhaustion with commitment. That have betrayed our shared commitments and led us to believe that being a “professional” or being “of service” requires us to sacrifice our well-being and leave our intuition, values, conscience, and spirit at the door.
we call the work or addressing these issues moral cartography. it begins from the premise that to heal, lead, and fulfill our duty of care to each other, we need to come to know our internal and external terrain, before we can learn how to move through it across the different seasons of life.
at roots in the clouds we know that people and organizations are unique and one-size-fits-all approaches to leadership and duty of care don’t work. moral cartography offers different pathways to a common destination, which we offer through moral mapping™ (our signature coaching and consulting work), speaking, writing, and art.
we’e designed all of our offerings to meet you wherever you are, whether you're seeking support for yourself, your team, or the people in your care.
challenging outdated narratives
My book, Tell Me My Story, is where this map first began to take shape: through the stories we inherit, the wounds we normalize, and the narratives of service that ask us to abandon ourselves for the mission.
"What if the service path we've chosen is actually an invitation—to see and heal and love and embrace our own humanity through the stories of the people we're serving? And what if that healing could happen at both the individual and organizational levels?"
— Dimple Dhabalia - Tell Me My Story
Available in paperback, e-book, and audio at all major online retailers.
empathy, connection + care
our empathy cards are designed to bring the practice of empathy to life — not a single gesture, but a sustained act of presence and care.
one box. six cards. shared with one person over time.
a ritual of care, unfolding slowly between sender and receiver.
a choice to keep showing up — through the hardest seasons of being human.
Find them, along with our books, journals, and prints, in our shop + creative studio.
meet dimple
Dimple Dhabalia is an attorney, award-winning author, writer, and speaker. The daughter of Indian immigrants — her mother born and raised in Uganda, her father in India — she grew up with family stories and rituals carried across continents, an inheritance that later drew her to nearly two decades of work in asylum and refugee operations for the U.S. government before founding Roots in the Clouds.
Her work at the intersection of moral injury, collective grief, and human connection has been guided by a single question: how do we honor and stay rooted in our humanity as we navigate different seasons of life?
Through Roots in the Clouds and ambika creative studio, she is restoring the language of connection and rituals of care — creating pathways to presence that invite us to stay rooted in our empathy and conscience, not as afterthoughts, but as intentional practices we choose to return to in every season.
organizations our work has supported
