A Sense of Home in the Body
Arriving at Casa do Limoeiro really feels like arriving. Arriving to a place of reset and reflection. Arriving within connection with colleagues and friends. Arriving in my own self, like a feeling of home. Many people identify me as a wanderer, never really staying in one place too long. And this continues to be an accurate state of my existence at the moment. Even when I go back to familiar territory to work or see family and friends or even stay for a few months in one place, there is always a sense of “what’s next”. I started to question how much of an impact this might be having on my stress levels, my capacity for daily challenges, and my overall health, even getting a health monitor to try to see the direct impacts flights and packing and unpacking and being in new places was having on my heartrate, breath, sleep and so forth.
While I haven’t come to a conclusion from that monitor yet (more to be revealed later I am sure), coming here I have been reminded of where home is for me and what that feels like. This small farm in Portugal is not my home even though it does imbue all the elements of a home that I would love to have one day. The land gives and receives, the hugs and fireplaces are warm when needed, and the wind offers a sense of purpose and pause all at the same time. What this place does offer me is a memory of what home feels like in my body. This is the home that I carry with me on all of my travels. Rick Hanson says in Henry Shukman’s book Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening on quoting Tara Brach and Dianne Connelly “All sickness is homesickness.”
He goes on to state that “if all sickness is homesickness, the reverse is also true: all health is coming home. What is our true home? We know it when we find it…There is also the sense of home deep inside ourselves, the most reliable home of all, the one we take with us wherever we go.”
Finding this home within myself has not been easy and I didn’t know that it always existed. However, I continue to be awestruck everytime I discover a place, or return to a place and find that sensation waiting inside me ready to emerge and “cure” whatever ails me. What this also suggests is that each of us knows this feeling and that it is available to us all. And while the pathway might be weed covered and the porch light burnt out making it difficult to find, it is there waiting to emerge for us all if we dare to push back the weeds and step lightly with a lamp.
My own somatic therapy has assisted me in rediscovering the road home to myself and once I felt this feeling again after so many years of absence, anyplace could become my “home” I carry it with me, not in my suitcase, but in my heart and soul. It is my intention that with every retreat, private session, and training that I offer this feeling of home becomes more familiar to you; an extra lightbulb to eventually be able to turn on the porch light of your inner home.