I am writing to you from an airport lounge, waiting to board a red eye to get home. Home… the notion of “home” has been my meditation and wondering for the past many, many months.
To say my life has been in a time of change recently would be an understatement. I know I am not alone in this. We have all been riding the waves of change, and the longer I live the more the cliche rings true that change, indeed, is the only constant. A younger version of me had even etched in a journal that “Change is not painful. It is the resistance to change that is.”
In the midst of these changes, there has been a constant wondering if perhaps the time has come to move from our home of over twenty-five years. This, of course, has brought up so many feelings and intense resistance. I wondered and worried that this would be too much change. A thousand “what-ifs” ran through my mind. I felt unsure and afraid. As a mother, I feel a primal need to take care of our nest. To suddenly not know where or what our nest was felt lille the ground was falling out beneath me.
In yoga philosophy we study the kleshas, the five obstacles in our lives that can cause pain or suffering. Abhinivesha is one of those kleshas. It is loosely defined as fear, fear of death or clinging ignorantly to life. As I struggled to wonder if I could stay in our home, I felt a very young, very child-like version of myself desperately holding onto an old idea of this home. “I don’t want to leave,” I cried to myself. “I won’t.”
I could feel myself clinging so tightly onto an old idea, an old version of home. This clinging, indeed, was bringing me suffering.
And so I meditated and meditated and meditated on the idea of home.
What is home?
I know it is not any four walls.
It is with us all the time.
It is when I am with my children.
With the people I love.
It is every place I visit.
Every place I stand.
It is when we feel love.
It is in each breath.
Slowly, slowly I began to loosen my grip. Until I was finally able to let go.
This past week, I stepped out of the busyness of my life and traveled to a faraway land. Despite never having been to this particular spot before, I was struck by an overwhelming sense of home. I stood in a valley between two cascading bright green mountains and felt such a visceral sense of peace and home… thousands of miles from the home to which I had been so desperately clinging.
In that moment, standing in a tropical rainfall, my tears merged with that rain and I knew I was home no matter where I was.