Even Wanderers Need Home
When you first walk into our house, there’s this beautifully framed credo right inside the door. A number of years ago, my husband, Joe, and I were working on cultural credos for our businesses, trying to define what kind of atmosphere we wanted to create for ourselves and our clients. In that process, it occurred to us we should do one for our home. Shouldn’t we take care to create the very space we were living in every single day?
We began asking ourselves, “What was it that our home should represent? What energy did we want to cultivate here so when people walk in, they know exactly how to feel?”
We went back and forth over a few weeks, talking about what we wanted for our home, for our relationship, and for the relationships with others who came to visit us here. Each conversation, we brought something to the table to ponder. Finally, we landed on the following:
Our home is a place of autonomy and creativity,
A place of power and order,
A place of fun!
We encourage all to express their thoughts, ideas, and emotions in the safety of love and acceptance as we seek to learn and experiment.
We do not fail; we collect data.
We honor one’s authentic self and we honor God.
We are a home of faith and action.
All are welcome.
Leave your judgment at the door.
Recently, two things have been happening simultaneously:
One, I’ve been thinking about what I want more than anything else out of this year. And what I want more than anything is to feel at home wherever I go. To feel safe, comfortable, accepted, loved — for me — in my truth and in my magic without being made to feel guilt or shame. Without having to feel like I have to hide any of the incredible parts of me that I know and love.
Two, I’m running this new group program for deep self-exploration, and it has similarly included conversations around home. What is home? Where is home? Who is home with?
As I’ve been working with each individual on what home is for them, I have been wondering — not just for them, but for myself — if we are finding the same things inside ourselves that we are looking for externally.
For example, looking at that credo Joe and I wrote, if I am saying to others leave your judgment at the door, am I leaving my own judgment at the door? Am I releasing shame and guilt and blame within myself? If I am saying that my home is a place where ideas, thoughts, and emotions are encouraged, am I giving myself that same space to have my ideas, thoughts, and emotions be expressed? Am I creating the same safety, love, and acceptance inside me that I’m attempting to create for others outside of myself who enter my house?
Because really, truly, if we want to find home in these external places like our businesses or creative work or families or partnerships, isn’t it wise to also cultivate that sense of home inside us? How can we begin to un-hide from others and feel at home, if we continue to hide from ourselves? Like so many other things, our work, our journey, our truth begins inside us first and then flows outward.
Are you looking to feel at home? Then start here.
DEFINING HOME
So, if we want our external spaces — our businesses, our families, our communities, our nation — to be the places we feel safe, loved, and accepted, then we all need to start creating that place inside ourselves.
We all deserve to feel at home wherever we are, and that includes inside our own skin. And for people of magic, creation, brilliance, and gorgeous muchness, they especially need to find their home. Many of us have been wandering too long, have felt out of place too long — hiding our beautiful muchness and incredible magic in order to fit into a world that only accepts us when we deny or ignore that which makes us… us.
Where do we begin, then? Where do we start cultivating this inner home so that we may also cultivate outer ones? First, we need to define what home means to us.
Answer this question for yourself. What does home represent for you?
Journal, meditate, go for a walk, paint, collage, sing. Do whatever you need to do, but find the answer. Write it down. See the words. Feel them. Then, ask yourself, if this is what I want for my home, am I cultivating that inside myself? Release what isn’t aligned and double down on what you are already doing to create safety, comfort, respite, acceptance, and love for you to feel at home within yourself.
HOME INSIDE OUR CREATIVE WORK
Once we have defined home and assessed whether or not we have cultivated that space for ourselves, we can do the same thing for the spaces, people, places outside of ourselves. I would suggest starting with your creative work, the thing that beckons you, the purpose you believe you are put on this planet to pursue. I call this your sacred creation.
The question to ask yourself in this instance is, “Am I at home inside the work I am called to do?”
Because over and over again — and it breaks my heart — I see people who are drawn to powerful creation, slink away from it or feel shamed by it. Be it mental gremlins, the internal voices that echo the ideas of cultural and societal norms, old narratives that have been passed down through their family, or some mix, there is this sense of judgment or failure or discomfort in their creative work.
I feel the resistance creators face as they lean into the voice that is guiding them toward their magic and impactful creation. I want them to feel emboldened instead. I want them to feel that sigh of relief as soon as they show up inside their work because they know it is a place of peace and safety and comfort.
Don’t you want to revel in your creation? To feel like you never have to leave there again?
Because I know that when I get to steep myself inside my delicious dreams I have that feeling of complete happiness, and of power. I feel like if I never had to leave, I would be happy inside this magical world of safety, acceptance, love.
It’s the same way I feel when I am at home with Joe. Because we’ve cultivated a space of peace, joy, fun, excitement, power, connection, and all the other things we’ve been looking for. Our creation and magic should feel the same way. Instead of beating ourselves up about what we feel called to do, we deserve to feel respite from the rest of the world.
We deserve to feel, Oh this thing I love, this thing I’m here on this planet to do, this is where I shine. This is where I have safety. This is where I have peace. This is where I am powerful.
Let’s cultivate that inner home so we can cultivate it in our sacred creation. We deserve that. You deserve that. And, the world needs it. I’ll tell you why in a moment.
HOME INSIDE OUR RELATIONSHIPS
Once we have that sense of home inside ourselves and our work, we won’t want to stop there. We’ll want to keep going. We’ll want to feel at home in all the other ways, in all the other places. You’ll want that feeling of home among your peers, your family, your friends. It has this snowball-like effect in the best of ways… though you might hit some rocks on your way down the hill because you’ll have to start asking yourself some tough questions and not all the answers will be the ones you want to hear or the ones you want to face.
Questions like:
- How many of your relationships are ones of safety, solitude, comfort and courage building?
- How many feel you can cultivate them into what you need them to be? Can they be altered or adjusted?
- And which ones, no matter how much talking, trying, and forgiving you do, just aren’t safe?
For that last group, the group of people where you talk and talk and talk and explain and explain and explain and it makes no difference… These are the ones that have to be released back into the wild. They aren’t here to support you in accomplishing what you feel called to do.
We deserve to feel at home with our people and we get to decide who those people are.
Blood and biology aren’t an actual contractual obligation for sticking around. They aren’t a guarantee for the love and acceptance we each deserve. And if those we share genetic makeup with can’t bind us to them, then the people we share nothing with and choose, are even less a requirement to stay. This is hard but it’s important.
Having a tribe, a collective, a hive, a squad — whatever word you want to use — is powerful and important on your journey to take up that space that the Universe has carved out for you.
Taking up the space the Universe has carved out for you is important because only you can fill that gap. We need your gifts, your talents, your brilliance. But it means you can’t hide. You have to be seen. You have to feel at home in your own skin, and in your group, and in your community, and in your work.
THE POWER OF HOME
And this is why it’s important.
When we cultivate this feeling of home in all aspects of our lives (self, work/sacred creation, relationships), we become empowered. There is no more hiding from ourselves, our magic, our greatness, our people. When there is no more hiding, there is so much more peace and joy.
Isn’t this the life we want?
Isn’t this the way we want to feel about our work?
Isn’t this how we want to experience love?
And if each of us lived in love, acceptance, truth… If each of us felt we had a place and space that was ours, that was home… Wouldn’t all this make the world a better place?
Finding our own home inside us is a step to a better world, a better life.
