Home is Within

A little over a decade ago, a friend’s cousin came to my house. I’m not sure how the topic came up, but the cousin said she was homeless, and I was baffled. She seemed “normal.” She appeared to have good hygiene and a positive demeanor. She didn’t seem like a druggie or fit any of the stereotypical Hollywood aspects of the typical homeless. In my inquisitive nature I wanted to understand more, here’s how the dialogue went.

Me: Where do you live?

“Homeless” cousin: in my body

Me: yeah, that’s cool, but what’s your address?

Tact was not my strong suit back then, and I remember not being satisfied with the answer. Now I get it, though. Sure, we may sleep in a bed, eat in a kitchen, and shower inside a “house,” but that’s our nest within the universe. We do the living part inside our body, our body is the temple that houses our mind, heart and soul. That’s where we live, think, and feel. This discovery has been quite empowering because I’ve always struggled with where I belong, I get to inhabit many cultures, but I never truly belong anywhere. Now, I realize that I always have a home within myself.

However, this understanding has taken quite a while, and it’s still a fairly new concept for me. Only in the last two years have I learned to be a friend to myself. My inner critic was an Olympian gold medalist commenting on my every move. It took years of therapy, a lot of introspection, endless self-help books/memoirs, and a Vipassana retreat in 2022 to finally dethrone that beast.

Now I can genuinely say that I like myself and dare I say love myself. One of the most life-changing realizations from my first-ever vipassana retreat was that “you can’t give what you don’t have.” I couldn’t give unconditional love if I didn’t have it for myself. Sure, I still have things that I would like to work on, but they don’t define me.

I’ve recently attended my second vipassana retreat, and the experience was much more serene since I wasn’t fighting my inner critic. The following will be posts dedicated to the many lessons I learned secluded from the world. It’s amazing what I could discover once I could fully be with myself.