The concept of “home” has been of particular interest to me my whole life.
I suspect I’m not alone in this quest.
However our yearning, our sense of honing in on what home is and what it means seems to come about in different ways for each of us.
In the recent years of my unraveling – of my history, my upbringing, and it’s particular ways that it’s shaped me – I am realizing more and more why my own concept of home is so important to me, and why it’s been unconsciously driving each decision I’ve made, directly or indirectly, my whole adult life.
If you grew up in complicated family dynamics, you likely also have a complicated relationship with home. My guess is that these underlying patterns that shaped you have also helped to manifest all of the decisions you’ve made and how you’ve manifested in your own life.
I notice there is a direct link in our relationship to home and our physicality on planet earth.
How we came here, the patterns that have shaped us, for better or worse, manifest themselves in our bodies, our financial situations, our living circumstances, and our intimate relationships.
This deep seated sense of home – no matter how it is shaped – is literally the bones of the structure of our adult life.
Recently, about 4 months after having left my home of over 12 years, I’ve had some interesting epiphanies and realizations.
From February 2020 to February 2023, I was building what for me was my own sense of home and real safety for the first time in my adult life. Being in my late 30’s, I felt in many ways I was late to the game but as this is a theme for me in my overall life (social retardation due to circumstances of my upbringing), the timing felt perfect.
It was not without its challenges – energetic, financial, and in every which way – but with each challenge came its own miracle and so further my belief that this space was destined for me and what I was creating in it.
Truth be told, my little white house (that I’ve talked about before naturally) was more than a home. It represented many fundamental cornerstones to my development as my own adult woman in her own right, finally filling my presence into my body, my soul, my home. The space was part of a larger dream that I’d written down 9 years before, a space for healing and a retreat to welcome those who needed it.
It became my own sanctuary but also a haven for guests, friends, lovers and loved ones, and the roots of my business and life’s work in embodiment.
It became a symbol for all that I had worked through, endured, and surrendered to.
It was the physical manifestation of my biggest dreams – and I was living them, not without life’s challenges, but gratitude of living my dream nonetheless.
In February 2023, the Big Dream was shattered in a most traumatic and stupid way.
I had no real option than to leave in a hurry.
I didn’t have time in the moment to really and fully process the loss and grief of all of the layers.
I was in shock. My system went into survival mode.
A month later, I was severely ill with mold toxicity poisoning, sleeping on my massage table, in pure survival mode.
Without my home, my safety, my two main sources of income that were physically tied to my previous home.
Months later, I would move into a beautiful sanctuary of an apartment.
It would take another year to feel safe enough to buy a couple of plants – a symbol of my nervous system finally starting to thaw, realizing that my body had been preparing for yet another move for the last year and a half.
A full two and a half years later, I am just now realizing the immensity of what this whole unfolding has had on not just my nervous system, but my whole movement and embodiment of life.
Sandra Ingerman describes moments in our life where we might experience deep soul loss, as she writes about the ancient practices of soul retrieval by healers around the world. These points are often places where the soul shatters or splits in order to protect us, similarly in parallel to trauma responses like dissociation. Often soul loss, or fragmentation, can lead to a more permanent state of dissociation, causing us to lose our sense of self, our connection to our life force and our sense of purpose on this physical plane.
Why do I bring this up?
After experiencing an eight year full remission from a previous chronic illness that rendered me completely bed ridden for almost two years, I don’t think it’s nearly a coincidence that slowly over the past two and half years, my previous chronic illness symptoms have returned, manifesting into nearly full blown illness once again.
Nor is it a coincidence that I’ve been living the last two and a half years in a catatonic state, cycling through survival, bitterness, and cynicism, not to mention bouts of severe depression and anxiety.
My relationship to vitality and life force have fizzled to an all time low, so much as that I felt I needed to stop all professional work as a healer, therapist, and somatic practitioner.
The connection between traumatic or life changing events and the onset or reemergence of chronic illness has also been well documented and studied. Although we don’t know the whys or what causes this, we do know that there is a solid evidence based connection.
Why am I sharing all of this with you?
On the subject of home.
Before all of this happened, when I was still practicing in my beautiful, life generative home, I had a conversation with a client about the importance of exploring our relationship to home. She had a complicated history growing up and I could recognize that her health struggles were directly related to a deeper somatic sense of home.
While it is vital that we learn to cultivate this relationship to our inner sense of home, I now appreciate how truly important it is to cultivate our external environmental circumstances of home.
That is to say, that sometimes our desire for the house and white picket fence is actually a deeper calling and need for the safety we didn’t have or never got growing up (even if our physical needs were seemingly taken care of).
In Chinese Medicine, many difficult to treat illnesses come from the loss of our various Shen (the 5 spirits or consciousnesses that make up our energetic essence). It is said that when the Shen have a safe place to come back home to (in the body) that the Shen will return, and with them, our vitality, our life force, our health.
I find this concept an interesting parallel to Sandra Ingerman’s description of soul retrieval and our modern day understanding of disassociation.
When the body becomes a safe “home” to land in, the elements of energy, spirits, soul parts, and vitality feel safe to return to.
One thing that is often overlooked is the relationship between our inner home and our outer one.
Despite being adults, as I’ve mentioned before, the patterns of our infancy, childhood, and beyond lay the stones of the foundations of our home. They inform our decisions, our sense of self and well being, and how we physically manifest our life, from the food we eat, where we live, and the partners and friends we chose. They lay the foundations for our work and they ways in while we are able, or unable to pay our bills.
On one hand, if we focus entirely on our external environment, we will not learn to cultivate our sense of inner home.
However if we only focus on our inner landscape, we may miss key physiological needs that will support our home coming.
They are interwoven.
We cannot have one without the other.
Sitting on this end of my own soul loss journey has given me a new perspective.
It is the closing of a proverbial cycle.
A death, so to speak.
In this place of space almost three years later.
Awareness of the bigger whole and the even bigger loss, I can begin to gather myself.
Slowly, I tune into my needs, yet again.
They are not new.
They have been with me since birth.
My need for what feels like to me, this physical place where I feel at home – in my environment, my cultural context, my individual self, and my cells.
We need to feel home in all of the layers.
Our very survival depends on it, but then again, so does our soul.