What Feels Like Home?
This morning I was exploring my Calm app. I had inadvertently hit the more button, which took me to “Check-Ins.” The Daily Calm Reflection asked me this question; what feels like home? The answer was instantaneous. When I am with horses, I am home. I marveled at how fast that answer came to me.
I felt lost for most of my adult life, adrift, as if I had no roots. I never thought that I really belonged anywhere. This sense of being lost put me on the journey of finding my “home,” and in turn, grew my passion for helping others to discover what feels like home. It seems that we have become so obsessed with our devices and various platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and the like, that we have forgotten who we are. When we forget who we are, our souls start to send us messages to get us to wake up and pay attention. The job of emotions is to send us a communique to get us to listen to our soul and take action.
That sense of being lost and adrift was my soul speaking to me. It made me uncomfortable so that I would take action and move forward with my life (we never change when we feel contented, we need that discomfort to motivate change). You would be amazed at the level of emotional pain I was able to endure before taking action. Looking back now, I realize what all of those years of depression, sadness, and loneliness were about; my soul saying, “get off your ass and find your home! Go back to horses.”
If you feel like you have lost your way or are adrift with no real purpose in your life, take the time to look at the emotions with which you spend the most time. Don’t look at them as something to ignore or push past. Instead, look at them as a gift from your soul. They are a message to help guide you. Take a few moments to quiet your mind by focusing on your breath, noticing where you feel the emotion in your body, and breathing into that sensation. Notice if there is any change in that bodily feeling as you breathe into it. When you feel you are sufficiently quiet, ask that emotion if it has a message for you. Notice what comes to your awareness. It may be a memory, an image, a smell, don’t discount anything that comes to you, especially if it seems odd or insignificant. This exploration is where you find nuggets of gold.
Just as a gold miner had to engage in hard work to have a payoff, personal and spiritual growth needs you to do some digging and exploring. Going deep into those uncharted areas of your psyche can have tremendous benefits. If you are new to doing this kind of work, it can be beneficial to work with a coach or therapist so that they can support and guide you on your journey.
In Gratitude,
Karen