Our body is our home, our gravitational centre, the most real place that we can be. Embodiment of our whole being is our homecoming and yet, for many of us our bodies do not feel safe or comfortable as a home should be. For many of us our bodies feel like a place of pain and discomfort. Here we will explore how to come home into our bodies.
We live in a world where our desires are warped into externalised addictions that cannot be satisfied. Our desire is really a longing to come home. When we pursue things outside of us we are not inhabiting the present moment, which is alive and satisfied in our own body. Our desire for satisfaction can only be found inside and in the present moment.
What do we find inside? Our bodies are our core of conscious awareness, the place where we get to call home for our entire lives no matter what changes in the environment around us. Homecoming is about re-establishing our comfort, safety and satisfaction within our bodies so that we can open up to our truest nature, which is whole, well and free.
Many of us have been conditioned to see our bodies as an enemy to conquer, or a burden to transcend, rather than a friendly abode to dwell deeply within. For this reason coming home into our bodies, our visceral experience of life, can feel much more threatening than staying disembodied in our conceptualisation of life through our thoughts.
The thing is that thoughts are just tools, they are helpful tools but they are not the true experience of real life. It is no wonder that many of us are so dissatisfied with our lives, or feel a sense that we are missing out on something real and true. We are not really experiencing life to our fullest visceral capacity. We are not experiencing life deeply in our bodies, in our bones. We have been believing that the story we tell in our mind is real and true – this is false.
And it is not our fault. Our cultural has conditioned us to believe that our stories are true, for good reason too. Humans have always told stories about the nature of reality as a way to bind groups of people together under the same ideology. Collective stories bind us together and offer us an element of safety, our own individual stories about ourselves and our lives also function to give us a sense of security.
Safety and security are the core tenets of welcoming ourselves home into our bodies. If we have unresolved physical and emotional experiences that felt traumatic to us then coming back into the body may not feel like a homecoming but a prison sentence. We can feel that we are stuck inside this body, as if it were a painful inhospitable cell, or we can begin to explore it’s richness, as if it were an ancient abandoned castle.
Homecoming is a radical act of dropping the story, dropping from the mind in our heads to the mind our hearts. From our heart-mind we can accept and embody the fullness of our experiences, from moment to moment, without the suffering that comes from believing a story about the way it should be. We can explore the rooms of our castle with new eyes, instead of shying away from the darkness we can shine our light of awareness inside.
What that means is we can stay with ourselves instead of abandoning ourselves when we start to feel and upwelling of emotion. We can meet our emotions, allowing them to move through us. Emotion is energy in motion. Our bodies are fundamentally in motion, to-ing and fro-ing from energy to matter; wave to particle; lightness to density. When we meet our past suppressed emotions, the ones that have been stored away in some dark room in the body, we can allow them to finally move through and out of us, instead of getting stuck inside.
When faced with intense emotion we tend to freeze, our emotions become stuck within our physiology until we are in a stable, resilient and open state to let them flow again. To the same degree that we allow emotion to flow through us, accepting what is, our bodies feel a sense of safety and softening. We open the door to experience the fullness of life. Welcoming our wholeness so that we can truly come home.
H O M E C O M I N G R I T U A L
- Scan your body and notice any areas of your body that feel numb, or in pain. As you bring your awareness to this part of your body notice any thoughts that you have about it, what are the quality of these thoughts? Are you judging, condemning, or pitying yourself for your body being this way? Just notice.
- Place your hands over this area of your body and breathe into it, visualising the thoughts or emotions dissolving with each exhalation. Stay with this for a few moments.
- Now, scan your body and notice any areas that feel alive, energised or pleasurable. Small or large, subtle or obvious, stay with that sensation of wellness.
- Place one of your hands over this area of your body, leaving one hand on the original area of numbness or pain. Focus on the sensation of wellness as you inhale and as you exhale imagine this sensation of wellness transferring into the area of numbness or pain. Stay with this for a few moments.
- Now, staying with the sensation of wellness, amplifying it as you inhale, as you exhale infuse your entire body with this sensation. Move your focus away from the original area of numbness or pain, as well as the original area of wellness. Not preferring any area or other sensation, encompass the whole body in this sensation of wellness the best you can.
- Stay with this for a few moments. This is your most natural and fundamental state of being. Your home of wholeness and wellness. Return to this practise any time that you get distracted by pain or lost in a trance of numbness. Your body is where your true safety, satisfaction and belonging reside.