Coming Home Is the Practice of Letting Go

"Now I see that the journey was never meant to lead to some new and improved version of me; that it has always been about coming home to who I already am."
― Katrina Kenison

Last weekend I had a chance to retreat for my soul – what an amazing experience curated by my dear friend Steph Smith Founder of The Listening Field: Spiritual Direction at Birdwing Estate owned by another dear friend Joanna Engstrom. It was a time to really practice what I’ve been blogging about this month, slowing down! And I got to do it with a group of wonderful women some of whom I knew and others who I know now and I’m grateful to call my soul sisters. My heart is still full and I see now that the fullness is all about the coming home moments I experienced and still hold close. So what does it mean to come home? That’s what I’ve been wondering about this month.

​Home is a word that I often associate with the space I live in and it's actually so much more than a location. When I think about what makes home home for me – it’s not the building itself or even all the things held within this structure I call home. It’s who is here and that includes me. Together my family (our pets) and all who spend time with us and I create home together in this place that I live. I know it’s possible to be at a house and not feel at home and I’m incredibly grateful that my house is my home. So what is home if it's more than a space? It's connection to ourselves, to each other, and to the world we live in. And connection is all about being present right now. So basically the whole idea of coming home begins and ends with presence.

What I learned this past weekend at the soul retreat is that coming home is not about adding more to what I already have it’s about letting go of what keeps me away from home, and I see that these are the same things that keep away from presence. We don’t need to create home within, it’s already here and the practice is finding our way back to center and the path is presence. It’s being here now in this moment. Letting go of the job of Manager of the Universe, surrendering to what is in this moment and accepting. Not to resign myself or to victimize myself but to live into myself and be with what is because guess what, we don’t get to control the universe or even for me my dog (when she wants to sniff something she wants it now 😆) as much as we might want to or think we have to. This is freedom. Just yesterday in one of my Positive Intelligence (PQ) pods one of our participants exclaimed “acceptance is so fun!” What wisdom – it’s so fun to freely be in this moment without the heavy burden of making it different.

​What’s interesting is that I don’t always feel at home in the body I live in or the mind I live with, like I do in the house I live in. And that’s because I’m literally not home, I’m absent. I get distracted by all the ways I judge myself, others, my circumstances. Again, it’s about letting go of these habits of mine, of getting it right, being perfect, beating myself up. These are the ways I stay out to lunch. I get wrapped up in a spiral of not enough’s or you aren’t doing it right or that’s not okay and it’s exhausting. This constant need to be someone else, improving more, fixing more. Yet when I take a breath. I know it’s not about adding some kind of quick fix or reading one more book (although I do seem to act like this next book is the one 😉) – I don’t need that and neither do you.

Instead the practice is to set up house here in my body, quieting my not enough or fix it brain, and coming home to who I am by being present. From presence, grace and love grow within me and ripple out beyond me. Coming home – it sounds so peaceful and right for me. And it’s up to me, I can do it and you can too. Oh yay, something that we can do (if we choose it). We can be present in this moment by coming home to what matters. It sounds so easy and I’ve said the words “be present” more times that I can count. Now it’s about living into presence. I can’t control what’s happening in my country or the world AND I can contribute and act from home, a place of grounded grace and presence within me. When I come home and you do too, it’s the first step to transformation and when we do it together, we change the world. What is your practice for coming home? Share your thoughts in the comments – we can do this together!