Creating Home Within

“You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.”— Eckhart Tolle

I re-read my January 2021 blog post as inspiration for my first blog post of 2022 (it's been a long while since I last posted) and I had weirdly forgotten how it ended – with enoughness. Wow, interesting how quickly I forget about being enough and go about my usual strivings for being better, doing more, trying harder. This is a deep rut in the road of my life that I continue to fall into. And to quote Portia Nelson’s poem Autobiography in Five Short Chapters from Chapter III –

​“… There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in ... it's a habit.
       My eyes are open
       I know where I am. …”

​With open eyes I see that it all starts from enoughness.

And I wonder what does it mean to operate from a place of enoughness? What does it really look like? How do I get out of my hole? At the heart of this question are more questions – how can we accept that we are enough when there is so much pain and grief and struggle in our lives, communities and the world? How can we find abundance when we are bombarded with messages of scarcity – not enough time, not enough money, not enough space, not enough justice, not enough love, not enough food, not enough _____ (you fill in the blank)? We are swimming in the soup of not enoughness and lack.

I believe the answer in its abundance lies in the practice of being self-full. This is not being full of ourselves or selfish – but filling our cup to the brim with the wonder and ease of our enoughness. It is connecting to the true essence of who we are – it’s what I call living from the inside out. It sounds really great to me in theory – but practically speaking what does it look like? That’s where it can get messy. Being self-full and living from the inside out starts with presence and it happens in our bodies – it is connecting into ourselves in this moment.

And this means being with what is there even if it’s not perfect (far from it), even if it’s painful, even if it’s angry or sad or bored or lonely. When we build this connection, we start forging the path to our Self with a capital S – our whole selves. It’s in the breath and the being of us. Once we find our breath and from there ourselves, we can reach out, weaving the tapestry of our lives with all of the threads of us and everything in our world. This is the fabric of interconnectivity and it’s grounded, full and, dare I say, abundant.

The beauty of it is that it’s always available to us – we get to continually rediscover who we are and live into the fullness of being alive by taking a breath. Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche (a Buddhist monk and international teacher as quoted by Richard Rohr) says it this way: “All that we are looking for in life – all the happiness, contentment, and peace of mind – is right here in the present moment. Our very own awareness is itself fundamentally pure and good. … Make friends with your experience and see if you can notice the spacious awareness that is with you all the time.” We can say to ourselves with joy “I get to be me!” This me may be different from the me that others think I am or that I should be, it’s the me I’m meant to be. And this is home. Yes! I believe that home is within us. Just last week, in a lovely conversation with a group of kindred spirits we re-discovered our shared understanding of home. To quote Jana Mitzoda’s (a fellow kindred spirit) poem, Home is where the heart is:

Home "is a door opening in the Now

If I find the peace within
If I relax into the present
If I connect to my soul
It’s a bridge to higher self
A place to embrace what is”

How freeing and peaceful this feels to me! This gives me energy and hope and it can happen in a moment with a single breath! This is possibility – we hold it in our home within ourselves when we are present for it! Pause, breath, move.