February 2023 Soul Notes
This month, I'm moving therapy rooms unexpectedly as my current space is sadly closing, a casualty of the pandemic and the economic hardships of life right now. In the space of losing my therapy home, I began to think about what a new home might look like for my practice, a musing that then expanded to what home I would like for my work in a broader sense; what home I would like for myself now my daughter has gone; what home I would like for my creative self and for all my other selves. And what home is possible in this divided and often unwelcoming world we find ourselves living in in the 21st century.
I wrote before the holidays about feeling restless and wanting to wander, and I understand this now as a longing to find a home. I guess what I’m really asking is where do I belong? Who do I belong to? Where can I call home?
Then in a conversation with the lovely Grace – she asked a profound question (as she often does). “How are you homing yourself?” This was followed by an extended pause. “How am I homing myself…..?” I wondered….and have been wondering since….
“What is homing?” writes Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Women Who Run with the Wolves.
“It is the instinct to return, to go to the place we remember. It is the ability to find, whether in dark or in daylight, one’s home place. We all know how to return home. No matter how long it’s been, we find our way.” …..
“The exact answer to “Where is home?” is more complex…but in some way it is an internal place, a place somewhere in time rather than in space, where a woman feels of one piece. Home is where a thought or feeling can be sustained instead of being interrupted or torn away from us because something else is demanding our time and attention. And through the ages women have found myriad ways to have this, make this for themselves, even when their duties and chores were endless.”
Home as a verb….and also as a place where we are “of one piece”….”where a thought or a feeling can be sustained”. I think of this as a place, not where all is united or peaceful, but where we can rest into the multiplicity of ourselves, with the tensions we hold, the fears and the sorrows, the doubts and the pain as well as the joy and the love. We can be with it all as it is.
So, to return to Grace’s question, how am I homing myself?
By writing
By curling up with a book I really want to read (rather than ought to)
By walking in the woods
By coming back to my breath
By spending time alone
By following my dream images
By drawing
By dancing
By keeping the company of poets and poems
By bringing all of me to my monthly “home” group
By being part of my Tuesday morning writing group
By resting often
By staring at the sea
By sitting beneath my favourite willow tree
By stroking my dog
By feeling nature’s cycles
By moonlight
By candlelight
By sitting by the hearth
By journalling
By asking the questions
By sharing the questions with people who care….
These are some of the ways I find my way home, wherever I may have travelled each day but I notice that the path is sometimes obscured and difficult to find. The route unfamiliar, or blocked by boulders of judgment and what I perceive as the world's demands of me. I may sit to journal, to rest, to dance, and glimpse that there are other, more pressing tasks to complete. I begin to rush, to only scrape the surface of my lived experience that day and feel a sadness that my visit has been short. If this happens too often, then I begin to be less familiar with myself; less embodied; I doubt my thoughts and feelings; I question my judgment and have a feeling that I don't quite belong. Poet, David Whyte speaks about this in the short video below, and notes that the moment we begin to feel that we don't belong, all we have to do is name the ways in which we feel this to be true and we are already taking steps back there.
So whilst the place of home may be changing inside and out, our naming of what is lays a pebble trail to it. This is important especially during times of change and transition, when what was true before is no longer so and uncertainty is the only surety.
Psychologist Jill Mellick writes in her book, co authored with Jungian analyst, Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself:
“To become whole, body and soul, we need to depart from the safety of the childhood house of beliefs into the wilderness, into the cave, with only the psychic necessities. We rarely have the safety of leaving one house of beliefs when we can clearly see the new house ahead, lighted and warm.”
I can feel the truth of this and how lost we can feel when we don’t know what the new place looks like. The urge to plan, to control, to know, dominates. We want a comfy place to stay in this hinterland, But it’s living in the forest that develops our wisdom; that connects us to the home within – to our hearts and bodies – our deepest truths, so that we may hold ourselves and be held there. As Maya Angelou writes: “You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place,”
Dr Estés recounts an old Nordic story, Sealskin, Soulskin, about the tale of a selkie (seal woman) who stays too long on land and loses her seal pelt. The story illustrates how we lose connection to our home selves and often stay too long in this disconnected place, functioning in a world that is happy for our ego-led service. It follows her as she recovers her pelt and returns to her natural home of the sea. As with all fairy and folk tales, it’s a beautiful archetypal journey full of symbols and imagery that feel their way into the body and say much more than words can.
But back on dry land, I’ve been fortunate to find a beautiful new space and community at …wait for it…..Homa Psychotherapy Centre in central London (homa here meaning a fire ritual in Sanskrit). I will be adapting to my new physical therapy home in the coming weeks and will continue to wonder about the ways I am homing myself.
And you? How are you homing yourself in these turbulent times? What pebbles are you dropping along the path to guide you back? I'm curious to know….
With much love, as always,
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