“We are born into this world and all we’re really trying to do is find our way home.” ~ Lauren, my yoga teacher
This weekend has been another set of hours in yoga teacher training that has provided me with a lifetime of learning. The idea of finding home that my teacher, Lauren, said struck me so deeply. We struggle to find the right job, relationship, place to live, friends, purpose, and what it boils down to is very simply wanting to be at home in our lives.
Certainly, the idea of the purpose of our lives being to find home could take on a religious bent, though it could just as easily mean just finding our way. Not someone else’s way. Our way. We’ve got this life full of days and we’re all trying to sort out what the heck to do with our time here. How can we be most useful? How should we connect and with whom? Where are we needed and wanted and loved? Simple questions that can be so tough to answer.
Sometimes, I really wish life was a game of hot and cold: as we move closer to where we should be we hear a tiny whisper that says “warmer” and when we move too far away from our true purpose we should hear a tiny whisper that says “colder”. And maybe we can make that happen. I’d like to believe that as I move closer to where I should be in any given moment that I’ll feel a warmth from knowing that says “yes, this is exactly where I needed to be right now.” On occasion that’s happened; I just wish I felt it with more regularity. I wish I had a giant compass that always pointed to home.
In class with Lauren, I started to think about how I might do this, tune my inner compass. Here’s what I came up with:
1.) Check in. Often. I sit in meditation for 18 minutes a day. I make myself do it, even if I’m tired and busy. Afterward I am always able to think a little more clearly.
2.) Record powerful dreams. It sounds cliche, but our minds do make connections when we are sleeping that our conscious minds cannot make. There are a number of scientific studies that support this idea. So I’m taking notes and seeing where that leads.
3.) Use past experience. There are definitely times in my life when I feel I’m on to something, that I am in the flow, and that everything is swimming along perfectly. I try to find the patterns that are common among those times. I’ve found that when I stop worrying about money and trust myself implicitly, somehow the world catches me when I leap. I don’t know how this happens; it just does. So I’m trying to look around for just a moment, make a decision from my gut, and leap more often.
I’d love to hear the ways you’re finding home, wherever that may be.
Christa Avampato 