Home

What is home? Sit with the word. See what feelings and emotions rise.

Is home a building, a place, a person, a group? Is it your body, your planet, your mind, your heart? Where can home be found? How can it be defined?

There is a mantra in my household. “A happy, healthy, peaceful, loving home.” I had a friend paint it on canvas, and it hangs on the front wall of our dwelling. It is a touchstone. In this edifice (and in our lives), we conduct ourselves in accordance with this mantra.

It took me years to arrive at this mantra. When my son was two years old, he frequently asked, “Mama, are you happy?” Inevitably, I replied yes, but the truth was, I was anything but happy. It must have been very confusing to him. He was learning emotions and corresponding facial expressions at daycare.

I did not grow up in a peaceful home. Peace, happiness, health were not modeled for me. I had glimpses from time to time. I was told that this is what love was like. It was very confusing to me. Both at the time and for a long time more in my journey this lifetime. Even when trying to reject the idea, I found myself repeating the pattern I had learned.

Until one day, I recognized it. And I made the decision to unlearn it. Further, to change it.

I’ve never looked back.

The word home can bring forth a myriad of complex memories, emotions, desires, antipathies.

It is an insult to tell a transgender person that the body is home. When the body feels like an attack against one’s inmost being, like a sorely fitting shoe, it is an insult to say, this is your home, this is where you belong.

It is an insult to tell a homeless person that homelessness doesn’t exist because we all belong to the earth and property rights are a construct.

It is an insult to tell someone who is dying or coping with illness that the body is not home, the earth is not home, the physical plane is not home.

What then shall we say?

Where is home? How can it be defined?

I invite you to consider Ishvara Pranidhana. Pranidhana means “surrender.” Ishvara means “a Higher Power,” “Supreme Being,” “personal God,” “Ultimate Reality,” or “True Self.” Ishvara Pranidhana means surrender to a higher power, and that higher power resides within you (your true self). This self is eternal.

When we remove the stories and narratives, the constructs and divisions, we can find that our spirit, our divine spark of life, is our home. Our inner sanctum of light. No matter where we go. And this light is from the divine and of the divine.

The Bhagavad Gita states, “Yoga is the journey of the self, through the self, to the self.”

I invite you to consider that home is yourself. I invite you to awaken to the idea that “you are not a drop in the ocean; you are the entire ocean in a drop” (Rumi).

• Renea Breashears (she/her)