This month we explore what it truly means to “come home”, not as a destination, but as the living sanctuary you carry within you. Like a turtle traveling with its shell, you move through the world with a home inside your chest that is always available. It’s a theme very close to my own heart (no pun intended!).
Inside Your Own Awareness
I have first hand experience with the “Dorothy of Oz” architype. For most of my life, I never felt “at home”. In the first instance, as a high-functioning neurodivergent, I never really fit in socially. And furthermore, I was always seeking something I felt I’d lost…traveling all over the globe and living in a foreign country to find it. Even owning my own home for a brief time left me itching for something I couldn’t name. Do you know these feelings?
We spend a surprising amount of life searching for a feeling of home: a sense of belonging, a place where the nervous system unclenches, a space where we can simply be. We imagine it’s somewhere “out there”… a perfect situation, relationship, or environment. But real homecoming happens in a much quieter, more intimate place.
It happens inside your own awareness. My quests for home, all of them save the one inside, have proved disappointing. It was only when I ceased looking for something outside of myself that I discovered I was and am always already at home.
There’s a steady, warm center within each of us that’s present even in the midst of chaos. Most of us miss it because we’re moving too fast, thinking too loud, or gripping too tightly, or distracting ourselves too furiously. But when we slow down, feel each breath, soften the chest, and drop into the body, we begin to sense a familiar presence that’s been with us our whole lives.
This is Home
It’s the inner hearth that doesn’t require external conditions. It’s the presence underneath your thoughts. It’s the grounded intelligence that reveals itself when your mind stops scrambling for solutions and your awareness returns to the heart.
In chi gong, we cultivate song: relaxed, awake presence. This inner softness is not collapse but the quiet power that arises when tension dissolves. When you bring this softness to your emotional life, something remarkable happens. Old patterns loosen. Defensive contractions uncoil. You stop abandoning yourself in moments of stress and instead return again and again to your center…to home.
Think of the turtle moving slowly across the earth. It doesn’t race toward belonging; it carries belonging. Its safety and sense of place travel with it. Human beings, with our restless minds and hungry hearts, sometimes forget that we also carry our home with us. It’s so easy to be distracted. But home lives in the same place every time you check: the center of your chest, behind the rise and fall of your breath.
Coming home doesn’t demand perfection. You don’t need to be calm or wise or have everything figured out. You only need to pause long enough to feel your own presence again. Your heart is the doorway.
Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to
which you can retreat at any time.
~Hermann Hesse
Contemplate:
Where in my life do I leave myself (emotionally, energetically, mentally, etc.) and what helps me return to the center of my chest when I notice I’m gone?
Practice This:
Heart-Home Touchstone:
Place one hand on your heart and one on your belly. Let your breath soften. Imagine the space behind your sternum as a warm, steady room of quiet, spaciousness. Feel how familiar and welcoming it is. With each exhale, settle more deeply into that room. Stay for one minute or ten. Notice how your whole field reorganizes when you return to this inner home.
In Conclusion
To come home is to remember yourself and return to your own presence. To stop searching for belonging in the outer world and rediscover the sanctuary that has always lived within you. No matter where you go, no matter what unfolds, this home travels with you providing you with the steady, warm, and unshakeably real shelter for which your spirit longs.
May this month bring you closer to that inner hearth.