Where are you? What is your attention mostly focused on? Do you spend most of your days worrying, fretting about future events? Or are you in a mind space of regretting your past? Choices you've made, events that have passed that you wish would have been different? Or have you found your way back Home?
Being at Home in a shamanic sense means to come back to You, to your Heart and Your sense of Center. It means to begin to recognize when you are being triggered, when something or someone scares you or angers you enough to make you lose your cool or composure. Most of my own life I just thought I was unusually angry or sad. It never dawned on me that I was living out my programming in a way that kept creating pain and suffering. For the first bunch of years I always saw problems as belonging to the other person, the event, society or partner. I knew something was up with me as well but I was not able to center myself long enough to see clearly what was going on. I couldn't see that my upset state, my always being behind on bills, my stress in life or my jealousy and fear was based in how I saw or related to life.
Over time it became abundantly clear that I had something to do with my own existence. And as I dove into deep meditation and subsequently even deeper shamanic work patterns began to emerge and I was able to see how my different wounds from upbringing and the earlier years were still resonating through my energy body and my mind as well as how I saw the world.
So many of us carry wounding from earlier parts of our lives. If you are told that you are not enough, or if you feel left out or abandoned by your family of origin, your trauma and protection from this trauma, will keep you in the same state, even when we think we have gotten over it. We develop personality traits that will keep us safe from the trauma we felt as children. These traits, although well-meant, keep us in the same patterns and we often have the same feelings haunting us through life.
The way to interrupt this flow of mind programming is to surrender and accept that we all have something we struggle with and that it is not shameful or "weak" to go within on a deep dive.
We begin the inner journey often after a personal crisis, something that pulls the rug out from under our feet, something that makes us realize that we need some form of change.
The first few steps could be therapy, energy healing and yoga. As we go further we often also implement meditation in order to find our own center. Listening to people giving talks, or going to yoga only, may not assist you as much into your healing journey as it could if you also actively participate in your healing.
One way to do this is to practice meditation. This means to seek your own inner stillness and slowly get your brain and nervous system to get accustomed to a new pace, a calmer, more still inner space. Once you experience your inner stillness, the peace that comes with it is immense and you may find yourself really craving more of the experience of stillness.
And this is how you begin to unravel the mystery of yourself. As you start to uncover your inner path and track your different reactions and how they protect yourself from perceived trauma, you also find your center. This experience of your deeper self leads to a strong and healthy healing path. Suddenly meditation stops being a chore and becomes a pleasure.
When you go deeper on this journey more is revealed at every stage and every turn. And all of a sudden, Life has become an adventure, a journey to be on, and joy makes itself known from the depths of yourself. At some point around this time of your development, the shamanic work enters the picture and you are now given new tools and new experiences that helps you get even deeper and more solid in your new way of life.
So You Find You at the deepest inner space of Yourself. When all pretense, fears and illusions are uncovered and dissolved, what is left is Your Essence. This is Home.
Art by Skyler Kenny from "The Four Elements, We Are Earth Mother" by Shaman Marcus Nobreus