Or perhaps the question is, where do I want home to be?
For most of my life I have moved a lot and had homes in different places of the world. All these years home meant a place. Familiar rooms, people I love, treasured belongings, and the comforting sense of being somewhere I belong.
Then, during a recent meditation, a simple thought surfaced: My body is my home.
It was not an entirely new idea, yet in that moment, it felt like a discovery. No matter where I travel, where I live, or how my surroundings change, this body comes with me. It has accompanied me through every joy, disappointment, tragedy, adventure, and difficult season of my life.
I began wondering what it would mean to truly make myself at home here.
If my body is my home, how well am I caring for it? Am I strengthening its foundations so they can support me through life’s inevitable storms? Am I attentive to its need for nourishment, movement, and rest?
And what is the atmosphere inside? Are its rooms filled with kindness and acceptance, or have I allowed worry, self-criticism, and expectations to take up too much space? What might I rearrange, release, or welcome in?
These questions brought back memories of my various dwellings throughout my life.
Visitors and guests often spoke of its peaceful energy. They felt comfortable there, free to settle in and be themselves. I loved creating that atmosphere, and I felt it too. Those walls held so much warmth and belonging.
Now I find myself asking whether I extend the same hospitality to myself.
Can my body become a place where I feel welcome, even when I am tired, uncomfortable, or not quite the person I wish to be?
Can I offer myself the patience I so readily offer a guest? Can I stop treating my body as something to improve or manage and begin relating to it as a place to inhabit and cherish?
Mindfulness is helping me explore these questions. Each time I turn toward my breath, notice a sensation, or become aware of an emotion without immediately trying to change it, I am learning something about this home of mine.
And like any home, it needs tending. Not because something is wrong with it, but because it deserves care.
I am discovering that being at home in my body has less to do with how it looks or feels on any particular day and more to do with the relationship I cultivate with it.
This is still unfolding for me. I have days when I feel deeply connected to my body and others when I am less patient with it. But I am beginning to appreciate the possibility of living here with greater gentleness, gratitude, and ease.
Perhaps that is what coming home really means.
What does it feel like to live in your body? Is it a place of refuge, a place you struggle with, or perhaps somewhere you rarely pause to visit?
And if you could create a more welcoming home within yourself, what would you change?
I would love to hear what you discover.