Home

“…Ας αρχίσει λίγο να φυσάει, Να μυρίσει πάλι θάλασσα. Κι ας μας πάρει τους αδύναμους, Τους άρριζους μακριά. Ας μας στείλει σ’ άλλα μέρη – Απάτητα κι αμάθητα. Χορτάσαμε από ψέματα. Χορτάσαμε από ψέματα. Η γη είναι μεγάλη. Ας μας πάρει από δώ, Κι ας χαρούν τ’ αεράκι άλλοι….”  (Τραγούδι της Νατάσας Μποφίλιου / Στίχοι: Γεράσιμου Ευαγγελάτου)

Home is one of those words that can conjure up diverse emotions and sensations, ideas, images and metaphors. Just by writing the word on a sheet of paper and then jotting down what comes to mind generates a rich list of ideas and emotions. In his paper: Homelessness and the Meaning of Home: Rooflessness or Rootlessness? Peter Somerville writes that “Home can be argued to have at least six or seven dimensions of meaning, identified by the ‘key signifiers’ of shelter, hearth, heart, privacy, roots, abode and (possibly) paradise {ideal home}…….. Home as shelter connotes the material form of home, in terms of a physical structure which affords protection to oneself, and which appears to others as at least a roof over one’s head. Home as hearth connotes the warmth and cosiness which home provides to the body, causing one to relax in comfort and ensuring a welcoming and ‘homely’ atmosphere for others. Home as heart is very similar, but in this case the emphasis is on emotional rather than physiological security and health, with associated images of a happy home and a stable home, based on relations of mutual affection and support. Home as privacy involves the power to ‘control one’s own boundaries’ (Ryan, 1983), and this means the possession of a certain territory with the power to exclude other persons from that territory and to prohibit surveillance of the territory by other persons……” Home can be perceived differently depending on personal experiences and sociocultural context and can bring up diverse material for different people, but however, we define home, there seems to be a more common longing for home in all of us. Maya Angelou writes “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” This longing probably lives in all of us even those who may not have had the experience of home. Peter Somerville writes that “people may have a sense of home even though they have no experience or memory of it.”

Most of us crave home to such an extent that probably more than ever before, we invest heavily in our material homes, at least, in more affluent societies, and yet, many people feel a fundamental insecurity. In a psychoanalytically informed article I was reading a little while ago it was suggested that this might also have to do with feeling insecure about who we fundamentally are. From a Jungian perspective the home is often a symbol of the self. So, on an unconscious level, our preoccupation with houses might reflect our self or concern about ourselves, and might be part of an effort to feel secure in our own being. We may have an unconscious sense that home is our childhood bedroom or home, which can be preserved in our inner world as if in a time capsule. Or our sense of home, security and belonging might be derived from our physical adult homes and our geographical situatedness, but as vital as our houses and homes are for our survival and well being, our inner sense of home and refuge, and our capacity to abide in our own mental home also supports us to get through the rough. If we can abide or reconnect to this mental space often enough, in some sense, we get to carry a sense of home and rootedness with us wherever we go. How a person reacts to a situation is in part influenced by previous events and circumstances. Our responses are influenced by past and present experiences; however, our levels of resilience and choice can be enhanced when we have a more robust sense of emotional and mental refuge or home

For humans and other mammals, life begins in the maternal womb, which has been suggested as the model for our later homes. It is believed that the earliest homes created by human beings tended to physically resemble wombs. Many animals also create womb-like burrows. In many myths and stories action centres around the journey back home.  Our physical homes might be the place where we can stretch our legs at the end of the day with a cup of tea and it might be the smell of homemade food and freshly washed clothes on the washing line. It might be our children’s artwork on the wall or memories of meals with family and friends. But any disruption of this physical sense of security and home requires we ground ourselves in a deeper, more stable and ever flowing sense of inner refuge that we can derive from our mere beingness and living essence. We mostly find it in a place of internal stillness. Tara Brach says that in times of great stress, it’s crucial that we have pathways to relax our bodies, quiet our minds, and rest in a calm and steady presence. She suggests that through meditation we can gradually reach a home base of presence where we can find inner refuge that can carry us through difficult times and where we learn to momentarily at least let life be just as it is without dissolving. She refers to this as “reestablishing a friendly presence, relaxing with the breath, relaxing with the life that’s here. Letting everything be just as it is.”

Our sense of security and belonging also has much to do with the sense of feeling connected and valued by others. Research has shown that positive attachment and connection with others, enhances our sense of security, belonging and the felt perception of well-being. Rick Hanson writes that for most of our time on this planet, humans usually spent their lives within a few hundred miles of where they were born, doing the same things every day with the same people, embedded in a culture that changed little from century to century and that “these external factors provided a stable sense of home – but they are largely tattered, even shattered today.” In that sense perhaps the need to grow an internal sense of home as an anchor and refuge amidst the fast economic and social changes and turmoil we live in nowadays is more important than ever.

As one contemplates the word HOME, the lack of it as in homeless and homelessness also arises. Homelessness is associated with poverty, economic hurdles, severe trauma, abuse, lack of affordable housing, and maybe more broadly the absence of a context that provides a basic level of security, comfort, privacy and acceptance, but there are other forms of homelessness like psychological and emotional homelessness. Psychological homelessness may be the result of many interacting factors like chronic stress, social isolation,   diminished community and relationship ties, competition and overwork. The experience of psychological homelessness, which seems rampant in our contemporary societies, may include the experience of painful emotions of alienation, self-deprecating thoughts or feelings of not belonging, which can generate a crisis of identity. Emotional homelessness might be our response to developmental traumas and it might be experienced as the lack of a safe place to be with and to be able to express difficult emotions. This can take place when there has been some sort of disruption to our sense of safety and predictability early on or when there have been difficulties with early attachment to our primary caregivers. Over time our neurophysiology gets primed to fight and flee and if no help arrives to eventually freeze and shut down. We may have learnt to express only positive emotions, and suppression of emotions may have eventually been equaled with survival. Also, culturally, expression of emotions is not often supported or encouraged. Later in adulthood we may dissociate from our feelings or turn our emotions inwards, which can result in a sense of worthlessness or powerlessness, people pleasing behaviours and self sabotage, depletion, physical symptoms and disease; however, our emotions require some form of acknowledgement, processing or expression often within a relational context. If we cannot find a place where it feels safe to integrate our inner experience with our outer life we can feel emotionally homeless. In some sense we need to create a safe home for our emotions to be held, ideally, in relation with a safe other. Initially, going into increased levels of emotional activation might feel overwhelming, so we need to know how to return to a baseline inner resting state within a safe outer environment.

In one of his weekly blogs at https://www.rickhanson.net/be-home/ Rick Hanson uses the term “inner homelessness”.  He discusses how when our body is not hungry, thirsty or in pain, and when the mind is not disturbed by threat, frustration, or rejection, then most people settle into their resting state. He writes: “This is a sustainable equilibrium in which the body refuels and repairs itself and the mind feels peaceful, happy, and loving. I call this the Responsive mode. In a sense, this is our “home base,” our fundamental nature as human beings. On the other hand, when our body or mind are not in a state of equilibrium due to multiple causes then the fight-flight-freeze systems in our body get activated, and related experiences of fear, anger, disappointment, loneliness, shame, and spite occur in the mind. When this experience is chronic stress then the body gets depleted, and the mind gets “frazzled, pressured, prickly, worried, and blue”. Rick Hanson calls it the Reactive mode and says that these two modes of living are the foundation of human nature and we have no choice about the basic human needs they attempt to meet, which are safety, satisfaction, and connection. We have no choice other than to be in one of these two modes and that our responsive mode is our underlying nature….. because that’s where energy is conserved for life, where learning is consolidated and where our pains and traumas are healed.

Growing a sense of “inner home” can heal this sense of psychological homelessness and create a buffer for difficult times. Getting a sense of inhabiting our body through breathing and slow exhalations, through the experience of meditation and through our loving connection to the body feels like a home coming and like a more unshakable belonging. This sense of being home can occur through staying present with our senses, sensations, movements and actions, the context we find ourselves in, our environment all the way out to the planet and even the vast Universe. The sense of simply being might be the underlying essence of feeling at home. This sense of inner home feels like the silence behind our thought chatter and calm stillness and the embracing  of all aspects of oneself with love and compassion. Returning to stillness over time helps stabilize the calm within. It is the sense we have beyond our story, our identifications, our aches, fears, reactions and circumstances. Connecting to this inner sense of safety and unconditional worth also feels like integration each time. In Dan Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness mindfulness metaphor and practice, which I will not go into now, but have referred to in older posts, there is a segment called the hub of awareness. Over time I have noticed that irrespectively of how one is feeling in the present or what one is dealing with, there is this almost surprising and constant sense of a fundamental joy of simply being alive when one is resting here. I cannot say for certain, but as far as I can know at the moment, this might be an expression of our inner experience of being at home within our body and the world. It also seems to be constantly available every time we become still and check in, no matter what may be salient in our life in the moment.

Settling our attention inwards, we arrive a little closer each time to all the parts of who we are and to whatever is salient in the moment. Eventually, as self awareness increases and more integration takes place there is a return to a somewhat familiar sense of being. Through meditation the layers of our past conditioning and accumulated life suffering, which are blocking us from this sense of fundamental okayness slowly fall away. Whenever we are able to settle into ourselves we settle into a feeling of being okay because we are alive. If there are a lot of things going on in our life when we connect with this sense of inner home we come to the realisation that beneath the problems we are still here, still alive and basically okay. It seems that we have this inherent capacity to feel more equanimous despite the things, we may be weathering. To conclude, for many people the word home is associated with some sense of stability and safety, the opposite of feeling “homeless”. We could say that the same experience associated with having a safe and trustworthy physical home applies to our sense of “inner home”, as well. We can cultivate stability and steadiness in our mind and heart. (Tonya Alexandri, Syros, January 6th, 2021)