How to Feel at Home in Yourself When You Never Did Growing Up
A four-step exercise to help you feel grounded, safe and at home in yourself, no matter what home looked like when you were young.
If you find it hard to find yourself, be your true self or express yourself authentically, one of the best things you can do is feel at home within. You might hear this often in the spiritual communities, but what does coming home to you really mean? The way I think of it is you’re able to filter out other people’s emotions, opinions or boundary crashing. You’ll then have a clear sense of where you end and someone else begins. From there you can dive into what you truly desire and how you want to show up in the world. You’ll be able to say, “I am home.” In this case, the home part is a state of being, not a place.
To get started, we do need to look at what the place of home means to you. What did it look like and feel like? This can get very tricky if you didn’t like the way it felt. Especially if you don’t want to associate the feelings you had with the place(s) you grew up in and who was there. If this is you, lets reframe this and start to cultivate a new, safe experience of home in yourself.
Starting with the felt experience you actually WANT, what does home mean to you? Follow the steps below.
List the words and phrases to describe a safe and loving home FOR YOU (it’s different for everybody). Here are my words:
Warm
Cozy
Carefree
Relaxing
Gentle
Fun/Light-hearted
Nourishing
Restful
Creative/Playful
Love-filled
Presence
Connection
Compassion
Expansive
Evolving
Fills you up
Meets your needs
Giving
Receiving
Describe a physical place that feels like a safe and loving home. You are describing the scene in a couple of sentences.
A log cabin with a roaring fire, crocheted blanket and good book. Stew is on the stove and a pie is baking in the oven. Textured paintings hang on the wall, and books cover one side of the room. Soft music plays on the record player.
A beach house sits on the sand with the ocean stretching to the horizon. The sun streams through the floor-to-ceiling windows, highlighting the colourful decorative pillows on the overstuffed couch. The wooden dock bobs on the water, holding kayaks, a canoe, and a pile of fluorescent floaties. A glass of lemonade filled with square ice cubes sits on the deck table.
You get the idea.
Now combine the feeling words with the described scene like this:
I lounge in my log cabin beside a COZY fire, wrapped in a WARM crocheted blanket, reading a LIGHT-HEARTED book. NOURISHING stew is on the stove and a pie bakes in the oven. CREATIVE textured paintings hang on the wall, and books cover one side of the room. Soft GENTLE music plays on the record player. I feel CONNECTED, RELAXED, EXPANSIVE and LOVE-FILLED in my home. I AM HOME.
Read this out loud every day as a mantra to embody and embrace this feeling of home within yourself.
Notice how you feel after a week. How has your relationship with yourself shifted? What do you notice about feeling connected and at home within you? Do you feel any different around other people after doing this practice?
You can play around with different feeling words and descriptions until you find a combination that resonates with you deeply. That is your “home” template that you can use to build that feeling of home within. Say it with me: I AM HOME.
Please save this post and come back to the comment section. Let me know what your experiences are, and your questions. I would love to know!