April 7, 2015

“Are you ready to go home,” my father asks the family dog, who is startled from his nap by the abrupt and emphatic question. My 86-year old father has dementia and his thoughts loop around the current thread. Right now, the loop is about going home. It is immeasurable sad for me to hear this question and also fascinating. My father has lived most of his life in the house where he was born, literally. He is home and has, except for a short period, been there his whole life. And yet, he still longs to go home. He still searches for it. What home exactly is he seeking?

This idea of coming home is commonly used in the yoga tradition to describe both the desire we have to be “home” and the process of finding that place. We are searching for the place where we feel at peace, loved and safe in the same way we do in the archetypal home. The yoga tradition says that home in inside each of us and is known as the heart centre. It is through the heart that we know our soul, the eternal part of ourselves that is at our essence. The heart links us to the cosmic energy and holds us together as One.

I initially found this energetic connection through asana practice. The physical practice brought me to a deeper connection with my physical home and in coming home to my body; I found a link to the “something more.” The profound experience of being deeply connected to my body allowed me to spontaneously find a loving ease of being that immersed me in and transcended the body. It was a taste of being home inside myself and this taste deepened a longing that brought me back to my mat for more and more.

Over time, I grew more coherent in the language of this loving ease of being that is my heart centre. I found the voice there spoke of love, peace and joy. I learned, and continue to remember, that my heart’s voice is never critical, judgmental, evaluative or comparative. The “other” voice is a collected one, a combination of people in my life whose beliefs I made my own. I have come to understand if I believe that to be the voice that guides me home, I move farther from my heart. If I sit in a place that is accepting, allowing, open, I move closer to the love, gratitude, compassion and truth that is in my heart.

This heart home we all long for is a place of great safety, warmth and love. Our work is to seek and find that place inside ourselves so that if our mind fails us, we can still find the way to the heart and sit at home there.