Be at Home with Yourself

Be present in your own life instead of in the stories about other people's lives. From your own life and in your own body you can have live wide awake, not distracted and mindless. I challenge you to fight back against all the noise of marketing, intriguing stories, and problems that are not yours. 

Transcript

I noticed recently how much time my wife and I spend talking about other people. I wondered if we would have a conversation at a meal if there weren’t other people to talk about. I was a little uncomfortable about that, so I pondered the whole idea of being interested in other people. We all love stories, maybe even some juicy gossip. Other people’s stories, that’s what makes books, movies and television interesting. It’s not necessarily bad. Unless you regularly criticize people, talking about them isn’t wrong in itself. But there is something slightly off about only thinking about and talking about what your friend, acquaintance, or enemy is up to. 

It’s easier to get caught up in what other couples should do to fix their relationship than it is to deal with our own. It’s easier to look at what other individuals should do with their lives than it is to deal with your own life. In other words, our deep interest in everybody else is often a distraction from more deeply looking into ourselves. Not just looking into our problems, not just finding things to criticize. But looking into our hopes, deepest longings, our deepest strengths, our deeper meaning. If you really look deeper into yourself, you might like some of what you see and take some healthy pride in yourself. There is a person there who you can love and nurture. 

There is an interesting path to going deeper in understanding yourself, and that is through your body. Our bodies are made up of the same elements found in the earth and sky. A line from an old song said, “you are stardust.” However you understand your existence, we travel through this world in a body. Too often it seems we leave this body and extend ourselves into something or someone else. 

Perhaps you are at home with your body; but many are not. The process of getting used to and accepting yourself helps you see that your body marks out your boundaries.  The envelope of skin around you marks out the outer edges of you! 

You may have a house but while still breathing your body is your home. Why do we leave home so easily? So often? I mean why does our attention go to somebody else’s story, even other’s problems to solve? Our attention gets high jacked. And then the mind is entertained by the thrill of another’s failings or fortune. Your child is doing okay but your friend’s child has gotten into drugs and the wrong crowd. It can be more interesting plotting out what that child’s parents ought to do to get this child in line than to work on getting closer to your own child. Or the situation can be marriage problems or personal challenges. When we learn others have problems we can easily get caught up in them, when we likely have no input into those other lives. 

A principle of parenting might apply here: parents should create a safe environment for their children to be at home. Home should be a safe place to go out from to explore. But kids who explore without a safe home to return to just become lost. It’s unclear who they are or where they belong. 

When you become more at home in your body, you have a place to return to mentally when your thoughts take you away to someone or somewhere else. A provocative, captivating story of someone else’s life can be set down as you turn your attention back to yourself, not in a selfish way, not egotistically, but going back to “where I belong.”

Settle down for a moment. Take a few slow, deep breaths. Close your eyes if it is safe to do so. Bring up a mental picture of yourself. Your image might be from photographs or reflections of mirrors. Feel the outline and shape of your body. You may be critical about your body, but it is yours. Yours to live and move in. Be aware of the air around you; is it warm, cool, moving or still? You take up space in the atmosphere. There are unfathomable cubic feet of air in earth’s atmosphere, and you take up a bit of that space. You have a right to take up space. Claim your space as your own; there is plenty of room for you to be. It’s really your responsibility to accept and use your space. If you give away your attention most of the time, you are not being at home in yourself. Imagine just increasing your attention on yourself and decreasing your distraction into others? The result might just be that you can love others better and be more genuinely with them as you learn how to be genuinely at home in your body, your self.