When you travel a lot or change cities frequently, it's not easy to “feel at home”. It takes at least a couple of weeks, or more, to get used to the new place where you live. Sometimes that feeling is addictive, you can’t let it go and stick to that same place for the rest of your life. Other times you fill your flat with nice flowers all over the windows, put a welcome mat in front of the door, add pretty details to the house, but still you don’t feel comfortable living in it.
These years I have been traveling and changing homes, living in a van and moving around, and I’ve learned one thing: that home is not a place, it’s a feeling. And this feeling is something that depends only on you.
I’ve started my inner journey through my mind and body some years ago, and the practice on the mat puts me in front of my fears and my weaknesses. I’ve started becoming friends with my body and feeling comfortable with it. Looking for that sensation of being at home in my own skin, that sense of ease that you have when you sit down and speak with your best friend.
When you come to a yoga class you feel there are people around that feel that ease, that comfort. People that won’t judge you for your body or your clothes. And this keeps you inspired to come back to class.
At the end of each practice we are asked to go back to the body and feel. Maybe at the beginning you won’t feel so much, you are like a foreigner. But after years of practice you become more and more sensitive, you can almost get in touch with your organs and the deep inner parts of your body. And from foreigner you’ll become friends with your body, learn to speak the same language, exactly as you learn grammar at school. It’s a slower path, it takes time. Stay there, wait and listen: you’ll start feeling home in your own skin, with all the light and all the shadows.
