Two cows are grazing in a pasture…
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Three years ago my partner Vince and I began looking for a house to buy together in Colorado. After two years of looking, nothing felt quite right.
On a road trip from Maryland to Montreal we fell in love with Vermont and decided “Ah, here we will find our dream home!” As spring approached, we rented a house on an island in Lake Champlain on the border between Vermont and New York. We packed up our things and moved.
Upon arriving, the house hunt began again. This involved hours and hours on Zillow, talking to multiple realtors, and attending home tours. In two months, we’ve driven back and forth across the entire state multiple times to look at promising leads.
This past weekend, we visited a house for the second time that had everything we thought we’d been looking for.
But it just wasn’t right.
An old version of me might have pushed through my hesitation and put an offer out anyway, desperate as I’ve been to finally land somewhere. I’ve been yearning for a kind of locational certainty that would make my heart sing and my body come alive. Somewhere to root. Somewhere to deepen. Somewhere to expand.
But this house wasn’t it, and none of the others had been either. For years I’ve been getting my hopes up only to end up right where I am again.
The night after this latest disappointment, I lay in bed feeling defeated.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I said to Vince. “I can’t keep looking this way.”
“Then stop,” he said. “This approach obviously isn’t working. We will find it another way.”
Vince has been saying this for a while now, maybe before the search began. However Vince’s approach requires patience and trust, two characteristics he has in spades, while I…well, let’s just say I haven’t practiced those as much as he has.
But I knew he was right, it was time to let go.
Laying there in the dark, I inwardly bowed to my disappointment and I thanked my defeat. These two are actually just shadowy shades of love and humility, respectively.
Then I began a practice I learned from Vince, who has used it to navigate his entire life.
I asked myself, “If I had the home of my dreams, how would I feel?” With my eyes closed, I began to imagine I was already there.
The feelings came as a body experience. If I had to name the feelings they would be:
Belonging. Rest. Safety.
Held. Expansive. Generous.
A sense of possibility.
Gratitude. Love. Peace.
Beauty. Home. Ease.
Excitement. Inspiration. Connection.
This is the first part of the exercise, and if you’re anything like me, basking in these new feelings lasts only several seconds.
Then the resistance comes in, and we’re on to part two.
Resistance can come in many flavors.
Sensations:
For me, there’s often a feeling of deflation or contraction in the body. My breath becomes tight and shallow. My jaw might clench, my tongue becomes stiff against the roof of my mouth. My belly usually gets hard and my whole body gets unnaturally still.
Emotions:
I often begin to feel sad or resentful and angry. I often feel emotionally hard too, or else a weak and victim-feeling that makes me want to collapse, curl up, and give up.
Mind:
Most of us will recognize the resistance of the mind. In this case, my mind started saying things like, “This is BS.” “This isn’t working.” “I can’t.” “This is too hard.” “This is not possible.” “This won’t work for me.” “I don’t deserve this.” These words and thoughts played on repeat.
The most tempting thing will be to buy into the resistance, to give up and stop the practice.
Imagine standing on a hill and the ground starts to give way, sliding toward turbulent water. Giving up the practice at this point is like letting the ground take you to the watery depths below, rather than scrambling back up to higher ground.
I’ve spent most of my life being swept out to the mental-emotional sea of drama and defeat. It has taken hours, days, months, or years to find my way back to solid ground.
You know what? Fuck that. After a while, that gets old. And it turns out there’s another way.
We all know that fighting the resistance doesn’t work. That’s just more resistance. So what do we do instead?
We re-locate ourselves.
In my case, when I experienced just a taste of “home,” the body started to rebel.
But I am not the body. I am aware of the body. I experience the body.
So I relocated myself as that which is aware, and I noticed the tension. I began to soothe it from the inside by softening, slowing, and deepening my breath (imagine petting a nervous puppy, or humming to a crying child).
When I allowed myself to believe “I am home,” the mind too, rebelled, saying things like “This is BS. This won’t work.” Etc. But since I am also not the mind, I located myself as that which can observe thoughts, but doesn’t have to buy into them.
Imagine listening to Resistance Radio. It’s a steady stream of objections, but so what? Are they real? Are they true? And even if they were true once, do they have to be true now?
Two cows live in a pasture in front of our house. They graze lazily day after day. The pasture is encircled by a single line of string. Not wire. String. Not rope. String. Not electrified. String. The thousand pound cows appear not to realize the illusion of their limitation.
Thoughts are made up of even less matter than string. They keep us cowed by mere suggestion.
That night, when I began to look for my home inside instead of outside, I made the most amazing-yet-obvious discovery:
When I try to conjure a sense of safety and belonging in my own being, I can’t do it. My body does not feel like a safe and relaxed place to be. It hurts at times. It’s aging. It’s anxious and fidgeting. It’s weary and heavy. I resist inhabiting it.
And I experience my mind as annoying at best and viscous at worst. I rarely want to be alone with it.
For anyone who says “I can’t meditate” you likely know what I’m talking about: There exists an intolerable aversion to just being settled inside one’s own self.
NO WONDER I HAVEN’T BEEN ABLE TO FIND A PLACE THAT FEELS LIKE HOME!!!
I’m walking around in a cloud of discomfort, hoping some magical log cabin on 100 acres of land with streams and beauty will satisfy. But how can it? I am living inside the strings of my own limitation: “Not worthy. Don’t belong. Never good enough.”
Yesterday we began unpacking the rest of our moving boxes. Our landlord has said we can stay in our rental house as long as we like, so we have decided to do that. I deleted my Zillow account and all my saved searches.
I may find a house out there, but there is only one place I will ever find home.
To recap, the practice goes like this:
- Get in an open body posture such as sitting straight up, standing, or laying on your back. I’ve found this practice impossible to do in the fetal position or any posture that physically closes my heart.
- Notice something you’ve been wanting.
- Pretend you have that thing, and generate the feelings you imagine you’d feel. Examples: Belonging, Successful, Open, In love, Helpful, Wealthy, Healthy, etc.
- Bask in that feeling for as long as you do.
- When the resistance starts, notice it as resistance.
- Relocate yourself as that which is aware of the resistance (i.e. step outside the string and look back at it).
- Bring a soothing, calming, or curious attention to the resistance until your mind wanders.
- Go back to #3, and repeat as long as you do.
Don’t worry about any outcomes. By doing this practice you are choosing to be happy, fulfilled, valuable, in love, enough. Let the practice be its own victory. You are standing your ground instead of being swept out to sea. This practice isn’t easy. In fact, I find it hard AF. But since the alternative seems to be worrying, wanting, resenting, and lamenting, I find the effort worth it, every time.