Running away from HOME can be done in our own house.
Our emotional house is our own body.
Our physical house is where we cohabitate with pets, people or sometimes just by ourselves.
A house is no HOME unless it contains emotional food, shelter and fire for our heart as well.
Most of us have come across those people that we describe as having …
“The lights on but no-one’s actually at HOME”
They are disconnected from themselves and others.
They don’t know how to emotionally feed their heart, shelter and protect themselves from emotional harm, nor find warmth and comfort in honouring themselves. The physical structure of their body is there, and they might be even impressive physically, but they are emotionally absent. They may even be intellectually bright, financially successful, physically fit and perhaps very beautiful, yet they are not at HOME with themselves in this big world.
Many people do not feel at HOME with their own emotions. They run away from their heart rather than find shelter within the warmth of its truth.
Spot one, you got one.
Yep, takes one to know one. I spent the first 33 years of my life as this person.
Those who physically survive, but don’t emotionally live, remaining awkward and afraid to show or share all of their HEART with themselves, let alone anyone else.
Our physical HOME is the place where in our heart we feel like we belong and where we find peace and refuge from those who don’t understand us.
Our HOME really is where our heart is.
However, if those we share a house with are not those we’re willing to share our heart with, our heart will seek comfort, understanding and refuge elsewhere.
As children we often create cubbys, forts or have secret squirrel places or emotional rituals to help our heart find an emotional HOME when others don’t ‘get us’. Some of us bring this habit into adult life and continue to run away from ourselves. We hide in different types of cubbyhouses at work, with food, with booze, drugs, physical weapons of mass distraction like sex, spending, computers and just hiding from our heart with busyness in general.
When we run away from anyone, or ourselves, it is usually for good reason.
We are being treated poorly.
If we treat our own heart poorly by making a habit of shaming, resenting, being impatient with ourselves, living in fear, telling ourselves we’re just not good enough, we’ll need to find emotional refuge elsewhere.
As many of you know my hubby and I often go on long holidays and trek to some amazing places around the world. The times I struggle the most with physical HOMESICKNESS were always the times when I emotionally leave myself. Those moments where I treated myself poorly, my lights were on, but I was not HOME.
I was not at HOME in myself, so it became even more unbearable to be away from my physical HOME too. When I used silent self-talk laced with poisonous resentment towards myself for being a recovering alcoholic/addict, and got drunk on my own fear, I came undone. I ran away from my own heart, my own portable HOME.
However, when I made the decision to emotionally sober up by making a superb warm aromatic coffee of self-love for myself, I then wanted to do a U-turn to come back HOME. All of a sudden my lights were on, and I can actually become happy and at HOME with myself again.
Mr D would start to smile once I had done my U-turn, because he could see in my eyes I would put my heart’s welcome mat out, and opened my heart’s front door again for him.
So I just wanted to look at the lovely word HOME and create an opportunity for you too to reflect on how you sober up from a fear binge.
How do you lovingly emotionally feed your heart?
For me heart nourishment always starts with meditation to delete fearful self-talk. It involves dropping to my knees in surrender and asking for help. That is often followed by some form of writing that fires up my personal sense of purpose. These rituals for me are heart-warming.
How do you shelter yourself from emotional overwhelm and shift from being fearfully cold-hearted to lovingly warm-hearted again?
I myself also sometimes need to give myself permission to decline from socialising when I don’t have the emotional fuel in order to honour my relished introverted nature. My husband, who’s an extrovert, gets cabin fever from too much time alone so he shelter’s himself from that type of emotional overwhelm and does the complete reverse of what I need to do; he socialises.
Another vital element of a great HOME life is keeping ‘the fire’ alive, our passion, our love. No matter whether we are in a relationship or single, living with others or alone, our heart’s emotional ‘fire’, our meaning, our purpose, needs to be nourished. What is that for you?
What wood do we put in our heart’s fire to keep it burning?
What do we get out of bed for?
What do we dream about and work towards creating for ourselves?
The most reliable fuel I know of to use is “love.”
It is said a house is made of walls and beams; our HOME, however, is made with love and dreams.
So let’s all remember to treat ourselves with a generous serve of good lovin’ from this moment onwards.
Lotsa love Cynthia xxx
© Copyright 2016 Cynthia J. Morton Emotional Fitness™
This Word Vitamin is an excerpt from my latest bookset “The Four Seasons of the Heart”. If you would like to order your own full set of Daily Word Vitamins one for each day of the year, in book form for yourself or as a gift just click on the SHOP tab and place your order.
