When I was an elementary school teacher, I had the honor of seeing life through the lens of small children. It was a gift to be able to see the world through the eyes of those whose perspective was not colored by cultural concepts and beliefs.

My final class of first-graders in 2021 wrote a book called, "Strong Like the Ocean." The pages of the book confirmed the way these amazing kids saw themselves: strong, resilient, steady. Like the ocean.

I think most of us start out with a quiet, deep knowing that who-we-are is not separate from Life itself—that our truest identity is strong, resilient, and steady.

And yet, somewhere along the way, without really noticing, many of us tend to drift in our orientation. We begin to lose sight of what is steady and what is moving. And almost without realizing it, we start to take what is passing through—the moment-to-moment human experience—and we build our sense of home around it. It starts to feel like our identity.

Thankfully, we suffer—not because the momentary experience of life is painful—but because we forget who we are.

We forget what HOME is.

I still remember the day my parents told me they were selling our family home back in 1995. I was in my early-twenties and newly married. Pete and I were in the process of building our own very first “starter home” a couple of towns away from my parents.

Even though I had no intention of ever living in my parents’ home again, there was a feeling of grief when I got the news that they were putting it on the market. My heart ached, and my mind was flooded with all of the memories that had been made in that two-story Colonial Williamsburg house. Somehow it felt like I was losing something fundamental. My home.

It was the place where I had grown from Barbie Dolls to boyfriends. The place where I learned how to recover from heartbreak. The place where my dad taught me how to build a ladder for a tree house and my mom tried her best to teach me how to cook.

The story my mind told quite convincingly was that something that was supposed to be forever was being taken away from me.

Today, I can see that with story with such compassion. There is something so deeply human and innocent in the way our minds weave hypnotic stories of “this shouldn’t be like this” into the fabric of what simply IS.

Our beautiful human minds take something that is always moving, always changing, always passing through, and they quietly wrap our sense of stability around it. We begin to lean on it, to organize ourselves around it, to let it define who we are. A relationship, a role, a physical location, a diagnosis, a certain feeling in the body, an emotional state. And when it shifts, as all things do, it can feel like something is slipping away, like something needs to be held onto, protected, or figured out before it disappears. The mind races in—the way minds are designed to do—and it plants seeds of urgency, seriousness, high stakes, and fear.

And we suffer. By design.

But what if the suffering isn’t actually about the experience itself—the diagnosis, the loss, the symptom, or the fear? What if the suffering is the opportunity to wake-up to a fundamental misunderstanding? To a belief that this experience—this series of sensations and emotions—is where we meant to find our stability and peace, our HOME?

During the height of my struggles with chronic hives and facial swelling, the lyrics to a beautiful song by Laura Story played in the background of my mind for many weeks. The chorus included this phrase: This is not my home. Those simple words would come when my body was flaring and my mind was racing, when everything felt like it needed to be solved right away. Whenever urgency seemed MOST real and MOST true, those lyrics would wash over me. And something inside me would soften, not because anything on the surface had changed, but because something deeper recognized what was true. This is not my home. This is not where I am meant to find peace without an opposite. This is not where I am meant to search for imperturbable joy.

It was as if something within me gently remembered, in the middle of all that movement, that what was happening, no matter how real it felt, was not where I lived.

And in that remembering, the urgency began to loosen its grip, just enough to create space, just enough to breathe again.

When we begin to treat the waves as home, every wave carries so much weight, so much importance! Every thought feels high-stakes, every sensation feels like a problem, and every emotional shift feels like something has gone wrong. We find ourselves trying to stabilize what was never meant to be still. We stand in the middle of constantly changing weather, using more resources than we realize to hold the puffy white clouds in place while pushing the dark, stormy clouds away.

And it is exhausting, not because anything is wrong, but because we have innocently forgotten who we are. We have innocently forgotten that this—this momentary experience—is not HOME. It is simply transient, human experience. And without the made-up narrative overlay of “this is awful” or “I can’t handle this,” we are designed beautifully to have the experience of WHAT ACTUALLY IS. We are perfectly designed and equipped to have the raw, unfiltered movements of energy that make up our moment-to-moment experience before the mind jumps in with labels and beliefs.

When we can begin to see that who-we-are is more like the ocean than the wave, everything begins to reorganize in a quiet and almost tender way. The waves are still allowed to rise and fall, fear still moves through the body when it does, sadness still comes and goes, anger still surges and softens, but none of it needs to be pushed away or held onto, and none of it is mistaken for home.

It is simply seen as movement, as energy, as life expressing itself for a moment and then changing again.

And what begins to stand out, almost on its own, is that there is something here that does not move in the same way, something that is not coming and going, something that is not improved by a good day or diminished by a difficult one. Something that is quietly here, noticing, allowing, holding all of it without resistance. There has always been, at least for me, a kind of wordless knowing of this, something that can be sensed in the body—but does not share the limits of the body. Whatever this underlying aliveness is, it is deeply, inherently okay in a way that goes beyond what my words could possibly describe.

It is like the Ocean that does not mind which waves come and go. The ocean welcomes sail boats and war ships equally. It is like the open blue sky that holds space for summer breezes and ice storms without preference or resistance.

It is this aliveness that gives rise to all experience, the same presence that is here before a thought appears and remains long after it fades. And when this begins to be felt, even in small glimpses, the sense that something urgent and irreversible is at stake starts to soften and fall away. And Life, almost unexpectedly, becomes more available.

We find ourselves less caught in the stories of experience and more willing—and excited, even—to be in the pure ENERGY of experience.

We catch more and more tiny glimpses of who we really are—the open, alive, space in which human experience flows. And we find ourselves naturally falling out of old, habitual beliefs that peace, joy, light, and love are dependent on anything transient.

We still find ourselves doing what needs to be done. Doctors are called. Boundaries are set. Medication is taken or not. Conversations are had. Work gets done. But we are no longer doing it from the belief that our home is on the line. And when that pressure lifts, even just a little, the whole experience of being here begins to feel lighter, more open. The phrase, “GO PLAY!” takes on a whole new meaning.

Ironically, when we can begin to sense that even this body is not our home, the instinct to be more FULLY IN THE BODY emerges. Getting to know the body becomes something deeply inviting. Feeling ALL the energies that want to move through becomes something to be curious about rather than judgmental of.

When it really became clear that who-I-am does not share the limits of this temporary body, I realized that nothing that my body does is personal. It is not about ME. As a result, I was able to meet my body, my emotions, and my physiological sensations in ways that I never could before. There is a presence—an aliveness—an energy—that precedes the physiological, emotional, and psychological experiences of the body. And that aliveness—that Presence—that clear blue sky (metaphorically) is steady, timeless, and stable. That is who-I-am. That is HOME.

And so the invitation for today is not to try and understand or makes sense of any of this. It is an invitation to simply be open to considering something beyond your mind’s habitual, cultural beliefs about who you are and what is at stake.

What if this—this sensation, this emotion, this diagnosis, this symptom, or even this current chapter of life—was never meant to be where you looked for stability, permanence, or peace? And what if something real and stable has been here the entire time, steady and open, quietly holding everything without needing it to be different. What if you could rest in the knowing that you—the timeless aliveness of you—is already home, here, right now? And what if that shift in orientation could begin to change everything?