Coming Home to Bliss

As I mature, the idea of figuring out where I feel most at home, most able to be me, has become more prominent in my mind.  But the more I consider the idea, the more I realize that, like happiness, that feeling of "home" isn't going to necessarily come from an external source, or physical location.

Everyone of us has experienced those moments of total bliss and contentment, but it seems as soon as those moments slip away, we start striving to get back to that place again and stay there.  Paradoxically, the very act of wanting to hold on to that happy feeling takes it away...

We go through life with these ideas and conceptions of who we are and who we’d like to be (“I’m a woman, a Canadian, I’m ambitious, loving, curious, a student, a daughter...”) and try to align ourselves with positions and people in life that reaffirm these seemingly basic and crucial parts of our identity.  Which is great.  It’s so important to foster our passions and values to elicit positive growth and create beautiful social connections.

But at the same time...all of this is quite limiting.  Imagine, cramming yourself into such a puny box of identity, when you could experience your infinitude instead!  Really, we are not (the sum of) our cognitions, our emotions, our actions, our values...Indeed, these things seem to bury our inner “self”.  Who we really “are” is the *awareness* of all these parts of us.  As soon as everything becomes stripped away, and we are living in a state of pure, present, simple awareness, that’s when I think we attain those ever-elusive flashes of bliss and contentment.

Why would I chase happiness my whole life, when bliss has been here the entire time?  One has the potential to be blissful and content, at any time, always. It just seems most of us simply aren’t ready/able to comprehend this yet.

My proposition: home is whenever/wherever you’re with *you*

Bliss, contentment, nirvana, home, inner peace...whatever you want to call that feeling, that "being," that "place" -- “You may return here once you have fully come to understand that you are always here.” --