When I think about the places I’ve traveled in the world that have felt like home, one place stands out more than any other. Roma. Rome. What was interesting was that it wasn’t the apartment I was staying in that felt like home. It was the streets. There was something about walking through Rome that felt familiar. Like I knew where I was even when I didn’t. I would get up in the morning without much of an agenda, take a bus or an above-ground trolley, get off somewhere and start walking. Somehow, I would run into the very things I had wanted to see. Places I had read about years before would simply appear. I wasn’t looking for them. I bumped into them. And I kept wondering, Why does this place feel so much like home?

Rome’s Tiber River did nothing for me so I could not understand why this land locked city felt good. Then one day I saw a man drinking from one of the many fountains around the city. And something clicked. Water. Underneath Rome is this ancient system of aqueducts. Water has been moving through the city for thousands of years. You hear it in fountains. There is flow beneath Rome. That’s was what I was sensing – FLOW

Another place that felt like home was Tikal in Guatemala. Years ago I was doing volunteer work and spending time studying with Indigenous people in Western Belize. Somehow I heard about Tikal. I had never been there, but something in me knew I had to go. So one morning I packed my backpack with extra underwear and a wrap in case I ended up sleeping on a floor somewhere.  I found out I couldn’t join a tour because I was traveling alone and they needed a group. One of the women at a tour company told me to take a taxi to the Belize /Guatemala border and find a tour from there. At the border, I found a driver who was willing to take me to Tikal.  I would be his only passenger, so of course it cost more, but off we went.

When we arrived at Tikal, he originally planned to just drop me off. I asked him to be my guide because on the drive there, he told me that he was raised by his grandmother and he usually accompanied her to the park on the days she worked. He accepted and that decision changed the entire experience. Instead of taking me along the routes where all the tours went, he took me through the back ways he knew from childhood. And the animals started appearing. Hawks. Toucans, agouti, Howler monkeys swinging through the trees above us. It felt as if the forest itself were accompanying us.

I thought I knew why I was called to Tikal, The Jaguar.  I wanted to see the Temple of the Great Jaguar. I was certain that was where I was supposed to go. My guide said no. First, he wanted to take me elsewhere, Temple V.  At the time, it had only relatively recently been uncovered and restored. I followed him on the uphill trek there.  When the top of Temple V peeked out from the dense trees, the tears flooded in.   I weeped uncontrollably. We climbed down and sat in front of while he talked about the temple, and I simply could not stop.  I wasn’t sad. There was something incredibly comforting about it. Something welcoming. A part of me felt as though I had come home to a place I knew from another time.

Eventually we continued on to the Temple of the Great Jaguar—the place I had been so certain I was being called to see. Seeing this spectacular monument brought no visceral reaction.  I guess me being called toTikal was about Temple V 

Machu Picchu gave me another version of that feeling. There are places where I have stood and felt something that I cannot necessarily explain intellectually. The Earth feels familiar. The path feels familiar. Something inside says, I know this. Maybe I have walked here before. Maybe there is another explanation entirely. I felt the connection to different dimensions (that is another story).  

India felt wonderful to me. The energy felt incredibly high, but it didn’t feel like home. Bolivia felt good. Europe often feels like fun. But Rome, Tikal and Machu Picchu were different. They carried recognition.

Those are the physical spaces I’ve felt very much at home.  But sometimes home is a person. There are people in my life with whom I can relax completely. That is rare for me. I am an observer of patterns. I notice things. I read what is happening around me. Most of the time I know how to turn that off, but every now and then someone says something and the observer wakes up again. So I notice the people around whom that doesn’t happen. There are only a handful of people with whom I can simply sit, talk, eat, laugh, have fun. There is no agenda coming from them, and I have no agenda for them. I can just be. That, too, feels like home.

My husband, who passed many years ago, gave me that feeling of home in a much more intimate way. I remember lying in his arms and feeling completely comfortable. Home. He has been gone for a long time now. There are times I wonder whether I might have that feeling of finding home in the intimacy of a partner again.  Life on the other hand has been teaching me another kind of home.

What does home look like when I find it in myself? I teach people to look inside of themselves, go deep. All the answers are inside of us.  From that space, I am fascinated by life, Spirit , by the experiences that come into my world and somehow help me become a better me.  I am no longer doing a meditation, I’ve become the meditation.  Feeling deeply grateful that I get to experience this life.

Maybe that is the most important home I have found. We spend so much of our lives looking outside ourselves for the answers- the place, the person or the things, that will finally make us happy.  On our journey, we sometimes find beautiful versions of “Home”out there. A city. An ancient temple. A mountain. A forest. A friendship. Someone’s arms. But perhaps those places and people are also reminding us of a feeling we already carry.  A vibration that matches!  And maybe the real prize is to look at your own life and recognize: “This is Home”