Home is a tricky thing.  We grow up in a home that sometimes feels safe and other times getting away from that place is the safest thing we can imagine.

As we get older, regardless of how home felt to us as kids, we start creating the homes we want for ourselves.

Sometimes in the same towns we grow up in, sometimes the other side of the country, other times the other side of the world.

And then again, some of us find new people we include in our “family.”  Whether that is through partnership or friendship or soulship. 

So what makes a home?  And how do we know if we are there?

Today I celebrate my 1-year anniversay of moving across the ocean to a island in the middle of the Pacific.  I was called there, quite literally, and am looking back with awe at what the last year has brought.

It has felt like home in some ways, but it feels more like the kind of home you create while you are in college.  A place you to go for higher learning that may or may not be where your drop your roots once you’ve taken your last final exam.

This is the first kind of home we create for ourselves.  The home for now.  For me it has come with some of the best friends I have ever made, it’s come with Sun and Beach, it’s come with the clearest and deepest learnings I have ever had, it has come with an expansion of my gifts, and it has come with the freedom of free floating in the middle of the great Pacific!

This home for me though feels like a home away from home.  And I only realized that when I stepped foot onto the Emerald shores of Seattle.

This is my adopted home.  It’s where I grew into the woman I am.  It’s where my entire adulthood blossomed.  It’s where I see myself when I really see myself.  And yet, it was important for me to leave.

Sometimes home becomes too much, it becomes a place more about memories than what the future holds.  It becomes a burden instead of the gentle hand that urges you on.

That is what Seattle became for me.  And so when I landed here 10 days ago, and my foot touched the ground and I started walking I noticed something.  There was nothing holding me back.

All of the tethers that were pulling me in every direction but forward had been erased.  The erasure, I now see, is the product of the intense growth work from a full year on Maui.

But what is home? Can you go back? Or is the peace of knowing that a place isn’t a trigger for you anymore reward enough?

As with everything I look to the signs…don’t you?  That’s how I found Seattle in the first place from my humble beginnings somewhere on the other side of the country.

So that brings us to the other way of knowing you are home. Does it give you sweet chills of twitterpation like a new lover?  Like a Sunday kind of love?  Does it make you want to create friends and stay for a while?  Does it make you want to explore?  Does it make you feel safe?  Does the air smell good?  Does the nature speak to you?

If the answer is yes to many of these…then I think you’re in a good place…and you should check it out for a while!

As for me?  I’m still in my PhD program and who knows how fast I will get through all the information Dr. Maui has for me?  But it’s good to know there is a place in the world where my energy loves to be.  And I more than anything am glad that Seattle and I made up…my world was a little less shiney without her in it!

So if you arne’t feeling like your home supports you.  If you don’t absotley love where you are.  Take it from me…explore, get out there, push through the confines of your comfort zones and find out where your true home lies!  There is really nothing like it!