Returning Home. My homepage: www.kyllikineuman.com

Returning Home

Mathura, Return to Yourself

I am back in Estonia. In a discussion with a friend of mine, I told her that I was flying home. Yet, I have been living in California for years now and it is my home. This made me wonder where is my home and what is my home?

Is a home only a place on planet Earth?

Or – do our connection to people we love create the place that we call home?

Recently I saw and art installation where viewers were invited to respond to a question: “What does “home” mean to you?

The responses were among others: “Knowing self”, “Safety”, “My body”, “Family, comfort, love, warmth”.

Can I be my own home, can I be at home in myself, in my body and being, regardless of my geographical location? And what does it look like?

What do I need to do to reach this state of my being?

Love After Love

The time will come, when with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other's welcome

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you.

all your life, whom you have ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

~ Dereck Walcott

Deep Listening in Silence - http://www.kyllikineuman.com/blog/

Konrad Mägi, Meditation (Landscape with A Woman) 1915/16

Deep Listening in Silence

Our daily life is filled with news and information arriving from all directions. Yet, recently I have encountered the situations where facts and cognitive approaches are not helpful, bringing even more confusion into my decision making process.

My solution has been to slow down and take time to be with myself in silence. Sometimes it means sitting and “doing nothing”, sometimes it is a walk on the beach. When I am able to quiet the thinking mind and make space to unknown to surface, the right answer to my question surfaces gracefully. There are times when the response might come through unexpected phone call or email. Few times, the answer “popped out” from a book that I opened and once, it was written, larger than life, on a billboard above the freeway.

And even when the response does not come, I feel calmer and more balanced.

Which answers in you are wanting to reveal themselves to you?

Which bright ideas are germinating in you, waiting for silence to make space for them to surface?

Lao Tzu said:

Colors blind the eye.

Sounds deafen the ear.

Flavors numb the taste.

Thoughts weaken the mind.

The Master observes the world

But trusts his inner vision.

He allows things to come and go.

His heart is open as the sky.

The Shock of Spring

The Shock of Spring

Photo Marje Einre, 2016

I wanted to write about the joy of spring here in Los Angeles – how the scent of orange blooms from neighbors’ garden is sneaking into my bedroom and the amazement of vines around next door turning into soft purple flower rain of Wisteria and much more. But suddenly, there is news about another senseless killing spree in the middle of peaceful daily life.

I notice my shock and wonder how I have become used to hear about the bombings in Middle East, yet it seems so scary in Europe. I ask myself – how can one become used to any killings?

And, at the same time, media is feeding our fears, bringing more negative energies, hatred and anger into the world.

Now my main question is how can we maintain the balance in the middle of chaos?

How to keep the healthy caution without being swept away by fear?

Maybe the nature herself teaches us to follow the life force – life itself wants us to succeed!

Wendell Berry says in The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

And I wake in the night at the least sound

In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

Rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

Who do not tax their lives with forethought

Of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

Waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The Seat of the Soul

The Heart

An Angel Weighs, Epp Kokamägi, 2015

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The heart has been considered a medium between spirit and matter, a seat of the soul and the source of love and courage. Both poets and spiritual traditions embrace its sacred nature.

The old Egyptians left only the heart in place in embalming process, believing it to be the center of a person's being and intelligence. At the gates of heavens human heart was weighed against the feather to judge the purity of their heart.

Research by the Institute for HeartMath in California has shown that the heart is the most powerful generator of electromagnetic energy in the human body.

It also secrets its own balancing and regulating hormones, instantaneously communicating electromagnetic and chemical information to the rest of the body and to other bodies near it.

Coherence between heart and brain waves not only creates a sense of peace and wellbeing in person but one person's heart signal can effect another's brainwaves, and heart-brain synchronization can occur between two people when they interact.

How do we relate to our hearts?

Are our hearts’ and minds’ desires in sync?

What do our hearts need in order us to blossom?

The Fox teaches the Little Prince:

“One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye."

                                                                                    (Antoin de Saint Exypéry)