Home is where the whole is
Yesterday I wrote about the experience of ‘not feeling at home.’ The words repeatedly bubbled up in my mind afterwards. This happens often, like a mantra words ebb and flow inside my mind and their visceral resonance in my body reflect emotional truth to me. Listening is all there is to it...
When I set out to explore the restlessness that I became much more aware of during the first two and a half years of our daughter’s postnatal life, I was seeking more than listening. In my lyrical book ‘Intens mens’ you can find a reflection titled ‘what you seek, is seeking you.’
Somehow, this previously recognized wisdom was uprooted.
The corona pandemic also had an impact on our family’s wellbeing. I was working from home, mostly online. I missed essential ingredients of the warm – embodied - interaction I had with friends, family and the participants of my workshops and trainings. Also, publication of my first book meant that I felt somewhat empty afterwards. This was an intense creative birth that also led me feeling 'artistically dead' for a while. Combine this with the already ‘home intensive’ situation of nursing our daughter and rewiring the love relationship as partners, and it becomes quite sensible that clearcut constraints with respect to time, space and sleep would lead to new forms of being and feeling human...
I noticed that my mind wanted to run away, skinny dip imagination and think about all kinds of possible, divergent futures. My value system, my emotional guiding system, stuttered. Here I was with a magnetic expression of life force, a fiercely growing baby, that surely needed my sensitive attention and devotion in the here and now. Old tendencies to cope with frustrated needs rose to their feet. I cried out sometimes, this was not the kind of mother that I felt like being... This was not ‘being.’ External restrictions made me look in the mirror once more. It reflected an image that felt foreign and anything but free. Did I choose this life for myself? Was it pure biology - and am I now becoming aware of the fact that motherhood is not my destiny?
No, my body mourned. Before choosing to try to get pregnant, I decided to sleep alone for a week. Essentially, I created a ritual without framing it this way at the time. My workspace became a cave. During that week, I deeply retreated into myself and silenced my thinking. I knew the answer to the question – do I want to become a mother? – would express itself spontaneously if I did not intervene with rising emotions and swirling thoughts, with projections and internalized norms. After five days, I woke up one morning and started to cry immediately. I felt called to say yes to the process of potentially giving birth to a new life and motherhood. And that was it. This was my, our, path wherever it would lead us. This was a practice of surrender even though suffering would inevitably be part of it. However uncertain this queeste would be, and even though I could not directly ask our potential child whether he, she or they wanted to live, I felt somehow that we were called to surrender to this process.
So, back to the unrest that I felt after giving birth. The constraints of that situation heightened my self-awareness. By being in a complex situation, by being deprived on different dimensions, and by not getting what I thought I wanted (business as usual), I was challenged to rethink what it was that I wanted. There were also parts of myself that I could not claim anymore as ‘typically Lotte-like,’ some of my supposed dearest hobbies (reading theory, ha!) seemed so futile. The whole situation forced me to rethink, to re-feel and include more honest mental discernment about what I had been doing the last couple of years and whether that was truly reflective of my calling in life.
The presence of our daughter, the 24/7 devotion to her wellbeing, amplified my capacity to feel into what a calling can be…The depth of desire I feel towards our daughter’s wellbeing made me more aware of life’s potential. The constraints of the situation made it possible to sense that desire and not run away from it, not flatten the depth of the insight like I might have done previously.
The situation forced me to listen. To listen more deeply on a daily basis and to perceive the ‘feeling of homelessness’ as a way of being in this world and in this body in and of itself. I had to learn, and in some cases relearn this existential skill.
Gratefully, something crossed my path that matched perfectly with the situation I was in. The seeking of course led to a discovery. Colleague, psychologist, and trans spiritual monk Stijn Smeets offered a new training in existential development. Intuitively and clearly knowing that my participation would stir up a lot of intensity and thus mental work to discern what this is all about, I decided to go for it. In the meantime, the fact that my partner and I were becoming more aware of our interdependency with the broader community would bring about many changes in the way we relate to each other and our social network.
Maybe ‘not feeling at home’ meant that our home is much bigger than we could have ever imagined…
To be continued!