Mario has been living in is own apartment now more than four months.  Often people ask him, “How do you like your new home?”  Mario responds with,  “I needed to move here for my brain.  My home is with my mom and dad.” 

Last week my friend, Virginia came over to Mario’s apartment for dinner.  She asked Mario the same question:  “How do you like your new home?”  Mario gave her the usual response.

Virginia thought for a moment, pointed to Mario’s heart and said, “This is your home.”  Mario smiled.  I got all excited and acknowledged what she had said.  “Your body is your home!”

Virginia went on to explain to Mario.  “You are sort of like a turtle.  You take your home with you where ever you go.”

This was an epiphany for me.  I believed that my body was my temple, but never thought of my body as home.  As a temple I only felt connected with my body while in meditation, out in nature, or in a spiritual place, or doing what I believed to be spiritual things.  How limiting for me.  When my body is in pain or not working as I would like, I actually hated my body and would think or say, “Please God release me, I have suffered enough.  I just want to go home.”  Home for me was being in a limitless form as spirit, without a body.

Now I am reevaluating my truth.  If my body is home I will never be “homeless,” even if my shelter or material house is destroyed.  I can move to another house, live in an RV, hotel, car, hospital, it doesn’t matter, I will always have a home: my body. 

This is a very comforting place for me to be.  I like it.  So I have decided that my body is my home so I had better take good care of it.  Clean out any garbage, exercise, eat right, and most of all, enjoy it.  As Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz said,  “There is no place like home.” 

Another enlightening quotation I like is from Teilhard de Chardin:  “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.  We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Be Love