Where is your inner homeland where you feel most connected?

I’ve come home to New York to spend Christmas with my Daddy. It’s quite interesting to come home. I was wondering if you’ve thought about, where is your home? 

Many kids moved around a lot and never had their roots or had a stable place. If you moved around a lot as a young child, you might have that sense of instability, of not having a grounded, rooted place. 

As most of you know, I officially became a British citizen this year, and I have lived in England longer than I’ve lived in the States at this point in my life, but still, coming home to New York, touches me unlike anywhere else.

I suppose because my formative years were here. And, officially a New Yorker, born in Brooklyn, I have a sense of pride about that.

This area where my dad lives, where New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts all kind of meet, was sort of my second home, where I’ve been coming since I was thirteen. I had an excitement and so much curiosity driving up here last night from JFK. A sense of connection that I don’t feel anywhere else. 

When I come back to England, I also feel like I’m coming home, but it’s a different kind of home. The place my children’s roots are from! When you think about the work that I do, birth trauma, and where our roots are, the roots of our becoming, it spurs me to think about that patterning.

Do you have a place that you call home? You may call a few different places home, and really, home needs to be where your heart is, so that you can be home anywhere that you are. 

Today I attended a Zoom discussion on friendship with the Modern Elders Academy with my father, and they were talking about how many friends we need in our lives in order to avoid loneliness which statistically is more detrimental to your health than smoking, alcohol and diet! 

Also, he said a really brilliant thing, “if you expect to be accepted, you’re more likely to be accepted than rejected.” And I thought, that was very interesting, because if you have a sense of grounding and a sense of connection deep within yourselves, you probably will feel more accepted in most places that you go. 

Maybe that’s why I’m really happy and comfortable being a world traveler, because the world is my home. I feel good everywhere. 

If you didn’t have a home base, and move around a lot maybe it manifested as you feeling at home everywhere, or maybe you don’t feel at home anywhere. These are all repeating patterns. 

Just about everything that happens in our life is a repeating pattern that starts early on. So when you start to look at your default programming, your repeating patterns, you can connect the dots of different circumstances in your life to see what manifested for you as a young child, as a baby. 

And as for the friends, what did you model from your parents? They said we ought to have five intimate friends, which means the people that you call on to be there for you, who you can depend on, on a daily basis. And then it was something like 15 best friends, people who maybe you’ve known your whole life, people you can call and even though you haven’t spoken to them in a year, and it feels like not five minutes has gone by when you’re connecting. 

There were some other categories, and then they said 500 acquaintances. Statistically, the most important of all of those friends was the 500 acquaintances, which was really surprising to me. 

I thought about before the pandemic, when I was going dancing all the time. I’m one of those people who is an ambivert (both sometimes introverted, and extroverted), so sometimes I’d have to really rev myself up to go dancing, because there were “all those people,” and “superficial chit chat,” and I felt like it was too much. Of course I never was upset once I was there, always happy to connect and dance with everyone.

Then suddenly the pandemic hit, and I didn’t have all of those connections with all of those people, and I really, really missed it. All of the acquaintances, the people you meet in the street, the people in the shop, if you smile and you’re nice to someone else, they’re more likely to smile and be nice to you in return. It’s an affirmation of your very being. 

Also, If you trust someone, they are more likely to be trustworthy. It was a wonderful talk. The next most important category of friendship, they said, were those five intimate friends, the people that you can count on. 

My five intimate friends are my kids, my family. They’re the people that I live around. I’m very blessed and extremely lucky to have my kids right near me and to be friends with them. Not everybody has that kind of relationship, but I feel very blessed for mine. 

I feel joyous to be here with my 89 year old daddy, and to see him with my kids and have Christmas with him, and soon my sister is arriving too. So I’m here for the holidays, back in my homeland, and I’m really happy to be here, feeling very grounded, aligned and connected, and I wish the same for you all.

Find your inner homeland, in your heart with your friends and celebrate your connections.