The Yearning for Home

Somewhere along the road to becoming modern people, we have lost our way. While this may have happened to us individually, it has unarguably happened to us collectively.

How can I assert this with such blithe assurance?

Only a bird that’s sick would foul its own nest. It is this simple. Our collective fouling of the only biosphere in the known universe is all the evidence we need that modern humans have lost our way. No terrestrial creature can foul its home without undermining its very survival. We know we are doing this, we tell ourselves that we are the most intelligent creatures on earth, and yet we cannot seem to stop. We cannot even seem to collectively maintain a focus on it without devolving into partisan politics.

Yet assuredly the evidence does not stop here. Look around you. How many people do you know that you can say are genuinely thriving? How many people do you know who have the kind of resilient deep stability required to navigate a world in flux? How many people do you know living out their true purpose? How many people do you know who feel hopeful about the future?

Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering, says poet Gary Snyder. People are turning away from religion in record numbers–this is an old story– because the church story doesn’t meet our need for meaning. Many of us have merged with the black mirrors in our pockets, sequester ourselves online in digital worlds where we are harvested by the Machine. Capitalism has reached an endstage increasingly detached from the human scale. We have become collectively unmoored, that’s my contention here at the outset. We have lost our way. Doesn’t take a genius to notice that.

And what have we lost our way from? We have become alienated. Like Odysseus pulled to foreign lands to fight a war, and then unable to get his ship homeward bound to Ithaca, we are stranded far from home and hearth, trying to make our way back to where we are from. Yet for home we certainly yearn.

The Greeks had a word for it. This longing to return to the place we belong. The word is nostos. It is at the heart of the story of the arc of becoming modern. It is the engine of narrative in The Odyssey, the archetypal hero’s journey, and by extension the engine of narrative in the modern story.

And while this leitmotif of home is certainly a place– we have lost the coordinates of our belonging– it is more deeply a relational loss. A relationship with inner dimensions. The origin stories of modern ‘western’ culture document this falling out of relationship with All That Is. The stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babble– these are palimpsests, writ over and over with the knowledge of lost relating, attempting to explain why we are no longer in contact with the Sacred Source, the Creation, with one another.

We are stranded outwardly, and we cannot get home, but the home from which we have been most deeply alienated is not a place. It is not a geographic location. It is an inward home. Our inward home. An intimate contact with our true nature. Inwardly, then, are the coordinates of our possible return.

You have felt this. It is likely why you were drawn to a practice like mindful awareness. Why you were drawn to the yoga mat. The call of self-reflection, somatic work, embodiment. You turned inward to make contact with a certain landscape of who you are, a landscape that the culture-at-large, the English language, doesn’t even have very good words for.

Everyday, sitting on the cushion, or the yoga mat, you have experiences that are so difficult to translate into English that many of the words you use for them will have been birthed in other, and more ancient languages, tongues more fluent in these inner sciences. It is why you will describe yoga postures, and types of inward clarity in Sanskrit, Japanese, or Tibetan.

Because the modern world– eviscerated of deep interiority– denatured of sovereign indwelling– does not know how to describe these landscapes.

And yet.

There is still something missing. Perhaps it is because the importation of these awareness technologies have been filtered through layers as they made their way to you. The yoga you learned has been filtered through a ballet studio in France on its way to American shores. A yoga room with a wall of mirrors is a modern invention– a marketing tweak to the tradition making the import more palatable to Westerners- not a product of Vedic science. We’ve brought the ancestral technologies over– the Sun Salutation, the zafu, the zabuton– but we’ve had a harder time bringing over the cultural context.

And importantly, the cultural context out of which these awareness technologies was born– it was not modern. People who came to learn to meditate hundreds or thousands of years ago in the East were people whose cultural context, rural location, circadian rhythms, and therefore deep physiology were profoundly different than ours. From this different physiology unfold different topographies in consciousness.

Most modern people walking into a yoga studio or a meditation center are far more deeply traumatized than they realize, far more shut down than they understand, are carrying far more archived allostatic load than would have a corresponding student in 12th century Japan. We moderns– we are really fucking stressed out.

And because the way that attention works is downstream of your neurophysiology– specifically your autonomic physiology– the practices that you are doing, even if they are the same exact practices this 12th century student was doing, exercised with diligence and precision, do not lead you home in the same way.

From where your body resides now, its physiological baselines, from the nature of your daily stress responses, you cannot access the psychic terrain described in the literature of enlightenment. No way.

You are generally bereft of safety and connection in a way that was not possible hundreds of years ago, lest you had been in a war or survived an earthquake. And no one has really told you this. There is a fundamental structural map of your alienation, and it is held deep in the body, and it is mediated neurologically.

All of this hubbub about the vagus nerve– much of it shallow, over-simplified, poorly illustrated, under-informed… all this talk of vagal stimulators, vagal exercises, the autonomic ladder...all of these new somatic trauma healing modalities, Polyvagal Theory– these are pointing in the direction of a nervous system science you need to know.

You need to know it for practical reasons, because it explains things like why the exhale is longer in pranayama, or why you should not practice traditional mindful awareness techniques when you are anxious. Or why there is a regular uptick in psychiatric admits at the local hospital whenever the meditation center has a longform retreat. (Did you know that?) It can help us resolve the confusion about the difference between equanimity and dissociation, which most meditation students do not understand at all. It clarifies the neurophysiology of spiritual bypassing.

It is an inward map that you have been missing, a cartography you need to be able to locate yourself upon. Because once you begin to understand it, it will change the way that you practice.

I’ll be teaching autonomic cartography and tracking at a number of face-to-face retreats from May through October this year.