Good morning from New York City. Ah, it feels so cool to say that. I am thrilled to be home. It’s funny because so many people would say to me when I was in Milan especially, do you miss New York? And my response was always the same. No, I’m loving being here. I’m one of those people that is very much wherever I am in the moment. Yeah I’m not going to lie. That first week I was away, I was like what the hell have I done? I blew my life up. I was completely out of sorts. It took a while to have what I think was perhaps the single most important experience or realization that I had, and that was that I’m able to find my center, find my groundedness, wherever I am. So yeah, I think probably the single most important takeaway for me from this experience was that. It’s something that I experienced over and over again.

Interestingly, as I got to the very end of the five months, I had that pang of I have to get home, and that didn’t feel good. That desperate feeling. I slept on it, and I decided to extend my stay. I’m so glad I did because that frantic feeling of I got to get home became the sweet anticipation and longing for home. I started daydreaming about people I was going to see, things I wanted to do, and it felt good to nip that desperate feeling in the butt because I didn’t want to end my sojourn with that desperate feeling that I have to get home.

Of course, now that I’m home one of the things that’s going through my mind a lot is what is home? What does it mean to come home? How do we come home to ourselves wherever we are in whatever circumstances we’re in? Not to wax all philosophical on you, but the truth of the matter is this idea of home – this finding home and finding our center and finding our calm wherever we are, no matter our circumstances – is one of the big challenges we all face in life. It is really all about coming home to ourselves. In my personal circumstance, I needed to leave home to come home to myself. I needed to break away from the cadence of my life to experience finding my center no matter where I was.In fact, I did that in many different living circumstances, different countries, different continents. That’s one of those things that I didn’t know when I closed the door behind me when I left New York City – that I needed to feel in every cell of my body. And that’s for sure one of the most important takeaways.

So, now that I’m on the other side of that, I am thinking a lot about home. What is home?  How might I do things differently? How might I renegotiate the terms of my relationship with my home? Not only my physical home here, but also the city that I live in. There’s a part of me that loves falling back into my old habits. I love my neighborhood. I love my building. I’m looking forward to seeing my friends. I absolutely adore sitting in my meditation chair and recording from here, and I want to maintain some awareness of not falling back into the same old same old.

This feels like an opportunity to bring new energy into my home and into my life. So that’s what’s on my mind today. I’ve been sleeping a lot and I have yet to find my footing, I’m definitely still in transition. but it feels so good to be home. Actually, I spent three days completely alone. The only people I’ve seen since I got home are my college roommate Lisa and her husband Fritz and the family. We had dinner last night and I don’t know there was something very poignant about last night for me. It was wonderful to reconvene to catch up to hear what’s going on in their lives, and as I rode the bus down Lexington Avenue I was thinking to myself how glad I am that I seized the opportunity to walk out my front door. I am grateful that I listened to that voice in my head that didn’t make sense at the time that said you need to leave. You need to push the boundaries. You need to step outside your comfort zone. I’m very grateful that I heeded that call. It gave me the opportunity to explore, to get to know myself in a different way. to open new doors, and also to close some doors. And I’ve certainly brought back fresh energy into my life or so I hope.

So, yeah, that’s what I’m thinking about. What is that energy I’m bringing home? And how can I infuse my life with some of that energy that I garnered out in the world? How can I expand my world and reacquaint myself with my home and with this city? I’ve spoken about this many times in the past. It’s very much about renegotiating the terms of your relationship with your life as it is. So yeah, I’m thrilled to be home. It feels good to be in my own bed and I’m thinking about how I can use this energy I’m bringing back as a sort of fertilizer to my life here because it is, after all, springtime.

I’ll end here with that metaphor of planting seeds and nurturing the positive expectation of the blooms yet to come.

Until next time from my heart to yours.