Coming Home

by Harold M. Rice-Erso

We all yearn to live as we once did as children – as the authentic and loving self that we are but have forgotten we are. Early in our lives we were in total union with our bodies and with all of life. We took such pleasure in finding our fingers and toes, and delighted in discovering a new universe of feeling and sensation. We lived in this state of natural bliss automatically, effortlessly. We lived in a Garden of Eden.

If something felt good, gave us pleasure and made us happy, we did it. If something hurt and felt bad and made us unhappy, we avoided it. We woke in the morning hungry for more pleasure and spent the day engaged in Life, in the Mystery, in the Great Unknown and Unknowable. We lived this way naturally and without knowledge. We refused to go to sleep until our bodies were too tired to go on. We were moving at the speed of Life.

And then we fell. We began to believe in knowledge, in world consciousness and self consciousness. Inevitably, we accepted all kinds of stories about what we were and were not. Most of the stories were not true, but we believed them because we didn’t know any better. We could not have known any better. We became enslaved to these beliefs and lived in constant reaction to them. We practiced fear and self doubt and worry and anger until we mastered them.

At some point we realized that we did not feel so good and began to wonder why. We began to search for reasons. We read books and went to therapists and sought out spiritual gurus. We began to search for those joyous, happy, creative, loving, blissful feelings again. We tried many solutions: more relationships, more money, and more sex. We accumulated material belongings, worked harder, drank harder and took drugs. We became seekers of a truth that we were convinced existed outside of ourselves. We began a search for freedom and authenticity in all the wrong places.

If this story feels and sounds familiar, it should. It is at the heart of every great mythology, at the fundamental level of every religion, at the base of any worthwhile approach to psychotherapy. It is our job to come home again after losing our way. It is our greatest act of power to surrender our fear and to recognize what we are. We can stop seeking, and start believing in us. Each of us creates his own Land of Milk and Honey. Each of us finds Heaven in his love and respect for all things. We can become again the joyous playful loving creative humans that we once knew ourselves to be – this time with awareness, choice and consciousness.

Remember yourselves as Life again. Come home to the humanness of you. Experience Earth, nature, the flowers and trees and animals and sea, and the music and poetry that are everywhere. Appreciate the primal drive to love, to make love and to live compassionately and creatively. Live once again in generosity and gratitude for all the natural rhythms of creation – as you did before you believed a story that said you were lost.