Finding Home (Blog post 3)

It has now been about two weeks since my first time going to a meditation class. This means that I have just completed my third season. The funny thing is I feel like I have been doing it for months. I guess that’s because time just flies in college. As it was only my third time, I am still trying to get the hang of sitting still in silence for an hour and a half. However, I enjoy the commitment it requires of me one day reach that goal of being motionless. One thing in particular that I have been noticing in my experience is this weird warm feeling in my body. It almost feels as though I am sitting down with a warm heated blanket that makes me think comfortable. After my second session, this made me think about what it was that I was feeling and why I was feeling it. I later came to realize this feeling was the feeling of being home.

    Long before I was a student at Loyola University, I lived in a completely different world. This world was called Eugen Oregan. I lived there for 14 years of my life before my family moved to Pennsylvania. You might be wonder what does this have to do with me feeling at home while I was meditating. Well, it is because this meditating made me feel like I was back in Oregon. For the first time in five years, I felt a sense of belonging. I think I felt this way because the West Coats is very different from the East coast, yet that room of meditation captured the essence of the west for me.

    The west coast is filled with earthy crunch people who like to move through life slowly, always making sure to take time out of there days for themselves. The east coast I have found to be very fast-moving and competitive. Yet in the room, everything stopped for the first time in four years. That room of people meditating made everyone stop there fast-moving days and forced everyone to reconnect with themselves. It's strang, but that feeling made me feel like I was home. I didn’t even know I was missing this feeling until going to this meditation class.

    In Countee Cullens poem “Tableau”, it talks about sitting in front of a mirror and speak to the stranger in front of you. I relate to this idea because I feel like I had to sit in front of a metaphorical mirror and ask myself what that strange feeling was that I got during meditating. By doing this, I was able to like the poem said, “give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you,”. I did this by realizing that a calmness that was given to me from the west coast that the east cost took. However, with this meditation, I have been able to restore the serenity of my old home that was lost. This then allowed me to, like what the poem tries to get the reader to do, reconnect with myself.

    All in all, these experiences for me have deffenity been going well, and I am excited to see where it will lead me next.