During times of agitation, like I am experiencing now, I feel unsettled and I don’t like it. I find myself looking for ways to avoid the discomfort of not knowing how to change my life to return to joy and peace. I am not patient.  Mostly my mind tends to strategize, to play out different scenarios to see if any would be better than what I am currently doing – should I cancel ALL my classes and spend a month at the beach?  What if I stopped teaching Zumba and only taught Nia?  Maybe I should only teach close to my house so I am not dealing with traffic every day?  You get the picture.

So I was on the Eckhart Tolle website and watched a video by another teacher there, Kim Eng. And she talked about agitation in a way that really resonated and comforted me.  She said that agitation – the definition of which is to stir things up – occurs for a reason.  It’s part of the process that leads to clarity, but often we want so much to escape the discomfort of it, that we don’t let it do its work.  We are fearful of this discomfort because we project it into the future and believe that we will always feel this way. 

So true for me.  It’s so hard for me to remember that agitation is a state, a temporary state.  I just know that I don’t like not knowing, so I often make any decision rather than just allowing myself to feel agitated.  She encourages us to just watch the agitation inside us, rather than identifying with it.  Immediately I felt better when I could do this. 

She then shared that deep within each of us, the very core of us, is peace.  I know this place well.  This place is home, she said, and our lives are simply a continuous process of leaving and returning to home.

Home.

For me, this is both literal and symbolic. We all know what home feels like – the place we live that feels safe, comfortable, and beautiful.  Sometimes I feel like I just want to stay in my home and never leave, especially here in Sao Paulo.  At home, I am buffered from all the things that frustrate and hurt me.  But I know on a deep level that staying home forever is not possible.  I have to leave even if just to re-stock the shelves of the pantry.  It’s funny, because I have often contemplated becoming a hermit, thinking I would enjoy it. And maybe I would.

But maybe the purpose of my life IS to leave home and return home. To the home within myself-that place of stillness and peace; I now know I cannot dwell there forever either.  Life pulls me out of it, and when I experience stress and frustration then I know it’s time to return home.  Sometimes returning home is only a deep breath or Nia practice away, and sometimes it’s weeks of agitation. Either way the destination is the same, and I have made the journey once more.  Who knows? Maybe someday I will learn to enjoy the journey rather than resist it.