A Compassionate Inquiry® Practitioner, Psychedelic Preparation and Integration Coach, and facilitator of Nondual Tantra-based Hatha yoga, meditation, and somatic movement practices, Stephanie supports others through The Way Back Home as they reconnect with their fully alive, expressed, soulful, and authentic selves. She guides them home to the essential depth of who and what we are beneath it all.
In this excerpt, Stephanie offers layered perspectives on what home can be and how we may be longing for it without realizing it. Listen to the full conversation on The Gifts of Trauma Podcast.
STEPHANIE: Home is not this physical place where we can come back to being fully ourselves, remembering and recognizing the fullness of who and what we are.
For Stephanie, “What is home?” is not a philosophical question. It’s personal, embodied, and lifelong. Born between cultures, shaped by loss, and drawn into a decades-long inquiry through yoga, somatics, psychedelic integration and Compassionate Inquiry, she has spent years finding her way back home to herself and supporting others in doing the same. Home is not one thing, she says. It has layers:
STEPHANIE: There’s the layer of what it means to be human, to be in connection, and to move through this world experiencing the fullness of what it means to be human. There’s the layer of being authentic and fully expressed, welcoming all our parts and being able to rest in that. And there’s an even deeper layer that’s spiritual. For me that layer has definitely been influenced by the yogic path I’m on. It leads me to inquire, “What are we?” and invites me back into the remembrance and recognition of who and what we are beneath all the stories, beneath all that we are in this life. Gabor says that we are all made of the same essence. To me, being able to rest in those different layers is to be at home.
Stephanie’s understanding of home arrived at a gathering in Colombia. She was in a Maloka, listening to an elder sing the songs of his people when something in her recognized what home felt like.
STEPHANIE: In that moment as I listened, I realized, wow… I don’t know the songs. I’ve never been to where he’s from, and yet there’s a remembering deep down in my bones, something that’s touching on where I’ve been before. That’s when I really started to play with this idea of: What is this beyond home as a place? What are the relationships we have to home, and the definitions we carry of it? Maybe it’s a place I’ve been or I’ve been for a long time or where people know me or where there are people I feel very comfortable with. That’s when I started to open up to the full spectrum of the many things home can be felt through, and invited through.
If home is this vast and available, why do so many of us feel so far from it? Often, Stephanie says, it’s because we don’t recognize our longing for home.
STEPHANIE: Longing for home can range from feeling out of touch with our emotional landscape to not feeling the possibility or the capacity or the safety to be in touch with the fullness of our emotions or with the fullness of our emotional expression. It can show up as not being in touch with, in relationship with, or not feeling safe enough to be in connection with our bodies.
Safety, she says, is at the heart of so much of this, yet it often goes unnamed.
STEPHANIE: Safety is such a big aspect of why we turn away from ourselves, cut off parts of ourselves, don’t allow our full expression, or don’t allow ourselves to choose authenticity.
Many people might not say, “Oh, I’m looking for safety.” But it’s definitely something that people mention again and again. “Oh, wow, I feel safe here. I feel like I can share. Wow, okay. I finally feel I can be seen, and it’s safe enough to show myself.”
Sometimes, Stephanie shares, longing for home does not look like feeling lost. It can look like a life that is, by most measures, fine.
STEPHANIE: I’m thinking of one particular client who showed up and said, “things are good, life is good, but it feels like I’m not in connection with something that’s just under the surface, that’s wanting to be explored, to be seen, to be touched upon. And I could continue, keep floating on and doing relatively fine and great.” What was missing was that depth and being able to welcome the fullness of life and all of what that looks and feels like.
For Stephanie, connection is at the heart of homecoming—connection in all its forms.
STEPHANIE: What we’re here for is to be in connection. There are so many aspects to being in connection to bring out the fullness of life. I believe it’s this connection to ourselves, to all the parts of ourselves, to all the different levels in connection, to our emotional, mental, physical and somatic landscapes, to our spirit, to our soul, to each other, to community, to the environment we’re in, to the earth, to nature, and for those who believe, to the greater power that holds it all.
Home is not lost. It is waiting, and the way back can take many forms. For Stephanie, dance has provided an unexpected pathway home.
STEPHANIE: I’ve been seeing the many ways in which the healing, in my own personal journey, is being expressed through dance. I can show up and be more fully expressed and be more emotional in how I move. At some point when I was growing up, something happened and I felt like I couldn’t fully express myself, so I lost that pathway. Being able to come back home to this form of expression, being able to feel what it means to more authentically express myself and show up. It’s just beautiful to have different modalities in which we can feel that.
The way back, she says, is always available, no matter where we are or how long we have been away.
STEPHANIE: I believe there are anchors we can feel and come back to, again and again, no matter where we are. And yet I don’t discount the power and the potency of place and people and how much I found those to be important aspects of what it means to feel at home. Because our environment, where we are, can encourage us to be more and more ourselves, showing up again and again authentically, fully expressed. So I think it’s possible to cultivate that sense of home, no matter where we are. It can be such a powerful invitation.
The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma, transformation, healing, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. Listen to the full conversation, and if it resonates, please subscribe, rate, review, and share.
Editor’s Note: This post is comprised of edited excerpts drawn from The Gifts of Trauma podcast transcript. Selected passages have been carefully woven together to create a cohesive narrative that speaks in the guests’ voices and faithfully represents their perspectives. – Rosemary Davies-Janes
