Welcome Home: A Guide to Building a Home for Your Soul

by Najwa Zebian

Whatever your brain is looking for, your eyes will see. If you are looking for the positive, you’ll see it. And if you’re looking for the negative, you’ll see it. It’s a matter of what you choose to see.

Here is what I mean…your ability to see, receive, and accept love from others is a healthy sign of you actually loving yourself. Because you genuinely believe that you deserve that love. In other words, it is not the love of others that forms the basis of or nourishes your self-love.

Being able to see your self-worth reflected in the world around you indicates a state of self-worth. So seeing love in several places is a direct result of an inner belief of worthiness of love.

If you set out in the world to see love, you will see it. And if you set out in the world to see lack of love, you will see the absence instead.

Boundaries are not about what you are protecting yourself from. They are about what you are protecting within yourself.

I’m not positive all the time. Negative thoughts visit me. Negative feelings visit me. And instead of pretending they’re not there or ignoring them, I actually listen to them and try to understand where they’re coming from, whether I choose to continue to think or feel them (which I rarely do), and then I let them go.

I am the only person in charge of loving myself. I will see evidence of love throughout my day. I am my number one priority. I deserve my own love. Loving myself means being at home with myself. My whole power is inside of me. Today I will answer my own call for love. I understand that I might have moments of falling back into old habits rooted in self-hate or unworthiness, but I promise myself to practice self-love any moment I become aware of my own negative self-talk.

For much of our time, especially in this age of social media, we spend countless hours aimlessly scrolling through our phones, hoping for something to happen—perhaps a notification to pop up, or a piece of information to bring us some form of relief. It’s all a distraction from our present. It takes us away from the power of the present moment with the hope that something external will make us feel better about ourselves. We give away our power over what we do with our time, because we would rather invest time in the uncertain than in the certain. The uncertain is the possibility of something external to us making us feel better. The certain is our current situation. We are constantly looking for an escape.

spending every moment you’re not working, studying, or doing whatever it is that you do, in texting, calling others, watching a show, and so forth? And it all feels like the feeling you get when you’re continuously eating but not getting nourished.

you were to build a home for yourself within yourself, you would be giving yourself the safety you need, the love you need, so when you look at others, you don’t feel in need of them welcoming you into their homes.

I am not defined by the love that others accept from me, but by the love I have within me.

If you truly and genuinely accept yourself, then that includes the love within you. And if you accept that love, then you don’t define its value by who takes it or what they give you in return for it. And you wouldn’t feel so desperate to give it just to feel it has value. Doing that means you’re defining your value only by what you do, not by who you are.

Why did I want to be vulnerable? Because I wanted to feel a stronger connection to people, to life, to here, to now. And what was I afraid of? I was afraid that rejection of that vulnerability would make me feel I’d betrayed myself.

was afraid that if he shut me out again after my being vulnerable, it would have been my fault for being vulnerable in the first place.

Perhaps it looked like constantly questioning why this person or that person was not being considerate of your feelings or why they don’t care about you. Next time you find yourself waiting for validation from someone, whether it’s in the form of a text message, a phone call, or any form of communication, ask yourself What is that validation really going to do? What is it going to tell me about myself? What is it going to REALLY change for me?

Every time you ask yourself Why is this person not valuing me? turn the question to yourself and ask Why am I betraying myself, my home, by giving someone else so much power over my own worth, over my own feeling of home? What do I need to give myself right now? And give it to yourself.

You are aiming to accept, not reverse, what happened. You are aiming to rise above the pain by walking through it.

Do not seek a cure from the person who caused you pain. Do not wait for their apology to give yourself permission to feel the pain.

The one in charge of letting go of the pain inflicted on you is you. Not anyone else.

if the person who hurt you came back to you right now and admitted what they did and said they regret it, it will not take away the pain.

Someone can’t be the pain and the cure at the same time. They can be the instigator of the pain, but they cannot be the healer of it.

I judged myself for having a hard time letting go of the ever-so-toxic attachment I had to him. Was it him? Or was it the attention? Was it the attention? Or the attention of a man who had power and status in the community around me? Was it my need to please someone with so much power? Was it my need to feel I had value as a teacher, as a human, as a woman?

Making sense of the pain and the trauma was not enough. I had to make sense of myself. I did not heal from my trauma merely by making sense of the events that led to it. I had to take a hard look at my life as a whole and the cultural and religious conditioning I grew up with.

Do not focus your healing on making sense of why someone would want to cause you pain. You will never know their true intentions or whether they actually intended to hurt you or

You have to welcome the pain when you feel it, not just know where it came from.

You need to transform those scars from being constant reminders of the pain into reminders of how far you’ve come from that pain. And, most important, there must be ownership on your part over your own life.

You must let go of the idea that healing means going back to the person you were before the event that broke you.

We get so focused on regaining what we lost because, to us, doing so is an indication we’re on the right path. We get so focused on becoming the person we were before, but that’s like trying to fit into a shell you’ve outgrown.

direction you need to take to reach that person? It’s in the past. It’s behind you.

When you break, you can see all the parts of you that you needed to see. It’s the messiest and most beautiful form of unraveling.

You must let go of the idea that you can heal only if the person who hurt you apologizes or regrets their actions.

Instead of laying blame on them for your current situation, you must hold them accountable for their past actions and take ownership over your present situation.

Sometimes forgiving yourself takes the form of you telling the story as you experienced it, not as someone else wrote it. Instead of “He first did this, then this, then that,” you are saying “I did, I felt, I…” And this is not to lay blame on you…it’s to make you the narrator of your own story.

You see, often we make another person’s actions feel like a big looming cloud overhead because of what we make their actions say about ourselves.

the moment we can separate their actions from what we think they mean about us, we can understand ourselves better.

felt/feel ________ (insert emotion) when ________ (recount the event that happened) because ________ (insert what it made you think of)

Letting go is seeing and accepting yourself as you are, without the pain.

OUTLET #4: CUT THE CORDS In Sparks of Phoenix, I used the analogy of a marionette: He attached strings to my self-worth and played with me like a marionette. If I could rewrite that poem, I’d say: I attached my self-worth to his acceptance of me. I said, did, and felt what I thought I needed to say, do, and feel to be worthy of being loved, seen, and heard. step 1: Sit in silence. step 2: Close your eyes or focus on one object. step 3: Imagine a person who hurt you. Think of all the power you’re giving them, as represented by the cords that tie you (the marionette) to them. Each cord represents something you can’t let go of when it comes to that pain or that person. step 4: Imagine picking up a pair of scissors. The scissors come directly from the foundation of your home. One blade is self-acceptance and one blade is self-awareness. You take the scissors to each cord separately and say I accept you and I release you. You have no power over me. step 5: Every time you cut a cord, imagine its power flowing back into you. Into your heart. Into your home. This activity is like saying I am dismantling your power over me. The power that I thought was yours is now mine.

By forgiving, I am letting go of what I have no control over.

I can only control my thoughts, my feelings, and my actions (what I do with my thoughts and feelings).

I get to decide when and who...

I forgive ...

I can’t rush forg...

It is my choice whether that person can or can’t come into my life again.

oh how grateful I am that my wish never came true. Because in this exact moment I am who I am, I am where I am, because of every moment before every exact moment

In fact, it’s ensuring that when you are compassionate with others, you aren’t doing so by depleting yourself, that you’re not developing resentment.

being compassionate with others does not require you to minimize your own problems.

You can do the best you can to effect change for others while also making change for yourself.

Empathy requires you to feel with, not for, the other

Those who practice, not just show, compassion. Those who, even when they disapprove of your actions or what led you here, will tell you “It must be so hard. I can’t begin to imagine feeling what you’re feeling.” Not people who will say things like “But how did you not see this or that?”