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

by Najwa Zebian

The mistake most of us make is that we build our homes in other people in the hope that they will deem us worthy of being welcomed inside. We feel so abandoned and empty when people leave, because we’ve invested so much of ourselves in them.

First, emotions are energy in motion, meaning that although they seem so hard and real, they truly are just energy that will flow through and which we can absolutely work through.

The body keeps score. And when those things continually happen, they create strong neuropathways that cause our belief of not being worthy or not good enough to become more and more ingrained.

You can heal a recent wound, but if you haven’t come to terms with your past wounds, you can be sure those wounds will turn into scars that will continue to define you.

Home is not a physical place. It is the place where your soul feels it belongs, where you can unapologetically be yourself, where you are loved for your authentic self. Home is the place where you don’t have to work hard just to be loved.

every moment we live is connected to all the other moments.

The biggest mistake we make is that we build our homes in other people.

what many don’t realize is that when you build your home in other people, you give them the power to make you homeless. When those people walk away, those homes walk away with them, and all of a sudden, we feel empty because everything that we had within us, we put into them.

The emptiness we feel doesn’t mean we have nothing to give, or that we have nothing within us. It’s just that we built our home in the wrong place.

In education, we refer to the transfer of knowledge on a theoretical level to a practical level as praxis.

So let’s change the question from “Why can’t I have that” to “Why don’t I have that?”

The goal of constructing the road that leads to your home within is not to avoid the roadblocks in your way. Rather, it is to break them down and use them as road bricks you can interlock to construct the road. That is what makes the road to your home within unique to you.

When you don’t know what home looks like, you take whatever you’re offered.

We each have our own third space. It’s the space in which we feel we are our authentic self. It’s the space that contains all our preferences for how we would like to live our life. It’s the ideal space in which we feel fully and wholly represented. It’s…home.

These mountains that you are carrying, You were only supposed to climb.

The foundation is built from two things: self-acceptance (you must feel worthy of the foundation) and self-awareness (knowing who you are).

Because if I myself saw my worth, I wouldn’t base my worthiness on someone else’s seeing it.

Your worth cannot be derived merely from your knowledge about worth.

Self-acceptance at its core means knowing yourself as you are, with all your weaknesses and strengths, with all that makes you who you are.

ask yourself Is this something that serves me? Or is it just consuming my time?

To accept yourself, you must have no ifs. Your current feeling about yourself and your worthiness cannot be dependent on the possibility or probability of something happening.

As long as your decisions stem from your need, or want, to stand out in the world, you cannot reach self-acceptance. Your decisions must instead stem from your need, and want, to be yourself.

You might be accepting a version of yourself that’s just a product of your environment. That shallow self involves your ego and what it tells you about yourself. Deep self-acceptance, on the other hand, requires you to accept who you really are, free of conditioning.

Before you accept yourself, you must know yourself. To know yourself, you must be aware of yourself.

the problem was that I was so stuck on understanding myself in my current state that I forgot that this “me” is a product of a history that made me. A product of identities that shaped me to be who I am. A product of expectations of the world around me.

You see, when you don’t know why you believe something, you don’t feel right. Something is off. You are passive in your own life.

The feeling of home is the feeling of I’m together with myself.

Before you can genuinely love yourself, you must believe that you are worthy of love.

When you believe you are worthy of love, you will start seeing love around you.

Self-love is loving yourself exactly as you’d love the person you love the most. And that love actually feels like love and looks like meeting your own needs.

first remind yourself that you are worthy of the love you give to others.

If loving someone is beautiful, how is loving yourself anything less than beautiful?

If you define your worthiness of love by the worthiness that others see, you will always find a flaw within yourself, when the simple truth might be you’re looking for your worth in the wrong place.

just because someone doesn’t love you, it doesn’t mean something is wrong with you.

Instead of asking yourself What is wrong with me?, ask What did I go through that taught me to be this way?

Love is in action.

And to love is not about what you feel. It’s what you really do with that feeling.

If you say that you love yourself, what are you doing to show that?

it hit me that the only reason I was constantly feeling unworthy of love was that I was blocking my eyes from seeing love from any source other than the places I was seeking love.

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.

As you work on learning self-love, every morning, tell yourself Today I am going to see proof that I am worthy 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.

The love you have within you is your power, not what you get in return for it.

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

You see, once we stop evaluating the worth of our love by who receives it, or whether it’s received at all, or the type of reaction we get as a result of giving it, that’s when we can see the worth of our love on our own.

when you place the foundation of your home—your self-acceptance—under the roof of the person who gave you pain, you’ll never see yourself as worthy of your own home.

You need to transform those scars from being constant reminders of the pain into reminders of how far you’ve come from that pain.

If forgiveness is about letting go, it’s about opening space for anything you’re holding on to—feelings, thoughts, resentments, bitterness, helplessness—to be released.

remember that your scars are meant to remind you of how far you’ve come.