Venus Rising

Yoga for LivingIssue: Cancer 09 - The Home Issue

Making a House a Home

Last summer, my husband and I bought an 1840s farmhouse in Underhill, VT. The house was a duplex with two attached barns, a dirt basement, plaster walls covered in layers of wallpaper, knob and tube wiring, and original pine and maple floors. Needless to say, we purchased a project and have spent the last year fixing, remodeling, and updating the house.

The very first month that we moved in I became ill. I had two asthma attacks in the house and experienced coughing and trouble breathing as a result of living there. The basement was damp and the air was toxic. There was mold in several walls where the chimney leaked and dust mites galore. I had never experienced an asthma attack before we moved into this house. As a result, I quickly learned the environmental causes of asthma.

Shortly after my first asthma attack, I moved out. We bought a house and I was homeless. I spent the summer staying with friends, camping in the backyard, and traveling to the ocean. I was scared of the house because it made me so sick and the stress on my husband, who was left with the task of cleaning the place out and making it livable, was enormous. Thankfully, we are still married. I am grateful that I chose the wrong house and not the wrong husband.

Thousands of dollars and almost a year later, the house is livable for me. I still can’t spend a lot of time in the front room without developing minor asthma, but I know what we need to do to fix it. The experience has been a huge lesson in patience, acceptance, and letting go. Buying a home, which symbolizes security, turned into a completely insecure and unsafe experience when the home I bought made me sick. I developed a lot of empathy for people who live in unhealthy living conditions and do not have the skills or means to clean them up. There are so many children who live in poor conditions, become sick, and therefore have difficulty learning in school, which only continues the cycle of poverty.

I had to accept that I made a mistake and put myself in a compromising position. I had to let go of scolding myself for this choice and accept my situation. I waited and waited and waited while the work was being done and continue to wait, knowing that I must be patient as we slowly tackle the multitude of projects necessary to keep this home updated and safe.

I am not alone. One of my dear friends has multiple chemical sensitivities and has spent the last three years moving from house to house in an effort to find a “safe” house where she can breathe without pain. 

Home is not always a house. My best support while I went through the experience of healing from my house sickness was my yoga and meditation practice. Meditation was the one place where I could sit and simply be with my experience, when it was painful, when my lungs hurt, when I worried about what would happen and how bad I had messed up, when I had momentary flashes of calmness. Yoga kept my lungs and heart open. I found a home that was complete and whole, inside. Sometimes we have to lose our sense of security in order to find this unchanging place. 

Underneath disappointment and pain, there is also release. When things get bad, there comes a point where we simply have to surrender. This release is the ultimate home. It is that place where we accept our circumstances and choose to live here, where we are, rather than in a fantasy of where we should be. This allows us to breathe, relax and ultimately, to be happy.