Coming Home to Hara
Photo Credit: unpolishedunafraid.substack.com
Written by: Katie McGerther
I’m sitting cross-legged in my old worn leather chair, the first piece of furniture my husband and I bought when we first moved to Cornwall 16 years ago. Young and hopeful then, crammed full with advice, opinions, and strategies on how to live a good life, become good parents, and be contributing members of society.
I was armed with hypnotherapy and NLP training, convinced that qualification meant transformation. That learning techniques, gathering tools, completing courses would somehow solve the puzzle of being human. I thought I was doing the work—helping others adapt, fit in, find their way back to belonging.
What I didn’t understand was that all my doing was keeping me from being. That becoming the work meant settling into what I’d been avoiding: the fear, the wound, the original choice to abandon myself for acceptance.
What a fool I was.
Yet also one of the finest gifts bestowed upon youth: foolishness—it has blessed me with a lifetime of adventures, poor decisions, close calls, and most importantly, lessons carrying the real treasure, embodied wisdom.
No course can teach you what life will.
I have matured within the arms of this chair—broken, reformed, grown stronger, accepted weakness, turned back to the mirror, and found the courage to open my eyes and face my own shadowed failings. To recognize that my apprenticeship with life never ends. That the very adaptation I was teaching others was the wound I carried myself.
It has been a long, long journey.
And today, I was reminded once more of the lesson.
This morning I awoke to news I’d been waiting for—something significant I’d worked toward for months. And I felt nothing.
I spent the morning reaching out—to my parents, close friends, tendril acquaintances on LinkedIn. I even sent Ginny an email hoping to spark some resonant feeling—pride, joy, relief, fear…anything. Yet nothing but stillness, silence greeted me.
I cleaned the kitchen, had a bath, made pleasantries, and doom-scrolled to see if anyone had responded to my swinging bell. My parents briefly whooped, but nothing stirred within me. Nothing.
Then, with no direction apparent, no pull, spark, or signal of any kind being offered, I decided to do something I’d been promising to do since I signed off my Zen Leadership Flip3 training.
I’d already slept past the UK’s 6am zazen. It was now 11am and hours away from America’s offerings. But I followed the quiet thought anyway. I put some music on, crossed my legs, and sat within the arms of my chair—where I’d spent all my time over the months studying zazen with the rest of the Zen Leadership cohort. I took a breath. I settled my eyes into panoramic focus.
I wrapped my right hand over my left thumb and placed my combined hands into my lap, over my hara.
And as soon as flesh met flesh, a song released from my hara and my composure broke.
Like a small child lost amongst chaotic supermarket shelves, the clamoring of noise and overwhelm—I turned around and found myself swept back into the arms of safety. I was home. And my body shook from the relief of it.
This feeling. I’d completely lost this feeling. The warm thrumming song of connection. That part of me so desperately reaching across the ether, the internet, the cosmos seeking connection, resonance, celebration…
Only now, in this moment of mind, heart and present senses lighting up has it dawned upon me that I’ve been facing the wrong way—all this time.
I don’t remember the precise moment I’d become outwardly focused, my orientation rerouted, dizzied by the overwhelm of Christmas—yet there I’d been, focusing out over focused in.
And there she is. There she has always been. My hara, waiting, patient, quiet, holding the light steady till I was ready to turn back and receive her warmth. To come home to myself and know myself held, witnessed, and whole.
Even as I write these words, tears chase down my cheeks. I hadn’t even recognised I’d become lost.
I left my training in November filled with promises, commitments, and ideas that this was it. I had found my way. I knew my path. My fealty to the path was assured.
Then I stepped back into life: demands of the family, the excitement and frustrations of work projects, reaching out to the business world seeking validation, juggling motherhood, children’s fluctuating needs, my marriage, Christmas, and then a holiday.
“It’s okay, I’ve got all this. I’ll sit zazen when I’ve just got through this phase. Tomorrow I’ll get up early. Wait no, tomorrow. After Christmas I’ll focus back on my book, I’ll reconnect with my Zen Leadership community. Just another day, another problem, another visitor… once they’ve left then… oh I’m so tired, I’ll rest first, feel better then…”
Slowly my energy stores depleted, my sense of self strayed, my ability to hold a sovereign center for myself flailing. I hadn’t recognized it because the change had been so slight and also so familiar that, as the water of my disconnected life heated up to a gentle rolling boil, this frog had become so accommodating to the subtle drift that I never recognized it was time to jump back out of the pot.
Not till this moment of reconnection.
Feeling my hara pulse through me, the felt sense of belonging, do I perceive how slowly I’ve been switching my felt senses off to accommodate the increasing demands that my current life requires of me.
That morning’s reaching out—to parents, friends, even Ginny—seeking celebration, connection, validation from anyone who might respond. I’d been casting my net wide because I’d lost the internal compass entirely. I was seeking outside what could only ever be found within.
But I am equally aware that this journey ahead, even with this recognition at hand, is not going to be an easy one.
If it was just a matter of discipline, I think I would find it easier to walk the path of habit forming than where I find myself—which is, truthfully, afraid.
It seems silly, doesn’t it? Being afraid to embrace joy, belonging, resonant connection with oneself.
For surely isn’t that the thing we are all quietly seeking: integrity, authenticity, and the felt knowing of oneself in true loved belonging?
That is what my hara is offering me in this moment. And I yearn for it and equally feel myself bracing from it.
I’m a paradox of hope and fear.
Everything I want is right here if I simply soften, release, open up, and choose… yet, yet, yet… I’m afraid.
Because my psyche had learnt—that to be safe, to hold connection, to find belonging amongst my society—demanded that I be everything and anything except myself. I believed to my core that being me wasn’t only not okay but that it was dangerous. I was wrong. I was bad. And if I wanted to meet my developing needs, to remain a part of my community, my school system, working society, healthcare—I must adapt and I must sacrifice my feelings in order to become flexible enough to do so.
And now, if I reconnect to all I am, I fear two things will happen.
One: I will become all the things that my lifetime’s conditioning has taught me is bad, and if I embrace her, once again I will be unacceptable to my community, an outcast, bad. And I will have to sit in the pain and isolation of that.
Or worse: I will finally know myself home, resonating in belonging, and I’ll be forced to abandon myself in order to maintain my identity in society, my family—and the pain of that wounding will be too much to bear.
Though even as I write this, I can reflect upon my own words and realise: these feelings I am afraid of experiencing, I have already experienced. This is the wound that I’m already carrying, and the fear is one I am already enduring.
I wonder now if the thing I’m afraid of is becoming fully somatically embodied and having to recognize the pain of the original wounding.
Finally enduring what I long ago found too extreme, too painful. The soul-crushing experience of that first decision to turn on myself in favor of another’s requirement, to release my own authentic nature because safety was more important than identity. Because in order to get my needs met—I had to abandon myself and all that I am and become who my carers demanded I become.
That is the fear I carry.
And that is what zazen offers me. A road back to myself. A discipline, a guide, a method for returning me back to my own authentic belonging.
The journey home is a constant one. A choice made anew, renewed, a choice day in and day out to seek home. Eventually the habits form and a new mass grows around the soul, but the work still demands fealty. Refreshed commitment to choose the hara, to settle and step away from the madness, to seek our own inner counsel, to check: is this voice my adaptive one or is it coming from my heart, my hara, my sovereignty?
I recognize I’m not alone in this path. In fact, I have a whole community behind me. So I embrace this moment, I embrace you all, and I humbly give thanks that the ether sent Ginny into my life all those months ago, whispering, “I think there’s some people you should meet.”
Katie McGerther is a therapist, writer and founder of Cognitive Cartography — mapping the hidden architecture of the mind and the path back to belonging. Exploring the intersection of psyche, presence and emerging technology.
Based in Cornwall, UK, she lives with her family, two wildly entitled cats, and the ongoing practice of juggling both with as much grace as possible.