In The Little Book of Big Change I refer to home base as that innate, default home within us. 
It’s our natural set point. The home to which the momentum of life naturally bounces us back.
More than “within us”, home base is us.
So it goes something like this. We feel stuff—thoughts, feelings, and all sorts of psychology.
That stuff takes us for an experiential ride. A little bit up, a lot down. A huge spike up, gradually back down. Updown downup updown.
Psychological experience does what it does and home base is the backdrop. The never-changing, never-affected, never-lacking or -missing or -altered backdrop.
There was some confusion about this a few weeks ago in The Little School of Big Change. It was looking to people like home base was a feeling.
Home base is a peaceful feeling, they said. Home base is answers, clarity, hope, a positive mood.
Nice feelings and clear answers may be what little mind—Little Ms. (or Mr.) Ego—calls “home”.
But the home base I’m talking about is not that. What I’m pointing to, as the source of mental, emotional, and behavioral freedom, isn’t a feeling at all.
It’s not psychological and it doesn’t have qualities that come and go.
The home base I’m referring to is the space within which stuff rises and falls. It’s that space of having a psychological experience, but it not having you.
The confusion is understandable. When experience shows up and we see that we are not it…
…when we get that we aren’t our psychology, we aren’t consumed by or synonymous with our moods, anxiety, concerns, opinions, preferences…
There does tend to be a certain peace to that. You can experience depressed mood or worried thinking and also sense home base. And the wise people in my school were right—there definitely tends to be a feeling of peace and acceptance that accompanies that.
But that’s not the same as equating peace and acceptance with who we are. Who we are is the space, the container, the backdrop, the consciousness.
What we feel is the psychological experience of peace or terror or craving or elation.
In this week’s Ask Amy, a woman is afraid of having a traumatic experience. Who hasn’t felt a similar fear? We all have.
And, she is not her experience. Traumatic or wonderful, no experience can touch or take away from home base. The more she sees this, the freer she is. Experience—even one that we call traumatic—isn’t as threatening as it appears.
Home base is not a feeling. It’s just the opposite.
See more about home base in homeroom…homeroom in The Little School of Big Change, that is!
