The House
There is this film on Netflix that deeply disturbed me.
It’s called The House and it’s a UK-made stop motion animation for adults. The stories are in the way of The Twilight Zone; the first two are particularly unnerving and the last one is mostly depressing with a hint of hope.
All the stories in the film are about our relationship to building and owning houses. They rattled me because I’ve been immersed in a journey of awareness in my relationship to having a home for the past eight years, and more intensely for the past five and a half.
It’s been nearly three years since the last time I had an official place to live, an address I could give out knowing with certainty I was living there for the next couple of months. The many places I have inhabited have felt and been temporary. Nevertheless, I learnt to create a home wherever I stayed, be that a room or a full house all for myself.
At the beginning of that nomadic turn, many things aligned beautifully and I moved around London; house sitting or lodging temporarily with friends. With those moves, I got rid of most of the extra stuff I didn’t need.
Eventually, that effortlessness disappeared and what loomed over me was the realisation I was in a foreign land with no family around me and no home.
I had to perform a leap of faith but I couldn’t do it in one go, so I did various mini-leaps. Not that I knew what I was doing nor where I was heading.
I moved to the continent and after that move, I felt terror constantly, a terror that I had felt before when my energy levels went down to 10% overnight and I didn’t know how I was gonna make rent; only this time the fear had been exacerbated.
I had a sense of constant dread. I feared being kicked out and ending up sleeping rough in a place I barely knew anyone. I crashed and burned repeatedly and the more time passed, the more I felt overwhelmed by not finding a hold.
I saw myself embodying all the “f” trauma responses — flying, fighting, freezing, flopping and fawning — in countless situations related to having a roof over my head. It was hard and that didn’t stop me because many times I also saw myself working on facing the triggers. I constantly sought to stabilise myself even when the threats weren’t imaginary and people made passive-aggressive comments or showed their teeth and screamed in conversations.
So many times the terror overtook me and I cried and hollered; no I howled in anguish not knowing where to go and what to do. Not understanding what all this meant in the big scheme of things. I shook in fear when privileged close friends I had explicitly told I had nowhere to live chose to host privileged guests around Christmas and replied to my request by saying it was “inconvenient”; when despite the number of people I have met or befriended only a loving handful offered help or a place to stay; when I trusted the “whisper” I ended up penniless, with dwindling energy and in a foreign country where I knew no one as well as cornered to be energetically ransacked in exchange for shelter, twice; when hardly anyone ever asked me how I was feeling about not having a home or financial means despite shouting about it from the rooftops; when I was expected to regulate myself in extremely stressful situations in order to be deemed worthy of help.
Not fun, necessarily, but very enlightening. Very sobering indeed.
I feel grateful that not one day so far did I have to sleep rough. I feel grateful that so many people helped me, many in the nick of time. I feel grateful for the huge growth and awareness I was awarded. However, this wasn’t a walk in the park. This was revisiting trauma or re-traumatising myself each day for many many months.
During that time, I pondered a lot about what is to be a burden for a household, for the system, for friends and family. I learnt to come to each location, each new house with a beginner’s mind, not knowing what would happen this time and just willing to observe what came up. Notably, I explored what it felt to be a guest, a visitor, a house sitter, a relative “down on her luck” and even a financial protegé.
I discovered that the foundation of our beliefs regarding homes has deep issues. The energetics of that foundation strongly relate to the dominant culture (AKA the mouthful AKA the white supremacist, ableist, cis-hetero patriarchal, settler colonialist, imperialist, capitalist and anthropocentric field) and replicate (in a fractal kind of way) hierarchical patterns as well as domination, exploitation and oppression in general.
Under the dominant culture, I am worthless for not earning my keep one way or another. I contribute nothing and therefore I shan’t have a voice. I am expected to know the rules of a house (generally without asking) and abide by them without discussion; one small infraction and I am moved down from the beloved guest category to the one of a freeloader. I am a favour, a charity case but not an equal. I should be eternally grateful for the help, for putting up with me because no one is not getting anything from me being around, right?!?!. I am a burden, a waste of space, a “why don’t you grow up?!” and a “why don’t you get a normal job”. I am crazy if I make a fuss about consent or if I say I know alternatives to what you do that could work better. The weight is on me if I have a need that clashes with your defaults; I am to either ignore my needs and violate myself or to educate you and hold you through your discomfort (for free and you may bail out anytime!). Though not always, I experienced these patterns often enough to identify how systemic and how hard to dissolve they are.
Luckily, despite all the distress, I had tools and also experiences of living in community houses that helped me throughout.
In particular, I lived for one and a half years in a very successful practitioner house which gave me an experience that, largely, didn’t match what I mentioned in previous paragraphs. In that community house, we had explicit boundaries. We sought consent. We agreed on basic practices and constantly expressed our emotions and our truths. We talked about house management once a week. We shared responsibilities. We set money aside in case someone experienced financial hardship and couldn’t make rent on time. We made sure all the food we ever wanted was available as well as all the house supplies and little extras. We gave ourselves a sober experience of beauty and abundance.
Of course, the practitioner house experience may have been worlds apart from some of what came after it but that doesn’t mean these subsequent experiences or the people in it were wrong. They were meant to be different to remind me of the amount of work it takes to build what I had in the practitioner house and to also break my bubble out of it so I could look at what is with fresh eyes. I am grateful for that.
All I have discussed so far has been just about having a roof over my head and interacting with the people who provided it. Things can get more complex when the land holding the house is taken into account.
One day, when I was lodging somewhere in Camden, I was fantasising about owning a flat in London and I felt a shortness of breath and a gnawing pit in my stomach. I felt overwhelmed by the responsibility of owning a piece of land and a building on top of it (even if shared). I felt what would be for me if I claimed the land and the land claimed me. I felt tied, constrained and overstretched.
During my walkabout of the last years, I increased my connection to the land I was staying on. I often cleared fields or left offerings by the houses I lived in and the land responded with love. However, I’ve never owned land because I started perceiving owning land as burdensome; mostly because I do not have the elements to articulate a relationship that is not vastly tainted by the diseases of the dominant culture.
Circling back to the film, watching it brought up a new set of distressing thoughts related to house ownership:
- The thought of being conned, ransacked and ultimately destroyed after giving up a much-beloved home in exchange for a pretentious dream.
- The thought of falling for the con of the “property ladder” and losing one’s integrity, sanity and humanity in the process.
- The thought of being so disconnected from reality and so attached to an illusion that the house becomes a prison for oneself and others.
After watching The House I needed to ground so I started thinking about what I know regarding houses that are well anchored.
This is what I believe. I believe my body is the only house that gives me a holding sense where I don’t need to move out. I believe my body has been a vessel that doesn’t think my energy and who I am is too much. I believe I have a mother who held my body and my energy inside of her for nine months. I believe my birth family and its home held me for 23 years and they’re holding me right now; I can feel the gravity of that holding even if it takes work and it is not always straightforward. I believe this planet and the Mexican land I am standing on are also houses holding me. However, I am not fully decolonised so I still default into an antagonistic relationship with them at times.
I started pondering on the energetics of being housed not only in the standard way but considering also energetic housing for creation, transmission and businesses.
Houses collapse if the foundations aren’t deep enough. They crack and break if the material they’re made of isn’t of the right quality or is not designed to hold what is inside. I have witnessed houses struggling or collapsing around me when full support is given on the way of teaching, money and creation.
Not that I have not been mindful. At times I have sensed my presence could ignite something and I have shared that with householders, sometimes to no avail. This is because a lot of the dynamics belonging to the dominant culture that I observed in regular houses are also found in energetic houses.
Therefore, just like with regular houses, I am very appreciative when I am welcomed in an energetic house that is a grounded space with boundaries, a clear vision and has been strengthened with devotion.
My dance calpulli is one of those spaces. Through the Tlazohteotl Cihuacalli and their participation in a longstanding practice, I feel I have begun to root myself in my home country.
I feel connected to the land of my birth and her energies wanting to work with me. I feel held and guided by structures and lineages; by the sweat, the blood and the prayers of my ancestors having a passionate love affair with this land (as Pat McCabe describes it) which have lubricated this connection for centuries, even millennia.
I feel a union with the Indigenous dancers across the Americas.
I feel like so much of me can be housed and offered within the container of my calpulli, the mesa Conchera I belong to and the moon dancers strengthening our prayer.
However, this house, my calpulli, isn’t an exclusive container for me. I am house poly, haha.
Last year, I entered another energetic house, the Remember Institute. I was a guest there for two magnificent courses, one who taught me about my racists and colonial patterns, and another who gave me the rails to create a business that is in alignment with what I believe and I feel as true in my bones and my blood. In there, I felt alignment regarding the acknowledgement and dissolution of existing forms of wealth hoarding and discrimination.
Recently, my relationship with the Remember Institute shifted. This energetic house is going to host me whilst I showcase the Erotic Engine, a tool based on the definition of the Erotic by Audre Lorde.
I value that so much!
I value being in alignment with the ones who built this house, the house guardians and ushers caring for her energy.
I value that at the core of this house there is an acknowledgement of visceral experiences and a pursuit for integrity, curiosity, equity, responsibility and enjoyment.
I value that I can grow my relationship with the members of this house such that we can discuss and disagree and learn and change our minds. At the end of the day, we know our hearts and souls point in the same direction so we can always go back to that, to that centre of knowing that anchors us with love and connection.
I cherish this house.
I feel overjoyed for being received there.
I am delighted to begin this journey and see where this relationship takes us.
In a world that is extremely corrosive, it is a real luxury to have an energetic house where we can get shelter. It takes so much work to build one and maintain it!
That’s why I consider myself very lucky; I am welcomed in two energetic houses I feel deeply connected to!
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An earlier draft of this essay was published on January 20th, 2022 on Facebook.
