A Short Meditation for Homesickness

Homesickness does not always show up as sadness. Sometimes it is irritability, a low hum of not-quite-belonging, or a sharp wave that arrives at an ordinary moment, a smell, a song, a public holiday nobody around you is marking. This meditation does not try to talk you out of missing home, it gives the feeling somewhere to sit for a few minutes.

Brief mindfulness practice has a reasonably strong evidence base for reducing the intensity of difficult emotions in the moment, even when the underlying cause, distance from home, is not something a meditation can fix. The aim here is smaller: making the feeling more bearable for the next hour, not resolving it.

This is a common experience for people building a life a long way from where they grew up, and it usually eases with time and with a life that feels rooted where you are now, even if it never fully disappears. If you are one of the South Africans living abroad I work with, the online counselling pages describe how sessions work across time zones.