coming home
If you have returned from military service overseas, we'd like to contribute all we can to welcoming you home.
Coming home after military service in a war zone can be a challenging adjustment. After a tour of duty, you probably feel relieved to be home safe, but you may also feel disoriented, in some way more 'at home' with your brothers (and sisters) in the field. You may feel deeply changed by the effects of war and the losses of comrades fallen. You may be suffering symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress arising from your military experience. A returning soldier can find it hard to feel relaxed: perhaps having lived under continual threat and surviving on adrenalin. Coming home to family relationships can be difficult. Contemporary civilian life, with its many choices and consumer culture, can feel strange, even meaningless and unreal. Military training and service is a tough journey in courage and discipline. Servicemen and veterans have many skills and inner resources, though for a time after coming home you may feel pretty unsettled. There is a need for time, support and understanding in homecoming.
Meditation can help you find some home ground under your feet again, some calm and centredness, a sense of belonging and of having time and resources to adjust to coming home. You may even 'come home' within yourself more than ever before.
We recognise that a veteran's experience is a warrior's journey. A veteran, through service in war, has been through a powerful rite of passage: he or she has seen and experienced, up close and perhaps for sustained periods of time, a reality that most people have never actually seen or felt. The warrior goes through many strong experiences. Whether or not an individual veteran feels he or she succeeded or failed, whether they feel proud or doubtful about their military service, or an intense mixture of all of these and many more deep feelings and emotions, they have been through something incomparable to anything else.
Meditation includes self-care, integrity, healing, compassion and forgiveness. It can be very supportive in allowing the intensity of thoughts and feelings to settle, letting life experience become a hard-won part of the warrior's wisdom. Meditation can help us to remember who we are and find peace with our lives including all they have been, are and will be. We would like to offer all the support we can in helping veterans to make the transition home and to find new and satisfying ways to be themselves.
