Alaya means “home” in Sanskrit. So we could translate the fifth lojong slogan, “Rest in the nature of alaya, of essence,” as coming back home. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche says, “You don’t have to run away from yourself all the time in order to get something outside. You can just come home and relax. The idea is to return to home-sweet-home.”

That’s why emphasizing rest is so important in this slogan. We learn to stop running away and running around and just come home to ourselves. We rest, right where we are, right in who we are, right in the middle of our basic human goodness that is our home.

I love what Norman Fischer says, too. He writes, “There’s no need to figure everything out. We can just be alive. We can breathe in and breathe out and let go and just trust our life, trust our body. Our body and our life know what to do.”

Our body and our life know what to do. Do we trust that?

We are rarely taught to trust our inner intuition. (It’s one of my life callings to help people recover that skill.) But we cannot possibly rest unless we also trust.

So maybe today, maybe this weekend, maybe over the next few weeks, you just give yourself a little inventory. Do I trust that I can come home to myself? That my body and my life know what to do? That my soul knows the way?

Alaya: home sweet home. It’s always waiting, and you can come home to it anytime.