Marta felt "home" on a cliff in Portugal.
What my second podcast guest taught me about coming back to yourself.
A few years ago, Marta was on a road trip with a friend. They were heading to Spain. The weather turned. Her friend said, almost casually, “Let’s go to Portugal instead.”
It was nearly 9pm. Marta was the one driving. They turned the van around anyway.
Hours later, they arrived in Sintra. Cliffs. Ocean. A sunset no one had planned for. She stepped out of the van, and something in her chest answered before her mind did:
“My God, I’m home.”
That feeling didn’t fade. It became the seed of everything she’s building now.
Marta is the founder of That’sY.me, a yoga therapist, and a teacher. She also works full-time as a textile engineer. She has lived in China, in Norway, and carries that traveler’s softness, the way people speak when they’ve learned the world isn’t black and white, but mostly grey.
We were introduced by a mutual friend. We jumped on a video call to say hello. Two hours later, I knew she had to come on the show.
What stayed with me
Marta wasn’t running from anything when she started this journey. Her life wasn’t wrong. She said it carefully on the podcast “Maybe it’s not the right word to say something was missing” and I understood exactly what she meant.
It wasn’t absence. It was a calling.
What stayed with me most was her honesty about the cliff moment. At first, she thought it was the place. The ocean, the sunset, the cliffs doing their magic. But over the years that followed, as she went deeper into herself, she realized something else:
The place didn’t make her feel home. The place reminded her she had been away from herself.
That distinction is everything.
My reflections since the episode
I’ve been sitting with the idea of coming home to yourself and how often we mistake it for travel.
We book the trip. We fly to the island. We hike the mountain. We hope the geography will do the work for us. And sometimes a place does crack us open, I’ve had moments like that too. But what we’re actually feeling, in those rare moments, is our own presence returning to us. The place just held up a mirror.
Marta said something on the podcast that I keep returning to:
“Do things as if nobody’s watching. Most people are more concerned about themselves than about you.”
I laughed when she said it, because it’s so true and so freeing. So much of what keeps us from coming home to ourselves isn’t fear of failure. It’s fear of being seen trying. Of dancing in the rain. Of asking the embarrassing questions: What actually makes me laugh? What do I want? Who am I when no one is watching?
I spent a lot of years not asking those questions. Not because I didn’t have them, but because I was busy being someone. Busy performing a version of myself that worked, that fit, that didn’t draw attention. And the cost of that, I now know, is a quiet kind of homelessness inside your own life.
Marta’s cliff moment is a reminder that home isn’t somewhere you arrive. It’s something you stop running from.
A question for you
When was the last time you felt at home in yourself?
Not at home in a place. Not at home with a person. At home in you.
If you can remember the moment, sit with it. What were you doing? What had you let go of, just before that feeling arrived?
If you can’t remember, that’s information too. Not a verdict. Just a quiet signal.
The asking is the green light.
Listen to my full conversation with Marta on YouTube or Spotify (linked above). We talk about her cliff moment in Sintra (Portugal), what it really means to live in the present, and why being yourself (fully, awkwardly, joyfully) is the most courageous thing you can do.
It does not cost you anything to share. And sharing is caring!
Until next week,
Cris
Author of Follow That Whisper · Host of Catching More Green Lights in Life