Healing HOME

We can have our home, our micro-world completely clean, orderly and organized into perfect cubes, complete with labels. We can manage our days by the hour, assign chores, prepare meals in advance, and snag every dust bunny out of the air before it lands. If this sounds like you, then I am here to encourage you to relax.

Yes, cleanliness is necessary for our health and self-esteem. Yes, organization keeps chaos at bay (and is also a necessity for many children). But when one’s physical environment is so impeccably orderly that nobody dares to seat themselves without permission, then it stagnates, which causes the life force energy to contract or become depleted.

And it also says a lot about you. It tells me that you’re a sensitive person and perceive the world as a cruel place to be, a place in which you have little-to-no control over what happens in life. But you do have control over your physical environment, and so you flex this muscle every day, and you flex it to say “See? I am in control – at least here at home!”

This creates a rigid environment, sometimes cold, or a sense of others “walking on eggshells” around you, afraid to drop a crumb. This is my grandma, and my mom, and it was me before I awakened to this deeply ingrained aspect of myself. In this sense, I believe that we can inherit these types of behaviors minimally by picking them up into the subconscious in early childhood. What can we do about it?

RELAX. Life is to be enjoyed. It is to be loved. We get rigid from deep-seated resentment around the world not being the cozy place that we wish it were. In time, this shapes the personality into something cold and austere. We might be the Queen of our Castle, but often the Queen has no guests for Afternoon Tea. And this is why. People like other people (and environments!) that put them at ease, places where we don’t strive to impress or appease in surface-level engagements.

TRUST. It is a matter of self-love (in the individual sense) that we trust that everything will ultimately work out despite fears, doubts and uncertainties. Trust in the human heart that overwhelmingly seeks change for the better and acts according to love. This is easier to witness in some places than in others, but seek and you shall find. Buy a new red truck and you will begin to see similar red trucks everywhere. Look for the good and you will find it, and it can slowly change your mind around trust issues.

CONSIDER OTHERS. Perhaps most of all, and especially if you do not live alone, it’s important to let others live as they will. Set some common-sense rules, teach responsibility, and let them be themselves. Accept if they do not measure up to your standards, because they are yours, not theirs. Have compassion for yourself, and issue apologies if your heart tells you to, and admit that it is difficult for you to relax when you have so little of a sense of control except in your own home. They will understand this deep and forthright honesty.

We can do ourselves and our loved ones the greatest service by simply allowing room for everyone to relax, trusting and accepting things as they are. (Think of the Serenity Prayer. Print it, keep it where you will see it daily.) It is much better for our health when we can do this. Sigh it out. Take many deep breaths through the day, turn on some happy music and sing. Do what you must to lighten your state of being. Science (namely, Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn in partnership with health psychologist Elissa Epel) has proven that we can literally prolong the healthspan of life by keeping the stress response in check, by maintaining a relaxation response.

Challenge yourself to receive a guest and leave a few (what I call) “signs of living.” You can apologize for it if you must, but what you will notice is how good it feels when you can experience this small triumph of letting something disorderly be good enough. You might even notice your guest relaxing in their body language, which is to say, you are giving them space to be real.

This happened to me recently when a guest had to use my restroom. There is only one and it is upstairs. I felt a need to apologize in advance for the fact that we “live” upstairs and it was out of order. She came downstairs and in a humbled voice told me how beautiful my house was, remarking astutely that it was built about twenty years before hers, and the extra attention to detail in Victorian craftsmanship is a sight to behold. I sensed that she was feeling compassion in that moment, telling me that “signs of living” are precisely signs of living.

We can let the home be a reflection of our true essence, which is a facet of the greater truth of Reality. It is a facet that we do not need to control; it simply is, and we can accept that.