How to Turn Your Home Into a Sanctuary, Today

Photo by Tatiana Syrikova from Pexels.

Let’s turn our homes into places where we can restore and resource ourselves.

It’s 2023, the year to make our dreams come true and start living our best lives.

For that, I’d love to show you how you too can start to turn your home into a sanctuary, today!

I think you and most people around us agree that things have to change, if we want to sustain our planet and ourselves, and not only continue to live on our earth but to do so joyfully.

This year is the year I’m opening the CREATRIX School to invite you to find clarity in all areas of your life, start creating the necessary changes, and then turn that clarity into ease and confidence about how to live your life.

The topic for September 2023 is HOW TO TURN YOUR HOME INTO A SANCTUARY.

In this article, I will introduce some of the core principles, that we need to look at if we want our homes to support our lives, growth and well-being.

And I will also share two practical tips with you at the end of this article, that you can implement right away.

And if you like what you read, come and join the CREATRIX School!

I’m looking forward to welcoming you personally.

Our home plays an essential part in maintaining our physical and mental well-being.

Like our clothes, it keeps us warm and protects us from certain environmental influences. Like our clothes, it is also an element in our lives that expresses our souls.

If our home and living situation are not in order, that can be a reflection of our state of mind.

This goes both ways, though. In the same way, the state of our homes might reflect our own states, it also influences our well-being.

It’s one of these vicious cycles which I think we all know quite well, and we’ll come to resolve a few of them over the course of this year.

In this case, we will break this cycle by taking a good look at our homes, what they are now, how we got to here, and by finding out how we would like them to be and how we can get that.

If you worry about the time it might take to allow for that introspection and work, I hear you.

But it also takes a lot of time and energy to worry or wonder about our living situation, to live in a house that is not organized well, or to obsessively organize everything to distract ourselves from other things.

It’s a choice we make either way.

We can continue as it is and try to wing it, or we can consciously set aside one or two hours per week for a year, and get the clarity we need in each area of our lives so that we can save time for the rest of our lives and live with more confidence, joy and ease.

And one of the wonderful things about starting this journey with our homes is, that these external choices and changes are easier than some of the later work we will do, which is more connected to our internal processes.

Yet, the changes we create in our homes will also serve as a visual reminder throughout the year that change is possible.

At the same time, they can make us aware that it’s not enough to clean up the house once, but that we need to make it a continuous practice, that we need to keep up for things to be the way we want them to be.

The same way we have to continuously clean and tidy up our homes (only that once we know why we are doing it and where everything belongs it becomes quicker and takes less effort and might even bring us deep joy and contentment) we have to continually keep up the practices that are not visible on the outside, but fuel our way of thinking and feeling and our actions.

But more on that next month.

Why Our Homes Matter

Everything is connected. The uncertainty and insecurity we feel when it comes to the changes in the outside world, we see reflected in ourselves and in our homes.

If we want to create a sense of security and stability, we always have to come back to see what we can change and what we cannot change.

And while we can’t change the outside circumstances, we can change the way we live in and think about them.

I feel very lucky in many ways, that I have lived in a small village in Ukraine volunteering for a year after graduating from High School, where we did not have running water, central heating or even an inside toilet.

Electricity was limited to a couple of hours per day and yet, after getting used to it, life became as normal as anything.

I know, from my own physical experience, that we don’t need these things to live happy and fulfilled lives. Do they make life easier? Yes!

Do we need them? No.

When it got cold, we heated with wood and coal, when it got dark, we lid some candles.

When we needed to use the bathroom, we went outside. And when it was a full moon, it even became a beautiful and magical experience to do that at night.

I learned to live with very little when it comes to material goods, but I also learned to live with gratitude and with an abundance of love, care, beauty, home-grown food and quality time while I was there.

My experience gives me an immense sense of calm, when it comes to the changes we see in the world today because I know how few material things we really need and that community, finding joy and being open and loving and caring are so much more meaningful and important.

Studies show, that people’s well-being improves until they reach an income level of around $100,000 per year in the current economic circumstances. Above that, we don’t get happier.

I would dare to say, we need much less and that a lot of people who have less are happier than many of those who have more.

So, the first thing, that I would like for you to investigate is what you really need, to feel happy.

We’ll do an exercise to guide you through this in the CREATRIX School.

What do you need to turn your home into a sanctuary?

So, in order to turn our homes into a sanctuary, we start by investigating our inner states, our fears, hopes and expectations.

But there is more.

While earlier generations did not have the freedom and need to question everything, we do.

And while that means that we don’t have to follow any rules when it comes to how we want to live and that we can invent our own lives, the number of possibilities we have because of that, can also easily lead to overwhelm.

Some of us live in cities, others in villages, the desert, on a boat or in the woods.

Some of us live alone, with or without animals, in shared housing communities, as families, biological or chosen.

And families come in so many wonderful formations these days, that that alone can mean a myriad of different combinations in itself:

Two parents with children or three parents with children. Parents living in different places and children staying with each parent at different times. One parent with child or children. One parent, with other single parents and children. One parent and child, and other people without children.

Each of these variations comes with its own set of problems as well as joys.

However we live, now or in the future, it’s essential to know our needs and why we decide to live a certain way and then to make peace with that.

Because the possibility to rethink everything and to choose freely also means that we’re faced with new problems, that have not been figured out by other people yet, so we will have to come up with our own ways of dealing with them.

While our world may be constantly changing, our ideas about a happy or successful life have often been formed when we were growing up and can subconsciously remain stuck with what we learned from our parents or grandparents or TV commercials, teachers, friends, or whoever we had access to when we were growing up.

While we (think we) are making our choices independently now, these subconscious believes can still influence how we act and how happy we are with our lives now.

What we consciously want and believe in and what our subconscious tells us to do, does not have to be the same and can lead to an internal conflict without us being aware of it, yet it can deplete our energy.

All we may notice is that we don’t feel happy or at peace or that something is bothering us, or just not quite right.

We might notice a constant searching for something else or a dissatisfaction with our situation, without ever really knowing why.

The good thing is that together we can uncover these subconscious believes, so each of us can decide for themselves what they want to keep and maybe even celebrate in terms of traditions and values and what does not serve us any more, so we can let go of it.

In other areas, we might know exactly why we don’t feel completely happy or very unhappy about our home, yet we don’t know how to change it.

In the membership programme I will share a technique with you, that you can use to uncover and test these hidden assumptions and then we will create doable plans on how to implement the changes you want and need.

How to turn your home into a sanctuary

So, the first thing we will do to turn our homes into a sanctuary, is to get clear on what we really need, to be able to let go of unnecessary fears when it comes to our living situation.

Then we will evaluate what we do really need and also what we would like to have beyond the basic needs, and make actionable plans about how to get that.

In this process, we will also take a look at hidden assumptions and other ideas or thoughts that might have been blocking us from finding true peace of mind and happiness in our homes until now.

And last, but not least, we will do some of the practical work of cleaning up our homes and then sorting through our belongings to gift, sell or exchange the things we don’t need any more.

Once the emotional and physical baggage is gone, we tune in to our deepest wishes and desires to bring our soul and our love into our homes, into the places we inhabit daily so that they can become a true sanctuary.

Are you excited? I am.

It’s such a wonderful transformation and empowering experience.

But whether you decide to go all in and join the membership community or not, I would like to share two practical tips with you, that you can use right away to make your life easier and bring more peace into your home.

They are part of my daily practice and part of the fuel that helps me to enjoy living my best life every day.