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Healing Your Home What do we mean when we say: clear out
the toxins so that the life force can flow in? Let’s take a step back:
What is life? Well, we don’t know. It’s a mystery. The best we can say
is: life is the life force. It’s some kind of flow or animatory power.
All we know is that we are most fully alive when we are in connection
with that force, and it’s flowing through us. We are like human wind
socks, and it blows us up. Our ability to wage peace, to be peace,
depends on connecting with that life force, being in its breeze. It’s
the hearth, the heart, and our survival depends on letting it in. That’s
why we must clear out our spaces of what’s blocking it and let it in.
Neurotoxins, chlorine, TV, radiation:
all of these disrupt the flow. Feng shui, Vastu, and other home healing
arts are based on these same principles. They are focused on helping
the flow of energy through your home. Living space is a healthy space
when energy is flowing through it. Consider this article a spiritual crowbar.
Pry open a trans-dimensional rift in your home. Open it up to the health
and peace dimension so that the life force can flow through. The home is the ultimate bridge between us
and the outside world. It’s both an expanded version of ourselves and a
contracted version of the world at the exact same time. Just as breathing
is the bridge between the conscious and the unconscious mind, the home
is the connection between the individual and society at large. The home
is on a human scale. It’s manageable. It’s not too big, and it’s not too
small. It’s just right. Some resources, Web sites, healers, self
help gurus, experts and books focus only on the health part, on cleansing
the self. You won’t see much from these sources about saving the planet.
Rather, the focus is on internal purification. They say: "To be well,
work on you". But what if you are more than you? What if part of our
feeling of illness comes from the world being ill, because our actual
selves are part of that world? Other voices for peace focus only on the
outside, on politics or activism, with a focus on just changing the world,
or saving the planet, as if it's a goal that can be posited in contradistinction
to what we're already doing. It doesn’t matter so much how in tune you personally
are. What matters is fighting the good fight and knocking yourself out
for the cause, even sometimes at a personal cost. But what if we focused our attention on
the middle ground, on the homes we all inhabit daily? Of course, there
is no reason to reject anyone on the macro and micro ends of the scale:
those doing internal cleansing and spiritual practice on the personal level;
street protests or resisting worldly injustice on the global scale. But
somewhere between flushing out your colon and getting arrested at a peace
rally is cleaning up your living space so the life force flow through. Even if we can't manifest peace in ourselves
or in the outside world as often as we would like, or almost never,
we can take actions to manifest it in our living environment. We can
connect with the interconnected oneness that will lead us to peace by
making these simple changes where we live. By getting rid of toxins,
radiation, poisons, negative vibrations - not to mention noise, air
and water pollution - we can remove the obstacles that block our experiencing
deep peace. Then, it will flow in (it's always there). By clearing out
our clutter and surrounding ourselves only with things that have positive
associations, we create the space where it's possible to change ourselves.
And it is only by changing ourselves that we can change the world. So
we go: Home -> Self -> World. To take the peace thing all the way, there
cannot be a distinction between these areas. Self and World are also
our “homes.” And actually, we live in more homes than that. What's our innermost home? It's our core,
our soul. This is our most inner home. And yet it is the home that is the
soul that, as our ownmost nature, moves outward from within. The penultimate
inner home is the subtle body. From here we derive our concept of interiority.
Then there’s us as we normally see ourselves, just standing in front of the
mirror (in our skin). And our "homes" continue outward from there. The next
home is our clothes, sort of a second skin. Then there’s our house or apartment
or condo, our third skin in a sense. Then continuing out from there, there’s
our local community, our country, our planet, and ultimately, the universe. That’s eight homes right there. These
could also be viewed as many concentric circles of the self expanding
out, or conversely, many concentric circles of the universe contracting
in. If our goal is to be well, let’s start with our home and work in.
If our goal is to save the planet, we can likewise start with our home
and work out. When the home becomes the venue for peace action, it becomes
the fertile ground where we can take active steps to make peace without
needing to be politically engaged or disciplined spiritual practitioners.
Just homemakers! The process of becoming the peace we want
in the world is not easy, and we need to give ourselves the space, the
tools, and the context to allow it to happen. Taking action to keep
one’s house clean can be an active step in creating the space to be
better able to do spiritual practice and to have a sanctuary from which
to engage worldly powers. It might take a while to get used to seeing
the ripple effect of our choices. The very idea that every little step
we take to change our home is having a profound affect on the world’s
home may seem new to us. But it's more than a ripple effect. It's a
resonance. We’re that resonance. By changing ourselves
we can change the world. And by changing our homes we can change ourselves.
By seeking the life force within us, we can find the greater life force
that we are within. Call it DIY (do-it-yourself) Spiritual
Remodeling. Call it holistic retrofitting. Or call it what we called
it for this article, Healing Your Home. But CALL IT.
Whatever we call it, taking this idea to heart is our chance to discover our
own definition of what it means to heal. By starting within our homes, we
find ourselves already in that place where we participate in being the missing
link that changes the world. Please reference our new article
Top Ten Ways to Create World Peace by Cleaning Your House to see the
specific steps we have in mind. © 2003 Lawrence S. Comras Jaymie Coriell, Anastasia MacDonald and
Kaliya Young contributed to this piece. |
“Our ability to wage peace, to be peace, depends on connecting with that life force, being in its breeze. It’s the hearth, the heart and our survival depends on letting it in. And that’s why we must clear out our spaces of what’s blocking it and let in all the good stuff.” |
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