Your spiritual practice holds a vital place in your life. It can direct the positive course of your actions and serve as a guide by which you make your most important decisions. You may even have some goals you’re striving toward through dedicated practice. Even in your spiritual practice, however, it’s a natural part of your journey to come across obstacles you must overcome.
While many of these are likely to be mental, emotional, and spiritual, it isn’t just the aspects of your internal life that can impact your trajectory. Sometimes the external world will have a negative influence on your path. As such, it can be helpful to create an environment at home that serves as a sanctuary, a spiritual hub, and a place of peace that can empower you to thrive.
Let’s consider a few approaches to help make aspects of your home more conducive to your spiritual well being.
Declutter for Clarity
It is difficult to maintain a spiritual environment amid chaos. The impact on your mental health of being surrounded by a lot of mess — particularly as it relates to stress — is well explored. But it is also a vital component of your spiritual health. When you can remove aspects of mess from the world around you, it gives you space to focus on your esoteric goals.
If you’re committed to a lifestyle that discourages clutter, it can be worth considering adopting a minimalist approach to your living space. In essence, minimalism is focused on living only with the things you need to get by, without the distractions of additional furniture, personal possessions, and even spaces. Many people choose to downsize their homes to support this reduced approach. This is a much more quality-of-life-focused relationship with your environment. It emphasizes the importance of the spiritual elements in your life and how these are more appropriate for making a positive home than the extraneous possessions society dictates you should have. Not to mention that a minimalist home tends to be much easier to clean and is conducive to reducing stress.
That said, this can be an extreme approach, which may not be practical. If you have a family, particularly with children, minimalism may not be the right approach. However, you can still put in place environmental tools to minimize the clutter. Utilize storage bins that provide an alternative to filling surfaces with clutter. Take some time throughout the year to assess your belongings and donate what you haven’t used in a while.
Support Wellness
Yes, spirituality can be an important tool in maintaining your sense of wellness, but it also works the other way around. When you cultivate environments in your home to support physical and mental health, these are also supportive of achieving your spiritual goals.
Physical health may not be something you consider can be impacted by the home environment, but our homes are not always well-designed for our active needs. It’s important to look around you to see what changes can be made to put you in a psychological and practical space for physical activity. This doesn’t mean you necessarily need to convert your garage into a gym. It can be something as simple as arranging your furniture in your living room to give you room to stretch out on a yoga mat. It might be cultivating a garden area so you can both engage in gentle physical activity and benefit from the fresh air.
Remember, though, that your physical health can be impacted by your mental wellness and vice versa. Studies have shown the presence of stress in your life can induce physical symptoms that may exacerbate existing conditions. Mental strain can weaken your circulation in particular, which provokes illness and makes it harder for you to engage in physical activities. This combination of unwellness forms can be instrumental in derailing your spiritual goals. It can be wise, therefore, to create stress-relieving “zones” inside your home. Dedicate a corner of a room for moments of quiet mindfulness and tranquility — all you need is a supportive seating area and perhaps some peaceful music. It can be useful to utilize your outdoor spaces, too. Surrounding yourself with plant life can create an environment for meditation, which is beneficial to your mind, body, and spiritual center.
Seek to Inspire
There are those places in our lives that immediately place us in a spiritual frame of mind. This could be an area of outstanding natural beauty sparking awe and gratitude. It might be a church, temple, or community center where the surroundings transport you to places of mindfulness. However, our homes so rarely have this effect. You should therefore seek to bring some of this inspiration into your environment to feed your spiritual needs and also nourish your family and visitors.
This might involve literally taking a piece of those inspirational areas and transplanting them into your home. Utilize some of the same plants and colors from your awe-inducing natural spot. Display small statues or representations that hold positions of spiritual significance in your favored places of worship, prayer, or meditation. It can be as simple as giving yourself easy access to sources of inspiration — place books about your spiritual practice in your space of tranquility. While motivational phrases scattered about your home can certainly appear tacky, it might be helpful to display images on your walls that bring certain mantras or prayers to mind.
It’s also worth considering using your spiritual practice to inspire the direction of appropriate aspects of your home decor. This could be significant color schemes on certain walls or making layout design choices that reference ideas or areas of spiritual meaning. In some ways, this is a positive feedback loop, in which you’re harnessing your spirituality to move your creative choices, which in turn further inspires your spiritual practice.
Conclusion
Spirituality should be a positive part of your home life. Your efforts to create a spiritual environment in your living space can benefit from a commitment to minimize chaotic clutter and allocating spaces to boost your general wellness. Alongside a focus on inspiration, you can build an environment to bring you the inner strength and peace you value.