Enhancing the Sacredness of Personal Space
When you take on a project of enhancing your connection to Spirit by adding to, taking away, or shifting the décor in a room, you begin with the same question you would use for any spiritual practice of change: “What do I want to experience?” The answer might be “peace or love or Oneness.” The answer might be “connection to a time or place or season or person.” The answer might be “to remind myself of my creativity,” or it could simply be “to feel my connection with holiness.”
Starting out, you might make, find, or buy a physical representation of a deity or angel and add it to the décor of any room in your home. You may bring together other universal symbols of the sacred, such as circles, stars, crosses, candles, bread, flames or goblets and put these with your holy image. Other symbols and colors of personal, sacred meaning can be added to the mix, such as photos, sayings, and any other precious things. Put these items together in a pleasing arrangement to create an altar. You can create altars on any flat surface, in any nook or corner in your home or yard. The idea is to put spiritually meaningful objects and symbols in your living space so that they will continually remind you of your Source or another spiritual message that you want to communicate to yourself.
You can make a hotel room feel more like a holy site with the addition of a travel altar. Every hotel room has a desk or nightstand where a small altar may be created. When you are packing for a trip, business or pleasure, think about what you want to experience on your trip and take some sacred objects that will remind you of your desire. Add a candle and you have a travel altar. Although many hotels do not allow an open flame, I find that an unlit candle holds the power of illumination just as well as a lit one. This is a photo of my travel altar on a window ledge in Ireland. It has the green man, who felt right at home in Ireland, a bit of my mother’s ashes, which found their way into the chamber of Newgrange among other places, and the snake dancer from Crete, who travels on all airplanes with me.
The idea of acknowledging the fact that unseen support nurtures human endeavors transcends religions. Knowing that solutions and answers, courage and perseverance come to us from the realm of the formless to serve us in the realm of time, space, and form are notions that most people could agree upon. Creating sacred space for group work can be very powerful even if you refer to it as “establishing a receptive environment” or “helping our space become ready to support learning.” As a business leader, teacher, or group facilitator of any kind, you can use the principles of acknowledging sacred space to deepen the work that your group accomplishes.