How to Create a Mini-Sanctuary At Home
As I write in Spring 2020 the vast majority of us are confined to our homes. Suddenly a place generally reserved for rest and relaxation has become an office, a gym and perhaps even a classroom. Hearing various stories about how people are handling this rapid adjustment has got me thinking about how we divide up the space in our homes. I think it can reveal a lot about our priorities. How much space we give over to a particular activity reflects so much more than the practicalities of our living situation, it reveals our lifestyle, personality and choice of living companions (furry and otherwise).
Right now I want to focus on how we create the space we need for our mental well-being. This is a really challenging time for all of us, and we need tools for stress and anxiety relief now more than ever before. As many of us try to bring the yoga studio home, we might be struggling to find the same focus that we did before. It’s easy enough for our minds to wander in the safety of a yoga studio, but when we’re surrounded with reminders of our daily lives it can suddenly become a whole lot harder to focus. Those of us with pets, children and housemates might also encounter noisier distractions than our thoughts when we try to practice at home.
Photo by Valeria Ushakova from Pexels
One way to combat these distractions is to create a mini-sanctuary in our now multi-purpose homes. When we walk into a yoga studio the outside world melts away and we can focus purely on ourselves, if we can recreate this atmosphere at home, we’re bound to get so much more from a home-practice. It can be easy to think a yoga studio’s sense of sanctuary comes from the decor – white walls to minimise distractions, plants to make us feel connected with nature, incense burning to set the mood. Don’t get me wrong these things do really help to create a focused and peaceful atmosphere, but before you get out the white paint and Ganesh figurines, let’s think about what it is that really makes a space feel sacred. I don’t think it’s got very much to do with what it looks like.
When I think about the sanctuaries in which I’ve found real peace and focus, whether a church, a yoga studio, or my bath, they’ve all been defined more by what is not there, than by what is. The way I see it, creating a sanctuary is about setting boundaries, and adhering to them religiously.
To give an example, I recently spent a week on a yoga retreat in India, and one of the best parts of the week was walking into the shala (studio) every day. I loved the way we turned the yoga studio into a sacred space as a group. It was a large light room, it had a lovely wooden floor and a statue of Shiva, but these were not the elements that made it sacred. What made it sacred to us was how we behaved. We agreed as a group that we would set this space aside for yoga and meditation only, that we wouldn’t chat amongst ourselves before and after class until we’d left the room, and that we’d always tidy our mat areas fastidiously at the end of practice, in order to return to a peaceful and orderly space. This agreement, and our commitment to it as a group, transformed a large room into a sanctuary.
Our Yoga Sanctuary, at Satsanga Retreat in Goa, India.
Over the last fortnight, many of us have been busy transforming some part of our home into an office. This might also have involved setting some boundaries, a code of conduct – perhaps you decided to work in a specific room of the house, or to always shower and get dressed for work, or to keep regular working hours (perhaps you threw caution to the wind and are now living in wfh chaos, if so how’s it going?). I think it could be just as important right now to cordon off some part of our homes for our mental health. To those of you thinking, ‘must be nice, but I don’t have the space for a sanctuary at home’, I challenge you to think again. Firstly this does not need to be a permanent space, it could be an area that you set aside for 1 hour of the day. Secondly think about the way your home is currently set up and what that reveals about your default priorities. Is there a way to rework things to give yourself enough space? How can you make the space you need for peace and relaxation in a time of heightened anxiety? If you’re keen to give this a go but not sure where to start, here’s a little guide to get you going.
7 Steps to Create a Mini-Sanctuary at Home:
Decide what you need space for, is it for yoga, meditation, crafts, reading, having a bath?
Decide when you need this space, do you want to access it at a certain time each day or have it there for you whenever you need it?
Consider how much physical space you need.
Think about whether you can create this space and leave it or whether it needs to be temporary - if it’s temporary can you build up a bit of a routine or ritual around how you set up the space and how you return it to its normal use.
Decide what your behaviour boundaries are for the space, is your phone allowed in? Are your children allowed in? Are you allowed to speak in the space?
Explain your mini-sanctuary to those you live with, and ask for their help in maintaining your boundaries.
Start enjoying your space, try to keep to your boundaries, but be willing to flex these if you think you didn’t get it quite right to begin with.
Let me know how you get on with your space. I’m off to carve out a little meditation spot at home, maybe it will help me to finally practice every day…