The House Witch: Your Complete Guide to Creating a Magical Space with Rituals and Spells for Hearth and Home - Arin Murphy-Hiscock 2018

Your Imagined Spiritual Hearth
Your Spiritual Hearth

One of the things you can do to further develop your perception of your spiritual hearth is to create one in your imagination. This imagined version in no way replaces or supersedes the location of the spiritual hearth in your home. Instead, think of it as your idealized version of the spiritual hearth, a place you can visit in your mind while meditating or allowing your thoughts to wander. An imagined landscape such as this offers you unlimited access to another representation of your spiritual hearth, one that you can carry with you wherever you go. It’s also a place where you can carry out activities in which you can’t necessarily engage in the everyday world for whatever reason (lack of space, lack of privacy, limited physical capability, and so forth). Think of it as your virtual spiritual hearth, linked to both the physical representation of your spiritual hearth and the actual spiritual heart of your home. Your imagined spiritual hearth can be a mental reflection of the actual physical place you have set up, or it can be an idealized spiritual hearth.

To create your imagined hearth:

1. Sit in the spiritual heart of your home, in front of the physical representation you have created or chosen.

2. Light a candle or oil lamp to represent the sacred flame of light and love that burns in the heart of the spiritual hearth.

3. Relax your body and close your eyes, breathing deeply and slowly. Visualize a flame, such as the one you have lit. Now slowly expand your visualization to see what kind of surface the flame is resting on. What is the light like? What is the room or area around the flame like? Look at the walls (if there are any), the ground, the ceiling, or the sky. These things tend to appear in this way for a reason, usually created by your subconscious mind. You may change these things as you desire, but think about why they have appeared in your imagination in these forms.

You are free to design your virtual spiritual hearth as you wish, but keep it simple. Remember that you are creating a space in which you want to feel safe, relaxed, serene, and still connected to your home. The space you visualize may not be very different from the physical representation you have created for your spiritual hearth, and that’s absolutely fine.

When you are finished, take some time to write down or draw what your imagined spiritual hearth looks like. Include these notes and sketches in your kitchen journal (see Chapter 8). If you like, you can perform a version of the previous ritual to recognize the sanctity of the hearth in your imagination too. Simply visualize performing the ritual in your virtual spiritual hearth.