The House Witch: Your Complete Guide to Creating a Magical Space with Rituals and Spells for Hearth and Home - Arin Murphy-Hiscock 2018
Building Your Spiritual Headquarters
A Place to Call Home
The hearth-based house witch seeks to create and maintain the best possible home atmosphere for family and friends, to support, fuel, and nourish them on both a physical and spiritual level.
A house is a neutral structure, and a home is a living, thriving place that is created by the actions and intentions of the people who live within that house. The home is a sanctuary, a place of security. It is defined by the people who live in it, is created by them, and is keyed to their energy. Energy defines the home in more than one way: it feeds and propels it spiritually and emotionally, but it is also invested in the form of money that sets it up and maintains it. Mortgage payments, rent, furnishings, consumables are all fueled by energy in the form of money, which is earned by an individual through work or other exchange of energy. Emotion, time, and money are all valid forms of energy that go into running a household and home.
The home is where you build a base or headquarters from which you may venture out into the world, and to which you may return at the end of the day. It is a place where you can be yourself, where you can relax and allow the energy you control so tightly outside its walls to flow freely in a protected space. It makes an excellent and very immediate base for a spiritual practice.
Denise Linn, author of Sacred Space, says, “Homes are symbolic representations of ourselves, and in fact in a deeper sense are extensions of ourselves.” She is absolutely right. On an unconscious level, how you treat your living space can very often give insight into how you perceive yourself. On a more active level, by consciously controlling how you organize and decorate your living space, you can impact your sense of self as well and influence how you feel. Environment affects your emotional, physical, and mental functioning; it makes sense that it affects your spiritual well-being too.
For many of us it’s important to have a room or defined space within the home that is exclusively ours: a bedroom, a corner, an office or reading room. What is often overlooked is a communal area that is equally invested in with conscious awareness and is cared for in the way a private or personal space would be. Communal spaces in a home, such as living rooms, family rooms, bathrooms, and kitchens, become an aggregate of the energy of all the people who use them and the activities that take place within them.
Rather than allowing the energy to form willy-nilly without any sort of conscious direction, and living with whatever the result is, it’s wise to take it in hand and guide the energy signature identity. In the next chapter, we’ll explore the idea of how this impacts the spiritual health and well-being of the members of the family as well.
Energy is fluid and always moving, so the result is never permanent. Ongoing maintenance is ideal. And it’s never too late to begin or to work to reverse the energy signature of a communal room that is unwelcoming or uncomfortable in some way.
Maintaining, guiding, and shaping the energy of a communal room is a form of caring for the health and well-being of the people who use it.