Soul of a Home

I know I share with you in the collective heartbreak seeing the wreckage from the fires. We have luckily been out of the path in Ojai, but continue to hear of friends who’ve lost everything.

When I see photos of homes burnt to the ground, the grief overcomes me for the occupants, along with the home itself and the memories in that space. In my twelve-year career of being a student and teacher of the energy of spaces, the cornerstone of my teachings was that homes have a soul.

“Soul can incarnate progressively into a building as it progressively gains substance from wish, through idea, planning, constructional design, building, and occupation.” - Christopher Day, Places of the Soul: Architecture and Environmental Design as a Healing Art.

In working with homes, I came to understand that the energy of a home starts with the land, then the blueprint phase of the building, followed by the lives and stories lived in the space. Even if the walls and roof are no longer there, the energy, like an actual blueprint, remains. (I go more in depth about the energy of our spaces in my book, Mind Body Home.)

One of my favorite quotes comes from the classic book, The Timeless Way of Building:

“[W]e must begin by understanding that every place is given its character by certain patterns of events that keep on happening there.”

I watched the recently-released movie, Here, that exemplifies this quote quite well. The film shows the patterns that keep on happening here on a certain plat of land and house over multiple centuries, generations, and families.

Energy works the other way too.

Not only does the energy of the home remain within the proverbial walls, but a part of our own energy remains in spaces long after we’re gone from the space. One poignant example of this happened to be with an apartment I lived in in the Pacific Palisades.

I subleased it from a guy temporarily living in New York. Our only correspondence was through our Wells Fargo transactions, but I would on occasion have dreams about him while living there. The dreams were nothing interesting, just snippets of what I believe were his day-to-day life in New York. A part of his energy was still there in the space and I was picking up on it.

Another time, I had a dream of my favorite home in Nashville that I had lived in years before. In the dream, I came back to the house and saw a candle still lit on the coffee table. I realized I’d left it burning all this time. The candle represented my energy that was left in the house.

After these experiences, I developed a guided meditation to help clients travel back to past spaces in order to re-integrate any remaining energy, sort of like going back for items you may have left in a house. (Feel free to link to the free recording here if/when you feel led for such a soul retrieval. The meditation starts around the 7:00 minute mark.)

The more sudden we leave a space, the more likely we are to leave our energy there, particularly if a lot of emotions or trauma took place while living there. Ideally, we go through the ritual of selling a home and have proper time for saying goodbye.

I now think of all the evacuees who had to flee their home within minutes or hours, leaving behind all they’ve known. Meanwhile, the patterns of that space remain there suspended in an invisible blueprint among the ash.

I lived in two spaces in the Palisades that are no longer standing due to the fire, a third one if you count my first two weeks in LA at a rental in Topanga. Three other spaces I’ve lived in have been under evacuation orders. I feel it all. My low back feels like pylons I imagine barely standing in the rubbish. I mention this only for others who live or have lived in LA and may be experiencing random physical pains.

The city, buildings, homes, and bodies have fallen. Regardless of time and space, the mind-body-home connection is real wherever you are.

For those who’ve lost your home, I grieve with you. The ripple effect of this tragedy is both personal and global. It will take time to be made whole again, but we will get there, and I know the City of Angels will fly higher than ever.

❤️ Tisha