Spirit of the Home: How to make your home a sanctuary. Jane Alexander
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the hearth, the larder, the bathroom, the cellar and attic are favourite spots. I have a tricky spot on my stairs which I am convinced is the home of a mischievous spirit. I often almost trip on it and keep meaning to find a way to pacify it.
Dogs were often considered guardian spirits of the threshold. If you can’t have your own living guard-dog you might like to put a pair of guardian stone dogs (or lions or dragons) either side of your front door or in the inner hallway.
I haven’t talked about more unwelcome visitors. Some people feel their homes contain unpleasant spirits or ghosts which can make a house feel very uncomfortable. I’ll talk more about this in the section on space clearing.
SO FAR WE HAVE TALKED ABOUT the home in a mythological, archetypal and spiritual way. Now we should take some time to pull in from the wider picture and start to think about how our homes affect us in a more personal, psychological way. For our homes are reflections of our psyches – the home you pick and the way you choose to decorate it speaks reams about your psychological make-up; the way you view the world; your hopes and aspirations; your deepest insecurities and fears. In House as a Mirror of Self, Clare Cooper Marcus says:
People consciously and unconsciously ‘use’ their home environment to express something about themselves. Our home and its contents are very potent statements about who we are.
By paying attention to the choices we make about our home, we can start to understand more about our psyche and soul, just as we can by focusing on our dreams. Jungian psychologists believe that dreams are ‘messages’ or projections from the unconscious; within them are all the issues and unresolved business of our unconscious minds. By working with dreams we can often find answers to our most pressing dilemmas. In a similar way, we project our inner thoughts and preoccupations, our likes and dislikes, onto the fabric and furnishing of our homes. Clare Cooper Marcus points out that an adolescent may well leave his or her room in a mess as an unconscious gesture of defiance to the parents. Someone might buy a home that unconsciously emulates the style of the home of a much-loved, deceased relative, or rent an apartment which is a copy of a childhood home. Psychologist Sarah Dening agrees:
Because your home environment is something you ‘dream up’, consciously or otherwise, it can, like a dream, say a great deal about the state of your complexes.
If you are a great hoarder of clutter, for instance, it could be because you are unconsciously trying to protect yourself against some possible lack in the future or that you are overly attached to the past and fear that the future cannot bring anything as valuable and meaningful as that which has gone before. Sarah says:
The stagnating energy reflects as inner stagnation, which is why Feng Shui insists that the first step is to get rid of the clutter.
More about this in Chapter 8.
Some people, however, are entirely the opposite. These are the ones who constantly make changes to their environment; who are always moving or always shifting the furniture. This could well point to a ‘Peter Pan’ complex: an unwillingness to ground oneself and to make commitments; a perpetual unhappiness with the status quo. Of course, in an ideal world we would be somewhere in the middle – keeping a certain amount of our past with us, but also being confident of greeting the future too.
LEAVING HOME
Before we move on to what your present home says about you, think first of all about when you left home. Were you desperate to leave or was it a huge and hard wrench? Maybe you are still living at home. Some people find it almost impossible to leave home, even if they are fully grown and launched in life. Even if they do leave, they will try at all costs to re-create the childhood home. Jung explained this as a ‘participation mystique’ with the family in which they identify first and foremost as members of a family rather than individuals in their own right. Sarah Dening explains that:
It’s a tribal thing. Some of my own relatives arriving as refugees from pogroms against the Jews did just that. One woman continued to live with her parents even after she married. Her husband simply moved in; her own children grew up in that house; and she still lives there to this day. In the background there is obviously a great fear of any change, presumably because change has been associated with circumstances getting worse.
Not all ‘stay at homes’ have this participation mystique. Some suffer from ‘eternal youth’ syndrome – they can’t seem to grow up and take on adult responsibilities. Usually this happens because they were so indulged as children that they just don’t want to move from this cosy position. Or it might be because the underlying message they received from their parents was that being an adult was a pretty miserable business and so it was better not to grow up at all.
Other people take precisely the opposite position. They can’t wait to find their own home, to make their own choices. Sometimes this comes about from a basically unhappy childhood and a huge need to separate from the family and to make your adult life as different as possible. Such people will want to move far away, or choose a radically different style of house or furnishings from that of their parents. However, just because you raced away from home after leaving school and chose minimal rather than copying your parents’ Victoriana, it doesn’t necessarily mean you had an unhappy childhood. Some people live perfectly happy childhoods but grow up to lead very different lifestyles from those of their parents. Sarah Dening believes these differences can be explained by Jung’s system of typology.
JUNG’S PERSONALITY TYPES
Jung believed that we could all be described by a system of four personality types and two modes of behaviour. We are all familiar with the two modes: extrovert and introvert. But the personality types – thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition – are less well-known.
You probably already know if you are an introvert or an extrovert. The extrovert will always reach out towards the world; the introvert will instinctively draw back. Most people will fall cleanly into one or other camp. Of course, we all have times when we dip into the opposite (the extrovert who needs the odd patch of peace and quiet; the introvert who will suddenly become the life and soul of the party) but they are exceptions rather than the rule. When it comes to the home, extroverts tend to be concerned with how other people will regard their living space, and will often decorate and furnish the place with a view to entertaining, to impressing other people. Introverts, on the other hand, are more concerned with what feels comfortable for themselves. On the whole, interior designers tend to be extroverts!
When it comes to the four personality types, or ‘functions’ as Jung called them, it becomes a more subtle process. Jung realized that some people approached life predominantly by thinking while others dealt with life through their feelings. At first he thought that extroverts were the ‘feeling’ types while introverts would be thinkers but with time he realized it was more complex than that. Thinking and feeling were dimensions of personality quite independent of whether someone was extroverted or introverted. He also realized that there were two more functions – sensation, the information we receive through our senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch and scent; and intuition, the information we receive directly from the unconscious.
Each of us will tend to be a mixture of two or perhaps three reasonably well-developed functions with maybe one or two with which we do not identify. Let’s have a closer look at each of the four functions and how they manifest themselves in the home environment:
SENSATION
People who have a strong sensation function are concerned above all with things as they are. They are less concerned with the aesthetics of the home than with whether or not an object is functional. If you are a sensation type, your home will run like clockwork! Shelves will go up, taps will not drip, painting will be done when necessary, curtains will be made with the minimum of fuss. You are concerned with how