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3-2-1 HOMEwork

Posted December 3rd, 2008 by Linda Hollier

 

Homes reflect and influence our inner lives. Taken further, our homes also reflect and influence our behaviour, our culture and the society we live in. All events tetra-arise.

 
 
 
Becoming mindful of the fact that one’s choice of home – its location, architecture and decor, is a reflection of one’s inner landscape, can be most useful when doing shadow work.
 
Clare Cooper Marcus points out that many of the preferences and dislikes in our homes are projections from the unconscious. “As with dreams, we can live our lives ignoring them”, Cooper Marcus reflects. “But if we care about personal and spiritual growth, becoming who we truly are, the messages implicit in the dwelling – its form, location, decoration and state of order – and our feelings about those messages can be rich sources of insight.”
 
Cooper Marcus suggests jotting down images, words and feelings about your home and then speaking to your home and letting it speak back to you.
 
I would propose taking this one step further – speaking as the home, thereby completing the 3-2-1 process in what I would like to call your 3-2-1 HOMEwork.
 
Doing this HOMEwork provides useful insight not only into one’s current state but also into those aspects of the shadow that need to be embraced.
 
Is the “disturbed perfection” seen in so much of our current architecture also reflected in your home?
 
Does the fact that there are so many TV home make-over shows and the need to get in professional help reflect a helplessness or a lack of agency?
 
3-2-1 HOMEwork  also makes us aware of how a change in surroundings can help us bring about the changes necessary for growth.
 
Architects over the centuries have been aware of the fact that our spiritual paths can be encouraged by the surroundings we find ourselves in. The need to reconcile humans with nature, reflected in the architecture of Hundertwasser (who incidentally was fascinated by spirals) is but one example of this.
 
The home and its location can and does help to foster growth and change. One need only think of those inner city areas where a general cleaning up, the planting of trees and the creating of gardens has taken place. Statistics have shown that such areas have a significant drop in crime rate over a period of time.
 
The magnificent steel and glass construction of the Berlin Hauptbahnhof train station could be seen to reflect the need for transparency. And yet even in such a mammoth construction, the fact that the glass roofs had to be shortened by approximately 100 metres because the construction process was taking too long, shows how time constraints can detract from the original plan. How often is this not an excuse, and maybe a valid one, in our own homes and lives? But more than that, how often are we mindful of this fact?
 
Doing 3-2-1 HOMEwork has many benefits. I believe that this process can also prove in time to be a useful tool for businesses wanting to redesign the working environment of their employees.
 
So are you ready to move around your furniture (translation) or maybe its time for new furniture or even a new location (transformation)!
 
Are you willing to share the results of your 3-2-1 HOMEwork? 
 
Or maybe you have a suggested term for a home-soul dictionary.
 
 
Bibliography
Cooper Marcus, Clare. (1995). House as a Mirror of Self. Conari Press.
Fairall Morrell, Monica. “Home: A Mirror of Inner Being”. Natural Medicine Issue 44, December 2008/January 2009.   www.naturalmedicine.co.za
Gympel, Jan. (1996). The Story of Architecture. From Antiquity to the Present. KönemannVerlagsgesellschaft mbH.
 
 
 
 

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sacred temples

Posted December 3rd, 2008 by Dee Black


beautiful .. and may i add that cleaning our homes .. like bathing our bodies .. is holy

they are both temples where we reside

 

 

 

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Posted May 1st, 2009 by admin
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Can we expand on this?

Posted June 26th, 2011 by Travis Herb

3-2-1 HOMEwork is an idea who's time has finally come.  To me this is clear because architects thrive on principled methods.  Architecture actually means "first-principles." Just as Christopher Alexander's "Pattern Lanuguage" became one of the best selling architecture books of the 20th Century, when a manual for integral architecture is polished, architects will eat it up!  

I am very interested in contributing to such a project.  I'm new to the Integral Life Practice so as I develop, I will be translating the practices I'm learning into architectural practices.  

This has been on my mind for quite some time really.  I started reading Wilber in '98 because he was the only academic I could find who spoke of Vipassana and related practices.  I entered architecture school two years later and so embarked on a rather dual path, combining my honing of detached awareness with learning the arts and sciences of as indestructible an architecture as is humanly possible. 

 

"Builder of this house, now there are no bricks left to build with."

- Gotama Buddha

"We are perfecting what nature is trying to become."

- Frank Lloyd Wright

 

Honestly, I have often been dismayed by this zig-zag path.  And I still feel pulled between the direction of my career and that of Vipassana.  But I know the journey has been worth it and I look forward to many projects of integral architecture.

I once read how in Vinaya Pitaka, the first step to learning Vipassana is to find a place conducive to the practice.  Having wrestled with achieving a regular practicer for decades now, I have to admit how tremendously helpful it is to have a mediation room but who can afford it?  People of means often build meditation huts in the backyard but this is also an expensive thing to do and a difficult thing to do well.  Could it be that the community of meditators has been undervaluing architecture when in fact, the built environment is often pivotal for the success of a serious meditation practice?  

So thanks again for 3-2-1 HOMEwork and I'll report back soon.