Essay and Photo by Karen Johannsen
Sometime in the late 90’s, a few years after my divorce, I began to feel the urge to get out of my house. I wanted to start fresh, in a new environment. I loved my home and fought hard to remain there after separating from my husband, but it began to feel oppressive and somehow not supportive of my energy anymore. So I put it on the market.
As beautiful and affordable as my house was, it didn’t sell. I began to feel like maybe the Universe was trying to tell me something. So I enlisted the services of a Feng Shui consultant and friend and here’s what she told me:
“Just because the energy in your home doesn’t feel right to you doesn’t mean you need to sell the house. All you need to do is shift the energy.”
Wow, that was an intriguing thought. I’d pretty much always known that I could sense subtle energies, but the thought of being able to consciously invoke the qualities that I wanted to be surrounded with was mind blowing!
My friend suggested that I first list how I wanted to feel in my home. Immediately I knew that what I wanted was a home that radiated peace, tranquility, harmony and joy…qualities that my life had been sadly lacking for many years. She also told me to engage with the “Angel of my Hearth.” That was a new idea. There was actually a being that inhabited my home that I could connect with and work with? I began a practice of sitting in meditation each week, invoking her presence, and asking her to help with creating the atmosphere I wanted in my home. One day I looked up at the piece of art I had hanging above my fireplace and realized, there was a perfect representation of my angel. I began standing in front of this image and talking to her, reinforcing the desire for more harmonious energies to fill my home.
After just a few weeks I noticed a palpable shift. I began invoking her before every full moon ceremony so that people who walked in the door would feel welcomed and safe. Many people began commenting that they felt they were walking into a sanctuary, a sacred place. I was amazed and had to agree that things had definitely shifted.
I stayed with this commitment of weekly joining forces with my angel for several months. Then I let it lapse, feeling like we had accomplished what we set out to do. The energy in my house remained harmonious and lovely.
It wasn’t until reading David Spangler's work on subtle energies that I realized I wanted to re-establish this relationship as a daily practice. I began connecting each day with the “Angel of my Hearth”, the overlighting deva of the land that my home sits on, and acknowledging the nature spirits and techno-elementals that were also present. I wrote in a previous blog about how this practice has shifted the way I walked through my days. Seeing everything as connected and sacred. It felt expansive and inspiring. To recognize I was not alone, that I had all this help and that I could receive and radiate this new found connection. I could impact my environment in a conscious way and in return be supported by this field of energy. I began to see myself as a radiatory energy field as I walked to the grocery store, the gym, the gas station.
In a recent issue of Views from the Borderland, David discusses how many of us feel overwhelmed by the environment of chaos and disruption that is our world today. How it is so easy to feel like nothing we do can make a difference. He then quotes one of his inner colleagues.
“Of course you make a difference! Each person does. You are each a thought of God made manifest. How can this ever be inconsequential?”
I began to try to take that in. “I am a thought of God, made manifest.” How would I walk through my days if I really believed that? I began to feel empowered and strengthened in a deeper way. I started watching my thoughts and actions more carefully. Sort of like that old saying, “What would Jesus do?”, I began to think to myself: “How would a thought of God behave? Does my thinking reflect the being that I am, the thought of God that I am? It felt like owning my sacredness.
It’s easy for me, when I have a deepening awareness of something to immediately make it a job. “Ok, now I have to be very vigilant about watching my thoughts, my behavior, my attitudes.” In an effort to somehow be better, be more spiritual, be more aligned, more...whatever. Another of David's inner colleagues came to my aid when he said:
“Humans try too hard to be spiritual. You draw too much on your own inner nature and forget that you have help around you if you will access it. Relax and allow the Light to bear you up and unfold the qualities you seek.” He then went on to use the image of a seed. “The seed’s job is to know what it is. The soil’s job is to enable that identity to unfold and flourish. The seed does not struggle to bring forth its nature. It opens to what the soil and its environment bring to it to nourish its growth and allows its nature to unfold.”
I love this image because it reinforces the idea that we don’t have to always be trying to be better, to be more, to do more. We can just relax and be the sacred seed that we are, and we can connect with the soil around us, the subtle worlds, to assist us in our unfolding, to nurture our unfolding. We naturally and organically unfold into our potential when we are aligned with our sacredness, but we can be supported in our journey by connecting to the help that is available to us via the subtle realms, the angels, devas, nature spirits and elementals.
So the new awareness for me was that these subtle energies that we live in, especially in our homes, can be our soil. We can let go of trying so hard and just allow the energies to assist us.
Whew, can you feel the release in that?
May we always remember the sacred beings that we are.
May we be at peace with just “being.”
May we remember that we are loved just because we are.
And may this awareness create an opening that will allow the subtle energies to fully support our journey.