What is a house?

What is a house?
Well, that's a silly question. The answer is easy, right? A house is a building. Maybe we don't call it by that exact name, maybe we call it an apartment or a condo or a mobile home, maybe your house is an RV or a tent, but regardless of what descriptive word we choose to use, a house is a physical space that a person or a group of people live in. But I believe a house is more than that. I believe a house is a living breathing thing. 
A house plays a role in our lives just like people do; it holds space for us just like our families, our friends, and our pets do. The most basic role of a house is to provide us with physical shelter. It's a place for us to go to be protected from the elements. That's quite a big role, deserving of respect, but a house is more than a physical shelter. It shelters us from the harmful behavior of other people, of animals, it provides us with a safe place to store our things. Now, obviously, in a certain percentage of cases a house fails at that role, just as people sometimes fail at their roles, because some people are just not good people, but for the majority of our lives it succeeds at those roles. Besides just physically protecting us from bad people and animals or storing our things safe from theft and damage, it also shelters us from the negative or over-whelming energies of other people and of our busy modern world. And yet still, a house is so much more than a physical shelter and a shelter from chaotic energy. 
A house is the first environment that we start our days in. It lends its energy to how we will go about each day. Just like making our beds sets the tone for the rest of our day, the space that the bed sits in also sets the tone for how our days will go. A house is most often the place where we prepare and eat our food, and the condition of your kitchen can dictate what energy we directly put into our bodies. A house is the environment that we come home to and end each day in. It's where we land ourselves to unwind, to decompress, to relax. Like starting our days in it, the condition of our house can influence our ability to unwind, to relax, to let go of our stresses. A house is the space where we often cultivate our deeper relationships with others in life. It's where we fall in love, it's where we make our children, and it's the environment that we bring them home to in the first precious days of their lives. We learn and grow as parents in our home, and we raise our kids in them for 18+ years. The energy in our house plays a role in who they will become as adults, and how they will raise their own children. We play games, we read books, we build forts, we watch movies, we play dress-up, we create art, we cook and we snuggle; it's the place where we spend most of our quality time with our kids. We celebrate birthdays, and holidays and coming of age moments. We create and pass down traditions in our homes. We welcome pets and friends into our homes, and we create memories and love with them too. Our houses are the places where we celebrate when we've had a great day at work, or school, or someone calls and gives us good news. It is the physical place where we dream and plan for our futures. If you are lucky enough to own your own home, it will provides a more secure future not only for you, but for your children and possibly your grand-children. A house is where we cultivate our creativity and our goals. It's also a place that holds space for us when the world is all wrong and unfair, when our lives are chaotic and stressed and sad. 
A house is where we vent our anger and our frustration when we've had a bad day. It's where we heal when we are sick and where we nurse our family members and pets when they are ill. It's the place we come to to hide when we are filled with anxiety or suffering from depression. It's the place where we will contemplate and make the hardest decisions of our lives. Sometimes, it's the building where we must witness the people and the animals that we love transition out of this world, and then it becomes the place where we grieve their loss. It's the place where we too, will eventually become sick or grow old and die in. A house holds space for us to feel safe through the tough emotions of living. 
A house plays a huge role in our existence. Our house holds energy! It holds warm air in for us in the winter, and cool air in the summer. It has active power wires running through all of its walls that move energy from outside of our homes in, to power the machines we use to make life easier or more entertaining. It has cables running through its walls and wireless signals beaming through the air to provide us with a means of communication or entertainment. It has pipes filled with water throughout to give us hydration, a method to cook our food, a way to cleanse ourselves and the house itself. Our homes are alive with moving energy even when we are not present in them. It's not only physical, tangible energy that brings it to life; it's alive with the unseen energies too,the energy of every person and thing that has come through its doors. 
Every item in our home carries with it an energy. Every memory or moment, good or bad, carries with it an energy. And those energies influence our own energy levels and moods, either positively or negatively. The energetic alive in a house influences the way we live our lives, the way our children, our pets, our plants and and the people we invite in live theirs. 
A house is a very special and powerful place. It is a sacred place, a very sacred personal space. It's the thing that we work hardest to keep in our lives, and the thing that most of our hard-earned money will be spent on. When our homes aren't treated with respect or cared for, neither are we. And vice-versa. When our house is chaotic, so our our lives. When our house is stressed, so are we. When our house is cluttered, so are our minds. When the places we eat and go to get clean are unhealthy, so are we. And the opposite, when we are unhealthy, our house often falls into an unhealthy state. A house isn't just a building. It's an organism with its own unique ebb and flow of energy. 
I want you to think about your life and what people, things, activities, and qualities you hold most valuable. Write them down. Make a list of five to ten things that you value most. Then, based on your values, write down five to ten goals you have for yourself over the course of the next year. Where and how do you want to be this time next year? Sit with those two lists for a minute, and then get up and walk through your whole house room by room. Does your house carry with it an energy that reflects those values? Does the energy  of your home support your goals in life? What areas or things in your home participate in holding you back from living your core values and attaining your goals? And what area or things in your home energetically support your vision for your how your future unfolds. Write those things down too. Put them on your refrigerator, your chalkboard, or your vision board if you have one. 
If you find yourself stuck in undesirable pattern in life that doesn't support the highest version of you, chances are when you walk through your home, you will find lots of areas and things that are preventing the flow of energy and no longer serve you. It's time to remove those things that distract us, that make us sad, that stress us out, that remind us of our failures, of people who were unkind to us or hurt us, of things that keep us up at night making lists of all the unfinished projects we must complete tomorrow and prevent real quality sleep. It's time to remove all that doesn't help us to make our dreams become our reality. 
Tomorrow, our 30-Days-to-Neat: Declutter Challenge begins. Commit yourself to taking ten to twenty minutes of your day, each day for the nesx thirty days to create more space, time, energy, and money for the things you value most in life. Join me as I go live tomorrow, March 24th, at noon eastern time to lead us through the first small step to decluttering our lives. www.facebook.com/theneatfreaks