Photo credit: Daniela. (CC BY 2.0)

We all need a refuge. We all want to live in a space that makes us feel safe, inspired, fully refreshed, and ready to take on the world. We all deserve to live in a place that we can truly call home.

Unfortunately, for many of us, the condition and appearance of the place where we live make us feel uneasy instead of refreshed, resulting in relationship, career, and creative blocks. With all the vulnerability in our world today, now more than ever we need to feel truly at home in our living quarters and in our own bodies. It is time for all of us to come home.

Creating a Living Space that Promotes Growth & Change

When you intentionally create a space that promotes growth and change, you support a natural process. We are all always growing and changing, and we can either fight it or embrace it and encourage it. When you promote positive changes by employing conscious design, you are seeding your home with wishes and desires for your life.

The right environment encourages you to embody your greatness, inspiring personal revolution and evolution, gently urging you toward achievement, greater success, and the life that you were meant to live — toward the greatest expression of your soul.

Feel At Home: Finding Refuge & Renewal Within Your Own Four Walls

Listen to the messages encoded in the home you have created. You’ll then be empowered to re-create your space to support the life you have always dreamed of living. Once you face your belongings, confront your fears, unclutter your space, and discover your personal desires and truths, you will have more energy, feel more inspired, access more creativity, and find that you can harness your creativity and find refuge, renewal, and splendor within your own four walls.

By working through the process in manageable stages, you deepen your understanding of yourself as you emotionally dismantle and physically renovate your surroundings. By using your belongings as a concrete way to investigate and understand your feelings and attachments, you will expose and then begin to break down old patterns, literally “making room” for your new, more evolved self.

If you can achieve and anchor beauty in your most sacred and intimate refuge — your home — you will find that your home will support you in every area of your life; if you can create peace and beauty in your home, you can create peace and beauty in all the areas of your life and in all the spaces you inhabit.

The Eight Stages of the SoulSpace Process

The SoulSpace process has eight stages, broken down into three parts, that will take you on a step-by-step journey through what may be one of the most important projects of your life.

By using conscious design with the SoulSpace process, you can learn to support yourself in a whole new way, learning to be the person you want to become tomorrow, supported by the experiences of yesterday, living more fully in who you are today.

Knowing The Past So That We Can Make Choices for our Future

Part 1 focuses on knowing the past, because the past is what brought us to where we are and made us who we are right now. When we investigate our conscious and unconscious attachments to the past by looking clearly at the things we have chosen to own and the home we have organized for ourselves, we can learn to honor those parts of ourselves that we may have forgotten, and release the extra baggage — literal and metaphorical — that we have been carrying around for too many years.

It’s about becoming aware of all the choices we have made leading up to this moment, and deciding whether we want to continue making the same choices as we move forward.

Assess & Release -- Then Cleanse & Purify Your Home

Part 1 comprises the first three stages of the SoulSpace process. In stage 1, assess, we examine how and why we have created the home we have, and we take an accurate reading of what and whom it supports. Stage 2, release, teaches us how to let go and why doing so is integral. This stage culminates in our disposing of literal and figurative baggage. In stage 3, cleanse, we clean and purify our home, paying homage to our most cherished memories and belongings. This stage awakens our gratitude for the things we love.

Manifesting the Future: How Do I Want to Live?

Part 2 is about manifesting the future. It invites us to ask ourselves, “How do I want to live?” During this phase we focus on our hopes for the future, learning how to lay the foundation for our dreams via the objects we choose to live with. We work to make changes in our homes that will trigger continued change and growth in our everyday activities so that our environment can gently whisper to us and remind us of our chosen path.

Stages 4 through 6 make up part 2. In stage 4, dream, we let our imaginations soar as we brainstorm the ways in which we can employ our home in the manifestation of our dreams. Then, in stage 5, discover, we collect the ingredients for realizing our dreams; we go out into the world to be inspired, opening ourselves to what the world delivers. Stage 6, create, helps us manifest our dreams in three dimensions by infusing our home with furnishings that reflect our true selves.

Living in Harmony with our True Nature

Part 3 is living the present. Here we take steps to live actively in the now, with a full understanding of what has brought us here and of our goals for the future. We can begin to live life in harmony with our true nature and in an environment that supports and encourages us to continuously live our dreams.

Stage 7, elevate, encourages us to nourish all our senses and make living in our home a richer experience. Finally, in stage 8, we celebrate! Now that we have a SoulSpace to enjoy every day, we can share more of ourselves with our friends and family.

Copyright © 2011 by Xorin Balbes.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher,
New World Library. www.NewWorldLibrary.com

Article Source

SoulSpace: Transform Your Home, Transform Your Life
by Xorin Balbes.

Discover fresh ways to declutter, refresh, and enhance your living space. Xorin’s wonderfully unique technique will nurture and transform both your soul and your home. The process works for any budget, anytime, anywhere and results in inspiration, self-discovery, and practical solutions.

Click here for more info and/or to order this book on Amazon.

About the Author

Xorin Balbes is an award-winning architectural conservator, designer, philanthropist, and co-owner of the interior and architectural design firm SoulSpace Home. His most recent project is the transformation of the Fred Baldwin Memorial Home on Maui into SoulSpace Sanctuary, a rejuvenation destination with twenty-eight ocean-view bedrooms and a farm-to-table restaurant. Xorin is also the cofounder of the nonprofit organization Global Vision for Peace, which launched at the 2002 Academy Awards, with many prominent celebrities and Oscar winners sending a message to the world that Americans were standing up for peace. The organization’s focus and mission have recently evolved to promote awareness of and solutions to the burgeoning problem of homelessness, focusing on one person, one family at a time. His website is soulspace.com/.