You don’t have to sacrifice your aesthetic to design a home that supports your mental, physical, and spiritual needs. Check out these five spiritual design tips for better alignment with your living space.
Discovering the perfect home design is like finding your personal style. Are you a minimalist or more boho-eclectic? Do you prefer industrial or coastal style? What if, instead of trying on different aesthetics and seeing if they reflect who you are, you work from the inside out? This is the essence of spiritual design — using interior design to enhance your mental, physical, and spiritual well-being. This isn’t about decorating trends or how much you spend. Rather, it’s about allowing your needs to be fully met in the space you call your own.
We spoke to experts from various backgrounds to get their takes on spiritual home design and tips on how to start supporting your health through your home.
1. Direct the Flow of Energy With Feng Shui
How can designing your home be a form of self-care? Look no further than feng shui for the answer.
Feng shui is all about directing the flow of natural energy in a space. And to Anjie Cho, co-founder of the Mindful Design Feng Shui School, podcaster, and author of Holistic Spaces: 108 Ways to Create a Mindful and Peaceful Home, this means living in harmony with your space and being compassionate with yourself through your home design.
Cho looks to our cherished objects as a metaphor for this idea. We hold onto gifts or family heirlooms because they possess a sort of meaning or energy for us. The same goes for certain spaces — have you ever walked into an old park or classroom you once spent time in and felt powerful memories rushing back?
When we can acknowledge that energetic connection, Cho says, we can begin to understand how a space can be supportive or unsupportive.
A simple way to approach feng shui as a tool for nurturing your mental and physical health would be to eliminate the things that stress you out about your home, and turn them into things that make you feel cared for and safe.
For example, eliminate clutter by a doorway, which might be giving you anxiety every time you enter or exit. Or clear the pathway to your bed, so that you don’t feel stressed out every time you approach it to go to sleep.
“By looking at our spaces and our homes as something connected to us rather than separate, we can start to create more compassionate spaces — spaces that we can connect to and acknowledge,” Cho tells DailyOM.
With this in mind as a departure, you can delve deeper into feng shui as a balancing of different elements (fire, earth, metal, water, and wood) and energies (yin and yang, or masculine and feminine), depending on the kind of energy you want to achieve or emphasize in a certain area of your home.
Interested in learning more? Check out Spiritual Design for a Healthy Home
2. Embrace Imperfect and Fleeting Beauty With Wabi Sabi
Sometimes what gives an object — or a moment — its beauty is its impermanence. This is a key tenet of the Japanese aesthetic philosophy wabi sabi. Originating somewhere between 960 and 1279, wabi sabi is rooted in Taoism and was later absorbed into the Zen world view.
“Wabi sabi is an intuitive appreciation of a transient beauty in the physical world that reflects the irreversible flow of life in the spiritual world,” Andrew Juniper writes in his book Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence. “It is an understated beauty that exists in the modest, rustic, imperfect, or even decayed, an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things.”
In other words, wabi sabi is all about embracing nature as an example of the beauty in imperfection and evanescence. Matt Aspiotis Morley, founder and director of design consulting company Biofilico, tells DailyOM that because of this viewpoint, wabi sabi stands in stark contrast to Western industrial design principles like precision, symmetry, and grandeur.
So what would this aesthetic look like in the home? “Wabi sabi can translate into something as simple as a textured, hand-applied natural clay plaster wall surface, or a pair of handmade ceramic bowls with subtle and unexpected variations in color, shape, and glazing, for example,” Morley says.
In terms of materials, Morley recommends natural fabrics and finishes such as linen, wood, wool, tadelakt (a natural, waterproof, lime-based plaster surface originating in Morocco), and clay. He also suggests “certain specific material treatments such as the Japanese shou sugi ban style — a burnt wood finish that is now popular as a carbonized timber building facade full of intricate textures.”
According to Morley, a little goes a long way with wabi sabi. A well-chosen bed throw or carefully placed piece of pottery can be enough to invoke its appreciation for the flawed and transient.
3. Align With Your Moon Sign
You may have already used your astrological chart to discover aspects of your personality or compatibility in love, but according to predictive astrologist and astrotherapist Crystal Bichalski, your moon sign can also be a powerful guide toward creating a home that feeds your balance, peace, and serenity.
If you’re not deep on astrology TikTok, you might simply think of yourself as a Taurus or a Sagittarius — but that’s just scratching the surface. That’s your sun sign, which is just one placement on your birth chart. It reflects who you are on the outside, or how you appear to others. Your moon sign, another placement (like your rising sign, Venus, and more), is all about who you are on the inside, behind closed doors, which is what makes it a great guide for designing your intimate spaces.
Your moon sign “has everything to do with how you feel and emote energy,” Bichalski explains to DailyOM. “Setting up your home, living, and working environment to be in line with your moon sign can help you feel better in your day-to-day operations in addition to helping you relax.”
You can find your moon sign (and all of your other placements) easily through an online calculator, though you do need to know exactly what time and where you were born.
You can begin by incorporating your moon sign’s colors with small accents like pillows or decorative objects, or go big with a piece of furniture or painting your walls.
For the upcoming year, Bichalski also suggests looking to Taurus, “with expansive Jupiter in that sign from mid-May through early 2024.” This means Taurus energy will be strong during that period. So, even if you have no Taurus placements, embrace its characteristics, which include being down-to-earth, dependable, and sensual.
And, in terms of home design, Taurus appreciates art, beautiful surroundings, and things that activate all our senses, which includes plants or botanicals. So, Bichalski recommends integrating those influences, along with Taurus’ colors of pale pinks and blues, into your home as we head further into 2023.
4. Bring Nature Inside With Biophilic Design
If you found yourself cultivating a major indoor garden of exotic plants or herbs during the pandemic, you certainly weren’t alone. Pinterest named “biophilic design,” or the movement to bring the outdoors inside, one of 2022’s major trends, with millennials searching for everything from how to create a vertical plant wall to which fast-growing plants are the best to create privacy.
“Our focus here is improving indoor air quality, boosting occupant mood and productivity whilst also reducing stress levels, and all of this without negatively impacting the environment in our design choices,” Morley says.
The mood-boosting effects of bringing more living elements into your home are not just a feeling — they’re scientific. A study back in 1984 revealed that hospital patients who were assigned to rooms with a view of a natural setting recovered faster than those whose rooms faced a brick wall. More recently, a 2019 study that looked at over 900,000 children found that those who grew up in areas that had the least green space had up to a 55 percent higher risk of developing a psychiatric disorder.
For those of us who work from home in a home office: Norwegian researchers found that being surrounded by plants significantly boosted workers’ productivity and reduced the amount of sick days they took. Another study found that workers with more exposure to natural light performed better on tests, slept more, and reported a greater inclination toward physical activity.
Morley says there are multiple ways in which you can incorporate biophilic design into your home, so get creative.
“Direct biophilic involves air-purifying plants, living walls, and both indoor and outdoor landscaping — an immediate, direct connection with living, breathing nature, in other words,” he says. “Indirect biophilia refers to representations of nature in flooring choices, wall decor, acoustic panels, artworks, soundscapes, scents, fabrics, and upholstery.”
5. Embrace Your Agency as a Designer
Something to keep in mind: The very act of choosing to design your home so that it supports your needs can be spiritual and healing in itself — no matter what design choices you ultimately make.
Renata Leitao, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Human Centered Design at Cornell University, specializes in social justice-focused design, specifically as it pertains to Indigenous and marginalized communities. Leitao understands design as the power to act upon and change our material reality. She believes that any human can be a designer, because we all possess this ability — but as with any craft, designing requires practice, and a major component of Leitao’s philosophy is that you can pursue a home design that brings you peace and happiness even if you feel limited by your finances or resources.
“Making projects and acting to materialize them is about being the protagonist of your own life,” she tells DailyOM. “It is about understanding what happiness means to you, creating a clear idea of that which you desire, and allowing this idea to guide your strategic life choices — and not being subject to choices and projects of the dominant society.” Designing your home can be a way to empower yourself, the expert says. “Empowerment can be understood as the process of strengthening the capacity of marginalized people to shape their own lives.”
And while Leitao’s focus is on the empowerment of marginalized and Indigenous communities, her words are true for anyone searching for a way to become the main character in their own lives again: You have the power to change your material reality and shape it into a place of compassion toward yourself.
