Home   >   Art & Lifestyle   >   Are You Waiting For The Perfect Time To Make A Change At Home… Or Anywhere?

Are You Waiting For The Perfect Time To Make A Change At Home… Or Anywhere?

By on October 16, 2016
dana

By Dana Claudat

If you’re living in a rental that you can’t be bothred to furnish, if you’re putting any part of your life on hold until you’ve fixed yourself, if you are focused on many great things but have a lingering sense that it’s not the right time to move forward… You’re not alone.

So many people don’t create a home for themselves for a monstrous amount of reasons pegged on time, money and the big one…” something better is coming soon, so I better not get too comfortable.”

Over the last ten years I’ve found that the same thinking that’s so common it’s wild leads to a waiting game…. and the waiting takes on it’s own life, helping to keep a lot of things stuck in inertia, waiting for the right time to move forward.

I know that it’s still not common to think that your home is a relection of your life, but I’m seeing big headway in this idea becoming a part of our thought processes in popular culture!  It’s true.  I’ve only and always seen it to be true: your home is a reflection of your life.

And wherever you are waiting in order to make a home happen, you’re likely holding back the magic in lots of life.

It doesn’t take money to make a place where you live into a home all the time, but it may take a little creativity, ingenuity and deep desire to feel grounded and empowered.  It doesn’t require painting the walls, but it may require the effort to sort out the clutter or move some furniture, frame some photos or DIY some art.

The reasons I hope you try this aren’t just for the sake of having a beautiful home.  That’s obviously an ideal, but it’s not at the coe of all of this.  It’s to have a beautiful life.  One where you are worthy of great things.  One where you’re present.  One where life is happening right now, not in a few months or a few years or off in the distance when things change.

Creating a home from the place where you live changes everything.

If you’re waiting for the perfect time to settle in, your wait may be over.

There are very rational reasons I had for not making any changes to my own place a decade ago.  In fact, they were so rational that they became a speech I’d give to explain why I lived in a gorgeous cottage in the Hills in Hollywood with nothing but a couch, a bed of a mattress barely made on a loft, and nothing in my kitchen but a table and a few pots and pans.

It was temporary. I had other things to do.  I was too busy.

The walls were blank, and I was equally blank in my vision for the future in some ways.  I was scared to commit to hanging up anything, and I was doubly scared to commit to relationships, deeper new friendships, a career path… solid goals.

Once I had it all together, in some wishful way, I would just move into a house and say my life was ready to start.

“When I have the money…”

“When I buy a house…”

“When I finish this…”

And… instead, I accumulated the stuff of waiting: clutter, debt, confusion, a mild sense of malaise that became a driving anxiety…

And, for me, it became a game of fixing myself.   I wasn’t going to settle in and have a home because I was never actually at home, I wasn’t interested in staying a long time, I wasn’t sure what to do… and I believed that if I made my mission all about the abstract ways I was broken I could somehow soar as soon as I was ready.

Self-betterment in increasingly extreme ways until I could magically manifest the things that would make me ready was my deep focus.  I was focusing on being broken (after all, everyone else could seemingly easily find their perfect life, it seemed, so I must be broken, right?) and when I fixed the invisible brokenness, it would all come together.

Instead, for me, it went a different way.  In all my striving, driving myself to extremes and working so damn hard on fixing myself that it was exhausing, I got deeply sick. I was knocked out of the game of striving in a zillion different directions all at once, and I was finally truly broken.  I made the idae of waiting and being broken into a real-life, full-body reality, and suddenly I found myself needing to spend months at home getting better.

When I stumbled upon the idea of feng shui through google searches when I was trying to make- at the very least- my space a little better since I was largely unable to do much physically every day, I realized that my home and my life were relecting the same story: a magical reality where I was waiting…and one day it would all be perfect and life would begin.

Being so leveled by life, it was a little easier to be grounded in my space. I had no choice.

I started clearing shelves of stuff and displayed books from the most powerful time in my academic life.  I started wondering if maybe I’d go back to school and get a PhD and looked at this seriously, calling for applications and actual details to explore this as an option.

I took my own spiritual practice that I shelved (literally, I put my altar on a shelf) and cleaned things off , set up an area to practive and deeply committed.  It was like the energy of my life in the present exponentially increased every single day. I was getting well so much faster…I was astonished.

I had to cook a lot and I started pulling together real things I needed like glasses, a water filter, plates and mugs.  I scrubbed down the kitchen walls covered in a layer of neglect and started growing some plants on the table- an aloe plant and a few herbs- in what I learned was the “wealth area”.

A few days later- I got a job right next to my Buddhist temple, as luck would have it, and I could practice in all my breaks in the day. I still couldn’t do much moe han go to work and come home, but it was the first actual job I had in a few lost years and I was finding myself…alive again.

I re-did my bedding, I hung some art, I collected plants for the entranceway, got a new couch from a neighbor… All in my “career area” of the space…

And I found myself suddenly well, and suddenly soaring.  I went from waiting to studying feng shui as a personal endeavor and working in art again in major ways.  I was thinking about my future in more clear terms.  I had real relationships coming into my life.

It was like a giant tidal wave of greatness happened over the course of a year of making changes that led me to such power.  I wasn’t thinking about being broken any more, or sick any more, or waiting any more… I was creating.

And it all started when I stopped waiting and started creating a home.  Mind you: I had no money to do it.  I had no special real skills yet.

I only had a deep desire and a growing awareness and a willingness to create it…and it helped me to create my own life in the process.

I can’t emphasize this enough: you can have a home right now. Even in a bedroom of a parent’s house, even with roommates, even with problems that are big in your life, even without money, even if you’re waiting for the right time…

Create a home.

We all need a home, not just a place to live.

In the last decade I’ve seen lives transform so profoundly- careers take off, massive wellness restored, incredible breakthroughs, babies born, relationships come together, healing of the past, crating of the future, fortunes made, self-denial end- all from starting with a simple premise: home is really important.

If you’re living in a space that doesn’t really reflect you, that’s OK.  It’s common.  It’s a starting place.  Now, make a small shift. Clean up or fluff your pillows.  Make yourself a piece of art.  Get connected. No judgement.  All flow.

From there, the momentum builds.

The whole point of creating a blog like this is to give you the ideas and inspiration and awareness that space matters… and to empower you to know you can change it without having any special skills.

You can.  I am certain your can.

Home is really important, and it’s actually been waiting for you.

xoxo Dana

 

danaDana Claudat is a designer, Pyramid School feng shui master and founder of the holistic & artistic lifestyle blog The Tao of Dana (www.fengshuidana.com).    A Stanford-educated Art Historian with nearly a decade of experience in design, feng shui, research and writing about the ways that changing spaces can change lives, Dana has fused art, science and feng shui into her own style of expansive design.

In addition to Mind Body Green as an expert for many years, Dana has been a Guest Curator for Saatchi Online and her work has been featured in Glamour, Lonny, Huffington Post, Blake Lively’s Preserve and many more global media outlets.

Based in Los Angeles, her design and feng shui clients include Hollywood A-List creators and vibrant entrepreneurs, as well as artists and creatives around the world seeking more creativity, clarity, love and empowerment in their homes- and their lives.

You can learn more about working with Dana on your own expansive design-  from anywhere you are in the world- here (http://www.fengshuidana.com/online-consultations/) .

About simply...woman!

We encourage spreading the message of knowledge and wisdom. We appreciate and thank our featured partners for their articles. All information provided on Simply…Woman online magazine is for reference only; the content is based on the authors’ experiences and therefore is not intended as a substitute to the services of a fully qualified professional. Although every reasonable effort is made to present current and accurate information, Simply…Woman makes no claims, promises or guarantees about the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of the information.