Everyone wants their house to feel like a home, not just a place where they store their belongings, sleep, and see what’s on TV.
All the same, it’s not hard to end up in a situation where your relationship with your home isn’t quite as positive and upbeat as you would necessarily like it to be – particularly if the place is disorganized and ends up being a source of stress rather than comfort and encouragement.
A big part of making a house a positive and encouraging place to be is a sense of the home being alive—or, in other words, having an aura of vitality, happiness, and energy about it.
Here are a few tips for making your home feel more alive.
Look for artisanal rather than mass-produced goods
Today, we are all inundated with more mass-produced and essentially identical goods than ever before in history.
There are certainly some powerful benefits to this. For example, consumer goods ranging from fridges to TVs and cars are now also more widely available and affordable, and this allows for great improvements in people’s quality of life.
At the same time, however, mass-produced goods naturally tend to lack the personality and sense of “life” of artisanal goods, where each item is unique and different, and has – and develops – its own story and character over time.
One great thing to do in order to make your home feel more alive, is to look for opportunities to bring more artisanal and handcrafted goods in your life, versus just mass-produced ones.
Decorate your home in a way that makes it feel more personally meaningful to you
There are all sorts of different ways to personalise and stylise your home, ranging from certain practical items such as copper mugs, to things like art pieces, statues, certain styles of curtains, and all sorts of other things besides.
If you can decorate your home in a way that makes it feel more personally meaningful to you, it more or less goes without saying that the energy of the place will change, and will feel more alive and upbeat as a result.
Treat your home as if it was a living thing you were trying to maintain a good relationship with
The famous Japanese cleaning guru Marie Kondo essentially argues in favour of viewing – and treating – your home as if it was a living thing that you are trying to cultivate a good relationship with.
In fact, she carries the same ethos forward and applies it to all personal belongings in general – and her book “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up” includes an anecdote of her thanking an old phone of hers for its role in her life.
If you treat your home as if it was a living thing that you are trying to maintain a good relationship with, whether you actually “believe” it, you will naturally have a completely different, and more positive, feeling about the place.
Among other things, you’ll almost certainly perceive the interplay between the different elements of your home as innately meaningful – and you will very likely also find yourself automatically experiencing and expressing a deeper sense of gratitude for your home and the positive role it plays in your life.
Ultimately, it will make your home feel more alive, in terms of making it a more positive, energetic, and harmonious place to be in a variety of different ways.
Try out some creative self-expression
There are all sorts of different ways in which you could try out a bit of creative self-expression on a personal level, ranging from trying your hand at sketching to painting watercolours to seeing whether or not you would enjoy pottery and making figurines from clay.
Ultimately, there are many benefits to trying out different forms of creative expression, whether or not you are especially talented at any given one.
Apart from helping you to feel more emotionally balanced, and more in touch with yourself, these forms of artistic endeavours can really help you to decorate your home in a way that is deeply personal, authentic, and that feels naturally alive and meaningful in a range of different ways.
