Henes - Bless this house: creating sacred space where you live, work & travel

Bless This House

Creating Sacred Space Where You Live, Work & Travel

Mama Donna Henes

Mineola, New York

Copyright

Copyright 2018 by Donna Henes

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

Bless This House: Creating Sacred Space Where You Live, Work & Travel is a new work, first published by Ixia Press in 2018.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Henes, Mama Donna, author.

Title: Bless this house : creating sacred space where you live, work & travel / Mama Donna Henes.

Description: Mineola, New York : Ixia Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018001669| ISBN 9780486818450 (alk. paper) | ISBN 0486818454 (alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Sacred space. | SpaceReligious aspects.

Classification: LCC BL580 .H46 2018 | DDC 203/.8dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001669

IXIA PRESS

An imprint of Dover Publications, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

81845401 2018

www.doverpublications.com/ixiapress

For Omar, who will always live at home in my heart.

A home is a symbol of the world, our own mini-world, our own Mother Earth. When we feel safe and comfortable in our homes then we feel more able to deal with the outside world. When we remember this link consciously and honor our homes, we will change our relationship, not only with our homes but also with our wider home, the planet herself.

Jane Alexander, Spirit of the Home

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My heartfelt appreciation and deepest gratitude to Deirdre Mullane, my agent and dear friend, who has always seen the worth of my work and stood by me through exciting thick and depressing thin. To Nora Rawn, my incredibly smart, perceptive, compassionate, and generous editor, and to the entire tireless team at Dover for providing me with a most supportive, pleasant, and satisfying publishing experience. To Sarah Reynolds, my amazing multitalented assistant who always knows everything I dont. To Jimmy, Tommy, Terry, Terry, Andre, Dennis, Ed, Ryan, Paul, Marsha, and Sarah, my old building mates cum family, who taught me about the true meaning of home: about belonging, mutual acceptance, support, and unconditional love. And always, always and forever to Daile for absolutely everything important.

INTRODUCTION

Stay, stay at home, my heart, and rest; Home-keeping hearts are happiest.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

House Mama

My home houses Mama Donnas Tea Garden & Healing Haven, my ritual practice, which includes blessing ceremonies for weddings, funerals, new babies, new homes, and new businesses. Of all the ritual services I perform, my most popular requests are for space clearings and aura uplifting. I have cleansed and blessed the energy in hundreds of domiciles of every description and social stratum, in commercial and corporate environments, and for film, television, and Broadway productions. I have also worked with realtors to create an inviting atmosphere in the places that they are showing, and to stimulate movement in previously unsalable properties.

It is my intention in writing this book to share my love, knowledge, and long experience of creating and maintaining a sacred energy in any space, so that anyone anywhere can be inspired to cleanse and bless the atmosphere in your own homes and work spaces. Bless This House gives you the nuts-and-bolts wherewithal to establish the environment you want, and to do this creatively and effectively.

Here is a comprehensive suggestion manual for DIY (do-it-yourself) house blessers. It offers extensive practical information about tools, supplies, and procedures to use, and it covers all the Whys, Whats, Whos, Whens, Wheres, and Hows of the clearing and blessing process. There are detailed lists of cleansing and blessing agents: descriptions, prescriptions, benefits, and explanations of how and when to use them. There are, as well, fascinating and inspiring examples of multicultural House Blessing traditions, as well as prayers and blessing words from many spiritual paths to help you express your own personal domestic needs and desires in a ceremony that you create to bless your house.

Bless This House is also in part a spiritual guide to individual empowerment. It offers a series of personal examples and stories, inspirational texts, poems, quotations, folklore, and questions to contemplate, designed to stimulate your reflective process and heighten your awareness of your space and how you relate to it. This will help you to identify how your home feels to you and how you want it to feel and to function. This introspection leads to trust in your instincts and inner knowings and your willingness to act on them.

Above all, Bless This House urges you to claim psychic ownership of the energy that surrounds you. It fosters your confidence that you have the authority and the ability to establish a living environment for yourself and your family that is safe, supportive, and comforting and feels great. The resulting blessing ceremonies that you create will reflect your feelings and intentions, your personal taste and style, and your philosophy and belief traditions. Your personal House Blessings will ensure a uniquely resonant energetic atmosphere that is deeply meaningful, incredibly powerful, and always, always perfect.

Blessings to you and your home.

A true home is one of the most sacred of places. It is a resting-place to which at close of day the weary retire to gather new strength for the battle and toils of tomorrow. It is the place where love learns its lessons, where life is schooled into discipline and strength, where character is molded.

J. R. Miller, Home-Making

Bless This House

CHAPTER I

Theres No Place Like Home

I am a homebody. I have been a devoted dyed-in-the-wool homebody since my very first home of my own, an extremely raw and slightly scary storefront loft in a tenement building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I loved that place and especially loved that it was a large empty space just waiting for my creative expression. I was an art teacher, after all. What fun! I took great pride and pleasure in taming some of the most deplorable aspects of this ugly barn and creating an environment that was quirky and funky and mine, all mine. This was my exciting grand adventure Maiden Loft. I would probably never have left this living project-in-process, had it not been for the fire in that decrepit building that left me homeless.

That first exuberant experience of loft living was followed by a two-year period of having to live in furnished rooms, because I had lost everything I owned in the fire, and of course at twenty-two years of age I had no insurance. Then I lucked out by being able to sublet a loft in the Garment District from an artist who was in England for a couple of years. I could not make any permanent changes to her living environment, but her huge workspace was empty and available for temporary transformation. Having this much space to create in was my dream come true and led to my early forays into the art world. Alas, the owner returned home one day unannounced, six months early, and again I had to move on a dime.