Sacred Design Tips for the bedroom

First it’s important to know the purpose of each room for you and your family. What does each room mean to you? What experiences will you be having there? What activities will be occurring there? What do you want your family, your guests to feel there?

In designing any room, select every item with your eye and your gut. Let each item have a specific reason or purpose, and evoke memories, moods or feelings that nourish you. Every item should be an anchor for something. Items that have no meaning for you, that don’t have a pleasing effect on you, don’t belong there.

What feelings and impressions do you want to greet you when you enter your bedroom? What objects, images, colors, motifs might give you the feelings described above, the feelings you long for? Before making any final decisions, do research and investigate options. Go to furniture stores, antique stores, art stores. Surf the web and see what’s available. Trust your intuition. Rely on serendipity and synchronicity. Get advice from people whose knowledge, taste and opinions you trust. Use the resources available to you. But trust your gut for all final decisions. Never go against it because it never lies.
The following tips will help you create an ideal environment for your bedroom or any other room. Let’s take a look at the bedroom from the center outward, starting with the bed, and considering other essential elements in turn.

The Bed

Our bed can express our personality, our artistic and aesthetic nature, and our true self in its most basic and elemental form. It can suffuse our body, mind and spirit with a calmness that is biophysical and sacred. Many of us have had profound spiritual experiences in our beds, in dreams, in reveries, in love.
In choosing our bed, it is important to place our attention and intention on every element of which it is composed, from the wood that your headboard is carved from, to the mattress you will lie on, to the sheets and blankets that will enfold you, and cover, drape and give shape to your bed. The only rules for creating your bedroom, and choosing your bed, is to listen to and respect your feelings, needs, desires and tastes, do the necessary research and investigation to find out and learn what you don’t that can make the difference, and then set your conscious intentions according to the vision that emerges in you out of all this.

My family’s bed is the center of our room, and in many ways the center of our family life. It is large, made from two large beautiful teak doors removed in the renovation of a Hindu temple. Thousands of worshippers over generations walked in and out of the temple through these doors that are now the footboard and headboard of our bed. So this bed has great meaning for both of us. What kind of bed would have the most meaning for you. My guess is that you will know it when you see it.
Furniture

Furniture is affordable and easy to buy in any of a number of furniture outlets and retailers like Pottery Barn, West Elm, and Ikea. Most of it is mass-produced in less than ideal environments by low-paid assembly line workers in batches of thousands in large overseas factories that have no independent oversight in terms of quality control, health and safety conditions for workers, and more. Much of it is typically made from low-grade materials treated with toxic chemicals. The furniture may be visually pleasing and even well-constructed. But I believe the environment and conditions under which it made leaves an energetic imprint on the furniture itself. Not to mention that the toxic chemicals often used in making such furniture leak into the surrounding atmosphere of our home. (Toxic home-environments is a growing health concern.) For all these reasons, and especially for your bedroom in which you spend more time than in any other room in the house), I recommend buying high quality furniture made by craftsmen without the use of toxic chemicals. For your sake and the sake of your family, every item and bit of energy in each bedroom should be positive, peaceful, healthy and pure.