Unfortunaly, this is not the home we'll be moving into, but rather a gorgous home on Martha's Vineyard, but I figured some imagery would be nice 🙂

In about a month I’ll be moving into a new home with my girlfriend and 5 other awesome individuals. This is very exciting. It’s a huge loft, just renovated, with a ton of windows and lots of space. The idea is to create somewhat of a community feeling, where we share and support each other, and cook and create together, where we can dance and play, but also respect everyone’s need for personal private space. So far, we’re envisioning more houseplants than you can imagine, and lots of color and art.

It’s a pretty huge transition for me (and most others involved). The past year and a half, I’m been living with a different group of amazing people in a community/cooperative home that I help create. It’s been a pretty special journey for me, and has led to a lot of personal growth and I’ve gained a tremendous amount of experience. We’ve had our ups and downs, but we continually come together as a group to solve problems when needed and celebrate when it’s time.

That’s just a little background on me, that will maybe help put this blog-post in context. As a holistic healer, I look at the whole state of an individual. Obviously this points us to all systems of the body (which is why an acupuncturist might ask about your bowel movements even if you’re coming in for a headache), but it also points us beyond. Does the person  like their job, what’s their overall lifestyle, how are their relationships with their friends and family? We talk about root and branch treatments in Chinese Medicine, which is essentially, treating symptoms (branch) and treating the underlying cause (root), generally we try to do both. Sometimes it’s important to focus on the branch before we can get into the root layer, other times it might just take us a treatment or two (or 3 or 4) before we’re able to truly identify what the root cause is. Sometimes we’ll be able to address it with herbs or needles, but depending on the dis-ease at hand, the root cause could have something to do with lifestyle (diet, lack of exercise, poor emotional support systems, a rough transition). In these cases I think our role is largely to empower and encourage the patient to make whatever shifts and changes they need. I think empowerment and encouragement can be in the form of needles and herbs (which can create significant energetic shifts that put a person into the right mindset to make the changes they need) and/or in the form of counseling and educating.

One life-factor that is easy to overlook is the home. I hear practitioner’s ask about people’s jobs, their partners and friends and family, their exercise and diet, but I haven’t yet heard anyone ask about someone’s apartment. Do they like their roommates, do they live alone? Is there enough sunlight and air circulation? I think this is a particularly important issue in a city like New York.

Our homes are the foundational spaces from where we set off into the world. They are our Earth where we eat and sleep and dress, and it’s tremendously important that we take the time to maintain our homes. We are moving out of the winter, a time where we tend to nest and hibernate at home a little more, and as we move into spring, we feel a little lighter and lot more like being outside all the time. It’s important to take time to make sure our take-off and landing pads are comfortable places, healthy places, nourishing places. We’ve all heard about Feng Shui, which can seem a little “out there” at times, but on a basic level it’s about setting up our homes in a way that things can flow best. It’s a system to bring intention into the layout of our living spaces and whether you use Feng Shui or your friend’s advice, the spring time is a good time to clean-out and rearrange.
My roommates and I just set up a date to do a massive Spring cleaning (our apartment really needs it). Later next month I’ll be moving into a fresh new clean space, (leaving a fresh clean space behind for someone else in need of a new home).

I think it’s a good time to think about how our homes are affecting our health and well-being, and how are health and well-being are affecting our homes. And perhaps most importantly, make any changes we feed we need so that we can head into the summer on stable ground.