Bless This House: Creating Sacred Space Where You Live, Work & Travel

136 Pages·2018·0.77 MB·English

by  Donna Henes

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. | Space—Religious aspects.
Classification: LCC BL580 .H46 2018 | DDC 203/.8—dc23 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
Introduction: HOUSE MAMA
Chapter 1 THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME
Chapter 2 HOMING IN
Chapter 3 HOME MAKING
Chapter 4 WELCOME HOME
Chapter 5 HOMEMADE BLESSINGS
Chapter 6 HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS
Chapter 7 OUT OF HOUSE AND HOME
Chapter 8 HOME AWAY FROM HOME
Chapter 9 HOMEWORK
Appendix
About the Author
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 don’t. 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 Donna’s 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