I’ll never forget the first time I met Sue, her vitality and personality palpating throughout her home spreading energy and love. Sue had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and was recovering from a mastectomy; I was her home-care nurse. Entering her home for the first time, I was overcome by the sensation of being enveloped by warmth and love…light flowed through her simple living room, illuminating personal touches. Her teenage son sat curled on a chair, papers strewn around him, reading a textbook of some sort. Sue emerged from a secluded nook smiling, “I cocooned myself (in my nook), I can see the garden from there, I go there to pray and watch the beauty of life passing. Now here I get to indulge myself in life itself”, nodding her head toward her son. Over the ensuing months of Sue’s recovery, I had the privilege of getting to know her well – her strength, enduring joy and hope, her laughter and her pain. Her impression will never leave me – nor that of her beauty resonating through her home, even revealing her before we had met, and her home nurturing that beauty – spaces she shaped to support her ‘soul’… solitude, connection, self-expression, and so on. My eyes were opened to the powerful connection between heart, home and health.
The connection between ‘heart, home and health’ is powerful and important in our lives. Our surroundings, and very significantly our homes where we spend a majority of our ‘rejuvenating’ time, greatly impact our ‘feeling of well-being’ and our health. The tie between our ‘feelings of well-being’ (aka our emotional health) and our physical health, I think, can seem a bit abstract or elusive and can thus be much more easily ignored than, say the connection between environmental toxins, such as asbestos, in our home impacting our health. However, as abstract or elusive as this may seem, the connection between our ‘feeling of well-being’ and our physical health is very direct, significant and real…and certainly not to be ignored – it’s one of the fundamental dimensions in our modern ‘model’ of health, as any health professional can attest to (it’s one of the first and prevailing concepts in our nursing curriculum that I teach to my nursing students) and well documented in health literature. People who are emotionally health are more physically resilient, have fewer physical diseases, heal more quickly, and so on…and vice a versa, people who are emotionally unhealthy – too much stress, depression, anguish, emotional trauma, and so on – become physically unhealthy too.
So, with the understanding that emotional and physical health are interconnected (without me indulging in writing a book here…but I’d love to discuss it further elsewhere!), what, then, is the connection between our surroundings – our home design and décor – and our emotional health…other than the trite “it’s so pretty, it makes me happy”?
Sue had found this connection. She radiated with emotional strength and her home supported this, nurturing her emotional well-being…and her physical health too, quickening her response to treatment, diminishing her pain and providing her with endurance.
So what is this connection; how can our homes nurture our emotional and physical health?
That connection becomes clear, I think, when we consider how we define emotional health…what helps us achieve emotional health. An easy (and quick) synapsis of this can be seen in the ‘human needs’ models. All the social sciences use some variation of a ‘human needs’ model, which basically describes the various ‘needs’ that human’s require to ‘meet’ to be ‘complete’ (happy and healthy). Some of the more basic needs are for ‘survival’, things like food, water, shelter – they are very directly and obviously tied to physical health i.e. Eat or starve. The more advanced needs, those that you can consider once you know you are out of imminent bodily danger, are categories such as social connection, self-actualization, cultural integrity, connection to nature, and so on. The specific categories vary depending on the particular ‘needs model’ but overall can be captured in these categories. These ‘advanced needs’ are the building blocks for our emotional health. For example, looking at the need for social connection which highlight humans need to interact with other people to maintain emotional and physical health. When people are isolated from other human contact, they tend to become distressed, depressed and ill.
Of course, the degree of importance of each of these needs vary amongst individuals and during different stages of our lives…your teenage daughter who is constantly texting her friends may, in a few decades, actually replace the phone with a book (hang in there, there is hope!) – but right now, her need for social connection is very important to her emotional and physical health. Sue, for example, recognized as important to her the ‘needs’ of solitude, reflection and connection to nature and spirituality – she felt rejuvenated when she was able to have time for solitude, reflection and connection to nature and spirituality…and the importance to her of this being balanced with the need of social connection with her family.
So, broadly speaking, our ability to ‘meet’ our more ‘advanced human needs’ strengthens our emotional health. And, since emotional and physical health are strongly tied together, this also strengthens our physical health. Our surroundings significantly facilitate or hamper our ability to ‘meet’ these ‘advanced human needs’ …thus, our surroundings facilitate or hamper our emotional and physical health.
This is especially true of our homes, our refuge where we spend a majority of our ‘rejuvenating’ time. Sue recognized that solitude helped her cope, it gave her joy, hope and perspective, especially when balanced with connection with her family; and she created spaces within her home to facilitate both these needs. Her home resonated with and supported her emotional health. Although this didn’t give her immunity from illness, as she did have a serious physical ailment, it did help her cope effectively – she was able to engage in her experience with strength, enduring joy and hope, and with peace…and, I believe, as is certainly elsewhere evident in literature, she also responded to treatment more effectively.
The influence of our homes on our emotional and physical health is significant and important. When our homes are set-up to facilitate our unique individual ‘needs’, those we have identified as important to our feelings of well-being, we are happier and healthier – and to a degree that is tangible and quantifiable….we need to pay attention to it.
So, how do we pay attention to this…how do we achieve a home that nurtures our needs, helps us thrive and makes us happy and healthy? Very clearly, it seems to me, this means we need to be true to ourselves in our homes…our designs need to be driven by authenticity, courage and loyalty to our true needs, goals and desires – expressing our heart in our homes…heart, home, health; design that makes us happy and healthy. Design that is meaningful and worthwhile.
…Making a beautiful home that nurtures our needs, helps us thrive and makes us happy and health…more to come!
Have a beautiful (and healthy) week!
xo
shelley
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