How to create a home temple

What is a home altar

The idea of wanting to see even at home a small space dedicated to meditation, prayer or recollection is the most special thing you can do to give and receive harmony.

The altar or domestic temple is something that comes from the East, which the ancient religious and philosophical traditions teach us that the presence of the sacred in everyone's life is something essential and fundamental.

The domestic altar represents this desire for union and communion with what is greatest and infinite, a point, a "center", a pivot, in which one can gather to rediscover the universe and its energy every day who are also in us.

To each his own temple

Here is step by step how to start building your own home altar :

> You find a point in the home that is intimate and untouchable, where you feel deeply safe, so that, beyond any contingency of life, you find yourself "there".

A physical, symbolic, impermanent place to remember that there is also a non-physical, spiritual, interior place, probably an eternal temple. When we think of the altar, let's try to see it as the "heart" of the house.

It doesn't have to be in the bedroom, but it can be anywhere, up or down . This is not something built and artificial, heavy and complicated, but a simple and clean niche in which to store a particular object or sacred images or whatever you want.

> Orient your altar to the east, to where everything is born. For those who practice yoga, it would be ideal to leave a space to dedicate to sun salutation . All following the advice of Vastu, the oldest holistic architecture in the world.

> Use a slightly raised base, with a stone or a wood, then a natural element, on which you can store a cloth or a precious canvas for you, which comes from your travels and memories. At the center put a statue or an image (or even different) related to your desired cult.

> Surround this space with scented incense, fresh flowers, candles, mala, bells, vases with water, stones or everything that is part of your spiritual history.

As beautiful as the home temple

The altar, or the temple, can be built as desired, the important thing is that it possesses a precious quality: the "beauty" . Every time you look at it, it must give us a sense of harmony, which plays with colors, shapes, scents and essences.

It must convey beautiful and positive things. The Hindus are masters in making their altars, sometimes too "rich" and "exorbitant", in which the various avatars of the deities are found, from Ganesh to Parvati, passing through Durga, in the form of statues more or less large or of images; they are rich in flowers, incense, candles and mala; they can be internal or external, dotted with " tilaka ", the red dots that women draw in the center of their foreheads, or of Sanskrit writings .

Instead, those dedicated to Buddha are simpler and more linear, as for example they are present in the Japanese tradition.