Why I never use the word sanctuary to describe a home

One major re-frame for action in a burning world.

There’s an idea that has taken over the home lifestyle space in the last decade. I see it in books, on websites, all over Instagram, wherever I go:

“Your home is your sanctuary.”

The meaning of course, is clear. When you are at home, you get to shut out the world outside, to retreat into a set of rooms that you get to design to function in the way that churches might have worked in centuries past. Here, you are safe, calm, collected. Here is where you regenerate. Here, you cannot be touched by the evils of society and by movements or shifts that don’t align with your own understanding. You can pretend everything is all right. Out of sight, out of mind.

I think we are telling ourselves a big lie.

I think that we are delusional if we think that we can have an active, engaged life — a life of purpose — while also retreating from the public space.

The world needs more from each of us now than a quiet zombie shuffle between workplace and Netflix cave. It needs us to have aligned with our own priorities and for us to have done the work on ourselves to know what gifts, knowledge and love we might have to share.

“Sanctuary” also doesn’t reflect reality for many of us. More of us are working from home than ever before. As many as 70% of us work from home at least once a week according to this study.

When we call our homes a sanctuary, or a retreat, we are telling ourselves a story that our home life is separate from the life outside its four walls. We are moving beyond the original idea of sanctuary — think Quasimodo yelling into the rafters at Notre Dame — to a life where we don’t have to address or think about the world outside and how it needs us.

Certainly, we need places where we are safe, where calm reigns, where we don’t have to be constantly working, where our nervous systems can recover from the stresses of modern life.

But I don’t believe my home is my sanctuary. To me, my home is the great collaborator in my life.

I’m a magazine editor. I spend a lot of time in the world of shiny objects and beautiful settings. I love gorgeous spreads, curated flat lays, perfect vignettes, meaningful color palettes, inspiring floor plans, and above all, I love houses, from the oldest Celtic Hobbit hole to the modern traditional fixer upper.

But homes are places lived in five senses, and the past couple of years, I’ve experienced a paradigm shift in how I view the purpose of the home.

The first shift occurred through my studies of Feng Shui and environmental design, which is the theory of how spaces affect human behavior. I started exploring how you can work with a space to change peoples’ experience of life with our family small business. I wanted to find design solutions that would allow our patients to feel calm and serene in our waiting room. The result? We actually have patients who hang out in our waiting room AFTER getting their teeth cleaned.

What followed was a five-year deep dive into Feng Shui and my eventual certification as a Feng Shui consultant. Over these years, I experimented with both the logical and the magical components of an ancient (and somewhat woo!) practice to develop my own form of spatial consulting, which combines classic tenets of Feng Shui with modern brand storytelling and scientifically-backed design principles.

Along the way, I have done much experimenting with how thoughtful design and visual storytelling can have transformational effect on mood, happiness, success, a feeling of belonging, and an overall sense of well-being. I’ve done more than my fair share of tweaking my own home to see how choices such as color, shape, texture and placement affect how my family interacts with each other. At my worst, I’ve been an evil puppet master tweaking floor plans to see if my kids will get along better. At my best, I’ve used spatial design approaches to solve problems: Monsters under the bed. Arguments at the dinner table. Home office conundrums. Need for wider community. Desire for deeper work.

My home saves me, again and again, but it’s not a sanctuary. It’s a living, breathing thing that I shape intentionally in order to help me achieve my purpose, whether it’s for my clients, my kids, my husband, or my big, beautiful projects.

When you have a great home life, you have more bandwidth to help others. When you achieve peace at home, you can bring peace to the world. When your home inspires your creativity, you bring that creativity to everything you do. Your home can be the great collaborator in your life.

To me, the true nightmare of modern society is to have people snuggled up watching Netflix in their “sanctuaries” while the world around them burns.

Ok, it’s fine. I am currently watching “Gossip Girl,” and rotting my brain with it. Home is also a place to entertain yourself.

But I’ll leave you with this:

Walls can talk.

Your home is the place where you are telling your own story to yourself.

The home you have created is a mirror of who you are. But it could be something else: a reflection of who you want to be.

You can be safe and also change the world.

Next week I’ll give you some more words for talking about your home that might feel more aligned with where you want to be.

P.S. That’s my husband, Adam, and son, Griffin, watching the news two weeks ago. We are on a news break, which feels necessary but difficult for this journalist.