What Is House Therapy?

What is House Therapy? Let me begin to explain. As adults what one material thing is valued more highly over all others? It is the home of course! For those fortunate enough to be able to afford to purchase their own home it provides great security. A house or an apartment of your very own, is seen as the prize, and, in some cases an investment steppingstone to tremendous wealth. As many of us, work frantically toward this Mount Olympus like achievement, paying off large bank loans with monthly repayments, we can lose sight of who we are and what makes us happy. Rising interest rates can threaten the goal and generates stress. The focus on the goal, can overwhelm our sense of enjoyment in playing this game of life.

Can I Benefit From An Understanding of House Therapy?

Discovering the secrets to what makes us happy, can be found at home. In fact, the clues to who we are and what we truly want, are all around us in every room of our abodes. Welcome to what I call ©House Therapy – Discovering Who You Are at Home. You do not have to own the home you live in to benefit from ©House Therapy, as your mere presence within your house or apartment defines it as yours. We all generally have some influence on the look and feel of the rooms within our home, and even for those uber minimalists out there, your non-doing defines your home just as much. There is a Taoist flavour to ©House Therapy, as it employs the Isness of things as a principle at work in our lives. The way things are – is the way things are – and that is for a reason, if you just take the time to look.

House Therapy Is It For Me?

You do not need to be an architect or interior designer, to benefit from the insights offered by ©House Therapy, indeed, we are all to some degree designers of our own lives. If not you, who else is the most influential person in your life, and who knows you better? Who else, in your life, is defining themselves by every decision and choice made, as they make their way along their life pathway? Nobody but You I would suggest!

More About House Therapy

What is a home? Is it a place where we have accidentally found ourselves over time or is it a carefully designed structure, which conforms to our every need and want? Perhaps it is something that exists between these two extremes, or not. I imagine that our homes are as unique as we are ourselves, or at least our perception of them is. The home, holder of the hearth (see fireplace & kitchen stove), a place you may return to at day’s end, for rest, replenishment, and relaxation. What would your life be like without a home to go to? We often hear about the lives of the homeless on the six a clock news. Homeless children who may have fled domestic abuse, or ennui, to live on the city streets, and usually these poor unfortunates are paraded as examples of extreme social neglect. Homeless adults who have fallen through the cracks of our societies and live lives less than what is expected of 21C human beings. For the home is considered one of the most basic requirements of life, indeed the right to have a home/shelter, a place to call your own, no matter how small or poorly maintained, is as important as is having enough food to eat. Our home is our refuge and sanctuary from the challenges we may face in the outer world, as we bid for survival and success.

In the following pages and chapters of this book we will be looking at what houses and homes really are, on a whole host of levels of understanding, documenting examples and explaining their different relevancies. I will be bringing together, the bricks and mortar reality of houses, with their symbolic meanings to illustrate the core principles underpinning ©House Therapy, like the foundations of a home. We will explore the history of houses and take a guided tour through some of the homes of the most influential cultures and civilizations. We will look at the parallels between the inside of our homes and the inside of our heads.

©House Therapy