Spring cleaning for your heart and soul
Make your house a home with Mama Donna Henes
Just Released!
Spring feels like a miracle. You can let the sun shine in this spring with a house blessing, even if you’ve lived in your space forever, with Mama Donna Henes. You can find her on social media and around the internet by searching @mamadonnahenes.
Bless This House offers a 3-stage template for creating wholeness in your home, applicable to new spaces and old. There’s no worry about “getting it wrong,” by the way. Urban shaman Mama Donna says, “ It can’t be wrong! There is no such thing as a bad blessing. That’s an oxymoron. If your intention is pure, if the ritual you create reflects that intention, and if your energy is focused and devoted, then your blessing can’t help but being perfect! A true blessing comes from the soul and speaks to the soul.”
Mama Donna practices in Brooklyn, at Mama Donna’s Tea Garden & Healing Haven in Brooklyn where she provides consultation and direction. Some of her work includes blessing Broadway productions! It’s that kind of connection to place that really shines through in Mama Donna’s book.
Bless This House begins with a consideration of home; what is and how you can find it. “Even a small campfire in the vast dark wilderness can fee like home when it reflects the faces of the people you love,” says Mama Donna, emphasizing that “home” is more than walls and a roof. Your home is yours. Your home is you
All over the world and for as long as humans have created dwellings, a house blessing of some sort has been the norm. Mama Donna has many examples of the way different communities create a space for good fortune and good living. While house blessings are private affairs, she explains, she’s received many gifts from good people in other cultures.
“When I was in Morocco,” she said, “a Berber medicine man in the Rif Mountains offered me a special blend of items prescribed specifically for me that I was meant to use to bless my own house when I returned to it. It was an amazing collection of natural items for me to burn.The mixture included a four-inch-long mummified lizard stuffed with rock salt, a big hunk of reddish myrrh, and a selection of seeds, shells, leaves and bark. It is very holy and instead of burning it I have had it on my altar for 40 years to continually bless my house.”
And if you’ve lost everything, due to a natural disaster or a life crisis, you can take comfort in Mama’s advice.
“First, you have to mourn. At these times a funeral-ritual is helpful: to grieve, to remember, to absorb your experience. My last loft got seized by eminent domain, the entire tight-knit building community without homes and without each other. Right before the looming Kick Us Out Date, we all went to the beach at night and sat in a circle on the sand and chanted “Ohm, Home, Home. Home.” This was so comforting and cathartic. We were released from our shock and fury and thus able to shift our attention and energy to creating new homes and new communities, while also keeping our deep connection with each other intact.”
Take some time to create ritual and renewal with this title from Dover’s Ixia Press.
