A Place Like Home

Last week I wrote about the healing powers of gardening, and how I had neglected my garden even though I knew it was exactly what I needed during one of the hardest years of my life.

Grief does strange things to a person. Since losing my brother Ben, I had not been able to do very much for myself — whether that was survivors’ guilt, or simply that I couldn’t locate myself clearly enough to think about my own needs, I’m not entirely sure. I had also kept myself from yoga for months, even knowing how much it would help me.

But this week I went to a yoga class for the first time in months. I unrolled my mat and went to the cupboard to collect my props. Two blocks. A blanket. I laid them out in the familiar order I always have, a kind pre-yoga ritual that signals to my brain something good is about to happen. It was a Yin/Nidra class — slow, deep rest. I hadn’t been to a class in a long time. Bits and pieces at home, yes, but not this. Not a room full of people all arriving together for the same purpose. And as I got on the mat I felt my whole chest soften- like a huge exhale- the muscle memory of tension releasing. Yogis talk about the mat as home, and when you practise with any regularity it does become a kind of home you return to. A sanctuary.  Lying there I felt an overwhelming sense of comfort, and I realised I had been neglecting the one thing I needed most.

Earlier in the year, before all of this, I was in a class when my teacher began talking about drishti. Your gaze. The point of focus you return to in a balance pose.

Listening to her talk about Drishti I had a light bulb moment and I realised I had been writing about this exact thing for years without knowing yoga had a word for it. In interiors we call it a focal point. The thing a room is arranged around, the place the eye naturally comes to rest. The window framing the garden, a single stem in a glass bottle, an armchair in the corner that catches the afternoon light. I had written about all of these things in my books...Keep it Simple…The Romantic Minimalist… Chapters about following your heart, feeding the senses, ditching fashion, being in touch with nature. That was all drishti. I had just been calling it something else.

I realised in that moment that yoga wasn’t just teaching me a new philosophy. It was giving me a new language — a new perspective — for the one I had already been living.

And once I'd found drishti, I started spotting others too. Karma in design is buying well and investing in pieces for longevity, restoring rather than replacing, making choices you can be at peace with- what I once wrote about as “clean and green” and “easy on the pocket.” Ahimsa — kindness, non-harm — is what I meant by a softer minimalism. The idea that a home should not be a place where you are constantly aware of what needs fixing; that it should be kind to you. And sthira and sukha, the balance of steadiness and ease — that is the balance between old and new, rough and smooth, quiet and character that Dave and I have always worked toward.

Yoga teachers often talk about finding what feels good and it dawned on me that this is what I have actually been teaching all these years. That question I always come back to at the start of every project, and increasingly at the start of every day: how do I want to feel in this space? Not what should it look like. Not which trend might apply, which finish might photograph well.

How do I want to feel?

That question is the whole of it, really. It is what yoga asks of the body. It is what a good home asks of the people living in it. Find what feels good. Return to it. Let that be the guide.

I lay on my mat in that class, guided into deep rest, and I felt something I had almost forgotten was possible. Not happiness exactly. Arrival. The particular quiet of being exactly where you are, needing nothing else.

That is what I have always wanted from a room.

That is what I went back for.

One calm moment. That is all it ever takes.

One Calm Moment is a guide to the small intentional acts that give a room soul — however old or new the things in it are. £20.

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