Your home is like your body.

They say that your car is like you life. For instance if you want your life to improve, start by cleaning out your car and giving it a regular service.

If this is the case I wonder if your home is like your body. When I look back over the 35 years Pete and I have been together the one constant factor was that our homes were always in various stages of construction or destruction (not unlike the owners) depending on which end of the day you are looking at it. (Whether you feel fit and optimistic or tired and pessimistic) If we weren’t renovating we would be shifting furniture around, knocking the odd wall out, changing a window here or there or painting a wall or ceiling. We love weatherboard houses because they have character and they are so easy to change. All you need is a chainsaw and a sledge hammer and a burst of manic energy.
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It was the same with gardening. Wherever we went we just had to create huge gardens and when we moved to Forth 17 years ago it was no different. The previous owners had horses and sheep around the house, which left us with a clean canvas. (Both horses and sheep nibble vegetation down to bare soil) Within a couple of years we had created a beginnings of a 5 acre European forest, a​ huge medicinal herb garden, a Japanese garden, 3 mazes and English style formal

gardens around the house as well as a veggie patch. Our idea of a holiday was loading the boot of the car up with cuttings and spending the afternoon planting, trimming and weeding. Where normal people would plant five trees in a season, Peter would sometimes plant 500 trees per day! The children were always included in our dreams. I am sure they would have preferred to be excluded, but they had no choice, they were stuck with crazy parents. Eventually they ended up having a lot of fun lying in their hammocks between the teenage trees and exploring nature.

​After I had a serious MVA 10 years ago we slowed down a bit. Everybody stayed in the same bedroom for years and our gardens shrank. We sometimes used ready made cut up frozen vegetables instead of messy fresh ones with clumps of dirt from the garden. The medicinal herb garden which used to be my pride and joy went to the pack and was eventually turned into a chook yard. The trees in the forest quietly kept maturing in our absence. The mazes became a tangled mess. We completely gave up on the gardens around the huge dam in our paddocks. They became a haven for rabbits, wallabies and other wildlife.

At times we considered selling up and moving into a normal house in a suburb and lead a normal life like everybody else. Then suddenly Peter woke up one day and had the exact picture in his mind of a structure above a pizza area. This idea was prompted by the imminent wedding of one of our daughters which was going to happen in our garden. After a bit of brainstorming with the help of a visiting accountant who helped work out the degrees of the angles on the roof, Peter got to work and before long we had a new area in our garden that included a pizza oven with a walled garden around it.
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It felt like coming up for air after spending a long time under water and suddenly there was a frenzy of activities. Outside we got rid of a couple of garden rooms, levelled off some areas and created a large lawn area which required 20 truckloads of dirt that had to be spread out by Peter. While he was busy outside Arthit, ​my future son in law had to hold my hand because I was lying on the couch thinking I was dying.

In case you were wondering why I thought that: I had been freshly despatched from a psychiatric hospital after being diagnosed with Panic Disorder at the start of that year and been admitted for a couple of months. Panic Disorder is like having a full blown panic attack, like watching the twin towers come down inside your head 24/7. At this stage I was starting to feel a lot better, but things still got on top of me easily, like having 20 truckloads of dirt dumped on my garden and needing it for an established lawn area for my daughter’s wedding in a matter of weeks when I didn’t even know what I was going to wear to the wedding. Back in the good old days I would have sewn the family’s entire wedding outfit, marquis included if I had been asked and all I could do now was lie on the couch and feel pathetic.

For many years I had flash backs of the accident and I would re-live my own near death experience. As you can imagine these moments were highly inconvenient (even if I kept it low key for the benefit of everybody else) and Arthit must have wondered what sort of family he was marrying into.

The wedding went off without a hitch, except that it was the middle of winter, the pizza oven blew smoke on the bride, groom and guests and the celebrant had her arm in a sling. Oh yes, and gran had forgotten what the time was and we had to go and find her, which made us 15 minutes late.

Things slowly went back to normal. The new garden invigorated us and suddenly the house looked tired and tacky. Ideas tumbled around and wouldn’t let us rest. We knocked a wall down and included one of the kid’s bedrooms into our lounge area. This meant that our old lounge room had to become a new bedroom which meant we actually had to construct a wall. While we were at it we also removed the French doors out of the kitchen and installed them on the other side of the house to let more light in. We temporarily closed the gap in the kitchen wall with cement sheets which stayed there all winter. Eventually we installed beautifully handcrafted recycled myrtle concertina doors and then Peter completely renovated the kitchen.
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The new kitchen was large and light and a pleasure to work in. The only hitch was that it never got finished. It almost did, but not quite. All Peter had to do was drill a hole in the roof for the exhaust fan to let the air out when we cooked. I couldn’t really use it as it was, because it would suck the air up, which would then hit the roof and go sideways between the plaster and the roof, only to come out as smoke between the new down lights. This spoilt the effect of the new kitchen somewhat and I always worried about the potential layers of grease building up between the new ceiling and roof. For years I was careful not to cook anything greasy like pancakes in my new kitchen.

In the laundry we had a similar problem: my old dryer which had been installed properly blew up and the new dryer we got in a hurry blew damp air back into my laundry. On a wet day my linen cupboards would drip with condensation and all my stacks of towels got damp. Somehow we never got round to fixing the problem.

We really had a serious drainage issue too. Every time all the kids were home our septic tank would overflow (usually on a Saturday!). It simply didn’t stand the strain of multiple long showers, loads of washing and toilets being flushed during the day. Stench would rise from the septic tank and waft around our property and in the bathrooms toilet contents would gurgle back up. I forget how many times we had to urgently ring Collex to suck out the septic tank. We knew that it was only a temporary solution and that eventually we would have to foot the bill and connect up to the town sewerage, which luckily for us had been installed to the corner of our property by the local council a couple of years earlier.

But here is where it gets interesting: inside my body I was experiencing similar problems. My plumbing works kept tripping me up. I had to live my life very low key (as much as that is possible with a large family and business) because every time there was a perceived crisis my bowels would go on a holiday. I would go from feeling happy and vibrant to deathly ill within a matter of 30 minutes. Inevitably I’d end up in hospital marooned to drips and tubes helplessly waiting for my intestines to crank up again. This went on for about five years when finally I was struck by full blown bowel disaster. The old septic tank had given up the ghost. My bowels needed a bit more than plain old rest; they needed to get a proper sewerage overhaul.

Of course it had to happen in the lead up to Christmas where I was in and out of hospital for a month. Eventually between Christmas and the New Year my bowels got into such a state that I would have died if the surgeon on duty hadn’t taken swift action by opening up my abdomen, removing all old scar tissue and ironing out the kinks.

Goodness knows how many pipes he cut and shut, but I was very sore for ages. Eventually the gain was more than the pain, because I discovered that for the first time in many years I was able to live a normal life. I came through each crisis with flying colours! And it wasn’t long after that our house underwent a similar miraculous transformation, but not without putting up a bit of a struggle.

I went home for lunch one day when I found one of my daughters cooking up a storm for her 210 cm tall boyfriend, who is a professional basketball player and eats the equivalent of 6 average citizens. Here, in my spotless kitchen, she was cooking a kilo of greasy bacon in one frypan and a dozen eggs in a packet of butter in another. The kitchen was filled with blue smoke and I thought I could see fat dripping from my down lights. I was seething and threw a miniature wobbly. Peter who innocently walked in after me had to bear the brunt because Mieke and Paul hadn’t been together long and I was still out to impress him.

The notion that our house is our body may not be as strange as it seems. After all we spend most of our lives in our homes. When you think about it, pet owners often start to look similar to their pets, and dogs and cats often take on their owner’s traits. Even husbands and wives often end up looking similar. People often think Peter looks Dutch for instance, when nothing could be further from the truth. Our homes absorb our vibes and perhaps they become like an extension of our energy field and start expressing our problems.

We are made of dust, the same as our houses. The atoms that make up our bodies were once forged inside the stars, the same as the materials in our homes. We think of our houses, cars and appliances as inert objects, but if we were to zoom in closer they too are made of the same moving particles. Everything is made of atoms and subatomic particles and we are connected in incomprehensible ways to our living quarters. We just never think about the fact that our spirits infuse our homes and we become almost one.
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Whether there is any truth in my story or not, I do believe that there are no coincidences. Seemingly random events that ‘happen’ to us are not random at all, they happen in the right order, in perfect alignment with the highest Intelligence of Life itself.

This brings me to the tail end of my story. In last February after watching Alan Simpson talk about the Young Living oils I felt inspired to start using huge doses of essential oils on my tummy. I already used the oils every day at work and sometimes in my bath at home. Come to think about it, I probably used them like other people take Panadol. If we had a bite, burn or pain we would get the oils out of the cupboard and use them as a first aid.

Listening to Alan the penny dropped. I realized that for me to get maximum benefit from the oils I would have to take them out of the cupboard and relegate them to the front seat, on my kitchen bench next to my coffee machine.
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I started using Purification on my tummy, as well as Lavender, Peppermint and Panaway from one of the collections I had. Nothing exotic or different here, the only change was that I didn’t count the drops anymore; I just filled up my hand with oils and rubbed them on my entire abdomen. I must have instinctively realized that my tummy needed it, even though my old problems had seemingly vanished.

Within a week I excreted what I jokingly called a ‘fur ball’ in the toilet. I couldn’t believe my eyes and I knew no-one else would either unless I had something to back up when I told them, so I washed, bleached and dried the evidence and then showed it to my sceptical medically trained husband. On closer inspection we both came to the conclusion that it wasn’t a ‘fur ball’, but tiny shreds of synthetic material which must have been left behind during one of the surgeries I had to have after the MVA.

I kept doing the same thing and a few weeks later there was more. Medically speaking there was no logical explanation for it so Caleb suggested that I was ‘manifesting’ shreds of inorganic fibre after I showed him the same piece of evidence. Well, I countered, if that is the case I would prefer it if my body would get its act together and ‘manifest’ a few hundred dollar bills instead.

Just when I thought I was all ‘purified’ out came a third lot. This one was only recently after I had been feeling a bit under the weather emotionally. I booked myself in with Melanie for a combination massage/cranio/ kinergetic. I wanted to clean out my nervous system from everything that kept me feeling cloudy even on a sunny day, and to this end I brought along half a dozen of my own oils including ‘forgiveness’ ‘joy’ ‘juvaflex’ ‘valour’ ‘peppermint’ ‘trauma life’ and Frankincense. I didn’t really think about these oils for too long, I just intuitively took the bottles that jumped out at me. Melanie used ‘release’ which was one of her favourites. I asked her to use at least 10 drops of each essential oil on my spine, to be followed by a massage. That would be almost 70 drops of pure undiluted essential oils. I figured that if that wouldn’t lift my frequencies nothing else would. (Essential oils are concentrated sun energy trapped inside special compartments of each plant/tree. When the plants or trees are grown and harvested properly, the frequency is preserved and this works in harmony with our bodies to bring out the best of health.)

The moral of this story is that if you want to improve your life, look after your body first. Your body is the home of your spirit. Your house is your sanctuary which houses both your body and spirit and is infused by it every moment of the day. We often want to change our external reality in the hope that it makes us feel better on the inside, but in order for us to experience true happiness we need to work on our internal reality first. All the rest will then fall into place.
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Check out our Therapies to discover which therapy suits you best. You can also read the bio of our talented therapists to see who resonates with you. For more inspiration, information and products check through our previous blog entries

Free introduction to essential oils evening Wednesday the 25th of November at
643 Forth Rd Forth -7pm (Caleb and Tarley)

Or Thursday the 26th of November at 47 Wilmot Rd – 7pm (Peter and Grada)

Or Friday evening the 3rd December at Eve and Arthits place at 7 pm in Devonport

Phone 64283007 to RSVP or email us on purplehouseforth@bigpond.com
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Essential oils are a gift from Mother Nature to help us mere mortals lead extraordinary lives with ease and grace. NOW is the best time of your life to create positive changes. Come along and experience the oils for yourself, and feel more alive every day! Grada