Why Having an Altar Supports Your Emotional Well-Being
Having an altar adds beauty to your home and can bring immense benefit to your emotional, spiritual, and mental well-being. Your altar is an expression of your spirit, a place to go when you need healing or inspiration, and a sacred space to help you cultivate deep presence and daily ritual. There are no set rules for how your altar should look or feel. It can be very simple or more elaborate, as long as it feels beautiful and aligned for you personally.
Although how you build your altar is personal, there are some key things that can uplift and beautify the vibe as you set forth on a regular practice of soul-care for emotional well-being. Consider your altar as a symbol — how you show up and take care of it can become a compass for how you are showing up and caring for yourself. The more you tend to your altar, the more its healing and clarifying energy swells.
My Altar
Covered in sweet smells, candle flames, and sacred enchantments, my altar feels like a little campfire. It’s a familiar warm space that lights up my spirit and allows me to settle into my body as I restore my mind.
It’s where I meditate, journal, and contemplate.
It’s where I go when I feel overwhelmed or emotional.
It’s my landing pad when I need guidance or want to gather my inner resources.
The more I connect to my altar space, the more comforting and magnetic it becomes. I’ve had some of my heaviest cries and deepest prayers at my altar. I’ve been met by some of my greatest ideas or moments of clarity here, and I’ve experienced incredible stillness where my nervous system was finally able to soften.
When I regularly infuse my altar with meditations, prayers, and rituals, it swells into a deeply calming yet energized space, which helps me feel more emotionally fit. But when I ignore my altar and let it collect dust for too long, this ‘charge’ dissipates.
Do you sense the metaphor here? For me, neglecting my altar is a pretty good sign that I’ve also been neglecting my self-care needs, whether it be meditating, journaling, or working with my oracle cards. This neglect eventually finds its way into the many layers of my emotional health, both how I feel on the inside and how it is expressed on the outside.
Why Have an Altar?
There is a ceaseless rise and fall to life that can be both beautiful and overwhelming depending on the day. With this pulsing fluctuation, it’s important to have something that consistently grounds us.
Our environment impacts our energy and perspective, which in turn drives our emotions. An altar can lift the vibration of our home, bringing an element of beauty, protection, and inspiration into our space. Having a well-loved sacred nook where we can recharge our spirit and dissipate mental static is key to centering ourselves, especially amongst the many evolutions, losses, triumphs, growing pains, and teachings that we are all bound to walk through during our lifetime.
Whatever your practice may look like, having a daily moment with your altar allows you to land back home in your body, where you can feel more emotional ease rather than mentally stuck.
Create Your Own Altar for Emotional Well-Being
Your altar is your special place to set intentions, reconnect, meditate, manifest, grieve, journal, forgive, dream, and pray. Whichever enchantments you choose to dress your altar with, it’s important to periodically freshen up the design to match your current intention, which can change monthly or seasonally. Creating, recreating, cleaning, and clearing are all a part of respecting your altar, while keeping the good vibes alive.
There are many ways to approach building your own altar. Be intuitive with it, while using whatever inspirations align with your intention. With simple touches that are thoughtful and intentional, you can make any space feel sacred, no matter how big or small your altar is. Here are some tips to get you started or to give your current altar a boost:
- Use your intuition to decide which location in your home feels like the best spot for your altar. Choose an area that feels comfortable and inviting for you to sit quietly. If you have a hard time narrowing it down and want to take it a step further, use a compass to discover which direction your altar will be facing and decide which one best represents your intention. This added touch will boost its magic.
- Once you select your spot, gather all of your altarpieces and place it nearby. Then, move the air by opening your windows and burning your favorite smudge to help purify the space as you welcome in love and protection. The sacred smoke of white sage, sweetgrass, copal, or any favorite incense works wonders.
- Clean and clear any dust from your soon-to-be altar spot, so that it’s ready to be decorated.
- Add your special pieces in any order that feels most natural to you. Sense how your altar wants to look, and follow your intuition. I love having my candle in the center as a focal point, with crystals, flowers, and sacred objects I’ve found along the way, neatly placed in a symmetrical order. Plus I keep my journal and favorite oracle and tarot decks next to my altar. Feel free to also add a small cloth as a placemat, photos, hand-written letters, and anything else that amplifies your intention and soothes your emotional body.
- If you already have an altar, remove everything, clean the surface and surrounding areas, and reorganize it so that it feels fresh based on your current intentions.
- Once you’re done creating your altar, step back and take it in. If anything wants to shift, go for it. When everything feels just right, sit down, light a candle, be still with your breath for a moment, and then write freely in your journal for a few minutes.
Bring this Practice into Your Life
If you begin to feel disconnected or like your relationship with yourself is waning, it’s a good sign your altar needs a visit. Your special touch, unique spirit, and the warmth you carry inside can all be felt at the site of an altar. The act of creating it, and then consistently sitting with your altar will remind you of this each time. It’s also a reminder to drop in, pause, and return to trust.
The morning is an excellent time to focus on your personal rituals, with a daily sit at your altar being one of them. However, be sure to choose a time of day that you know you can commit to.
The cumulative impact of showing up daily, even if only for a few minutes, is key to feeling more emotionally balanced. With consistency, the deeper breaths, and little reminders that you receive at your altar will begin to pepper themselves throughout your day, giving you an access point from which you know you can return, any time you choose.
About the Author
Crocodiles and Plant Medicine: Lessons of the Modern Shaman
Crocodile came to me recently in ceremony. At first I was startled by his appearance, feeling I have already embraced every shadow aspect of myself he represents. Since his visit, however, I have spent time welcoming him and examining the teachings he now brings.
Crocodile/Snake holds our basal self, our deepest fears and lesser-evolved leanings which are held in the reptilian brain. In sacred ceremony and spiritual initiations, it is snake or crocodile who confronts you to face and embrace that which you fear most. His personal challenge to me: “You’re not a true shaman. You don’t work in the rain forest, you don’t ingest plant medicines, and you’re falsely holding your craft, thereby misleading those you serve.”
On more than one occasion I have been questioned and warned against calling myself a shaman. I haven’t studied in the jungle, I don’t have any hint of bronzed pigment in my Irish skin, and I don’t have a Maestro or don teaching me the ways. My path is unique in devoted past-life reclamation, shamanic journey, and an early proclamation at five-years-old that I would be a shaman. I was born ready and haven’t looked back. However, the thorny challenges still arise.
Enter the internal struggle of spirit and shadow. It’s brought me to a place of deep self-inquiry and an eventual and potent reclamation. It’s also offered me a new perspective on the path of the modern shaman.
What is a Shaman?
When asked, “What is a shaman?” my easiest answer is “someone who works in the invisible spaces to bring peace and healing to those whom they are in service.”
“Shamans are intermediaries or messengers between the human world and the spirit worlds. Shamans are said to treat ailments/illness by mending the soul. Alleviating traumas affecting the soul/spirit restores the physical body of the individual to balance and wholeness. The shaman also enters supernatural realms or dimensions to obtain solutions to problems afflicting the community. Shamans may visit other worlds/dimensions to bring guidance to misguided souls and to ameliorate illnesses of the human soul caused by foreign elements. The shaman operates primarily within the spiritual world, which in turn affects the human world. The restoration of balance results in the elimination of the ailment.”
Tryptamine Palace
In Cave and Cosmos, Michael Harner suggests it is simply “one who knows.”
Core and Indigenous Shamanism
The big divide in the shamanic communities lies between those who work in the rain forest with the lineage of indigenous wisdom in their blood; and so-called Plastic Shamans who have no connection to the cultures and traditions they represent.
As shamanism has gained prevalence in the modern era, “core shamanism” has become the accepted term for those who use the methods of the shaman but have not been raised in the traditional cultures. The Foundation for Shamanic Studies has reintroduced the shamanic journey for self-healing, while the Psychonauts have lead a revolution through chemically assisted self-inquiry. Both are valid paths that differ greatly from a jungle education. While the efficacy of the practice is all that should matter, there still lies a division.
Plant Medicine
Another crucial distinction for indigenous shamans is their relationships with the plants. Dietas are ceremonial ingestions of plant medicines that teach the shaman how to walk between and within the astral worlds. Any number of teacher plants are used, from tobacco to ayahuasca. These ceremonies are performed with great reverence and honor and remain within sacred guidelines as sincere spiritual endeavors to deepen the path of the seeker. The illusion of this world fades away and great insights are gained, revealing the true nature of one’s own soul.
Freakin’ awesome when done in this sacred space, right?
I, however, am a different kind of shaman. I traverse the dimensions without the use of hallucinogens. Drums, deep meditation, and the psychic connection with spirits and plant allies, for me, have been enough. And Croc challenged me on this also: “Is your plant abstinence genuinely enough to gain such an alliance with the spirit realms?”
In the modern world, our relationship to the plants is vastly different than that of the indigenous shaman. We don’t commune with them personally, nor do we seek to hone their wisdom. As a result, contemporary seekers often misuse the medicines. In my younger days, I experimented with mushrooms recreationally. I found them an expansive and uplifting dalliance that only affirmed my path as a seer and healer. Yet I took them with no noble intent.
Recently, I found myself called to work more closely with the plants in ceremonial space and felt conflicted. My ego holds my hallucinogenic refrain as a badge of honor — a way of ensuring the purity of the messages received. And yet I found myself deeply appreciating the plant spirits again, in great awe and gratitude for the teachings they shared.
And what they shared was this: I’ve connected more than sufficiently with the plant spirits. I learn and walk beside them every day to offer blessings to my community. I need not ingest them, for they have been my allies all along!
In a recent Aubrey Marcus podcast, Astral Snakes and Binaural Beats (episode 59), Cory Allen shared his most recent devotion is not in using the plant medicines, but rather simply being in the astral plane without any enhancements. Under the influence of the medicine, “The consciousness of the plant is with you in that space and colors your vision of that space. If you get there without it, you are completely you and you are on your own.” Boom, validation! And Croc began to smile.
What I realized was, it all comes back to me not having any allies, any perceptions, any filters on my experience in these worlds. The mark of the shaman is not who they are when they’re on the medicines or how they handle these energies inside of them. It is who they are in the absence of any aids at all!
