Altar Your Space: A Guide to Restorative Home

What makes a house a home, a sacred living space, a place of joy and grace? Jagatjoti S. Khalsa says that anyone can turn their home into a sanctuary, seamlessly blending form and function into a unique, life-affirming haven. Khalsa offers his inspiring and uplifting look at the sacred home, Altar Your Space: A Guide to Restorative Home ($29.95, softcover, full color photos throughout, 10 1/4” x 8 3/4” inches, 164 pages, November 2007), which will be available this Fall for anyone looking to create a sense of sacred self within their own home.

The book takes you on a journey in “designing a home environment that blesses you, uplifts your spirit, keeps you holy-minded, embraces and supports the fullness of your worldly life, and emanates the energy, atmosphere and fragrance of that which we call the sacred.”

An understanding of the relationship between inner and outer space is key to Khalsa’s philosophy and design sensibility. By reminding his clients throughout the design process that they are in control and are the masters of every aspect of their home, he helps them transform or altar their environments into sacred spaces that nourish the soul.

Chapters include a guide to creating an altar within ones’ home as a way to create a conscious environment, serene and temple-like. Considerations include the placement of furnishings, lighting, textiles and texture, sound, scent and the conscious selection of accessories. “The Front Exterior: The Face Of Home” reminds readers that the front of ones’ home is the face that is presented to the world expressing to others the owners persona. Throughout the book various rooms are used as examples to show how you can “altar” a space to breathe more life into the room, going beyond it’s baseline function.

Khalsa, designer and founder of Tara Home Sacred Furnishings, itself a respite for celebrities in Southern California and Phoenix, shows how simple furnishings like a hand-carved wooded chair, a stone Statue of Ganesh or graceful translucent curtains can transform a basic room into a refuge. Drawing upon the inspiration of a team of craftsmen and artisans in India, Tibet, Nepal and China, Khalsa suggests simple, yet profound ways to fill your home with inspiring materials, art and furniture that bring an Eastern sensibility into today’s modern Western home.

Khalsa offers the term sahej, (yogic term) meaning “Ahhhh…” to explain the feeling that comes over one when their new home environment connects “you to yourself and your vision” and that will be one’s sacred place. Celebrities who have experience sahej with Khalsa include Joely Fisher, Jeremy Piven, Sharon Stone, Robert Wisdom to name a few.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jagatjoti Khalsa is the founder of Tara Home in Venice, California, which specializes in sacred home furnishings and antiques from the world’s most spiritually rich locations. His goal is to not only focus on the design needs of the client, but also the underlying personal and spiritual needs that clients may or may not recognized within themselves. He has also worked in the natural foods industry at KIIT, the parent company of Yogi Tea. He lives in Venice, California.