The altar in the center of the home

Start with her main altar. That was the guidance I had before entering the home of yoga therapist and healer Trine Veiss Mikelssen. So I was looking for it. And as soon as I saw this branch of colored eggs - it was late April, shortly after Easter - I knew this was "it". It wasn't just the decorations; it was the way it captured and seemed to cultivate the energy of the large spacious kitchen in her Toronto apartment.

Watching her walk around her home as she showed me around, her body relaxed in the kitchen. She also showed me her office - which was also her meditation room, and held what she thought of as her formal altar. But it was this simpler, and yet also more elaborate, altar, clearly made with the participation of her daughter, that drew my attention. It stands on the side of her kitchen table, in the middle of the room. She told me that she and her family change it as the year itself changes. As we talked, it became clear though not in the physical center of the building, the kitchen was, nonetheless, the center of her home and family life.

We will begin here, I said.

Here? She looked a little surprised. I didn't blame her. We may love our kitchens, but few of us recognize them as the spiritual spaces that they actually are. Our kitchens are our pharmacies. In our kitchens we create the potions, also known as soups, drinks, meals, snacks, and other forms of food and beverage that bring us towards health - or towards illness. Sometimes both. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trine had anticipated we would work in her study. You know, where work happens.

But some of the most important work all of us do is in the kitchen. To negate the kitchen is to negate your own capacity for self-healing, and the real magic that can and does happen there every day. I don't want to get into gender stereotypes about women and kitchens, because many men I work with spend a lot of time working in kitchens, and are often primary caretakers of their families. Whomever is cooking, cleaning, storytelling, and caretaking in the kitchen is not only doing a lot of work - they are working with the energies of plants and animals and fire and water and earth and air. That's powerful stuff. So there is a lot of powerful energy in kitchens. It is not uncommon to find altars in kitchens around the world; a recognition not only of the deity, but of the space itself.

We started with drumming and music and doing a ritual of inviting the ancestors to be with us during our session together, and blessing the space. Eventually, as it was appropriate, we moved into the study, and closed the door, and finished the session in the space where she normally does her meditation, dreams her dreams, and works with her own clients. As a yoga therapist who supports women with their menses, her study also holds a lot of powerful images, symbols, ideas and energy.

To really work with a human body must, at least eventually, entail entail working with our environment. Our space - especially our home space - tells us a lot about who and what and where we are. It is part of why I often try working with people in their homes, and part of why I think of Sacred Bodywork as so much more than "just" massage.

Several weeks after our session, Trine wrote me a lovely note. She wrote not only about her body, but about her space, and the space we co-created: "thank you so much for the time we spend together in my home, which is still supporting and guided me every day to create a life which is true to who I am. You helped me feel my home space both around me and with in me. I start my mornings now by my alter with both feel solid on the ground from a place of feeling calm, connected and trusting that everything will work out just the right way, what a difference."