Chapter 6: The ABCs of Enlightened Design

When we enter a space, we have an intuitive, if unspoken, sense of it. The space might feel uplifted, wholesome, inviting, energized—or anxious, depressing, cold, or chaotic. No decorator can make a house feel like a home or a cold space feel like a warm one. The combined "vibrations" of people, places, and things author the sensory messages available in the environment. And the receptivity, or spaciousness, of our sense organs enables us to read them.

Without mental and physical space, we cannot even experience our senses. Sound waves, for example, must undulate in space to be heard; light waves must travel through space to be experienced as color and sight. Sensory overstimulation (lack of space) causes sensory numbness and contributes to attention deficit disorder (ADD) in children and adults.

An Aesthetic Approach to Design

AESTHETICS: from the Greek aisthetikos; of sensory perception; an ability to see, therefore to know, through the senses.

Sense perceptions—a function of space—are the ABCs of enlightened design, which is an aesthetic approach to design. Wakefulness restores us to our senses by restoring communication between body and mind. Enlightened design brings sense perceptions into harmony with space. The first space with which we work is mind. Mindfulness/awareness is 50 percent of "enlightened" interior, architectural, and environmental design.

In balance, all six sense organs work together to establish our world. Most of us these days are out of balance: relying heavily on conceptual mind, we often talk or read about things instead of putting them into practice. By flexing all of our sensory "muscles," we can balance overactive mind and join heaven and earth.

Creating a Sensory Environment

Mastering the ABCs of perception enables you to send and receive coherent sensory messages. Perceptual literacy creates conscious environments that are powerful and meaningful. Here's one example.

To create a rich and splendid space, you might start with one piece of furniture that says, "Look at me, I'm rich." From one seed of richness, you can "grow" a room—a fashion statement, performance piece, or public space. Richness—connected with abundance, dignity, generous scale and ornamentation, splendor, gold, and the color yellow—contains a world of associations. Express them through fabrics, rugs, accessories, artwork, and so on. Express richness through one or more of the sense perceptions. Needless to say, if you engage all the sense perceptions—sight, sound, touch, taste, and so on—you will create a very rich and powerful environment indeed.

The six tools of enlightened design are: eyes, ears, nose, tactile receptors, tongue—and in this tradition, mind (consciousness), which orchestrates the other five. Now we will look at the magic of the sense perceptions individually.

Sight

If a picture is worth a thousand words, our visual environment speaks volumes. Sight relies on light, and our eyes can literally enlighten us. Visual experiences have physical, emotional, and spiritual equivalents—and vice versa. They can be uplifting—or violent, depressing, and degrading. Interior design speaks mainly through the sense of sight.

Visual overstimulation is numbing. Visual chaos scrambles visual information, creating visual static and illiteracy. Both are forms of sensory pollution—and both contribute to attention deficit and other disorders in children and adults. These pressing challenges can be addressed on a daily basis by visual artists and designers. "The purpose of art," as Trungpa Rinpoche wrote, "is to wake people up; anything can wake you up!"

Walk through your space with visual awareness and record what "strikes your eye." Stand in doorways and record your first impressions of the house, of a room. Are the organization and focus of each room clear? Then look at the objects around you. What are they contributing to your environment? Look at walls, doors, floors, and ceilings. Study the colors in and outside of your home. Are they warm, cold, pleasing, bright, or dingy? Notice the quality and color of your lighting. Don't plan any changes at this point; just record how your visual impressions make you feel.

Sound

Sound is not frontal like sight. We are immersed in sound that registers continually in our nervous and skeletal systems. Ambient sound can be irritating, soothing, or neutral (white noise). Sound can be used to promote growth—or to disorient, even kill, human beings, plants, and animals. Sound pollution, or noise, doesn't have to be loud to be toxic to our bodies, minds, health, and behavior. It is a leading cause of hearing loss, and it's as much a problem in the suburbs as in the city.

Sound is connected with body (sight is more connected with mind). Natural sounds—flowing water, wind, and birdsongs—are more soothing and pleasurable than mechanical sounds because, like our bodies, they're alive. Mechanical sounds—no matter how gentle—become irritating or debilitating. Sounds of children and animals connect us with the energy of life. The absence of seemingly insignificant sounds (birdcalls, rustling leaves) is the most often journalized loss after earthquakes, fires, and other natural disasters.

Because children are naturally raucous, parents may think they're insensitive to sound. In fact, children's hearing and attention spans can be seriously damaged by "noise pollution"—not the least of which are television and noisemaking toys. Children should not be relegated—contrary to the designs of many contemporary homes—to bedrooms or playrooms polluted with sounds of heat pumps, refrigerator motors, or other sounds objectionable to adults.

Walk quietly through your home, relax your gaze, and pay attention to the sounds all around you. Listen for natural sounds (birds and animals, children, flowing water, wind) and mechanical sounds (refrigerators, heat pumps, plumbing, traffic, power tools and appliances, noisy toys). Listen for stressors such as squeaking doors, telephones (including call-interrupt and answering machines), sirens, and low-flying aircraft. Note how the "noise level" of your home makes you feel. Working with sound is important to home design.

Taste

The sense of taste may not seem relevant to environmental or interior design. We associate taste primarily with food, beverages, and other things we put in our mouths. In many traditional cultures, however, different kinds of tastes correspond with other sensory energies with similar kinds of effects. In Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine, for example, five flavors—sweet, sour, salty, bitter (astringent), hot (pungent)—correspond with the aromas, colors, elements, and so on, of the five basic energies. Balancing the energies of food helps to balance your environment. (See Appendix B, "References and Further Readings," for more information on this topic.)

Beyond that, we have a "taste" for certain kinds of experience. Taste implies discrimination (hence, "in good taste"). It is intimately connected with sensual pleasure (as in "What is your pleasure?") and, in James Hillman's words, "opening the soul's body to delight which anyway is implied by that sensate word 'taste.'"

Taste is intimately connected with the sense of smell. Both convey worlds of information, and both contribute to feelings of well-being or distress. Taste and smell help us to understand, or "digest," situations. We literally and figuratively "taste" what we smell in our environment and vice versa; psychologically, we "taste" our experience. In old age, we lose the sense of taste, and interest in food—and other sensory experience—declines.

Taste is not a question of good or bad, but of balance. Are the sweet, sour, salty, astringent, hot energies of your home in balance—or is your home too "sweet," too "bland," too "spicy"? Is it filled with things that "whet the appetite" and satisfy your soul? Or is your home the equivalent of a TV dinner? Are your cupboards literally filled with a discriminating selection of foods and beverages? Record your findings.

Smell

The sense of smell conveys worlds of information that affect us for better or worse. Smells can pollute our world or have therapeutic effects. Many newer hospitals, for instance, have cozy, eat-in kitchens on floors caring for seriously ill patients: the cookies and breads baked fresh every day fill the space with wonderful and comforting aromas. "Good aromas can create refreshing and rejuvenating feeling," writes Greg Van Mechelen, "but too often our buildings smell of toxic materials and sick air systems."

Smell is a warning system: it lets us know what's wholesome and what's not. In both Eastern and Western medicine, categories of smells—sweet, sour, astringent, and so on—are used in diagnosis. Every home has a unique smell that can be diagnosed as healthy or unhealthy. Smell is the sense perception most closely connected with memory.

Smells are used commercially to create "atmosphere" and positive associations and to seduce us to shop. When they are chemical, contrived, and used to manipulate, smells literally can be sickening. I was recently in a local gift boutique redolent of sugar and spice when a toddler accurately broadcast, "It stinks in here." On the other hand, the art and science of aromatherapy has brought relaxation, clarity, peace, healing, richness, harmony, love, energy, and delight to human beings all over the globe for thousands of years.

Are the smells in your home fresh, reassuring, and "good" or stale and "bad"? (Do you know what to do about unwanted odors?) Record your findings. Don't forget bathrooms, closets, and basement.

Touch

Touch connects us to the world through contact. We are constantly "in touch" with hard/soft, rough/smooth, pleasing/displeasing messages that inform us about our animate and inanimate world. The energies of soft (like the sky) and hard (like the earth) need to be in balance. Hardness can feel supportive and reassuring, or rejecting; softness can be comforting and friendly, or debilitating. If our world seems like too harsh a place, we may overcompensate with too much softness (and vice versa).

Temperature brings us into contact with the natural world. When we're deprived of that connection in temperature-controlled environments, we lose our ability to adapt to natural energies. Greg Van Mechelen notes that "buildings used to be designed around variations in temperature, and people used them accordingly: fireplaces gave warmth in winter, courts provided coolness in summer. Today climate control makes the same house possible in Minneapolis or Miami. Many cultures associate important rituals with warmth: the Finnish sauna, the Japanese bath, or the sweat lodge of the native American. Passive heat transmitted through materials like stone flooring is known to be the healthiest. Other climate modifiers include soft surfaces, warm colors and yellow light for warmth."

Beyond that, being touched means "to be moved," touched by the spirit—or slightly insane. Touch is a very significant sensory antenna and transmitter of sensory messages. It's also an important warning system. Contact with natural and synthetic fibers and building materials, for instance, provides us with a sense of wellbeing or dis-ease.

How does your home "feel" to you? Are you in daily contact with wood, straw, cotton, and other "living, breathing" materials? Are you in touch with earth, fire, water, and the other elements in your daily life? What kind of contact do you make with your furniture? Are you constantly in touch with delightful surfaces or with sharp corners and tight squeezes? Can you easily control the temperature of your home? Do you use energy-intensive (fossil fuels, electricity) or energy-efficient (solar energy, a sweater) means to do that? Do you have a favorite cup to wrap your hands around for warmth? Notice the comfort level of your furniture (your kitchen cabinets, your office chair, your bed).

Mind

An awake mind is our ultimate home. In the Buddhist tradition, "taking refuge" means taking on the practice of wakefulness. Wandering from that, the thoughts, emotions, actions, and houses in which we seek shelter become like sandcastles or prisons.

Bringing wakefulness to every aspect of your home environment is as simple as cleaning your teapot. Colors, textures, shapes, and spatial organization can enlighten your world.

Take time to sit quietly in each room of your home. Take a deep breath. Keeping your eyes open, count five relaxed out-breaths. Then, for the next five out-breaths, be aware not only of sights but also of sounds, smells, tactile sensations, tastes, and thoughts. Let each of them arise in your awareness, then let it go; come back to being in the room. You may notice that your home evokes feelings of satisfaction (sanity, well-being, renewal, peace) or distress (time pressures, feelings of isolation or intrusion). Notice those feelings and let them go. Ask yourself whether home is a spiritual power spot for you; whether you find personal and universal wisdom there; whether your home feels blessed.

BLESSING: honoring and invoking sacredness; something promoting or contributing to happiness, well-being, or prosperity; a boon; approbation; approval.

How to Use This Book

The next five parts of the book present each of the five styles from two basic perspectives: the power of the style and practical design applications.

The Power of Each Style
First, we'll take a look at the primary power of each energy and its effect on our lives. From a contemplative point of view, the ultimate power, or gift, of each energy is wisdom—its "awake" manifestation in space. The first chapter of each part also describes an energy's imbalance (in "Too Much of a Good Thing"), which you will learn to diagnose and correct; and sensory examples of each energy (in "Bringing It Home"), which will speak for themselves.

The Role of Each Style in Home Design
Then we'll translate each energy into practical applications. You will learn how to identify the energies in a room, to increase deficient energies, reduce excesses, and restore balance through design. Refer to the chart in Appendix A for an overview of the five styles.

Use your workbook to record impressions of your space, to identify where you need or want certain qualities of energy, and to plan changes.

Important examples and exercises are repeated throughout the book. Please think of these repetitions as the heartbeats of living energies and your creative design process.

The qualities of the five styles will be reviewed in Parts II through VI. Some design solutions pertain to several styles: boxes, baskets, and closed storage, for example, can eliminate clutter (creating space); decorate space (warmth); enrich space with their physical presence (richness); and make space work more efficiently (energy).

The discussion of each style ends with a summary design example and instructions for creating an "installation" in each style.

Creating an Installation
An installation focuses a particular energy—using its qualities, colors, natural element, and symbols—to channel it into your home. Large or small, it's a well defined statement that heightens your awareness of an energy, channels it into the space, and projects it into your world.

You can channel the energy of space, clarity, richness, warmth or energy into any bounded space (including your body, your car, the top of your desk). You can create an installation in the foyer of your house or along the sight line of a particular room to set the tone, to empower a particular room of the house, or to celebrate a particular season. Here is one format that I've used throughout the book by way of demonstration, but you can do variations of your own:

Heaven: a panel of colored fabric or paper on the wall. I use 36-inch- to 48-inch-wide cotton duck or colored paper (bought by the roll)—and hang it from ceiling to floor. You can use smaller or larger panels and dye, paint, or sponge on color and augment the panel with artwork, a mirror, or a hanging scroll. This panel defines your installation space and its specific energy.

Earth: a table or base—in the appropriate style—in front of your backdrop.

Man: a statue or flower/object arrangement to evoke a specific energy—to bring heaven and earth into harmony (which can be enlivened with plants, a spotlight, or a fountain of running water).

Please Remember This!

A masterpiece can be created with a stone or the burned end of a stick! You don't need a lot of money, space, or professional help to apply these principles. You can realign your home with the forces of nature by rearranging your furniture and working with the contents of your house. You can train in these principles using cut/torn colored paper, fabric remnants, flowers, or the contents of your pocketbook (and join heaven and earth with an "installation" of Post-its and paper clips). You can, in fact, evoke a particular energy with just one object—a chair, a flower arrangement, or a rug.

Start small. Use household objects and everyday situations to realign the energy of your home. One friend uses a tray of rocks, rearranging and relocating the tray in her home. The simplest, conscious gestures can change your life:

Space: Eliminate clutter (everywhere—walls, floors, ceiling); open space up.
Clarity: Make space spotless, restore order, and install good lights.
Richness: Put a pumpkin (or a basket of ripe peaches) on the table.
Warmth: Bring warm colors, flowers, and candles into the space.
Energy: Ventilate the space—with fresh air and with furniture arrangements that encourage energy flow—and bring in live plants.

Now take each of these suggestions and find it reflected in a painting or print (or do one of your own).

Whether you're working simply or on a grand scale, it's time to begin working with space.