By Sonia Choquette
To genuinely tune in to your Spirit and feel its guiding force, it’s important to make it a central part of your life—something you want to turn to automatically without pause or hesitation. One way to help you achieve this is by creating a personal altar in your home and sitting quietly in front of it every day for a few minutes (preferably during peaceful moments in the morning).
There is no right or wrong way to set up an altar—just follow your intuition. What you create should reflect your deepest, most genuine Self. An altar is meant to be a visual reminder for you to go within through prayer, meditation, contemplation, song or intuitive listening. Set up your altar as a place where you can anchor your attention inward, detach from the outer world for a moment and instead tune in to the subtle forces of love and guidance arising in your heart.
Your altar serves as a place that helps center your awareness on your inner voice and the guiding flow of love and support flowing from Divine Source to your Higher Self and on to you.
An altar is far more than a beautiful “thing” to look at. It is an active doorway to your beautiful guiding Spirit in many profound ways. Sitting at your altar trains your conscious and subconscious mind to let go of familiar mental patterns (which have habitually controlled you) and tune you in to the subtler, more loving, au- thentic frequency of Spirit. When you sit in prayer or meditation in front of your altar, you’re teaching your mind to relax and surrender to the higher power of the Spirit within.
Altars also serve as energetic portals, or openings, to the realm of Spirit. When you enter the sacred energy surrounding an active altar, the veil between the worlds thins and the heavens open up. If you consistently hold the intention of connecting with your Spirit as you sit at your altar, you’ll be “spirited away” into a beautiful higher realm. At first, the shift may be so subtle that you hardly notice the changes through your senses, but with repeated visits, your perception of this heightened vibrational frequency will become stronger. And no matter what you may be thinking about when approaching your altar, your mind will quickly be- come calm, quiet and clear as you settle before it; and your heart will open as your vibration shifts to one of pure loving-kindness.
With daily practice, you’ll actually feel yourself entering this sacred opening to the spirit realm the moment you approach your altar; it feels very similar to what you might experience when you approach an altar in a church, temple or other holy place. If you haven’t felt this or don’t think you’re energetically sensitive enough to feel it, be patient. Sitting for a few minutes each day in the energy of your personal altar will heighten your awareness, and you’ll start to feel this higher vibration. Also, the more you sit in prayer or meditation before your personal altar, the more the energy itself builds.
The shift in vibration around your altar is strengthened by regular, intentional acts of meditation, prayer, song, chant, and contemplation. If there’s no holy inner work going on, the vibration of Spirit won’t be present and the portal won’t open. It will simply be something pretty to look at, but it won’t possess Divine life force. Therefore, I encourage you to create your altar with holy intention, reverence and enthusiasm.
