The Creative Home Spa – Revisited

My mission to bring cohesion to all that I have created over the almost twenty years I have been BrocanteHome-ing continues apace, and next on my list is an all new version of The Creative Home Spa – a three day journey spent pampering heart, home, body and soul on a timetable of sorts to make sure that you step out of a weekend entirely focused on resetting yourself ready to step into the vigour’s of Winter refreshed, strong and purposeful.

I remember being thirteen years old and finding in one of my Mum’s magazines, an article that described an hour-by-hour weekend spent taking baths and dabbing at ones face with cotton wool puffs and I remember thinking it was the best thing ever because heckity-pie a person wouldn’t have to think at all to re-emerge on a Monday looking mighty-fine in her school uniform. I am you see a person who needs instruction or else books take my fancy and everything else is parked for a another lifetime in which I am a woman in better control of anything but words.

Anyways… many moons later I wrote my very own version of that Woman and Home article and each year hereafter have thrown myself a little Creative Home Spa party, for as my friend Kath and I once declared there isn’t a hospital for worn out ladies, when really I do believe it is exactly what society might be missing, so creating my very own version of convalescence from the sheer muddle that is life really was the only answer.

So what’s different in thus years version of The Creative Home Spa? Well essentially I have written it for myself – pulling in extended versions of the routines and rituals I have been adding to my own self-care regime over the last eighteen months and intensifying them for the most impact during a dedicated weekend of restoration, while maintaining the gentle flow of pottering through a collection of puttery little to-do’s to make you feel both nourished and nurtured along the way.

Because I do believe we are all a little discombobulated at the moment, Indeed I have been wandering the corridors of the interwebs today and some of my favourite bloggers seem to be utterly out of sorts too, one after the other making reference to an atmosphere they cannot label. A feeling they cannot shift, and a sense that we are all, as Leonie Dawson shared, just “churning our wheels in gravel“. I feel it. Don’t you? And I feel too, that sense of utter frustration we are all feeling about the way society is jabbing at any sense of serenity and security we may once have treasured.

This weekend I read a poem, a sestina, by Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman called To the Indifferent Women and it bothered me for it goes against my very senses. My firm belief that is only by “keeping our small domestic peace” that we have any hope of “promoting the progress of the world“. That it is from our dedication to nurturing that “small group (we) personally love” that we can inspire others to go on to know and care about “the sin and sorrow of the world”.

You who are happy in a thousand homes,
Or overworked therein, to a dumb peace;
Whose souls are wholly centered in the life
Of that small group you personally love;
Who told you that you need not know or care
About the sin and sorrow of the world?

So though I emphasise with her rage in a time quite different to ours, (and yet seemingly without real progress still), now more than ever I want to encourage you to strengthen your own sense of self first and nurture your body along the way because I firmly believe that it is only by mindfully prioritising extreme self-care that we are able to keep showing up as our whole, complete, selves and play our part in righting wheels not only stuck in gravel but liable to come flying off altogether in the maelstrom of what feels like global discontent.

Look after you. Truly madly and deeply. Our is not “dumb peace”. It is impotent rage. Fury that cannot be quelled about what kind of world we might be leaving behind for our children. And while spending a weekend supping bone broth and examining what really matters to us now may seem selfish in the whole scheme of things (and I think Charlotte herself would probably have had a lot to say about it!), for me self-care is always about standing in my own sovereignty, stamping the ground beneath my feet into something closer to terra-firma and soothing a mind liable to spinning away when life feels challenging.

The new version of The Creative Home Spa reflects all of that.

It says stop. Pause, reflect and think. And while you are doing all of that, call time on the habits that are compromising both your wellbeing and your ability to live beyond the overwhelm. If only for a weekend.

Give yourself a break from it all. Long enough to rest, reset and start again.

The Creative Home Spa will go live on Etsy and in The Library in November. As always you can help yourself to the early bird discount of 25% off when you order today for just $15.00, and it will be delivered to your inbox in November thereafter.

I’m doing my own version of the Spa this weekend because I’m all of a fluster and I need not just to reset but to totally disengage and find my equilibrium. Tune back in to my Renaissance. Trying it out for you as I switch off the distractions and go inwards for a while, Pampering myself silly till I feel human again and fine-tuning The Creative Home Spa so that you too will benefit from closing your mind to anything but strengthening your reserves…

Let’s go gently with ourselves.

Love Alison.x