Bringing Devotion Home: Creating a Home Altar and Morning Practice

Spirituality has replaced religiosity for many people, with people taking charge of their beliefs and relationship to the sacred. In the same way, so has the home altar or sacred space evolved.

For many years, the home altar was an abandoned concept: only orthodox or very devout homes kept the tradition. But now, rather than a proscribed space, the home altar has become a sort of new hearth, a gathering space, a touchpoint - where individuals create connection and make meaning of their own. It’s personal, and varied and rich.

Swimming in Devotional Art

Troves of uniquely framed devotional art

I’ve been digging through some of my old travel photography, being instantly drawn back into past adventures the way rummaging through old photographs allows us to do. When people visit my Dharma Boutique shop they often comment on the smell as they come into the rooms (“Oh, it reminds me of India!”), as so many of the vintage and antique items still possess elements of the aromatic essence of their origin. As you enter the big room, on your right is a wall of literally hundreds of framed devotional art prints: antique frames filled with original lithograph prints from the early/mid 1900s, as well awesome reproductions of old hand-painted miniatures.

Murtis in their Natural Habitat

One of the more unusual items I have collected and offered in my Dharma work over recent years has been a constellation of old marblemurtis, the temple statuary seen ubiquitously in homes, temples and roadsideshrines across India. When properly installed, these murtis are considered literal forms of the divine, and worshipped as a manifestation of the Deity represented—in the above photograph taken near Keshi Ghat in the sacred Yamuna River town of Vrindavan, we see Shiva, Parvati and their son Ganesh with the Yamuna flowing past.