MOVING HOME SERENELY

Moving Home and Wellness

How to Handle the Life Transitions that Accompany Uprooting

by Gina Lazenby

Isn’t moving home in the list of top life stressors? Right up there with bereavement!? Heck yeah!

No matter how well prepared and organised you are, moving home is a huge source of stress. Sometimes it is the legal side, sometimes it’s the logistics, and often both! All house moves are big. Uprooting and relocating your entire life is both scary and exciting at the same time.

I went through a big house move myself in 2015. That was when I sold my house of 25 years in central London and consolidated my living into a small house in Skipton. It’s not just the physical moving of stuff from A to B, it’s the drama of marketing and selling a home, suffering the endless viewings, enduring the lost buyers who change their minds way down the line then finally the big letting go of everything that life phase represented and embarking on the next chapter. Shedding and clearing out excess belongings is integral to the process of moving on and moving forward.

It’s not the easiest of life transitions so you just have to be resilient, intend for the best, prepare for the worst.

Keep your fingers crossed and just move through the process with as much help as you can pull together. Doing this at any age is not for the fainthearted. Try doing this at age 90. I’ve just completed a major house move for my elderly parents, decanting their lives from independent living over two hours’ drive from me to semi-independence in a new and smaller co-housing apartment just minutes from me. Reflecting on what my family went through these last six months, and my own major relocations, here are five insights.

The container will change you.

Your home is the container for your life. When you want big change then you have to examine the container that holds your current life experience and ask yourself, is this too small, too big…… Is this the right container for the life phase I want to shift into? So when you do move house, your life will change. As the environment around you becomes different so your perspective and approach to life will also change.

Identify your key priorities.

It’s good to set the criteria for the change in advance so you are crystal clear on what you want from life, and how your next home will support that. Once you have your list of must-haves and secondary desires on your wish list, it not only makes the search more manageable, you will likely manifest what you consider your ideal or dream home. Once I clearly determined my three top desires for a property, it appeared with 24 hours.

Letting go is hard to do.

If clothes no longer fit, then they are easy to let go of; it’s the stuff loaded with memories and attachments that’s much harder to deal with. The issue is that we identify with so much of our stuff. Haven’t we all, to some degree, bought a memento of a place we have visited, even if it was something practical like a cushion with an eye-catching design spotted in an unusual boutique in a far off land. There seems to be a greater tendency to hold onto these treasures because they remind us of special moments, moments that often give our lives more meaning.

It might be a good idea to take the clearing process in three stages.

1 Firstly, it’s good to let go of whatever you can before the move, anything you know definitelythat you no longer need or are interested in. Transporting it then junking at the new place is amassive waste of effort. I know because I am guilty of that!

2 The next opportunity for divesting is when you unpack. As you stand in your new space, which has a different energy, you will feel if the items want to stay or you can let go of them. It will either look right at home in the new space or it will tell you that it’s outdated and does not match the new vibe.

3 Lastly, it’s a good idea to acclimatise to your new space and during this period it is best to quarantine this third category of items. Everything that is not needed in the first couple of months and this includes all those boxes of books, family birthday cards, decades of personal history and family memorabilia …… whatever you have burdened yourself with over the years. Find a holding space like a garage or hire a store so you can deal with all these separately when you have settled into your new home and your new way of life. It’s at that time you will feel differently so when you look at those things again, you will know that you are ready to let go of the connection and can wave them goodbye or….. cherish as appropriate.

.It is easier to move boxes than people

Two sets of strong arms can lift and transport a big box which can then be unpacked andsorted at the new location. Yes, it can take a while to decide where to put everything in the newplace .. but how long does it take for the human system to adapt to new surroundings?

Deeply ingrained habits and routines anchor us into a space; they make us feel part of the home and the home part of us. So when we re-locate, it can take time to feel comfortable and to find things. Where are the teaspoons in this house you exclaim each time you open the wrong drawer? What helps in the integration into the new home is having a blend of old and new. The familiar sideboard, television and paintings will help you feel like this is your place while having, for example, a new sofa and coffee table, which signal that this is also a fresh start. Not everything is quite the same.

You want to feel both reassured and excited.

Settling in and feeling part of your new place.

Unpack and set up the most important rooms first.. bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom, thenlounge. Sleep, food, then space to organise! As soon as you can explore where you lie andstart to create new habits or new places for your existing habits and routines.

This is the exciting phase .. or it should be. Try not to travel too far away from home or spend time overnight out of your new bed. Like a seedling taking root in the new soil, stay in one place as long as possible. And talking about soil, plant shrubs, flowers, herbs or trees as soon as you can. Even without your own garden, you can help ground yourself with a few bulbs on a window ledge. They will grow as you grow in your new home as your new life takes shape.

Good luck.

Outgrowing the container you live in.

My story.

I recall a time in the 1990s after I had lived in my lovely London mews house a few years when I started to feel limited and trapped. I had just come back from a vacation in San Francisco where I had sat on a Pacific beach looking out over the endless ocean and experienced a feeling of being unlimited…… of having access to huge potential and opportunity.

When I came home and looked through the iron security bars of my downstairs window, to the house opposite me only a few yards away, with only a slice of sky visible above the roofline, I felt that unlimited possibility that I had experienced in California wither away. That’s when I resolved to move to a house with a huge Vista. I soon found myself living in the hilltop cottage that became the healthy home. The beautiful panoramic views over the Yorkshire hills opened up my own inner landscape and I was able to shift my worldview. The books I went on to write in that building became global best sellers and I just knew I would not have been able to do the clear thinking needed in my tight urban environment with only a slice of sky available to me. The bigger the external space you can access the greater the inner space that can be unlocked within you.

A fresh start at 90!

Barbara & Geoffrey Archer, my parents, make a pretty good team. They are 88 and 89 pictured here leaving their beloved lightfilled home where they have lived independently for 32 years in the Yorkshire seaside town of Scarborough, a place they have been since childhood. This was the day they made their way to my Yorkshire Dales market town of Skipton. A new adventure for their tenth decade.

It was a move they strongly resisted, particularly my dad. One of his arguments was that Scarborough is a popular place for people to retire to. As a retired person, it did not make sense to leave a retirement town. Hah! How old is dad? 90 in October … “but you retired 32 years ago”, I said! “You are beyond retirement in a phase I don’t know the name of yet but let’s just call it the golden years with being cared for.” He decided to frame the move as a fresh start, and that is not a bad way to look at it on your 90th birthday!

We took them away before the packing for the removal van to my brother’s … we handled the whole move and unpacked at the other end. A big celebration of Dad’s 90th birthday took place in the Healthy Home Retreat during this gap; then, seven days after they waved goodbye to all they owned, they moved into their new apartment. Here they are .. somewhat shell-shocked but settling in and always ready with a smile for the camera!

Gina has spent most of her life at the leading edge of new ideas. She started out in the world ofhospitality and her ground-breaking work was recognised with a number of industry awards. Hermarketing consulting firm helped her independent hotel clients to reach new audiences and markets.

Responding to her own life crisis took Gina into the emerging human potential movement and in the early 1990s, she again broke new ground by launching the London Personal Development Centre. For the last 40 years, she has developed expertise in how people can create change and manage the transition process.

Her passion for living well at home became the seed for her interest in Feng Shui and she was instrumental in creating the popularity of this eastern philosophy in the west. By 1995 she created the world’s first professional training program in Feng Shui going on to write three best-selling books, including ‘The Feng Shui House Book’ and ‘The Healthy Home’. International sales topped half a million copies and her work earned her a prestigious award from the Institute of Public Relations for her national PR campaign to put feng shui “on the map”.

Gender Equality and Feminine Leadership

Gina has always understood the management and care of a home as a very feminine skill set and one that has been highly undervalued. Her work in the last twenty years has been in the exploration of the changing nature of gender roles and the value of home-making in our lives. Her feng shui knowledge enabled her to teach hundreds of students the value of aligning a home for both wellness and success. She has also produced and presented a radio series called ‘The Rise of the Feminine’ exploring the shift in values in the world and the unique contribution of women. Her next podcast series will be about how the 21st century home is being adapted.

She has spoken at conferences and led retreats and workshops around the world on feminineleadership, feng shui, healthy living, wellbeing, wisdom, and entrepreneurship for women. For overten years she has hosted Women’s Gatherings for female entrepreneurs on four continents.

Gina has circled back to her hospitality roots and now offers her home that inspired her books as the Healthy Home Retreat, available for families to gather and leaders to host their own retreats. The 750-year-old original property near Skipton in the Yorkshire Dales has been restored and extended according to the principles she expounds. She often leads programmes there herself for women around the themes of wellness (personal nourishment) and wisdom (handling life transitions).

She also hosts community events and conversations about things that matter in this changing worldwith Conscious Cafe, both locally in Skipton and online on a global platform.

Supporting Women Entrepreneurs

I Trained as a Wealth Dynamics Master Practitioner for Women in Business, brought together myexperience of business consulting, empowering women and knowledge of ancient wisdom and flow.

My intention was to show women how they can expand their natural tendency for collaboration togrow businesses working with the right partners (according to Wealth Dynamic Profiles) so that theyachieve more success and essentially - end up baking bigger pies.

The key is for women to value their home-making and family skills and leverage them in business and entrepreneurship…. teaching the 21st-century business women.

For more information, please check out http://www.ginalazenby.com/

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