Think UP!

An altar is a tool. Why not use it?

Here’s a strength-giving thing you can do for yourself that costs nothing, takes ten minutes or less, and gives you a hit of dopamine, plus, it’s a cool home-decor item, too: Building an altar.

What counts as an altar?

I use a tiny altar to remind me of resources I want to draw on or what I’m aiming to create in that day’s task. I don’t mean a cathedral-scale, dining-table-sized thing you don’t have room for.

I mean something that fits on a dessert plate. A saucer. The one I’m using this morning is arranged on a drink coaster beside the couch where I’m writing, having coffee, and soaking up therapeutic light from a 10,000-lux light box in January.

Even the WASPiest households have altars. Household altars are a way of enshrining the things people value. Things they want to remind themselves of. Connections to where they come from and who they want to be.

If somebody has a mantelpiece in her home, what is on it? A big piece of carefully chosen art or a beautiful mirror in the style of a time they want to feel connected to:

• Hand-carved? They honor the honest, imperfect work of human craftsmen.
• Art Deco? Welcome, Roaring Twenties, when women shed their corsets, cut their hair, and rocked the vote.
• French or Italian or Scandinavian? They’ve wanted to vacation there, to connect themselves with that culture.
• Family portraits? You’re looking at home-grown ancestor-worship. Nothing wrong that, with reminding yourself of the parts of your ancestry that you choose to continue in your own life.

The tools hung over a workbench are an altar: They manifest the importance of the work done in that space. Pots and pans hung near a stove are a shrine to the chef’s work. Yeah, they’re arranged to be within easy reach, AND they’re also a kind of praise of those tools. Plus, they’re beautiful.

Getting dressed can be a ritual, and the closet or dressing area is an altar to highlight the process of creating the self you intend to be on a given day. Maybe that’s part of the appeal of those perfectly organized, beautifully lit closets pictured in ads for closet organizing stuff: They elevate getting dressed into a beautiful ritual.

An altar is a way of visually reminding yourself of your own resources, your own strengths. Like the tools over a silversmith’s workbench, an altar is also a way to have your spiritual resources near at hand when you need them. You can take strength from reminders of the infinitude of resources you’ve got. Sometimes we need to be reminded.

And, because science!

Let’s add to our altar-making the strengthening power of ritual by looking at making an altar as a ritual act, which it is. A ritual is a symbolic action or actions you perform to help bring about some desired outcome (Alkon 61). I knew my little altars helped me, but I didn’t know why until I read about the power of ritual in Amy Alkon’s book Unf*ckology (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2018), which I highly recommend. In it, Alkon discusses the research demonstrating that rituals measurably help people’s performance on tasks.

What can I use?

Choose objects for your altar based on what they symbolize to you. One object I use is a button from Grandma’s wedding dress. Kirsten found these, wrapped them in fabric with a pattern that symbolizes Grandma’s nickname, and gave one to each sister. Any coin I find on the street also reminds me of Grandma, who used to pick up every penny she spotted. When she got too stiff to pick them up herself, she’d make whoever was with her pick it up for her, and wouldn’t take no.

I also have a lot of crystals I’ve collected over the years — I’ve always loved rocks — and stones I’ve picked up from places I’ve hiked and, TBH, parking lots. The Universe gives you messages everywhere.

You can add small pieces of paper with affirmations, meaningful quotations, or phrases from poetry written on them, adding the power of words to your altar. Writing these down in your own handwriting would be a strengthening aspect of the ritual. Fold them up and add them. You can also light a candle.

The objects don’t have to be directly physically connected to your experience. I’ve got a couple shirts I wear to paint in that remind me of ones Dad wore when I was little. Something about the softness of the fabric and the plaid. Those shirts were long gone by the time Dad died, but I still remember how they looked and felt.

An important component of ritual is repetition, so use that in whatever way you can. Alkon uses the example of repeating a gesture or phrase: turning around three times, or saying something several times rather than just the once marks it clearly as a ritual. Since my altars focus on the visual, I can use repetition by using more than one of whatever type of crystal I’m choosing.

How To Build an Altar

1. Find a base that fits the space you have available: a tray, plate, saucer, or coaster. I have an abalone shell I use for occasions when I want to enhance the qualities I associate with it: gentleness, beauty created slowly over time, the Divine Feminine.
2. Decide the purpose of the altar: who you want to be or what you want to accomplish today.
3. Choose objects
   1. that symbolize the goal you’re aiming for, like an inspiring and clear piece of writing encouraging people who read it to create altars
   2. that symbolize the resources that you want to draw on, such as the creative energy of the Universe of which you are a beloved particle
   3. that amplify the resources you have: your dad’s sense of humor, your grandmother’s encouragement
4. While you’re arranging your stuff on your altar, remind yourself that you’re doing a ritual. Alkon notes the research finding that the actions someone does, even if they’re meaningless to the subject, who is being directed to do them, improve the person’s performance on a task if the person is told to think of them as a ritual.

Arranging the objects on your saucer, creating the altar, is the ritual. You can, and I do, repeat this ritual every day, taking a moment to focus on what I’m aiming for and what I need.

I plan to incorporate movement and maybe incantations into my next altar-making ritual, to make it even stronger.