When designing a dedicated space in your home for meditation, you want to think about cultivating an all-sensory experience: sound, soft and cozy textures, soft lighting, beautiful, calming style, essential oil diffusers. Total relaxation. Here are a few of the ways to start thinking about your meditation room, along with some inspiration imagery from meditation spaces we’ve designed for clients in the past…
Color Scheme and Materials
For obvious reasons, it’s common to go with pastels or monochrome in a meditation space, but we like to mix it up a little bit with jewel tones and bold colors. They can still have as equally a calming effect. Keep in mind in a meditation room, you should feel calm, but alert – the point of meditation is to stay focused and alert, not to fall asleep, after all.
It’s also fairly common, especially in warmer climates to stick with light linens, but we’ve also included heavier velvet drapery and upholstery in our meditation projects and have achieved a similar effect. It’s all about what relaxes you. So feel free to break the regular rules and personalize your space. For a nuanced step by step guide on how we designed and built each of our meditation beds, check out this post here.
Lighting Your Meditation Room
If you’ve ever been in a yoga studio or a spa, you’re familiar with the soft warmth of their lighting schemes. Seek to emulate that in your meditation space with candles, soft bulbs, and light’s with plenty of shades to diffuse the light, and put lights on dimmers whenever appropriate.
There isn’t a ton of navigating around in this space, so contrary to most of our other lighting advice, there isn’t a need for lots of variety in task lighting. The space should be fairly empty and intuitive to navigate without lots of light.
Meditative Accessories & Aromatherapy
Extra cushions, throw blankets, diffusers, incense, soy candles, and essential oils may all be part of your at-home yoga and meditation practices. For such an uncluttered space, there really are a lot of elements that go into it. Here are some of our favorites of each:
The Best Meditation Cushions
If you like to be as grounded close to the earth as possible while you meditate, a meditation cushion is an essential part of your practice. These cushions are all well worth the price considering how often they’d get used and how incredibly ergonomical they are.
Our Favorite Affordable Throw Blankets
Sometimes you just need a little extra padding or extra warmth on the mat. Each of these throws would make a simple, cozy addition to your meditation room. Not to mention – they make pretty great gifts as well!
Our Favorite Soothing Scents
Aromatherapy can be an incredibly impactful addition to your meditation practice, but you want to be sure you’re using healthy, eco-friendly scents and materials. It is worth it to pay a little more for the healthier candle burn, incense, or essential oils so they don’t end up having the opposite of their intended effect.
Connecting Your Space to Nature
Think way outside the box: perhaps there is an outdoor space you can carve out in your backyard to dedicate to meditation like we did with this patio at one of our Air BnB properties.
You can still connect to nature indoors, though: Water features and adding something living, breathing, and green will also take your meditation space to the next level. What’s more soothing than the white noise of running (recycled) water and a connection to nature?
Benefits of Adding a Meditation Room to Your Home
If you’re here reading this, by now, you probably don’t need convincing of meditation’s benefits, but in case you do, here it goes. The science in support of meditation continues to grow every day. There are countless benefits to adding a meditation practice, even if it’s just 10 minutes of mindfulness meditation added into your morning routine. Some of the indisputable benefits and symptoms include:
- Increased focus on the present moment
- Increased attention span
- Enhanced self-awareness
- Enhances creativity
- Increased calm
- Reduced stress and anxiety
- Metta meditation encourages and promotes kindness
- Improve your sleep at the end of the day
- Helps control and deal with physical pain
- Excellent use of the extra space!
