What's important is that both partners feel represented, so that you can build your range for intimacy rogether. To accomplish this design task, use the exercise Possessing Personal Style to discover each of your own individual personal palettes. Be sure to include neutral colors. Then bring the two palettes together and see which favorites you share. If you can only come up with one color you both like, then that's your color -- for wall, trim, and drapes. Yours will be a monochromatic colour scheme, with variations appearing in shades and tones of the same colour. Use the same exercise with furnishings, wood and fabric textures, and art.
In an interpersonal union, you can hold dear to the "I" while cultivating and nurturing the "we." The bedroom is the place in your home where the "we" comes together in the deepest, most profound manner. So find the common ground when designing and laying out the area and ensure that everyone has an equal amount of space for their belongings and their spirits, and an equal amount of responsibility for maintaining cleanliness, organization, and this room's sanctuary status. Women should not take the lion's share of the closet, even if they tend to be clothes horses. This room is about sharing, and that means even-steven. Sorry, gals, you can't own the room where your mate sleeps, too.
Protecting your sanctuary
Your time in this room is essential to your physical, mental, and spiritual health; it lends support to your emotional equilibrium, your experience of wellness, and your will to live -- you must not let anyone cut you off from it because of your lack of willingness to close the door and set limits. Let kids know what the closed door means. A door that locks and sound masker that confines the sounds generated inside, to the inside, are vital in the most private of rooms. Unless you're the parent of an infant or a toddler who must be supervised at all times, this room should be sacrosanct from children when that door is closed.
Fearfulness, exhaustion, illness, allergies, and insomnia are afflictions associated with this room that can be comforted, battled, or assuaged by handling problems with the room itself. If you have been sexually violated here or elsewhere, as one in four women and one in seven men reportedly have been, this is probably an emotional roller coaster room for you. It is paramount that you take this room back as a sanctuary. The book Spiritual House-cleaning (2001) offers an in-depth healing journey for violations in general, and this room in particular. The Emotional House Program directs you to keep going and embrace intimacy once again.
Check into your feelings by using the D.U.S.T. method of cleaning your room mindfully. Write down (or draw) the story of any violations and disappointments around the topic of intimacy. Place the written story of your violation or bad experience in an envelope. Label it "Bad Memories I Won't Allow to Affect My Future Happiness" and address it to the Bureau of Understanding. It's difficult to separate yourself from the negative experiences of your life and this is a symbolic exercise, true. But if you acknowledge and add your story to the virtual database of human atrocities and injuries, others may one day figure out a way to stop committing them.
Page 2 of 4 -- Why you may want to consider giving your television the boot out of the bedroom on page 3.
Excerpted from The Emotional House by Kathryn L. Robyn and Dawn Ritchie, Copyright 2005. Excerpted with permission by Raincoast Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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