What is Intentional Homemaking? A Guide to Happiness at Home
Learn how to harness the power of intentionality to create a more happy and meaningful home. Discover how to start Intentional Homemaking today.
The goal of homemaking is to create an environment that nurtures, supports and inspires the family that lives within it. Homemaking, the art of creating home, is a vital role for supporting physical, mental and emotional well-being for each individual it shelters.
But with homemaking being labeled as an archaic role in our modern society, it can be hard for today’s moms to know how to create a cozy and peaceful home where joy and purpose is found and followed.
Oftentimes, it comes down to a misconception of the value of homemaking and its greater role in society. While homemaking is presently likened to routine and skill-less tasks that demean a woman’s capabilities, the truth is this portrait of homemaking disregards the multifaceted and nuanced nature of the homemaker’s role.
We’ve all been sold the lie that successful homemaking comes down to productivity. You’ve probably tried multiple homemaking products, planners, and schedules that promise to help you run your household with smooth efficiency and give you a magazine-worthy home.
If you’re anything like me, you will arduously use these latest-and-greatest routines and products for 3-4 weeks, only to go right back to the chaos and feelings of not-good-enough-ness.
How many times have you asked yourself, “Why can’t I just get it together and keep my home clean and tidy? What is wrong with me that I am always so overwhelmed with homemaking when all these other moms make it look so easy?”
What if….and this is going to be a pretty big ‘what if’! I’m going to need you to read this next question with an open heart and mind. Take 3 slow deep breaths and release all of your self incriminations for just a moment. Are you ready?
What if the success of homemaking was not measured by how a home looks or how many chores you are able to perform daily? What if successful homemaking was defined by the emotional environment that is created in a home and by the level of joy and fulfillment each family member feels?
I’m going to explain why homemaking should be valued for and judged by its ability to nurture the people that live inside the home, rather than by how aesthetically pleasing a home looks.
Keep reading to learn about the importance of intentional homemaking.
What is Intentional Homemaking?
Before we can talk about intentional homemaking, it is important that we discuss intentionality.
What is intentionality?
For most of us, the word “intentional” is understood through its most common use in sentences like: “she’s intentionally trying to make me look bad.” It is most frequently used to describe someone’s purposeful negative behavior.
We rarely use it to describe how someone might purposefully use their behavior to create good. The exception to this is when people talk about “creating intentions”. We typically create intentions to reach some desired outcome. When used in this way, an intention is merely a goal.
The problem with these common frameworks for intentionality, is they don’t showcase the positive power and implication the use of intentionality has.
Dictionary.com defines intentionality as:
“An attitude of purposefulness, with a commitment to deliberate action.”
In my opinion, this definition still diminishes intentionality to the level of goal. Goals are small things in life that we desire to achieve. When small goals are achieved over time, they can create a larger direction and purpose for your life. This compounding effect of achieving small goals can only work if the goals are aligned in some way.
The alignment of goals is intentionality and has the power to direct your life in any way that you want.
“Choose your intention carefully and then practice holding your consciousness to it, so it becomes the guiding light in your life.”
John Roger
What is Intentional Living?
Intentionality has the ability to direct the course of your life. By harnessing the power of intentionality, you become the master creator of your future. The magic of intentionality is in its capacity to create any life you can imagine for yourself.
In his popular book, The Power of Intention, Wayne Dyer says:
“The only limits you have are the limits you believe.”
Wayne Dyer
Wayne Dyer teaches us in his book that by directing your thoughts, beliefs, actions, and efforts towards a desired outcome, you can design our lives to be anything that you want.
“Focus on the realities you prefer, rather than the ones you don’t.”
Wayne Dyer
Intentional living is merely harnessing the power you inherently possess to design a life of purpose, joy and fulfillment. It is, of course, up to you to decide what purpose, joy and fulfillment mean and look like to you. If you can believe it you can achieve it!
To put it simply, intentional living is realizing and harnessing your power as the sole creator of your life. The person who lives life with intentionality, is the person who believes that they create life, rather than believing that life happens to them.
Intentionality is a commitment to continuous purposeful effort and a discarding of passivity.
How does intentionality apply to homemaking?
So how does intentionality apply to homemaking? Intentional homemaking begins with a belief that homemaking is not something that you do, but something that you choose to create the life that you want.
Intentional homemaking, like intentional living, comes with great power. And as Uncle Ben tells a young Spiderman:
“With great power comes great responsibility.”
Intentional homemaking has the power to direct not only the life of the homemaker, but also the lives of the other people living within the home. Because of this great responsibility, a homemaker must carefully design her home to help propel each of her family members’ lives in a meaningful and meritorious direction.
“Set your spiritual intention for creating harmony and balance. Seek this divine impulse within you, then share it with everyone who comes into your life.”
Wayne Dyer
Intentional homemaking is about directing your efforts into creating a home where peace, joy and contentment thrive. Intentional homemaking is sharing your intentionality towards harmony and balance with your family through the daily efforts of making a home.
Why is Intentional Homemaking important?
Without intentionality we are lost and suffering
The sad reality is that happiness and satisfaction with life has been steadily declining in the United States for the last few decades. The incidence of suicide has increased around 40% since 2000. It is the 2nd leading cause of death among people between the ages 10 and 34. To find more statistics on Suicide in the United States go here.
You heard that right! Children….BABIES! As young as 10 are committing suicide. How can the most innocent and protected part of our population be so unhappy with life that they want to end it before it has even begun? We are supposed to look back on our youth as adults with wistfulness and nostalgia. It was once the bane of adulthood to want what we once had: our youth.
But as you can see from the statistics I listed above, the years that are supposed to be our best, have somehow become the most precarious. Why is this? Who is to blame?
Placing blame only serves to put people in a victim mindset and robs them of their innate power. I prefer to focus on who can be responsible for mending this virus of desolateness in youth. Who has the power and capacity to help us reclaim the joy and limitless potential for our youth?
I would argue that the homemaker, the creator of the sanctuary we call home, has the power and capability to help nurture young minds and hearts towards exploring life with purpose and joy.
“Rather than merely a box for souls to be stored, home is where body and soul are nourished, protected, comforted, and known. We long for a beautiful home because we long for a beautiful life.”
Carrie Gress & Noelle Mering
Theology of Home II: The Spiritual Art of Homemaking
Homemaking has the ability to help little souls find their purpose through intentionality or become lost and suffering without disorder and chaos.
Intentionality to the rescue
People who desire to end their lives are people who have a belief that there is no way to change their circumstances. They are people who have lost their power!
Remember, intentionality is a claiming and using of the innate power each and every one of us holds as a human being. If the cause of so much suicide and depression in our youth is their detachment from their own power, then we need to find a way to reconnect them with their infinite potential.
Children learn about the world and create a belief system inside their homes with the influence of their parents. Children decide if the world is scary by the quality of the interactions with their parents and the predictability of their environments.
Homemakers, as the primary caregivers and designers of the home environment, quite literally hold the power and responsibility to teach current and future generations how to live in this world. When we intentionally choose to design homes and life within those homes to support joy, peace and meaning, we create little people who go out into the world and create more of the same.
Intentional Homemaking is “the deeply purposeful art of sheltering and nurturing the souls of others, offering them a place to grow into the people” they are intended to be. (Theology of Home II: The Spiritual Art of Homemaking, Carrie Gress & Noelle Mering)
Intentional Homemaking can change the world!
How do I use Intentional Homemaking in my home?
Create a Vision
When we defined intentionality before, we said that it was the commitment to continuous purposeful effort. Intentionality is an alignment of goals over longer periods of time in order to create a life that is meaningful and valuable.
In order to align our behaviors, thoughts, and efforts into goals that compound over time into something bigger, we must first create a vision for what a meaningful and valuable life is. For most of us, a life well-lived is one in which we find and carry out our purpose. That purpose serves to help make our world a little more idyllic.
What would this “idyllic world” look like to you? When we define the ideal life and world, we are creating a vision of how we want life to look. This vision serves as the destination we intentionally work towards.
Take out a piece of paper and jot down a vision for your life and your family’s life. What would you be doing? What would you look like? How would you feel?
This vision is the life you should strive to create in your home, not one you find in a magazine or in a social media post.
Define your values
While the vision serves as a destination to help direct your goals and efforts, you need something to help you edit and refine those goals. There needs to be something that helps you to ensure that you stay aligned with your greater vision.
Defining your core values, helps you stay focused on what is the most important and know that you are focusing on the things that will get you where you want to go.
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
Wayne Dyer
What are the things that create meaning in your life? What are the values that help you know that you are making a difference in this world? How would you define a successful life if it had nothing to do with money or possessions?
Write down all of the words that come to mind and notice any common threads that connect them.
These are your core values that will help guide you in where and how to direct your efforts inside the home. If cleanliness is one of your core values, you will most likely spend more time cleaning and tidying than cooking or crafting. Maybe you value connection and intimacy the most. This understanding will allow you to put more effort into creating spaces in your home that allow you to connect with each other rather than focusing on more cleaning related tasks.
The important thing here is whatever is most important to you, is right. No one else can tell you want is a core value. In fact, when you define your values around what you think other people believe or how you would be judged, you will move further from your vision and a meaningful life.
Tips for getting started with Intentional Homemaking
Here are a few things to keep in mind when you start using intentionality in your homemaking.
First, don’t skip defining you vision and values
If you want to stop feeling overwhelmed or like you are spinning your wheels and getting nowhere each day, then you must get clear on why you’re doing any homemaking task in the first place. Your “why” in homemaking is composed of your vision and values. You want to give your family the vision and values that you have decided will help them feel happy and fulfilled.
Once you have defined what your vision and values are, then you can stop wasting time on things that don’t align with them and start using your time for things that do. When you see yourself making any movement towards the things that are most important to you, no matter how small, you will finally feel like you are making purposeful progress. Purposeful progress is the very thing that will help you stop feeling so overwhelmed!
Next, be flexible
Just because you sat down and defined your vision and values today, doesn’t mean that they will stay the same for the rest of your life. As a homemaker, we are dealing with the most unpredictable things: human beings! It is our job to create a home and a life within that home that helps our family move towards our vision and values.
BUT, how each person experiences and develops those core values will be determined by who they are, what their interests are, as well as their own developing set of core values. Intentional homemaking plans for this consistent change by
- Knowing it’s inevitable so that you don’t need to feel frustrated when you need to adjust and adapt.
- Having a plan for how to work through the change in a way that still keeps you moving toward your vision.
Remind yourself when something “gets in your way” that this is actually a sign that what you are doing is working. Life is unpredictable by nature. If everything stays exactly the same and perfectly routine, then life isn’t actually happening.
The whole purpose of life is development. So when development and change force you to adjust and adapt, then you know you’re doing a good job!
Finally, consistently remind yourself of your why
This one may seem obvious, but it’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day grind of making a home and find ourselves feeling frustrated, undervalued and overwhelmed again. Without a daily practice to remind ourselves of why we are doing the endless and extensive tasks of homemaking, it’s easy to forget their value.
We may think we should just inherently know that what we are doing inside the home is valuable, but when we don’t connect it to the greater purpose (vision and values) we forget to acknowledge our own value.
The most common and easy practice for connecting your efforts with your why, or your vision and values, is setting a daily intention. I know some of you are going to say that setting intentions feels very “woo”, but they are merely a physical reminder of our vision and values to ensure we stay aligned and focused.
This doesn’t need to be difficult or take up a lot of time. There is no need to create a new intention each day. Simply choose an intention statement that will remind you of your core vision and values and say it, read it or write it out each day.
Here are the intentions I remind myself of each day:
You may say, “Wait a minute! That’s so simple and basic.”
Exactly! It reminds me to “take care” with the things I value the most. This helps me prioritize responsibility to not only my family and home, but to myself as well. These intentions show me that there is an order in my intentional homemaking and when I forget to take care of something higher in the order, then the rest of the things suffer. Repeating my daily intentions reminds me to go back to the most simple things when I am feeling overwhelmed!
So, the final thing you need to write down is the intention statement you will remind yourself of at least daily. It can be a single word, or a sentence, or maybe even a few sentences. You can use mine if you want to! But please don’t forget to remind yourself of your vision and values. It’s the foundation from which Intentional Homemaking is able to create a joyful and content world!
Start Intentional Homemaking Today
I hope this guide to Intentional Homemaking has inspired you and reignited your flame for making meaning inside your home. Remember that you have the power to create a home that helps you and your family find happiness, peace and meaning through your intentional efforts in the home.
The best way to start your intentional homemaking journey is to find the time and space to journal about your vision and values. If you start here I know that you will finally be able to leave your overwhelm behind and start moving through each day with more purpose and joy.
An intentional homemaker judges her success and value not on how “put together” her home looks, but how much well-being and fulfillment each member of the family feels in his/her life.
Make sure you save the image below to your pinterest account so that you can come back to this Intentional Homemaking guide when you are ready to journal and get clear on your vision and values.
