Whatever occurs during a busy day, we ultimately return to the bedroom after we leave in the morning. This quiet curtained chamber, with its bed, dressers, and closets, is where we release a breath at day's end, don a special costume, or go completely naked without a care. For many of us, the bedroom is our stress-free zone of solitude and relaxation.

The bedroom means different things to different people. It is the place to collapse for those craving sleep; the place to make love for those burning with passion. It is where many of us store our clothes and dress up in them, put on a face, and mentally prepare for the day. It's the room where dust collects under the bed, where laundry piles up, where we write in our journals, or where we try out a new look.

Stop and think of the bedroom's awesome power. We share our love in the bedroom and create life itself there with our bodies and our hearts. So intimate, private, and personal is the bedroom. It is the only space in the house where guests hesitate to wander and where family members enter under strict rules.

We often pray there, soar in orgasm there, and sigh our deepest sighs there. It is perhaps the only place where spirituality, grooming, and sexuality nestle side by side. At its best, the bedroom is a place for union with partner, higher self, and with the Creator in whose image we are made.

The bedroom is where we sleep, where each night our dreams take us into higher worlds. We awaken in the night, sweaty from a nightmare or homesick as some perfect dream begins to fade away. We are sometimes startled awake, inspired with ideas, prickly all over with embarrassment, or unexpectedly stimulated and passionate. Vivid realities return to us of a lost childhood love, some forgotten hot-skinned shame, or a replay of grief for someone who passed away long ago.

Some of us learned to pray as children there, elbows on the bed before sleep, blessing everyone we could think of, asking to pass a test we were dreading the following day at school. As adults, we have knelt down by the bed to pray like we never prayed before: to pass life-or-death tests we did not expect. In the bedroom, we have known the sudden flash of perfect clarity.

The bedchamber is where parents keep secrets from their children, at least for a few years, and where children keep secrets from parents their whole lives. Many of us have been sent there with out any supper. Some of us were beaten there, concluding that there was no God at all. The bedroom is where, as kids, we were made to think about what we had done and to make sure we did all our homework. It is where we sulked when we got grounded. We suffered terribly in the bedroom when we were sick, while Mom brought tender words, medicine, tea, and toast. In the bedroom, we have felt the warmth of the sacred.

The bedroom is sometimes a screening room for late-night TV or a sparring ring for bitter and sarcastic arguments. It can be a place for negotiation, for defending personal fortresses, for conquests, treachery, and unions unholy as well as holy. The bedroom is often the place for apologies and forgiveness, a place for solitude when we need to be alone.

Our bedroom experiences propel us toward the sacred because they change us forever. Think of the bedrooms far away where we had to take care of ourselves for the first time. I will never forget how my life changed away at camp in a bunk bed and, later in life, in a sleeping bag under the stars. Can you remember a special night in a hotel, motel, the stateroom on a luxury liner, or something that happened in a sleeping car on a train that altered your life?

Many of us had our first sexual experiences in dormitories away at school. In bedrooms we have had our share of disappointments, narrow escapes, big mistakes, and we have also known some once-in-a-lifetime ecstasies that opened our imaginations and hearts in ways that could never be undone.

Whether you live in an efficiency apartment where the bed pulls down from the wall or in a five-bedroom house by a lake, most of us have a bedroom, from the cradle near Mommy's side to the cemetery on the hill, the final resting place for our worn-out bodies. For these reasons, the bedroom can be considered a sacred place. The bedroom hosts our rites of passage, initiations that test our faith in ourselves, our partners, and in the Creator.

There is a link between what we do in this mystical, powerful space and the harmony or disharmony in our lives. If we rediscover the bedroom through its hidden symbolism, we can begin to heal much of our confusion about life, love, and personal identity. Discovering the potential of the sacred in our bedrooms can help us in every other aspect of our lives. This is what The Sacred Bedroom is all about: discovering the sacred potentials in the bedroom activities of sleep, solitude, dreaming, meditation, prayer, sexuality. It is about enhancing our lives by utilizing this undiscovered sacred space to our best advantage, and creating a sacred bedroom in which to strengthen our spiritual life and grow toward the Divine.

The fact is, the world's scriptures provide a foundation for making the bedroom a temple in which worship and lovemaking can lie down together, side by side. We can do this in a way that does not offend our belief systems, by looking at the traditions that link these bedroom activities to the sacred.

It is ironic, if not humorous, that our spirituality and sexuality live in the same room, but are afraid to look at each other with the lights on. After all, we often pray in the bedroom. We pray for favors and for healing for ourselves and others. We pray for blessings or for disappointments to be taken away. We pray in gratitude and also desperation. We call out the name of God during lovemaking. The prayers of our bedroom may be the most sincere prayers we utter. However, our connection to the sacred in the bedroom goes beyond prayer. We also sleep our sacred sleep, dream our dreams, commune with the Divine in solitude, and make love with our beloved partners.

Little more is as natural or taken for granted in our lives as turning in for the night, but we could heal ourselves and our world if we paid more attention to the potential of this most important of rooms. The next time you retire for the night, enter your bedroom feeling entitled to commune with the Highest Power. Whether you are seated in meditation or tucked into bed for the night, be aware of the I AM consciousness, which is naturally open, receptive, and giving. Be aware that God-Is-Love has been within us from the beginning. Remember that each of us is a masculine-feminine lover full of compassion and one with the Creator.

In the bedroom, you can rest and recharge, talk to Spirit, express love in its many dimensions, and honor your genuine self -- your soul -- in the knowledge that you (and each person) contain and are made up of the image of God. Set your own rules, based on what you hold sacred in your life, and let the bedroom be your private space in which you rejoice in the divine identity of your authentic self.

by Jon Robertson