The Grace Space: How I Manifested My Dream Home Part 1

This is a true story of how dreams come true. And it's my story.

I moved to France in the summer of 2021. I've shared the joys (and the challenges) of this move in bits and pieces.

But what I haven’t shared with many people is the way that all this came about. It’s a story about intuition and trust and conscious manifestation that illustrates many of the spiritual principles I teach on this podcast.

It's also a story about Grace, and how we are led and guided on our path despite our best efforts to deny and resist the truth of our divine origins. It’s about how you can’t make a mistake in life no matter how hard you try, because all roads lead to Home.

Join me as I go deep into my own story of how the impossible becomes possible when you align with the Laws of Life.

Transcript

Take a deep breath and remember there's a power breathing you.

This is your space of sanity in an evolving world where we learn about spiritual law and how to apply it to our lives in a way that is practical and life-changing.

This is where we remember truth to make the world a better place one person at a time.

I'm Claire Lothier,

Inspirational speaker,

Teacher of the technology of transformation,

And a certified life mastery consultant and spiritual coach.

Welcome to the Grace Space.

In the last year and a half,

My life has undergone a radical change of place and perspective.

Some of you may know that we moved to France in the summer of 2021.

There are many reasons for this decision,

Which I had been flirting with for years.

Lifestyle was number one because I'm location independent.

I could really ask myself the question,

What would I love about where I wanted to live?

And I did.

The weather here is beautiful,

And the winter usually is mild in southern France.

And we're surrounded by olive trees,

Fig trees,

Vineyards,

And the sun shines 300 days a year.

I have most of my family here now,

Including my brother.

The food is clean and fresh,

And we can be on a Mediterranean beach in 40 minutes,

The Pyrenees in an hour,

And Barcelona in two hours,

Not to mention other European destinations and proximity to family.

I also have a strong and mysterious emotional and spiritual connection to this particular area where we've settled,

Which I will tell you about.

But what I haven't shared with many people is the way that all of this came about.

Now,

The feedback I get from all of you is that you find it instructive and interesting when I tell you personal stories.

So I want to tell you about how we came to live here in this house,

In this place,

Because it's a story about intuition and trust and conscious manifestation that illustrates many of the spiritual principles I teach on this podcast.

It's also a story about grace and how we're led and guided on our path despite our best efforts to deny and resist the truth of our divine origins.

It's about how you can't make a mistake in life,

No matter how hard you try,

Because all roads lead to home.

Plus,

It's a cool story with lots of jaw-dropping synchronicities,

I think.

Whenever I feel disconnected from Source,

I remind myself of how I came to be sitting here,

Looking out at this view of waving palms with birdsong and the sound of the river down the bottom of the hill.

And I remember that if I'm sitting here,

It's because I am connected and guided,

And that the universe wants to give me my heart's desire always.

I want you to know that for yourself,

Because a big part of living with grace and ease is trusting that what you truly want is already yours for the asking.

I am not special.

I am not an exception.

If you're breathing,

You have access to the infinite intelligence,

Just as I do,

And just as anyone else does,

An infinite intelligence that wants to give you what you want most in your heart of hearts.

We tend to have such a big block around that.

There's so much unconscious guilt in most people that we can't possibly believe that could be true,

That we could be so loved.

If we could just shift our perception about ourselves,

The floodgates would open and God would pour such a blessing on our heads that we could not contain it.

That shift in perception is the purpose of this podcast and this story that I'm about to tell you about my house in France.

Years ago,

When I started coming to France three or four times every year to study with my spiritual teacher and see my family here,

I started thinking about how nice it would be to have a place to put my stuff.

I had a tent and camping supplies,

Hiking boots and rain gear for the time that I spent at the ashram.

I had a yoga mat and a sheepskin here.

Then I acquired a winter coat and a water purifier and then some books started to pile up.

You know how it is.

Humans seem to acquire stuff.

It's part of living on the material plane.

Then it started to bother me how much money I was spending on Airbnbs and rental cars so that I could get around and visit everyone.

And my trunk was always filled up with a bunch of stuff that I would end up having to drive back to my cousin's house near the ashram and store in her attic until the next time.

Not to mention all the flying back and forth between Canada and France.

I was practically a commuter.

And of course,

This was before we all got grounded and had to reframe our thinking about travel.

Also,

I am in love with France,

Even the annoying things about it.

I've had a relationship with this country my whole life because I am half French,

And though I was born and raised in the United States and considered American by my family's standards,

I grew up vacationing here and in Corsica with my cousins.

And each time I came for a training with my teacher,

I would arrange to spend a few weeks here or there near family so I could explore.

Often I would base myself where my aunt and uncle lived in Montpellier,

A vibrant university city on the Mediterranean.

That's where my father went to medical school.

The medical school there is the oldest one in Europe.

It's literally a thousand years old.

And Nostradamus went there.

Okay,

So it's pretty freaking old.

My parents met in Montpellier in 1968 when my mother was studying French abroad,

And the rest is history.

My brother proposed to his wife there.

It's where all our cousins convene every summer.

And I've been going there since 1985 when my aunt and uncle moved back to France from Algeria.

My ancestors are from the area north and west of Montpellier going back to the 1800s and who knows how long before that.

So you could say there's a karmic ancestral connection to this area for me.

I also loved exploring around nearby Carcassonne where one of my other cousins lives.

And I spent a lot of time driving around in what is known as the Pays Qatar or Qatar country,

A land of rolling hills and vertiginous peaks with teetering stone castles and beautiful abbeys in and among the vineyards and flowing rivers.

The Qatar were a religious sect who were persecuted and massacred by the Catholic Church from the 12th to the 14th century.

Where we live now is right in the heart of Qatar country and we're surrounded by Qatar sites that are now tourism landmarks.

It wasn't until the late 1960s that some people started realizing they were living on the ashes and stones of a rich history that could be shared.

So a couple of visionaries started a movement to preserve the castles and abbeys.

And even though many of them are just ruins,

There are some that have been restored or at least prevented from falling over completely and fading into the landscape.

There are many plaques now marking the places where various massacres of Qatar people occurred as they were hunted down and rooted out over the years.

I felt an affinity with the Qatar when I first started reading about them and my cousin had shared some of the history of this area and the background and talked to me about the Qatar and the troubadours and courtly love and I knew that the goddess had gone underground there as the idealized feminine.

And the Qatar religion was an unorthodox version of Christianity.

They believed that humans were the spirits of angels trapped in the material realm.

They believed in reincarnation and that the spirit was being perfected until it could be freed from bondage.

And in fact,

Their inner circle of leaders were called perfecti or perfected ones,

Although they never called themselves that,

That's what everybody else called them.

They didn't see marriage as a sacrament.

They believed in the equality of men and women.

They recognized no priesthood and believed in heaven,

But not hell.

They practiced fasting,

Refrained from eating meat,

And believed in the ultimate salvation of all humanity.

They weren't interested in converting anyone to their belief system and they weren't bothering anybody,

But they were persecuted by the Inquisition,

Hunted down,

And eventually snuffed out.

Their story is blood and tears,

Fleeing and hiding,

Torture and holocaust.

Legend has it that the last known perfecti,

His name was Guilhem Belibaste,

Prophesied as he was being led to the stake that the Qatar would return again in 700 years,

Which if you calculate forward means 2021 actually.

So in the years before we moved here,

I spent a lot of time in this horseshoe-shaped area between Montpellier and Carcassonne and of all the places I've been to on this planet.

This is where the land speaks to me the most and I feel at home on the land.

I love the smell of the Garigue.

The Garigue is the name given to the ecoregion of low-lying herbs and shrubs which are part of the Mediterranean forest and the variety of aromatic resinous herbs like rosemary,

Sage,

Bay leaves,

And thyme.

There's juniper,

Rock rose,

And wild fennel and lavender and mint wafting through the air.

I love the sound of the birdsong here and the cool rivers that flow all year and sometimes overflow their banks and make our little bridge disappear.

I love the dramatic extremes of weather and watching the clouds speed over my head whipped by a lashing wind.

I love the rolling thunder and the scorching sun.

Nature is very present here and very unforgiving.

I'm aware of her power and she inspires respect and awe.

I love the inky black skies at night with an infinity of twinkling stars and the silent slinking foxes,

Wolves,

And lynxes.

It's mysterious here.

It's graceful,

Impenetrable,

Beautiful,

Harsh,

Frightening,

Paradisiacal.

It's brimming over with light.

The first week that we were here in our house,

We went for a walk at night along the dirt road that goes down to the river.

Suddenly overhead there was a flash of light.

We looked up and we saw some kind of celestial event.

Maybe it was a meteor entering the atmosphere.

I don't know.

You could see a bluish white flame around the object.

It flashed and burned as it traveled across the sky.

Then it flashed again and seemed to just disintegrate.

The whole thing lasted about five seconds,

Which felt like an eternity.

My husband and I looked at each other like,

Wow,

I don't know what that was,

But I've never seen anything like it.

And it felt like a sign.

Now I'm about to tell you something I haven't shared with many people because it might seem a bit strange.

A few years ago,

I woke up one morning with images of domes in my mind.

I began to have visions of a beautiful place like Earth,

But of a higher consciousness.

There were fewer people than here,

But they were human or human-like,

Except more beautiful and luminous.

And they lived in domes,

Or at least those who live in what I call the outposts live in domes.

There were also cities there,

But they're not like our cities.

They're not dirty or crowded or poverty or crime ridden.

They are luminous centers of concentrated spiritual energy with soaring architecture,

Sacred spaces that reflect the holiness and nobility of the spirit in harmony with nature.

Technology there is very advanced and unobtrusive,

And for the most part,

Mind directed.

The people go to the cities to study creation and to focus their energy in greater numbers on helping us.

That's the feeling I got.

And in the outposts are smaller communities of beings who live cooperatively and hold space for our ascension.

The ones I saw lived in domes that had been there for centuries,

And they were so integrated with the environment that flying over you had to look twice to see them.

I saw their communal gardens and their central gathering places.

I saw their stations with vehicles that hover and make no noise nor impact the environment.

I saw their children being educated in spiritual law with the recognition that they are source energy beings right from the day that they're born.

I saw myself there in another female form,

Living another life,

But aware of me here.

That's when I became obsessed with the idea of having my own dome in nature in France,

As if to link up to this other dimension like a portal.

Now,

Is it real?

Is it just a fantasy or some deeply symbolic communication from the collective unconscious?

I don't know.

And I don't know if it matters.

What I do know is that every time I go there in my visioning,

It feels great.

And it feels true.

So I wanted to connect with that energy.

I went to some workshops to learn how to build domes because apparently other people have been having the same kind of vision as me and started looking for land.

I knew I wanted nature but not isolated.

Within 90 minutes of Montpellier and 30 minutes from any shopping I could need.

I wanted a river nearby that I could jump into.

I wanted the smells and the sounds of the Garrigue.

I wanted peace and quiet,

Beauty and serenity,

Clean and modern.

A little retreat just for me.

At the time it was just my project,

Something small and simple for me.

My husband wasn't really involved.

The world was different.

There was no pandemic.

He was busy working.

I was going through big changes.

He supported my journey but it was a world apart.

For a while I had my eye on a piece of land in the Minervois region and I visited it often.

But I learned that you couldn't just build anything you wanted anywhere you wanted.

And I was mindful of not wanting to create anything that would conflict with the traditional and typical architecture in the villages which I love.

I wanted to do something unconventional but there are rules here.

Things weren't fitting together so I didn't pull the trigger on anything and honestly I don't think I fully trusted myself.

In the fall of 2020 I decided to spend a couple of months in the region of this land I was interested in because I felt like I needed to make a move of some kind you know to know more to be informed.

So I did research.

I called architects and I started to form a picture of what the reality of living there would be like.

And then the real estate agent that I'd been in touch with for a couple of years and who'd had me over to her house for tea a few times introduced me around to some people.

Well she informed me that there was an accepted offer on that land so I had to let go of that idea.

But I figured it wasn't meant for me.

I kept making appointments to see other places and every day I was scanning all the real estate websites and looking around.

I had faith that the right situation would present itself.

Occasionally I would stretch my belief in what was possible and allow myself to look at properties without imposing a price limit.

I would pretend I had unlimited money and ask myself what would I really love if I could have anything I wanted.

See that can show you what you really want instead of what you think you can have.

Sometimes without realizing it we limit our thinking according to our current circumstances.

We filter out better opportunities that are coming our way,

Creative solutions,

Bigger visions because on some level we don't believe we can truly have what we want and so we don't allow ourselves to even know what that is.

This is what I know to be a law of the universe and it's what I teach so whenever I felt a contraction around how much things cost I would tell myself just as I would tell a client it's just a number.

I would remove the budget parameters and allow myself to dream big.

Besides I'd started to realize that if I wanted to build my dome I would have to find a place where I could live while I was building and then there had to be enough land and privacy for that project to be possible so I opened up my search to include houses instead of just land and I threw the net wider geographically and I took the cap off my budget just to see what would come up in my searches.

That's when I saw Lafargue for the first time only I didn't know that it had a name.

I saw pictures of an infinity pool and the edge of what looked like of a villa.

There were travertine steps leading up to a large iron gate.

There were poured concrete floors in earth tones and spacious light-filled rooms with floor-to- ceiling glass doors.

There was a palm tree there were stone walls and a balcony with views of rolling hills.

It was gorgeous and modern but somehow also old and traditional and there was land quite a bit of it.

The description was translated from the French and it was awkward it was kind of hard to understand what the property was.

There was no overview of the house or the property just shots taken from different angles that gave me pieces of a puzzle I didn't know how to put together but what I saw I was drawn to.

Then I saw the price and I was like damn but because I walk my talk I thought it's just a number.

Would you love it?

Yes then go and see it and so I filled out the appointment form and sent it off.

Now let me explain something about looking for real estate in France.

It's a free-for-all.

The real estate agents here don't work together they don't co-broke it's every man for himself so that means a lot more legwork for buyers and fewer possibilities for the sellers because there's no real central database because the various offices don't cooperate and share information with one another at least not the way that they do in North America.

How do I know this?

Because one of my day jobs when I was an actor in New York was in real estate.

For several years I worked for a top broker in Manhattan so I know that world and I know the difference between those who are operating in it with integrity and those who are out to get what they can and screw everyone else.

During my real estate search in France I was often frustrated by the lack of accurate information or decent pictures for the listings on the major websites.

The databases were notoriously out of date and a lot of listings were used as bait just to get a buyer in the door.

Not cool but I'd seen it all before with certain brokerages in New York City and so I wasn't naive.

One time I had been to see some land in France and I was chatting with a real estate agent about how hard it was as a buyer to find out what was actually available and on the market.

Don't you guys work together?

I asked.

Wouldn't it be better for everyone if you all let each other know about your listings in case other agents have a buyer who would be interested?

Plus I had a sense of loyalty to the real estate agent who had I'd been working with for some time you know and I wanted her to be involved in any transactions that I might engage in.

Anyway I said to this guy it would be better for the sellers and the buyers and the agents too if everyone worked together.

Well he replied with a gallic shrug.

Then you'd have to share a commission and no one wants to do that.

C'est la guerre.

It's war he said grimly.

Great example of how the ego believes that if it keeps something for itself and refuses to share it with others it's gaining something when actually the opposite is true.

The more you give the more you share the more you gain.

But I was not about to make a dent in the consciousness of the real estate business in France.

Anyhow this disorganization and lack of cooperation in real estate might explain why no one replied to my initial inquiry about this intriguing property.

A couple weeks later I circled back to it and peered at all the pictures again trying to put a coherent image of the property together in my mind and more than ever I wanted to see it because I kept thinking about it.

So I filled out the inquiry form again and sent it off.

No response.

A few days later I called the number on the listing.

No response.

So I figured it was sold or off the market or not for real or something and looking at the location it said La Grasse and I thought oh that's too far because I still wasn't clear on my geography of the region and the only thing I remembered about La Grasse was that my cousin and I had stopped there one afternoon on our way back from visiting one of the Qatar castles in the region.

As we arrived on the outskirts of a village I saw a beautiful river the ruins of a stone tower and a large graceful ancient abbey and I said aloud my god this is magical do people actually live in places like this?

So my cousin pulled over on the spot and we spent about an hour walking along the river's edge and through the medieval village.

La Grasse is what they call a village classy meaning that it has been awarded a special tourism designation as a plus beau village de France translation one of the most beautiful villages in France of which there are 159 and believe me there are a lot of beautiful villages here so just imagine what it takes to get into that group.

So that was my first time in La Grasse and I thought of it as far away so I had kind of written it off as a place to look for real estate.

Actually it fit right into the parameters I had originally set out in terms of location but I didn't realize it.

So back to the fall of 2020 I was staying about an hour away from La Grasse in the region of this land that I had had my eye on and I found out that I didn't like it.

I didn't feel right there somehow.

It felt closed and insular and cold and I really didn't like the vibe of the house I was staying in.

So even though I had over two weeks left on my rental there I started looking for another place in some of the nearby villages but nothing was available.

I looked and looked and as I scanned the map of the region going in ever wider circles to try to find something my eyes kept falling to the other side of the county line on the little dot marked La Grasse and I would remember the afternoon we'd spent there and think but it's too far away from Montpellier.

Yet as the days passed and I still couldn't find anything near where I already was and I was really wanting to get out of the energy of the house I was staying I kept looking at that little dot on the map.

Finally I thought and I just measure the distance and realized it was less than 90 minutes from Montpellier and I thought oh so I looked to see if there was a place I could stay in La Grasse for a few weeks and right away a lovely apartment popped up that was available the next day right on that beautiful river overlooking the abbey.

So I booked it and I thought maybe I'll still be able to get someone to show me that house with the infinity pool since I'll be in the area.

I had made three inquiries so far with no response and there was no address given only the general area which could mean anything including being completely wrong or misleading based on my other experiences but I thought you never know.

As I drove down to La Grasse in the heart of Qatar country the next day as much as I had been resistant to looking there I now felt a sense of quiet anticipation as if something special were waiting for me.

Right away I started to breathe again and relax which made me realize how oppressed I had felt in the other place.

It was October now and everything was socked in with mist.

You could feel the stillness and the peace.

When I arrived I was met by the property manager who was going to walk me over to the apartment which was in the center of the village overlooking the river and a 12th century stone bridge with the abbey beyond.

As soon as he introduced himself and I heard his accent I knew he was Canadian and it turns out he was originally from Guelph about an hour from where we lived.

We hit it off chatting about stuff and I immediately felt at home and even though the streets of the medieval village were quiet and no one was around the energy there felt more open and creative.

La Grasse is known as a village of artisans and creators and there were lots of little shops on the square even though they were closed.

A leather worker,

A clothing designer,

A natural soap maker,

A designer of handbags and at the heart of the square was a 14th century market stall all stone and wooden beams.

Add to all that a monk passing through with his white robes flapping in the breeze and you felt like you'd step back in time.

I settled into the apartment and began looking through the brochures for the village of La Grasse when I noticed a list of local landmarks one of which was a house in the historic register as a classic example of 15th and 16th century architecture.

What caught my eye was its name Maison Lottier.

Lottier L-A-U-T-I-E-R that's my name and I thought what are the chances?

It made me feel good about being there.

The next morning I was sitting on the terrace of one of the local restaurants having a cup of coffee when I heard someone call my name and this is where it starts to get really interesting and weird.

I'll tell you the next part of the story in the next installment of this series.

I'll see you soon.

Meanwhile walk in grace.

Reviews

So great to see Claire Lautier’s work on Insight Timer. This is an amazing and inspiring story. What we want to manifest isn’t so much about getting “things”, but moreover it’s about teaching us to grow and co-create with Source energy. When we align with that, truly amazing things happen, as per Claire’s remarkable story!