Loving your home during & after Covid-19

If you are new to Feng Shui, let me tell you, there has never been a more perfect time to get started than now!  With the majority of cities, states and countries “sheltering in place”, people are working from home, homeschooling their children and basically spending every moment inside their homes.  Therefore, it is vitally important that our spaces nourish us in every way possible.  This is actually a wonderful way to define Feng Shui. When used correctly, it brings balance to disorder and chaos.  It creates stability and wholeness.   It invites and nourishes all aspects of life.  It is our not-so secret weapon to thriving and mentally surviving this pandemic.

By now, the reality that we are not getting out of here any time soon, has set in and like it or not, we are all in this together; making the best of a situation that none of us could have predicted.  Our homes can either feel like paradise or like prison.  We have a choice.  This is the time to take stock, and make the changes that need making to create a space that you love.  Feng Shui is a tool of empowerment.  In a time when so many of us feel powerless and out of control to the things happening in our world, it is one small thing that we can all do.  We start within, and expand out.

Having all this “free time” inside our homes, without the typical distractions of life, is eliminating the excuses we often tell ourselves about being too “busy” to do this or that.  As this word loses its power over us, the opportunity to stop procrastinating and take stock of the things that matter takes precedence.  Turns out that this is a great time to organize that closet, drawer(s), garage, guest bedroom, etc. that you’ve been putting off for ages.  It is also a time to take a mental and physical inventory of the things that you see every day, but stopped noticing or appreciating when life became too full of obligations.

Life can be overwhelming, and there just isn’t enough bandwidth to always give it all the attention that it needs and deserves.  When I feel overwhelmed, I find something small that I can do that will have the biggest impact. Since I don’t have a dishwasher, and I don’t wash things immediately after using them, focusing my attention on my ‘sink full of dirty dishes’ is often my favorite place to begin.  My point is, start small.

To help you get started, I am going to share a few Feng Shui pointers that are universally true, will help you feel better in your space and don’t require any previous knowledge or understanding about Feng Shui.

The first thing that you see when you enter your home, has the biggest impact on how you feel while you are there.  From the front door, the ideal room to see is the living room.  We want to invite the chi, which is just an Eastern word for energy, to chill out and get cozy. . . . to relax.   If the room you see does not make you want to relax and unwind,  it may be creating a form of anxiety and restlessness.

Homework #1 – Walk into your home through your front door.  What do you see?  How does it make you feel? Do you feel overwhelmed?  Do you feel calm and relaxed? What can you change?  Are you willing to make changes to feel more productive and focused?  If yes, keep reading.

Homework #2 – I want you to walk around your house and look for doors that hit each other.  Now, in case you aren’t sure, let me explain.   Are there any doors in your home that either hit or have the potential to bang into each other?  It’s more common than you might think. This happens most frequently between a closet door and a bedroom door.  These are called “fighting doors” and they create an on-going, but low-level type of tension.  There are two ways to combat this, but that is something better addressed in a private consultation.

And speaking of doors, it’s best that they be allowed to open fully.  By this, I mean there should not be any furniture, shoes, or toys preventing them from opening, nor should there be any items permanently stored behind them.  This door problem is similar to doors that bang, but it is easier to fix. Homework #3 – if you have something blocking a door from opening fully, find a new place for it, or get rid of it.

There is a rule in Feng Shui called the “command position”.  This means that when you are working at your desk, lying in bed, cooking or even lounging on the couch, you can see the main door to that room.  This is a huge thing in Feng Shui.  I like to compare this rule to the Vito Corleone character in The Godfather.  He would NEVER be caught sitting with his back to any door.  Being in command position demands respect.  It creates a feeling of safety, security and support.  It is so important on so many levels, that I can’t emphasize it enough.  Homework #4 – are you in command position when you are working, sleeping, cooking and lounging? How does it make you feel? Is it possible to move your furniture or yourself in order to be in command?  Are you willing to try it?  If you absolutely hate the way it feels to be in a commanding position, you can always move your furniture back.  Why not give it a try? It’s not like you have anything better to do now that you get to stay home all day and all night.

And lastly, let’s take a look at your stove.  Do all the burners work?  Do you use all the burners?  Is it clean?  The stove, in Feng Shui, is symbolic of abundance and prosperity.  If it is dirty, or if some part of it isn’t working correctly, that will have an impact on the flow of finances. 

I do realize that these tips and homework may bring more questions than answers, but the first step is awareness.  The next step is action.  Since I cannot do in-home consultations right now, I am offering remote consultations at a discounted rate.  If you are interested in learning more or feel like you are stuck, give me a call, text or respond to this post.  I’d love to help.

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The Feng Shui Yoga Connection

I’ve been consulting in Feng Shui for almost 20 years and I’ve been a registered and actively teaching yoga instructor for over 11 years, so when I say that Feng Shui and Yoga are yin and yang to one another, it might be worth considering.  Let’s break it down.  Feng Shui tracks the energy and flow of chi or life-force energy within and without a space.  Yoga guides and promotes the flow of prana in the body.  Prana is basically, just another word for chi.  So, Feng Shui is like yoga for your home, and yoga is like Feng Shui for your body.  See what I did there.

I’ve been afraid to write about yoga for years because I know there are so many people out there who are way more knowledgeable about it than I.  However, the one thing I know for sure is that yoga, just like Feng Shui, is something that we all need.  I can’t imagine what my life would look and feel like if I hadn’t found both of these healing tools and used them to create a grace and flow in my life that wasn’t present before.  It is my desire to find a way to combine both of these paths to flow and balance and share them with the world.

If you are already a fan of yoga, then you don’t need me to tell you how much better your body feels after an hour of sending prana and intention into the tight areas between your shoulders or into your hips and getting rooted and grounded in your body.  Doesn’t it stand to reason that a home that has had its chi adjusted would feel just as good?  Of course it does.  It’s the only logical conclusion.

If you are already a fan of Feng Shui, you know how good it feels when you walk into a home or business that uses this practical tool to ignite change.  Trust me, if your house could do yoga, it totally would!  Maybe when it is in balance, that is exactly what it is doing.

Feng Shui is a balance of logic and emotion.  Yoga is a balance of breath and flow.  They are like cosmic twins separated at birth and they belong together.  They are mirrors of one another, and we all deserve to know them, understand them and invite them into our lives.

Why You Should Care About the Helpful People Area of Your Home

‘Helpful People’ sounds like an ancillary benefit to Feng Shui until you find yourself in need of some truly reliable and helpful people in your life.  To be honest, more people become curious about Feng Shui because of the allure that it will improve their finances or love life, than for the probability that it will allow them to ‘receive it forward‘.  In fact, the Helpful People/Travel/ Service area may be one of the most overlooked areas on the Feng Shui bagua.  We all need to be able to give and receive stellar service as we move through this thing called life, and when this area is in sync, things just have a habit of going your way.

So who are these “helpful people” anyway?  Let’s run through a few scenarios where helpful people are very appreciated.  You were just in a wreck, you call your insurance company and they jump through hoops to make sure that all of your needs are met.  Need a tow truck, car rental or doctor?  Chances are that your insurance agent is acting as a very helpful person in your life in that moment.  Here’s another example; let’s say that you walk out of your apartment and your car battery is dead.  One of your neighbors has jumper cables, and offers to give your car battery a jump with their’s.  They just did a “pay it forward” and they helped you out of a frustrating start to your day.  A helpful person could be the girl taking your order in the drive-thru window or it could be the contractor in charge of your home’s plumbing needs.  Regardless, it is always a good idea to tweak this area BEFORE it becomes a issue in your life.

“When this area is in sync, things just have a habit of going your way.”

Now that I have your attention, let me give you the 411 on this area.  If you mentally visualize an imaginary tic tac toe box around your home, it will then be divided into 9 evenly placed squares (the example below is not perfectly even, but at least it gives you a visual).  The Helpful People area is located in the bottom right hand corner in relation to your front door.  Using your mental bagua, go to each room, locate the helpful people area and do an inventory of your findings. Your home is an overlay of multiple helpful people areas, and they all matter!  Once your inventory is complete, you’ll want to analyze the data.  Did you find your daughter’s collection of headless Barbies or did you find a chaotic table full of un-filed papers, bills, receipts and other symbols of overwhelm? Whether you found your meditation pillow and yoga mat, or your son’s legos scattered like land mines all over the floor, it doesn’t take a Feng Shui license to know what you need to do in order to bring some balance back into your life.

The next step is to eliminate the most obvious problems first.  If your area is filled with clutter and broken items, clean it.  Don’t wait for your kids to call Hoarders, and embarrass you on national television!  Next, remember that this area revolves around being of service.  From a Feng Shui point of view, all areas can be enhanced by balancing the elements.  Helpful People is strengthened by the metal element.  The  colors that enhance this element are obviously metal tones like silver, bronze and gold, and metal items like bells or metal Tibetan Singing Bowls as well as white and light pastels.  The shape that represents the metal element is a circle, so adding round, metal items would really pack some punch.  Obviously, whatever you add, needs to be able to fit in with the decor that already exists within your home.  Placing a Feng Shui “cure” in your home just because the store clerk assured you it will bring good luck is not nearly as powerful as finding a way to allow the cures to be blend seamlessly into your surroundings.  It is much more desirable to have your friends walk into you home and feel great about it without knowing why, than for them to walk in and be confronted by all sorts of  kitschy Feng Shui Chinese items that have no relevance to your life or culture.

Feng Shui may have its roots in some of the more esoteric and secret aspects of Chinese culture and lore, but at its most basic level, it is a very common-sense way to add a little peace and happiness into your life.  Have fun with it, and whatever you do, don’t take yourself too seriously!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why Didn’t Feng Shui Keep Me From Getting Divorced??

“You live in a world of energy. You experience and are affected by the energy around you all the time.” ~ Sanaya Roman, Soul Love

The question posed in the title above is one that I was asked recently  from a returning client, and I thought it might have some universal applications, so I am sharing it.  The client in question, invited me into her home a few years ago for a personalized Feng Shui consultation.  She had several correctable issues involving money and relationships.  At the time of her consultation, she and her husband had made several bad investment decisions, and she had discovered that he had been unfaithful to her.  Her home at that time, was an accurate mirror for the events that were occurring in her life.  A sample of these were visible in the missing areas in relationships and wealth, and other symbols of energy drains that were built in via the placement of the master bathroom and the stove/back door.

Over the next several months, she started making the changes that I had recommended.  With each one that she completed, she began to feel happier and more empowered about her life.  With each adjustment to the energy of the space of their home, the house began to reflect balance in relationships and balance in finances.  While things improved financially, the relationship did not. As the house’s energy shifted and became whole and complete, the house no longer matched the deep-seated energy of the couple’s relationship.

As we are energetically drawn to the energy of our homes, we come to understand that each place we live has gifts for us.  They are gifts of growth, awareness, and of change, but only  if we are willing to accept them.  As the energy of the house shifted, one of two things had to happen.  Either, the relationship would shift up to match the energy of the house, or it would shift out because it no longer matched the energetic frequency of the house.  In this client’s case, the result was divorce.  She sold the house, moved into a home that matched her new energy around relationships and money, and eventually found a partner whose energy matched hers.  Today, they continue to shift, and grow using Feng Shui to help them do it.

The Tale of Two Choices – Decks vs. Covered Patios

When you live in a place like Texas, where summers are akin to one version of hell, the general consensus is that a covered patio is the preferred option. Why?  Shade of course.  We will park a 1/2 mile away from any store if there is a spot of shade to hide our car under in the summer.  This same rationale holds true for our homes as well.  Shade is a commodity that helps ease the stifling 100 degree+ heat that we have come to expect here during the summer.

Even though my Texas roots go way deep, I cannot, in good faith, recommend that anyone choose a covered patio instead of a deck, regardless of their location on this planet.  My reason for this trumps the Texas heat and goes all the way to my Feng Shui roots.  In Feng Shui we have guidelines and rules that give us insights and potential outcomes.  Ideally, a house will have a completely even line across the back of it.  In other words, there will be no missing chunks, i.e. incomplete life areas.  One reason this is important is because the back of any home contains the life areas related to Wealth, Fame and Love.  Where there is a missing chunk in one of these areas, imbalance is probable.  Clearly, imbalances in other areas of the home are also important, but I consider these the Big Three, and they frequently impact our lives the most.  I have personally lived in a home with an added area that cut out the Wealth and Love areas of the house and it was no small feat to bring it back to balance!

When a house is complete in the areas of Wealth, Fame and Love, and its owners build a covered patio halfway across it, they have most likely created at least one missing area.  When this happens, it can take a year or so before the repercussions are felt, but they will be felt and they will have to be balanced in some way.  However, if a raised deck is added to the back of an otherwise complete house, as the photo below clearly shows, no missing areas are created.  Shade can be added in the form of large table umbrellas, a gazebo or a pergola.  You get all the benefits of mowing less grass, and none of the imbalances that can develop with a covered patio.  What do you do if you already have a covered patio? Well, that answer will follow in another blog!

Get Kinky & Go Deep with Your Feng Shui

All you really need to know about Feng Shui is that it knows all your secrets!  Another thing about Feng Shui is that it does not mind exposing all of these secrets to anyone who happens to walk into your home.  Your only saving grace is that very few people would know how to decipher the secrets that your home holds without a keen eye to detail.  I happen to be one of those people, and I am more than happy to teach you how to do it too.

Now, the first thing you need to do is look around for anomalies within your spaces.  Let me give you an example.  You say you want to be in a relationship, and yet, when you look in all the relationship areas of your home, you find things like the cat’s litter box, your gun collection, your extra healthy cacti plant or a nice, spiky yucca!  I’m not a rocket scientist, but none of those items seem very inviting.  In fact, on a subconscious level, they may be giving away a secret that you have not yet acknowledged within yourself.  Perhaps you aren’t as ready for a relationship as you think!

The solution is to go around and intentionally replace these anomalies with items that symbolize inviting images for relationships.  If kinky is what you like, then remove the cacti and place your copy of “50 Shades of Grey” there instead!  There are plenty of small sculpture of couples wrapped in each other’s arms.  Or, you can chose a statue of the union of  Shiva and Shakti. It is a symbol that expresses the sacredness of sexuality as a path to spiritual union.  Get creative! Whether you are kinky or spiritually deep, there is an image and a symbol that you can place around you to conjure up the type of relationship that you desire.

Now, we’ve been picking on the relationship area, but in truth, you can do this for each and every area of your home/bagua that seems to be incongruent with the type of life you desire for yourself.  In order to do this, you need to know one vital thing.  Every room in your house  has a money section, a family section, a life journey section, etc.  So this can either be a great opportunity for you, or an overwhelming burden of learning to take responsibility for your life. Let go, and let your resistance collapse into a new possible outcome!

Do You Have What it Takes to be a Hoarder?

I am pretty sure that I met a certified hoarder last week, and you would never know it by looking at him.  I was on my morning bike ride, roaming through an unexplored neighborhood, when I saw a garage that was so full, that it seemed to be defying gravity by not falling out.  Naturally, I pulled my bike over and reached for my camera phone.  However, before I had a chance to snap a photo, a slender man in his mid-60’s walked up, shook my hand and started talking to me. Within the space of 5 minutes, I knew all about his 20 year career as an air-traffic controller, a real estate deal he just helped close, that he is now single but used to be quite the ladies man, and that he was indeed the owner of the garage that I was about to photograph.  Needless to say, I did not get my picture, but I did feel as if the amount of information that verbally spilled out of him was relative to an avalanche of stuff that wanted to fall out of that garage.

I did not tell the man that I am a Feng Shui consultant, and I did not ask him about all the clutter that he stores in his garage because I know that the psychology behind a person who hoards is delicate and I wanted to proceed with caution.  The entire experience got me thinking about why people hoard, and what role that Feng Shui can play in the process of healing.

I found an amazing website that is dedicated to clutterers at http://www.clutterless.org, and it gives a great definition of the difference between hoarding and cluttering.  The truth is that they are not one and the same.  Even though they are both often a manifestation of deeper psychological issues like anxiety or depression, that is where the similarity ends.  According to Mike Nelson, author of the book, “Stop Clutter from Stealing Your Life”, while cluttering is a self-diagnosed condition, hoarding is not.  Hoarding must be diagnosed by a psychiatrist and medications are often prescribed.  He goes on to say that a hoarder “cannot make rational decisions about what is useful and what is not.  A hoarder obsesses about their stuff and is compelled to collect it, yet they are usually unaware of anything being wrong.”

I am doubtful that Feng Shui can be used to help a hoarder unless they start to recognize that they have a problem.  Just like an alcoholic must admit that they have a problem with alcohol before healing can take place, I believe this is also true for a person who hoards.

Using Feng Shui tools to allow a clutterer to shift their space is a much more likely solution and it starts with a Feng Shui bagua.  You will need to virtually  place a Feng Shui bagua over your space, oriented to the front door.  Once that is in place, you will be able to determine which of the rooms in your home or business have the most clutter or hoarding tendencies.  For example, you may notice that the only place in your home that gets cluttered is in your Money area.  It is dangerous to over-simplify why that is the case, so don’t try to figure it out unless you notice a repeat pattern.  If you clean it up and then a few days later, it has somehow managed to get just as bad if not worse than it was, there could be something more than clutter going on here.  Or, there may be some issues around money that you need to shift within your own thinking process in order to eliminate it for good.

Regardless of whether you have borderline hoarding tendencies or you are a plain ‘ol clutterer, the bottom line is that you will start to know your own inner workings better by becoming an ardent observer of your surroundings.  The fact is that your external surroundings REFLECT your inner world.  If it is cluttered or full of broken things that no longer have a purpose, you can use the tools of Feng Shui to learn to let go.  It may not be easy, but it will change your life, if you let it.