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It feels good when you spend some time freshening up your home. If you’ve decluttered and tidied up using the Marie Kondo method and want to take it a step further, feng shui your home. It doesn’t have to be an overwhelming task. And you may be surprised at the positive results.
Feng Shui Your Home
The art of feng shui has been around for thousands of years. It’s the process of ensuring free flowing energy all around your home. I believe we are all affected to some degree by our surroundings and that’s really what feng shui is. I think of it like this… you have these little fleeting feelings that you normally don’t pay attention to, like when something just doesn’t feel right or bugs you. That door that sticks, that lifeless corner of the room that bothers you when you pass by or maybe a feeling that something is missing. In the course of a day, all those little feelings can add up. Paying attention to those areas and “curing” them just gives you a fresher, lighter feeling.
There are different schools of thought within feng shui but a common principal is the use of the bagua map with the nine different life areas. And then how those areas correspond to the spaces or rooms in your home. The life areas are:
- Fame and Reputation
- Relationships and Love
- Creativity and Children
- Helpful People and Travel
- Career and Life Path
- Skills and Knowledge
- Family
- Prosperity
- Health
Imagine the bagua map with the nine life aspects on a piece of tracing paper. It will be oriented according to location of your front door. Now, lay that tracing paper on top of a representation of your home’s floor plan. You can now see which life zone corresponds to which space in your home. Each bagua area has certain elements (fire, water, earth, wood, metal) and colors that are associated with it. That can now guide you in ways of improving the energy flow and unblocking energy.
Move Your Stuff Change Your Life
You can hire a professional feng shui consultant, but that is not in most people’s budget. Besides, I think it’s more fun to do a little research yourself and think of it as a DIY project. And also, you get to learn something new. There is a lot of information online and in books. It can be overwhelming. But, if you want a really fun and practical approach and don’t know much about feng shui like I didn’t, I highly recommend the book Move Your Stuff Change Your Life by Karen Rauch Carter.
I love this book. It was published in 2000 and I’ve had it for years. But every so often (like this week) I pull it out and go over the feng shui map that I created and just spruce things up a bit. It’s like giving your home a check-up. I think about what aspects of my life might need some improvement and see if there is something I can do to power-up that area a bit. Or maybe see what space I’ve been neglecting.
Power Tools
The author walks you through creating your own map and gives you lists of “power tools” to use in specific areas. For example, the color purple is a powerful tool for your prosperity area, symbols of fire (candles, lava, light) are great for your fame and reputation zone. The color blue or symbols of wisdom will help in your skills and knowledge space. You also learn about destructive items to avoid in specific areas (makes sense not to have a framed print of a glacier in your relationship area, right?).
There’s definitely a feng shui aspect to the Konmari decluttering method. The end result is a lightening up of everything you’ve been accumulating, all the things that have been weighing you down. That sounds like a lot more space for positive energy flow to me.
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