Mellow Yellow

When we think of yellow we’re reminded of warmth, sometimes of movement, or maybe we may think of the sun.  In feng shui, yellow is deemed as auspicious as the color red.  But, did you know, if you sustain prolonged exposure to large quantities of the color yellow; you will begin to experience anxiety.  Though it’s considered the color of health and communication, you may run the risk of receiving too much of a good thing.

With the emotion of anxiety high, both your health and the communication within your family may begin to falter.  If you’ve placed an abundance of yellow within your home, begin to temper it with mixtures of the color blue. You can work wonders with a calm, soothing blue as an accent color.  Reminiscent of both water and sky, you’ll find yourself instantly calming down and beginning to relax.  Life in your home achieves balance, and once again everything begins to become stress free.

Find a reason to smile today.  It works wonders!

Spring has sprung!

Spring is quickly approaching.  This weekend, I anticipate beginning to replace some of my over wintered plants back throughout my home to clear the stagnant chi that has accumulated during the winter months. Are you beginning to experience the winter doldrums? A touch depressed? Low energy? An excellent way to refresh the dwindling chi is by addition of plants!

I will be moving the hardier plants (evergreens, pothos) into the more mainstream areas of my home. There is almost no better plant then the ever-trailing pothos to purify air in a lethargic environment. You and your home will begin to experience the benefits of breathing in the freshened oxygenated air. New circulating oxygen means more “good” chi inside you and inside your home.

Using the tenets applied by feng shui, harmony is created by placing healthy plants inside a stressful or tiring surrounding. The atmosphere is recharged with new and positive chi circulating throughout the home. Try to place at least two plants in each room of your home if possible.  Peace lilies thrive in most lighting conditions and English ivy is a top notch plant for effectively remove stale chi as well as the pollution found inside your dwelling. You will find the curvy round leaves of the ivy also helps to draw in "good" money chi, as well, as it boosts a new high energy chi throughout your home.

If you’re working on a healthier relationship among family members, try placing a yellow flowering houseplant in a clay container or pot in the western area of your home.  Primroses, with their rounded leaves, are available this time of year in many garden shops and even grocery stores. Some come with sunny yellow blooms, are very easy to care for and are almost guaranteed to benefit the entire family splendidly.

Begin adding your plants back this month and start to reap the benefits! Spread the love.

Bamboo

Growing bamboo successfully can be rewarding in many ways.  I didn’t realize that until a few weekends ago, right here in the month of January. It’s often accused of being invasive, this is true to a certain extent, but if you’re in the market for a clump of your own bamboo, it’s worth the risk and quite tamable to your needs. Their roots love to be compacted and will grow rather quickly if they are confined by an underground barrier.

I’ve often recommend bamboo flutes to clients needing added strength against overhead beams and slanted ceilings. When this source of bad chi is aimed within the home, tying red ribbons around flutes and hanging them from the beams themselves virtually assures a cure and is a common feng shui practice. 

Representative of the upper portion of the baqua, the hollow segments of the bamboo flute symbolically lift good chi through the flute to further symbolize permanence, protection, and harmony. The presence of bamboo stirs good fortune. Prosperity and good luck are often found in the presence of bamboo. Feng shui practice believes that the nodes contained on bamboo itself are the original source of energy that was sent through the bamboo plant itself.

Knowing I have a permanent supply of my own bamboo to use in my feng shui practice is satisfying. Even a better realization than that is, a few weekends ago while trimming my clump ahead of the new spring growth, the grand children, delighted at the sight of my wavy patch of bamboo found a new way of creating good chi by reminding me, a short piece of bamboo cut right between the nodes makes an excellent pea shooter and that good chi is also found in the laughter of children.

Peace!

Did You Know?

 Think about these few things:

Do you mope around or have a general feeling of malaise while you are stirring around in your home?

Try clearing out the clutter.  In feng shui, clutter of any type blocks your personal chi level and the overall quality of your life.  Throw open your window and tackle the blocking mountains of clutter one room at a time. Wait until you feel the high-energy surge that comes from ridding your home of unwanted blockages. It more than encourages you and your family members. I tend to use baskets from my local World Market store to replace the items that have been kept.  This allows fresh energy to circulate thru the weaves in the baskets reviving fresh energy and organizing items preventing further clutter.

Does the energy level of your home sometimes feel sluggish in the evening?

This can be an easy fix. You can counteract yin acting chi energy by using bright lights in your rooms. In feng shui, lighting signifies yang energy.  Lighting up your areas with lamps and candles will bring balance and harmony by bringing the yin and yang back together again.

Did you know?

If you have faulty wiring, not only should an electrician be consulted for safety reasons, but, in feng shui terms, faulty electrical wires and outlets can cause dissention among family members and further create obstacles to success.  Have your wiring repaired in order that not only the electrical energy will flow, but it will allow the energy of good chi to flow feely as well.

Tackle your clutter, your lighting, or your wiring and begin to feel the difference in the energy level of your home. It’s a feng shui thing!

Feng Shui Blue

  

We are reminded of peace and gentle growth when we consider the color blue as related to feng shui.  It represents the water element and is decidedly yin with its serene passive energy. Nourishing to all living things, blue can give receptive ability in times of confusion while helping to bring calm to your home.

To represent a harmonious expansion, use a lighter blue color.  Using a light blue in combination with white and green in your child’s room provides not only the ability to stimulate their minds, but is also wonderful to use as a cure towards calming over activeness. Two useful benefits for the price of one! Another benefit attributed to a soothing lighter shade of blue is how it helps one to discover their natural talents and abilities. There seems to be much less stress for them when the color of a child’s room is painted in a pale tone of blue.

Using a deep blue evokes feng shui energy of a deeper calm and serenity, much too strong for use in a child’s room.

When we think back to the baqua, we note that blue is the color represented in the south eastern region of knowledge.  Using it here will represent the path of education and wisdom. Like the color purple, blue brings with it a spiritual awareness and promotes mental and spiritual healing. Very good for use in the south east to promote peacefulness.

Supporting an organized life, a rich blue will emphasize controlled planning in your workspaces and is beneficial to have the color blue around you when you are working with money or are paying bills. If you have someone watching over your finances, its helpful to note their office décor. If it has a blue theme, it’s a good sign as blue is also the color of trustworthiness.

Check out all the different color palette choices at one of your local home stores.  I frequently use Home Depot when I need to find just the right paint color necessary to address the needs of a feng shui cure.

Have a great New Year!

Bedroom Shar Chi

Do you have trouble sleeping?  Is tossing and turning your nightly routine leaving you exhausted?  In the morning, get up and take a look at your bedroom with feng shui eyes. Your problem could not be with you but with your bedroom. We are talking about shar chi circulating in your bedroom. Shar chi stagnates your resting place. It brings with it unhealthy energies that disturb you and your sleep interrupting your nourishing nightly rest.

It is best for your bed to be in a commanding position. Place it as far from the doorway as you can, but not aligning with the door. You want to be able to see the door but not be crossed by it. Place your bed if possible against a good supporting wall or give yourself a good headboard in order to supply you with security as you sleep. Do not store anything under your bed and remember that beds with built in storage units under them allow for the storage of more than usable items.  They are huge recipients of shar chi and blocked healing energy.  Chi needs to circulate and if you have cluttered underneath your resting place, all the good energy comes to a stand still. Remember to balance energy in the room by placing a table or nightstand on both sides of the bed

Are there bookshelves that may be cluttered and unarranged?  Order is key here. Shelve volumes by height and pull the books right to the edge of the selves in order to block the negative energy of the sharp edges of shelves penetrating into your sleep zone. This will symbolically dissolve shelf edges and remove shar chi.

Be careful of mirrors. One shouldn’t see oneself from the bed. It is said that reflecting images of you or your sleeping partner will allow the possibilities of unfaithfulness to ones marriage by symbolically inviting more people into the room. While sleeping, either remove the mirror or cover it. Pay attention, as well, to what kind of reflected image is being invited into the room. Things lurking in hallways or bathrooms can appear to be in the room bringing their unwanted energy with them. Keep reflective items to a minimum.

Check what’s outside your windows. Utility poles, intrusive buildings, cemeteries, businesses, even garbage receptacles all can promote shar chi. Cover your windows with curtains or screen them with a good folding screen.  If a cemetery is in sight, hang a faceted crystal ball in the window to send nourishing chi circulating against natural bad energies. If there are roads with rushing traffic nearby, it would be good idea to plant large soft bushes underneath the windows to absorb sound and buffer energy. Odd numbers of faceted crystal balls, suspended by red threads or ribbons, can slow down all manner of shar chi rushing at your window entrances.

These same faceted crystal balls can be hung over the bed to dissolve bad energy emanating from beams and sharp angles protruding from furniture in the room.

Limit electrical devices that give off extreme shar chi energy such as televisions and computers. Things operating on high electrical energy waves do more to upset the energy balance you are trying to achieve than almost anything else. If you are unable to eliminate your TV, close doors over the TV or cover it with a cloth while you sleep.  Do the same for your computer or music systems as well.

As you begin to implement some these ideas, count on relieving some of your stresses as well as eliminating the counting of sheep. Good night and good rest to you!

Feng Shui Schools of Thought

In its earliest forms, Feng Shui included two principle schools. The form school, whose theory relates chiefly to landform of property, including mountains, waterways, roads etc., and the compass school of thought whose calculations, is based on the I Ching trigrams of the Bagua and the points of compass directions.  Similar in many ways, you will find that in the form school theory, there is more attention upon where and how to place buildings, and in compass school, how and what you do to those buildings comes more into play. Later, a popular form developed in the western world known as the Black Hat Tantric Buddist Sect. It is interesting and used by many outside the Asian influence.  Although many do not consider it authentic feng shui in spite of its relative popularity. It bases the use of feng shui placement rather than direction and the use of cures more than the meaning of land forms.

The two original schools base much of their teachings upon the directionality of compass points.  

The ancient luo pan, the original feng shui compass, is filled with concentric bands of different information. It is used for both forms. However, you will find many consultants within their practice use a regular directional compass to define the spaces and directions for placement within a home or building. These practitioners, familiar with the meanings of the individual trigrams within the bagua, use the degrees contained in this type of compass, although it contains only 16 true directions compared to the luo pans more precise 24 degrees of direction.

Your original compass reading should be taken from inside your home as you look out of your front door. Next, step outside of your front door about ten feet and take another reading.  Once you have accurately discovered the facing direction of you house, place the bagua over your floor plan and begin the process of

creating a home wonderfully suited to your individual need. You can now begin to make plans for the subtle corrections that come about only through the use of feng shui cures. You are beginning one of the most exciting calculations of you life! Much happiness to you.