Feng Shui

Have you ever walked into a room, and it felt right, it felt good to be in that room? Or have you ever walked into a room and found that you wanted to turn around and walk right back out again? How do you feel about your own home? If you think about that question, the possibility could be that you don’t take much notice of how it feels – but maybe more on what it looks like. In some cases you may be so used to how a room in your home feels, that you don’t notice whether it is working for you or not?

What do I mean working for you? How can a room possibly work for you? Well that is a good question, and it actually has a two word answer, Feng Shui! Feng Shui is an ancient Chinese method of looking at the home and how it correlates to your life. The actual translation of Feng Shui is ‘Air / Water’ but the Chinese were not talking about the two elements, they were actually talking about the ‘seen and the unseen’. The ‘seen’ are the objects that you have in your room, and the ‘unseen’ is ‘chi’ or energy that comes into your home and moves around. When you have free flowing chi, and the energy is able to move around easily in your home, you will feel like things are moving and happening in your life. However, if there isn’t much room for energy to move around, then you may find yourself stuck or not able to move forward.

There are many schools of Feng Shui that have their own way of doing things – to enable you to live the life that you desire, or to bring the energy into certain areas of your life. I trained in the Denise Linn School of Interior Alignment®, which uses some of the traditional methods of Feng Shui, but also we use our intuition – and the method is called ‘Instinctive Feng Shui’. Your life is different to that of your neighbour, and her life is different to her neighbour, and so some of the more traditional rules of Feng Shui cannot always apply, and you cannot always make the changes that the traditional rules dictate to you. So in Instinctive Feng Shui, we would look at what changes you would like to make in your life, and how you can then make those changes in your home.

We use the Bagua, which is like a map that guides us to the nine different areas of life. These are, Self Knowledge, Career, Helpful People and Travel, Children and Creativity, Relationships, Health and Spirituality, Family, Wealth and Fame. I’m not talking about the celebrity type fame here, but more about how people see you in life! When I begin to work with the Bagua, I look at the whole home, and within Interior Alignment, the goal is align your goals and intentions with that of your home. It may be that at the moment, your life is out of balance, and all you are doing is work, work and more work. So we would begin to look at the career aspect of your home and what you have there, and what needs to be changed. Alternatively, if you are looking for a relationship and nothing has happened for a while, we would look at what is happening in that area of the home, and then begin to make adjustments and changes to assist you in that area.

From my own personal experience, it works! My life was great, but I was missing someone to share life with. I have to admit, the relationship area was actually more like a junk area! I was having some pretty rubbish dates and no-one that I could see myself spending more time with. So I began to make small changes in the relationship area of my home. I made it a more inviting area for me to sit and read, or just be. I put an armchair in place of my junk, and added two pillows there that for me symbolised a couple. It took a couple of months, and a couple more bad dates before someone special did come into my life, and we are still together!

So how can you make changes within your life now? The first thing that I always recommend is to clear out the old, with some basic clutter clearing. This means going through the areas of your home where you have a lot of stuff and clearing it. Imagine this, if you were to walk into a room that was full of things that it made it difficult for you to step inside, how do you think the ‘chi’ or energy can make its way in to help you in life? Clutter clearing is easy. Start small, and pick one area of your home that you know you have wanted to clear out – but have not had the chance to. That is the first place you can start, of if you are not sure, but not that there is an area within your life that you would like to change, then you can use the Bagua to give you an idea on where to start. The home is rarely divided nicely into square boxes, but using the Bagua (can we add an image in here?), we would find out first where you front door is. It would be on one of the bottom three areas. Once you have found that – you can then begin to find the area of your life that you would like to enhance, and begin to clear out what you no longer need and watch how things begin to change in your life!