The Importance of the Feng Shui Living Room

Why your first feng shui priority should be a feng shui living room!

A lot of people gravitate toward a feng shui living room, bedroom, or garden, and there are good reasons for these preferences. Gardens naturally lend themselves to serene chi, with their beauty and connection to the earth. The bedroom has a profound impact on our health and love lives. But the living room is vitally important as well, especially for homes with families.

Why Living Rooms Matter

Why does a living room matter? Well, think about it: where does your family spend most of their time? Especially their together time. Every other room in your house tends to be isolated to either a specific purpose (eating in the kitchen, for example) or a specific person (such as a child’s bedroom). The living room is the only room in your house that exists specifically for, well, living.

That’s why a feng shui living room is so important. How you arrange the living room affects your entire family, and that affects the chi throughout your house. Although some experts would recommend starting with the bathroom or bedroom, I always recommend taking a strong look at your living room first, especially for homes with families.

The Feng Shui Living Room

So what does a feng shui living room look like? Well:

• it takes into account each of the people who will be using it and incorporates something they love

• it’s structured around people, not machinery (for example, having all the furniture circling a television screen is very bad mojo for feng shui)

• it emphasizes comfort in its furnishings, and probably has plenty of blankets and cushions around to boot

• there’s room for everyone in the family, plus guests, to sit comfortably

• No one has to sit with their back to the door (or any entrance to the room)
  

In addition, the perfect feng shui living room has some extra touches:

• The five elements balance (in other words, there are touches of wood, fire, earth, metal, and water throughout the room)

• Something in the room speaks welcome to guests

• It is clean and clutter free

• Something alive is in the room besides its inhabitants -- a goldfish, a green plant, or what have you
  

If you follow these tips, you’ll achieve the perfect feng shui living room in no time at all!

Interested in feng shui? Check out my book, "Feng Shui Secrets for a Fulfilled Life!"

Looking for great deals on feng shui products? Try Jade Market!

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Feng Shui for Bedroom Happiness

Use feng shui for bedroom comfort, romance, and relaxation!

When people ask about feng shui for bedroom and bed, they usually have one of two things in mind: relaxation and romance. And with good reason: these are the two things you should be saving your bedroom for!

This isn’t just a feng shui idea. Most sleep experts recommend keeping your bedroom sacred to rest and romance. In fact, some theorize that many sleep disorders originate from trying to do too much in your bedroom (acknowledging, perhaps, that a busy energy isn’t conducive to a restful one -- science catching up with feng shui at last?).

Feng Shui for Bedroom Rest

In this area, feng shui for bedroom comfort coincides with a lot of advice from scientists and sleep experts -- so even feng skeptics can enjoy these tactics without worrying about looking strange to their family and friends (hint, hint: it’s a great place to start a wishy-washy friend or family member along the path to feng shui!).

Follow these tips and enjoy a more restful, relaxing bedroom:

• Never work in your bedroom: no laptop in bed, studying on the floor, or desks in the corner. In those situations where it’s completely unavoidable, create a physical barrier (such as a folding screen) between your workspace and your rest space.

• Don’t use your bedroom for exercising -- it creates too active an energy.

• Don’t watch TV in bed. In fact, don’t even have a TV in the bedroom: the electromagnetic energy isn’t conducive to sleep.

• Avoid having mirrors in the bedroom as these can reflect sha chi back at you in your sleep.
  

• Position your bed so that you can see the door but your feet aren’t aiming straight at it.
  

These simple tips will help you create feng shui for bedroom relaxation. But what about...

Feng Shui for Bedroom Romance

Obviously, we mainly use our bedrooms for sleeping. But bedrooms also tend to be the romantic center of any couple’s relationship, so it’s worth keeping a strong romantic energy in the room, too. Even single people will benefit from emphasizing romance in their bedrooms, especially if they’re “looking” -- it can help create a receptive energy.

Follow these tips to emphasize romance:

• Keep the love and marriage sector of your bedroom clean, free of clutter, and full of pink, red, candles, rose quartz, pairs of items -- anything that evokes love.
  

• Treat both sides of the bed with equal respect and make sure one partner doesn’t dominate the room.

• If single, make sure there is physical space in the room for a prospective partner -- ie, space in the closet, the night stand, etc.
  

• Keep one or two romantic keepsakes (NOT from ex-lovers) in the room to help establish the mood.
  

By following this advice, you’ll keep your bedroom sacred to love and rest, enabling you to get more out of both. Remember, feng shui for bedroom life follows the same principle as all feng shui: emphasize the positive chi!

Interested in feng shui? Check out my book, "Feng Shui Secrets for a Fulfilled Life!"

Looking for great deals on feng shui products? Try Jade Market!

Read more!

Feng Shui Tips for the Bathroom

Use these feng shui tips to keep your bathroom from sucking away your health and prosperity!

When people ask me for feng shui tips, they're often worried about the bathroom. And well they should be: the bathroom is an incredibly difficult topic in modern feng shui. The ancient discipline never accounted for indoor plumbing, and so no allowances were made in centuries of studying chi for a room with this one's... well, particular uses.

Draining Away

The bathroom actually isn't so much a source of sha chi because it's dirty -- although that can definitely be a problem, and many Asian cultures actually have the bath and the toilet in separate rooms. Ask where the bathroom is in a Japanese home, and your confused host may think you want to interrupt your visit to take a bath!

No, the main reason the bathroom becomes problematic is because it has so many darn drains. Drains are never good for chi. Their only purpose is to suck things away as quickly as possible, and unfortunately, that includes chi. That's why it's so important to observe certain feng shui tips in the bathroom.

Fast Feng Shui Tips

There's no "good place" for a bathroom in feng shui, but some places are worse than others. If the bathroom is in any sector you're trying to emphasize, especially the wealth, love, or health areas, it can literally destroy your ambitions. If it's directly over your front door or kitchen, or just off either, that's a particularly inauspicious location.

However, there are some feng shui tips that will help you minimize the bathroom's impact on your chi:

• If the bathroom is in a particularly bad location, hang a full length mirror on the outside of the door (and always keep it closed). This helps to visually redirect chi away from the bathroom and prevent its loss.
  

• Use grounding items, such as earth-based cures, in the corners of the bathroom. Heavy ceramic vases, containers of any kind, and many types of crystals are effective examples of these tools.
  

• Hang a faceted crystal in the center of the bathroom to absorb and redeflect chi.
  

• Keep the toilet and bathroom door closed at all times, and try to cover the drains in the shower and sink as well (or at least close the shower curtain to create a physical barrier for any stray energy).
  

• Hang a 3 inch round mirror on the ceiling (use double sided tape) directly over the toilet. This will redeflect draining chi (and also makes an interesting conversation piece when you have guests!)
  

Following these feng shui tips is the quickest method I know of to undo any potential damage to the status of your home from draining bathroom chi!


Interested in feng shui? Check out my book, "Feng Shui Secrets for a Fulfilled Life!"

Looking for great deals on feng shui products? Try Jade Market!

Read more!

Should I Use a Feng Shui Consultant?

Wondering about the secrets of feng shui? Maybe it's time for a feng shui consultant!

If you're thinking about a feng shui consultant, congratulations: you've taken the first step towards resolving your life and creating a more fulfilled energy within your home. Feng shui is an incredibly powerful tool and, as a feng shui consultant myself, I have often seen the incredible changes it brings about.

Why Use a Feng Shui Consultant?

There's a lot of feng shui you can handle on your own, but there are times when it's nice to get some outside help. Some of the benefits of a feng shui consultant include:

• Experience -- consultants have been doing this for a long time and understand what they're about
  
  
• An outside opinion -- sometimes, you're too close to a situation to see it properly. A feng shui consultant can often sense things about your home that you can't simply because you live there!
  
• Accuracy -- consultants have studied the craft and know what they're doing. You don't have to worry about a bad compass reading messing up your whole house.
  
  

On the Other Hand…

Of course, there are many reasons people choose not to use a feng shui consultant, too. I understand these, even though I do think (obviously) that the benefits often outweigh the costs. Some of those costs include:

• Actual cost -- feng shui consultants charge a hefty fee. Meanwhile, for a scant amount of money, you could purchase a book on the subject (such as my own!) and take on a do-it-yourself project.
  
• Lack of conviction -- if you're just starting out with feng shui, you might want to see it in action for yourself before you spend a bunch of money on one.
  
  
• Inconvenience -- depending on where you live, it may be difficult to find a feng shui consultant (or at least one who knows what they're talking about!)
  
  

Whatever you decide, remember: your consultant is only that, a consultant. The ultimate decisions about your house should rest with you, not a feng shui consultant or anybody else.




Interested in feng shui? Check out my book, "Feng Shui Secrets for a Fulfilled Life!"

Looking for great deals on feng shui products? Try Jade Market!

Read more!

Choosing a Decorating Style

Decorating with Feng Shui doesn’t mean you have to decorate in Chinese!

Sometimes when I talk to my friends and family about feng shui decorating, they go kind of funny on me. The principles intrigue them, but they don’t want to hang dragons and Chinese coins in their ultramodern homes. What they don’t understand is that the principles of feng shui decorating are definitely not limited to Chinese style!

The best way to illustrate this is through a client I helped recently (who has very graciously given her permission). Her entire home was decorated like something from a design magazine: lots of white and neutral coloring, everything done in very sleek, modern lines. She was going through a difficult time in her life and hoped feng shui might help -- as long as it didn’t mean compromising her decorating style.

Which, of course, it didn’t -- making her uncomfortable in her home would hardly have been good feng shui. Instead, we focused on making simple changes that brought feng shui principles to play in her own style. Some of the changes we made included:

• Replacing artsy black and white pictures with artsy black and white photos of her with family and friends (we used great silver frames we found in the bargain bin of a local discount store)

• Rearranging her plants to put them in areas more in keeping with the ba gua

• Using some “hidden” decorating to attract positive chi (for example, she now has a small cluster of Chinese coins tied with a red ribbon under her couch cushion, which is located in the very center of her wealth sector).

• Creating pairs of things she loved in her relationship and marriage area (for example, she had a pair of interesting modern art-esque candleholders on her dining room table, which we relocated to a small hall table in her relationship sector).

When we’d finished decorating, you could barely tell we’d done anything. The visible changes in the house were miniscule and it still reflected her unique decorating style, but you could feel the difference in the feng shui!


Interested in feng shui? Check out my book, "Feng Shui Secrets for a Fulfilled Life!"

Looking for great deals on feng shui products? Try Jade Market!


Read more!