fun times with feng shui part one

Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life by Karen Rauch Carter is my go to book for spring cleaning with INTENTION. What is feng shui? It’s spatial organization for positive results. It matters where you place your bed or desk in your room and there’s a science to understanding how to make your space more conducive to creativity, rest, and productivity. I don’t know any other book I’d recommend more on the subject. Easy to understand and humorous without sacrificing substance.

Today, I concentrated on the relationship gua/area which is my patio garden. Where is your relationship gua, you wonder? From your front door, the area that is in the furthest righthand corner of your home is the relationship gua. That area is where you can enhance the space to affect how you interface with people, like building trust, making commitments, and getting along with people.

As an introvert I REALLY enjoy my solitude. It’s ironic that my relationship gua is OUTSIDE of my home though it’s more like an outdoor room. Mindful that this outdoor room is where I’m to place my relationship intentions, I make time to enjoy caring for my plants.

My former roommate fiasco could’ve been predicted by the fighting dynamics over the patio. He came in as a non smoker and then came out as a smoker after he had settled in. He smoked in my garden patio often and kept his ashtray there. The relationship area of my home was slowly getting poisoned. We played tug of war over the common space.

By law, you can’t kick out a person for being a smoker. It’s terrible that people will lie to live in your home and smile afterwards despite the pretense. All I could do was bring up my grievances like telling him the parents of my students asked me if I was a smoker because my clothes smelled liked cigarettes and being annoyed when I found a cigarette butt among the flowers. I spent less time in my patio as it started to make me feel sick to spend time there.

Anyway, bad stuff is out of the home now. I’m working on bringing the positive energy levels up. Note to everyone, no smoking in the relationship gua unless the whole household are smokers and that’s how you roll. If you have children and pets, I would refrain. Dogs and children suffering from breathing problems will thank you for quitting. And you may save a load of money not needing to be dependent on inhalers.

In case no one has ever told you and you’ve not read the warning on the box......Did you know that cigarette smoking can cause cancer and lead to death? A very slow death.

Today, putting some attention and intention in the relationship gua was my way of being awake and mindful toward the people in my life. I thought of my favorite people, wrote their names down, and placed it on a music stand next to my nursery of baby plants that I’m preparing to gift to neighbors and friends, And I thought of the people I’ve yet to meet. My goal and intention is to keep building my teaching practice, find fun opportunities, and get married. I did some special things to put my intention into the universe. And I hung some angel ornaments up to call on some extra help.

Fortunately, my patio is a favorite place. I know the state of every plant there and make sure they are thriving and that nothing dead and dried takes up space. It wasn’t perfect though. There were some things I was holding onto because they would be useful someday. They finally lost their luster and found their way to the donation pile or trash bin outside. A couple plants also got repotted. They had outgrown their pots or needed a fresh look. I feel like the area got a reboot. It feels lighter and happier. Here’s a page from the book that I studied today:

The writer is concise and funny. She gets her point across without fluffy boring language. I found other feng shui books too stuffy and not as engaging. If I’m going to read a book to clean my home, it’d best be a fun and entertaining book that I can easily return to reference like a dictionary. I’ve bought this book multiple times and given them as gifts. There’s not too many books I can say that about.

My home is mapped out. My spring cleaning and feng shui project will continue and I hope that remarkable things happen soon. That would be fun to write about! My next section to tackle will be “creativity and children”. Stay tuned.

JNET