Feng Shui your spring cleaning ritual

Feng Shui your spring cleaning rituals

By Nicole Noles Collins AP www.vitalichiacupuncture.com

and the microcosm are always connected, and it helps us stay connected to both the external universe outside of us and the internal universe within us.

Many of us grew up with weekly Saturday cleaning rituals as well as Spring and Fall deep cleans. A physical and energetic deep clean twice a year not only reduces germ and mold loads but also helps keep you in harmony with the seasons. From the Daoist perspective, Spring is the time to wake up and prepare for rapid growth and expansion. To do that though, requires cleaning out the old energy, physically and energetically. A physical deep clean accomplishes this efficiently, but tuning into Feng Shui principals to target specific areas of the house can help us create beneficial changes in major areas of our lives, too.

Feng Shui, which translates to Wind Water in Chinese, is a discpline that concentrates on harmonizing the relationship between a person and the universe using conscious placement or removal of objects in a person’s enviroment as well as meditation and internal cultivation techniques. It is a practice that looks physical but is mostly energetic and esoteric. It is a constant reminder that the macrocosm As each season progresses many times we unintensionally accumulate clutter or create poor feng shui in our enviroment, which in turn creates obstacles in our daily lives. This can be as simple as inefficent daily routines that eat up precious time during the day to challenges in major areas of our lives. Although each area of our property, house and office are equally important in feng shui terms, there are four specific areas to target that can help straighten things out quickly and set the stage for the rapid growth that spring can bring. These four areas are the entrance, the stove, the main bed, and desks.

In feng shui, the entrance, or the Mouth of Chi, is the main gateway to the house that brings all the chi into the house. Although the Mouth of Chi is typically thought of as just the main door to the residence, it is important to use your feng shui eyes and assess the flow of energy leading up to the door. If you live in an apartment building, you may not be able to change anything, but it’s still a good exercise to help you tune into your environment.

Start from the road and the mailbox or the sidewalk, and slowly walk up to the front door. Do you feel relaxed and happy as you approach the door, or overwhelmed and anxious? Do you see any corners or sharp architectural features pointing at you as you approach the door? Are the surroundings pleasant and welcoming, or forboding and repelling? Check for branches or other obstacles that need to be cleared from the pathway. Also check the width of the pathway leading to the door. Is it wide enough for you with room to spare or do you have to fight your way past plants, boxes or too much furniture? The entrance should be a “bright hallway” full of light, life and welcoming energy.

Things that need to be removed from the walkway to the entrance include: Branches and spiky plants, weeds, anything that is broken or worn looking, trash, and anything with sharp corners or protruding arrows (sha chi). Anything that is empty, like pots, vases or birdfeeders should be either filled or removed.

Now that you’ve reached the front door, look at the width of the walkway. Is the door entrance as wide as the walkway? If the door is narrow in proportion to the walkway, you may not be able to welcome all the opportunities and luck the universe brings you. If the path is too narrow, you may want to widen it physically or add plants to either side.

The front door is the most important element of the exterior house. This is one spot of the house that it pays to invest in the best your budget can handle. At a minimum, it should fit snugly into the frame, with no cracks or peeling paint. The door handle should be easy to operate and the same goes for the locks. Ideally, the front door should be solid, with a minimum of glass inserts. The doorbell should be a sound you love to hear, not a noise that makes you cringe. Sound activates chi, so think of the doorbell as the song of good luck or opportunity. Now turn around and look out to the street from your front door. Are there any trees, or protruding corners of other buildings symbolically attacking the front door or the house? Are there any buildings that tower over your building, or churches and cemeteries within sight? The view from the front door should be as pleasant as the view leading to it. You should be able to see a beautiful panorama in front of you.

Once you cross the threshold, how does the energy change? If there is a mirror opposite the front door, it needs to be replaced with positive and auspicious artwork. Is there enough room to move though the foyer, or is it jam packed with items that impede movement and chi entering the house? If you imagine that each item in your house is a chi magnet, and will “hold on to” energy as it flows in from the front door, then it will become clearer which objects are enhancing your chi, and which are just “stealing” it away from you. As clutter accumulates, the chi that should be nourishing you and bringing you luck gets bogged down, especially in corners. Then it becomes too stagnant to be useful and also does not nourish the rest of the house or the occupants. Again, keep an eye out for broken items, sharp corners and objects, depressing artwork or décor, empty vases and dried flowers.

While the Mouth of Chi represents the amount of chi the whole household can accept, the stove is considered the symbol of wealth. Classically, this would be symbolized by the rice cookers, and the stove is the modern equivalent. All burners of the stove should be working, free from clutter and rotated in use so that all opportunities for wealth are maximized instead of one or two burners working “overtime.” No one wants to get burnt out! Also remove any mirrors that may reflect the burners. Some schools of feng shui say that this doubles the opportunities for wealth, but from my personal experience I can say all it did was double the amount of cooking fires I had! That is way too much fire energy in one spot. The stove, like the front door, is a good place to maximize feng shui budgeting by getting the best you can afford and that will make cooking stress free. A happy cook is the most important ingredient in every meal, because the cook’s chi permeates the food. Never startle or upset someone who is preparing food. Many times I chant mantras, especially when decocting tinctures, to infuse more chi into the food or herbs. If there is a sink or refrigerator next to stove, add a small live bamboo plant somewhere between the two in a safe spot. The water will nurture wood, which will then nurture the fire of the stove, instead of the water putting out the fire of the stove.

The desk, whether it resides in a home, an office, or both, represents a person’s career success. That can include wealth, but it also encompasses more subtle aspects like power and leadership. Clutter free desks are required for good feng shui, just like in any other part of the house, and can be even more detrimental for a person’s success if allowed to get out of control. The desk should contain

ADOBE STOCK IMAGES Although the desk is positioned well with a solid foundation wall in the back, the desk should have a front panel extending to the floor to protect the person’s legs.

auspicious symbols of your chosen career, with no letter openers or scissors openly displayed on top. An executive desk has a front panel to hide the user’s feet, and this is ideal for protecting the person at the desk. Do not hang a picture of water or a mirror behind the desk; a soft mountain behind you, or a row of books, is ideal so that your back is symbolically protected. An executive chair with a solid back also does the same thing.

Ideally, the desk should face your sheng chi or success direction, which is different for everyone. But if it faces a wall, or a window with a view such as a brick wall, factory or church it can symbolize obstacles in one’s career. The desk should have a solid wall behind it, with a commanding view of the entire room. It should be as far away from the office door as possible, and also placed diagonally facing the door if possible. Secretaries sit close to the office door because hey are gatekeepers for executives, so this is definitely an example where you want the desk protected and as far away from the office door as possible. The desk should not face a toilet or share the back wall with a toilet or hallway either. It makes an interesting exercise to see where workers in a single room are placed and correlate it to their position within a company. Even without knowing feng shui, people who set up office layouts most times subconsciously place the leaders and executives as far away from hallways, doors and toilets as possible.

The last stop in your mini spring feng shui cleaning is the bed, the symbol of your relationship and childmaking. Secondarily I also consider this a health symbol, because the position and layout of the bed is so vital to the quality of sleep and rejuvenation of energy.

Like the desk, the bed should face the door and be diagonally positioned across from it. Remove clutter from around the bed on a regular basis. The usual problem spost are the nightstands, which should be identical on each side, with plenty of room for people and chi to approach the bed from all three sides. Do not place a bed below a window if possible, but if the other choice is to

share a toilet wall, then check to see which direction is more auspicious for you. Many times a compromise will be necessary, which is why it is helpful to know a couple’s auspicious and unlucky directions before determining bed placement. Also do not place a bed with the feet pointing directly towards the bedroom door, especially if it leads to a hallway. Another inauspicious positioning is to have any part of the bed aligned with a bathroom. Imagine the bathroom door as a portal for sewer chi. You do not want the “sewer chi” running into you as you sleep. Check also for pointed corners of sha chi that intersect the bed which may symbolically cause “headaches” or pains in other parts of the body depending on where the arrows hit the bed.

Headboards are important as they symbolize protection of your head as you sleep, and giving you a solid foundation in life. An ideal headboard is solid wood. A tortoise shape is auspicious; anything that has holes or bars is not. A metal bed frame can be too energizing, as are mirrors or TVs in the bedroom. Mirrors are too disruptive and bounce chi around the bed and bedroom. Colors of the bedding should be harmonious and soothing, not excessively bright.

Underneath the bed, chi needs to flow freely while you rest. Clutter underneath the bed can symbolize back problems, and storing items such as family pictures symbolically “presses down” the family’s luck. You can energize the under-bed area with uncooked rice or salt to absorb negative energy. Six round crystals can also be added to the salt or rice for health enhancement. Uncooked rice is also said to enhance fertility. An amethyst geode is a traditional cure to keep a spouse from straying from the martial bed.

Once you have “spring cleaned” these most important areas, you can expand your cleaning and feng shui activity into each room, and eventually the entire house. Feng Shui is never truly “done” as the energy changes with each day, each two-week period, each season and each year, but by creating a plan you can develop a feng shui rhythm to cleaning up the physical and esoteric energy your house, keeping it in harmony with the season at hand.