Illuminary: Cheryl Grace and Feng Shui Simply

After years of working as a feng shui practitioner and teaching Feng Shui Design at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, I began to connect to feng shui at a soul level, discovering how feng shui can keep my life on course by bringing what is most important to the forefront. The result of my exploration into the rich wisdom and inner work of feng shui is now presented in a book I’ve just written called Feng Shui Simply: Change Your Life from the Inside Out, published by Hay House.  I found that by successfully restoring and balancing energy in every aspect of one’s life, it empowers people to achieve what they might not otherwise be capable of while at the same time revealing one’s true life purpose and lasting legacy.

My book digs deep into the principles of feng shui to present an exciting new view of this age-old concept and shows that feng shui isn’t just about rearranging your furniture or painting your walls. Feng shui can be used to balance the energy of every part of your life—both in your external and internal environments. 

In addition to the classic Bagua Map, I go one step further, revealing the inner work of feng shui by using my own Inner Wisdom Bagua map, which correlates the characteristics, beliefs, and attitudes that will help you flourish in each area of your life.  By celebrating key principles like universal gratitude, a positive outlook, and living in the present moment, we can use feng shui wisdom to manage life on a day-to-day basis and present feng shui as a method for working with change.

Here is an excerpt from my book:

THE CLUTTER CRIME SCENE

Everyone has clutter. If purchases and possessions don’t have a place to call home, they automatically accumulate on top of counters, on the floor, or in drawers. Clutter is anything you don’t really want or need. Or it may just be a result of having too much stuff for the amount of space available. When you fill your home exclusively with essential items that you truly love, less clutter accumulates. Clearing clutter is the first step to creating space. With more space, energy flow improves.

Imagine it’s early in the morning and you’ve just gotten your first cup of coffee. Out of the corner of your eye you spot the stack of old newspapers you’ve been saving so you can cut out important articles. As you shuffle around the house, you nearly trip over a pile of scrapbooking magazines sitting alongside the photo project you started three months ago as a gift to your children. You make your way into the bedroom, only to be confronted by your unmade bed and a week’s worth of clothes scattered all over. An overflow of self-help books on your bedside table threatens to spill onto the floor. Break out the yellow tape: you’ve just come upon the clutter crime scene. And as we’ll shortly see, we’re not talking about the neat police, but something much darker and deeper.

Clutter appears in many forms and for many reasons. If you grew up in lean times, you may have learned to stockpile necessities in order to provide for yourself and your family. Hoarding of any kind points to this kind of “what if” mind-set: you’re always planning for an unforeseen event, needing to be prepared “just in case.” You may believe that having more is somehow better, that material possessions raise your status in the community and perhaps even define who you are. Even a collection of personal treasures or valuable artworks can qualify as clutter if what you accumulate goes well beyond the space you have to display it modestly.

Often clutter simply creeps up on us. Think about moving into that first apartment or first house. The urgency—or just the excitement—of getting those rooms furnished may have driven you to buy things without much thought to their scale, suitability, or relevance to the rest of the home. Perhaps you started out with hand-me-downs or mismatched futons and poster art held over from your college days. Over time, as your taste matures, your appreciation for the past probably deepens as well, so you accumulate an eclectic mix of family heirlooms—furniture, art, books, clothes, and all sorts of miscellaneous stuff. Maybe you add a mate to the mix, with his or her own freight of worldly goods, and before you know it, you’ve got a full house, whether you want it or not. Just as a drawer can be so stuffed it has no room for one more thing, your home, office, or life can be equally filled to the brim.

Why do we clutter, really? Beyond these practicalities, the root reason is most often fear—something inside that doesn’t trust the Universe to provide us with everything we need precisely when we need it. As Karen Kingston, author of Clear Your Clutter with FengShui, puts it, “The more you can learn to trust that life will take care of you, the more life will take care of you.,” But most of us have to grow into understanding what that means. Trust is an inner knowing that happiness doesn’t depend on owning things and safety doesn’t depend on stockpiling goods. When we don’t trust that we are safe in the world and don’t trust ourselves to deal with the stressful situations that arise every day, we may pack things in around ourselves, using clutter as a barricade—except it’s not really keeping danger out, it’s keeping us locked in.

The buildup of clutter is a symptom of something deeper—an outward expression of what’s really going on inside you, a symbolic behavioral pattern that parallels your life. In this way, the “view” in your home becomes your “view” of the world and your place in it. For example, if you’re hoarding possessions you don’t really use or require, which is an issue of trust, you’ll transfer this behavior to your life by not having faith in your future. Excess clutter in the physical environment correlates with a surplus of mind clutter in the creative environment. The subconscious mind is influenced by its surroundings and ultimately is expressed in everything you do.

This excerpt was taken from the book Feng Shui Simply by Cheryl Grace. It is published by Hay House and available at all bookstores or online at: www.hayhouse.com

Cheryl Grace Is a certified professional feng shui consultant and has a successful business in Sarasota, FL called Redecorating with Feng Shui. Her work as a writer, speaker and teacher on the subject of feng shui inspires her Clients and students to live an inspired and purpose-driven life. For more information on Cheryl, visit www.CherylGrace.com

Cheryl is a 2004 Graduate of the Western School of Feng Shui.