The Big Rug: Why Feng Shui Works
By Becky Iott, WSFS Instructor
I help my clients and myself create beautiful environments that we love to live and work in. I don’t promise more.
But I remember that when I first heard about Feng Shui and I took that sad picture of two beached boats out of the part of our home associated with Fame and Reputation, and replaced it with an image of a serene woman wearing a freakishly beautiful headdress, a huge misunderstanding about my family swiftly corrected.
I remember when a client cleaned out a storage room filled to overflowing and untouched for 20 years, and within weeks found the perfect house she had wanted for decades.
I remember the woman who gave away all the clothes that made her feel less than her best (almost all of them) and bought a few nice things she loved, and received a significant promotion and salary raise.
I know about 1000 stories like these.
I also know it doesn’t always work this way. Sometimes Feng Shui works more like a novel than a blurb. That’s why I don’t guarantee Feng Shui at all; but, I have a lot of confidence in it. I don’t know what will happen when you clean out your closets or make your front door beautiful and welcoming or arrange your furniture for comfort and conversation. But I can imagine what might happen. You can too.
People sometimes say that Feng Shui is “only psychological”. But human nature is psychological and Feng Shui is about humans as a part of nature. And things go better for humans psychologically when we live and work in safe, beautiful environments surrounded by what we love and value. We feel better. We look better. We make better decisions. We work smarter. We think more clearly. We behave better. Please, give me “only psychological” every day of my life!
If Feng Shui were only psychological that would be enough for me, but, something else happens when we enhance our environment. I can understand that the amazing headdressed woman in my house made us feel better about ourselves and that affected others’ thoughts about us too, but the correction of the misunderstanding came fast–I would use the term automatic–one thing followed the other seemingly as cause and effect.
Cleaning out the old stuff from storage helped one client lighten her load psychologically and she easily found the house she wanted. Getting rid of the old wardrobe propelled another woman to move forward professionally. But the changes in these circumstances were also swift and unexplainable.
For me, this is synchronicity, a deep form of intelligent coincidence where things come together in one’s Feng Shui, one’s feelings and one’s circumstances that are simultaneous or nearly so.
That brings me to the big rug. I’m a slow jammin’ kind of Feng Shui practitioner in my own home. I take my time, girls, to find the right thing, the deep and sexy thing. The wall is blank until I find the image I really want to see. And the living room floor didn’t have a rug for years because I couldn’t find just the one I wanted to see every day and wanted to feel under my feet.
This year I found it. A luscious wool oval with big gardenias, free flowing as if they were painted with a gigantic wet brush. No repeat in the pattern so it looks like art, a pale beauty against the dark wood floor, soulful partner with the pear colored sofa, piquant contrast to the dark purple chair. I’m feeling the happy only psychological effect of it right now.
It makes the room feel like a room, a whole thing with an identity, and a gracious, spacious welcomeness. It is a happy elegant rug and as soon as I installed it in our Wealth and Prosperity gua big happy elegant things began to happen. My husband is a musician and was offered a gig for too little money so he asked for double thinking they would find someone else, and they found the money for him instead. I had wanted to start a particular writing project for 15 years, and it started coming out of me without strain. And, the really big thing, I had one of those personal insights you don’t get often, a big internal shift in my understanding of my identity that life circumstances continue to rearrange themselves to accommodate.
I could have found a rug years ago, but not this rug. This rug is synchronous, the big rug that ushers in big transformations. Did the big beautiful rug bring us big beautiful circumstances and clarity? Or did big beautiful circumstances and clarity require a rug to match? I don’t know, but I see it all the time. Good Feng Shui, deep feelings, and life circumstances align for transformation and we move forward.
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Let it Shine
By Becky Iott, WSFS Instructor
When I don’t know what to do next for my home, I clean something. It’s fun and it’s free! Clean. Polish. Organize. Tidy up. A little mundane, huh? A little dull.
But then everything shines.
Except there are exceptions.
Sometimes when I am invited into someone’s home as a Feng Shui consultant, I walk into an almost unbelievable spotlessness, a clean so clean, a tidy so widy that I am speechless. And a Feng Shui consultant can’t stay speechless for long.
“What a beautiful home you have,” I say. “I wish my home were as clean.”
She is crestfallen. “It’s a mess. I wish it could be cleaner.”
“Does your family help with the work?”
“Oh, no,” she says. Translation: They would not do a good enough job.
“How much time do you spend cleaning every week?”
“Not much.” Clearly, every possible moment.
Later in the consultation I may ask the client if she knows her life purpose and she always does. The clarity of her cleanliness often reflects a clear mind.
“How much time did you devote to your life purpose this week?”
Now she is speechless. Because she hasn’t spent any time on it. Not that week, not in many weeks.
If your life purpose, your reason to be on this planet at this time, is to create a very high standard of cleanliness in your home—and I know people for whom this is true—do not let me or anyone else interfere with it.
But if you have something else important to do in this lovely lifetime, and you’re not devoting time and energy to it, reduce cleaning time by 25% NOW.
Enlist everyone you live with to do their fair share. Clean first whatever needs to be clean and organized for you to devote one hour a week to your life purpose, then two hours a week, then three, more if you can.
With good Feng Shui, everything shines, everyone shines, and so does your life purpose. Let it shine!
Read MoreQ&A – Which color should I paint my front door?
Q. Hello!
What color should I paint my front door? It’s at the southeast, could I use a different color inside or does it have to be the same? I stood with my back to the door standing outside to get this information, was this the right way? My back door is to northwest. Which color would be the best? Thank you so much for your help.
Janet from Puerto Rico
A. Hi Janet,
Our School teaches Form Feng Shui and you are referring to Compass Feng Shui. I would advise you to paint your doors the color/s that are your absolute favorite and that make your heart sing every time you see them. This lifts your energy every day and enhances your vitality, happiness, creativity, and productivity. Our approach focuses on your individual preferences rather than a generic formula.
Enjoy choosing Colors that you LOVE!
With Every Blessing,
Terah Kathryn Collins
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Walking Paths of Beauty
by Karen Abler Carrasco
It’s an excellent time to “Watch Your Step!” as we gallop into this Year of the Wood Horse, with the heady winds of personal and social transformation whirling all around us. We may have some daring new choices to make along our life’s path, or we may realize that we need some refinement or even a major redirecting of an old path. So it is a perfect time to look at the pathways to our homes’ front doors, where the main “mouth of ch’i” opens to welcome opportunity, abundance and love from far and near.
In Essential Feng Shui(r), we observe and listen closely for the metaphors speaking through the forms and structures that surround us. For example, is the path to your front door easy to find, wide enough to swing your arms, well-lit and safe by day or night, and beautified in some way? If so, this pathway brings grounded support for your life’s journey and any fresh experiences you may be considering.
On the other hand, does this path represent a “rough and rocky road,” an “uphill climb” or a “slippery slope?” If it is too narrow, or lined with prickly bushes or overgrown shrubs, it may be representing a life journey that is difficult, isolating or full of thorny problems and overwhelming work. Often a front entry offers only a cramped squeeze beside a driveway full of cars along a bland and neglected cement walk to a rarely used front door. Such a path symbolizes subservience to the all-important automobile door of the prominent garage. Sometimes there is no “people path” to a front door at all, which delivers the message “go around (or through the garage), this house does not welcome you.”
Over time our sense of belonging and ease of living erodes when there is either no clear path, or a neglected one, to our main entrances. Let’s get back on “Easy Street” with a lovely, clear and well-defined front pathway into our welcoming homes. Here are some suggestions for specific pathway improvements:
If your front entrance requires a walk along a driveway to get to the door, create a “people path” that is located and sized for a more comfortable stroll to the front door, away from the cars. If your front door is actually not visible from the front, or is very recessed on the property, entice visitors, and vital ch’i, to travel the distance, drawn by the sound of trickling water near the door, the notes of wind chimes, or the sight of bright movement with wind catchers and other decorations along the path. If your path is steep, either up or down to the door, create level “landing pads” along the way which allow rest, a sense of stable ground, and a view of something beautiful as a reward for the climb like seating, statuary, strikingly formed plants, lighting, or a grouping of brightly colored potted plants.
Enhance your home’s paths with safety, comfort and beauty and you will reassure the psyche, soothe the weary spirit, and delight the senses with creative inspiration. Your fortunes and outlook on life’s journey ahead will be vastly affected for the better. Pathway-dedicated phrases from the Navajo Blessingway come to mind–”Beauty before me, Beauty behind me, Beauty all around me. May we walk in Beauty.” And, in this extraordinary year of rapid change and new growth, may we all create safe footing on a more joyous, and ever more sacred journey into Love, Light and Laughter!
Photo: cococurtainstudio.com
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Happy Valentine’s Time!
One of the everyday ways we can express the love we feel for our homes is to call them by their true names… Here, WSFS teacher Becky Iott shares her experience of naming her home sweet home…
I invite you to share the name of your home with me and those around you. It breathes new life into your abode every time you do. My new home was immediately forthcoming with her name: Earth Haven.
Living In Love,
Terah Kathryn Collins
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