Webinar: Essential Feng Shui To Go
Essential Feng Shui® can help you prepare for your adventures on the road! Join Terah and learn how to assemble your own unique Travel Kit to transform less-than-excellent vacation spots into places you can call your own. Terah will also talk about how to choose the best hotel rooms, cabins, houses, and other vacation locations. Learn how you can pick the winners, fix the losers, and enjoy every moment of your wild and precious adventures!
Read MoreEssential Feng Shui Tips: Connected by Ch’i
Everything Is Connected by Ch’I: The second principle of Feng Shui is that every person, place, and thing is connected by Ch’i. The energy that connects us to our personal environment extends to include our entire planet. Energetically, there is no such thing as isolation. Although our connections are usually strongest with the people, places, and things that are physically located close by, we are essentially in relationship with everyone and everything on Earth.
Read MoreEssential Feng Shui Tips: Alive with Ch’i
Everything Is Alive with Ch’I: The first principle in the Feng Shui philosophy is that every person, place, and thing is alive with the vital energy we call Ch’i. This concept is all-inclusive, changing our physical existence from a world “that” is largely inanimate to a world “who” is completely alive. When we see our world as made up of animate “beings,” we make decisions differently than when we see things as inanimate. Indiscriminate destruction of our natural world, as well as amassing large quantities of possessions we don’t love or need, can only happen when we believe it’s just “dirt” or “stuff.” When we feel the aliveness of all things around us, including the earth beneath our feet and the belongings that surround us, we are compelled to be “care-full.” We tend to slow down, treating ourselves, each other, nature, and our belongings with dignity, knowing that every “thing” is imbued with vital energy.
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Q&A – Spiral Staircases
Q: I have a spiral staircase and I don’t know what to do with it. I find that I’m avoiding going upstairs, afraid I’m going to fall through! Help!
A: The downward moving “waterfall effect” of stairs is greatly amplified when those stairs are also spiraling down just as water does in a drain. Spiral staircases affect our sense of stability and safety, especially when there are no risers installed and the banister is open as well. The ch’i rushes down these stairs too forcefully, and there is a sense of danger in using them—are we going to fall through those openings in step and banister on the way up, or are we going to lose our footing on the way down?
Essential Feng Shui applies our balancing tools of The Five Elements to remedy the situation.
(Download your full color FiveElementChart.)
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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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