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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