Learn to Manipulate Home Energy for a Harmonious House
The energy in your home is important. Home is the place where you recharge and reboot, and if you don’t have harmony in your home base, it makes it difficult to have it live a harmonious lifestyle. So goes the thought of feng shui, an ancient Eastern practice that seeks to guide your life according to the energies put forth in your house.
A little about feng shui: it originates from China as a philosophical system of harmonizing the human existence with the surrounding environment. The two Chinese words the practice derives from translate to “wind-water.” Feng shui is one of the 5 Arts of Chinese Metaphysics, tapping into the observation of appearances through formulas and calculations. Feng shui isn’t some random bit of vague, mystical practice; it’s a highly-cultivated, [ancient art] that uses numbers and patterns (/series/feng-shui-life) to bind the invisible forces of universe, earth, and man. It is also very specific to you, your Kua number, your Chinese Zodiac animal, and your birth element (consult the chart on this page for your own!).
Ready to begin? There are just a few tenants you need to be aware of:
Make Some Space
Clean out the clutter. If it’s been in your house for years and you haven’t used it (or have thought of throwing it out on more than one occasion), it should go bye-bye. If this sounds like a horrific chore, you may be surprised. Throwing out old junk and space-taking useless items is quite therapeutic. It’s also not a step you can skip. Sorting through the old energies at home is vital to creating harmonious house feng shui.
Let the Light (and Air) In
You can’t have good feng shui energy without these two elements! Of course, we mean introducing natural light and air into your home more often. Open the shades more often, crack a window, or start growing some feng shui air-purifying plants. Essential oils are a good way to clear the air in your home, as well.
The Feng Shui “Trinity”
While you’re in the planning stages, make sure you pay extra attention to three spaces in particular that are deeply connected to your health. They are the bedroom, the bathroom, and your kitchen.
Bagua
Bagua is the feng shui energy map of your house that you will need to figure out for yourself. The two methods are classical school bagua (staying true to the traditional Eastern conventions or the BTB, or Western bagua. All it involves is a floor plan, paper, and pencils, and then drawing out a grid that will help you align with the correct areas you wish to develop, such as personal growth and cultivation, career/path in life, health/family, and children/creativity.
Five Feng Shui Elements
These are Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water, and they each have their own colors. Utilize the power of color to bring these five elements into balance in correspondence to the bagua areas. Each color has its own power, as well, such as green for improving health in the East feng shui bagua area in your house.
Your Feng Shui Birth Element
You were born on a certain day and year, and that specific time corresponds to a particular element. Check the chart on this page for your personal element. Be aware, however, that Chinese calendars are different than Western ones, so align your “birthday” with the Eastern timeline.
Kua Number & Lucky Direction
This affects the best energy you stand to gain. By doing things like facing your bed or desk a certain direction depending on your Kua number, you can seek to gain specific fortunes, like Money and Success, Better Health, Spiritual Growth, Love and Marriage, and so on. Figure out your number, and then figure out what you’re seeking, and align your furniture accordingly.
Energy Mindfulness
Energy, by its very definition, is a force in motion. Practicing feng shui once does not keep your house aligned with the energies permanently, so be mindful of your surroundings and make adjustments as needed. Happy Harmonizing!
About the Author
The Seven Cycles of Life, and Then Some
Did you know that no two people see the same rainbow? It’s a fact. Each of us views a rainbow through billions of water droplets. Even if we are only a couple of inches apart, we’re looking through a completely different set of lenses in order to see one of the most magnificent sights in nature. Hold that thought, as we’ll come back to it later.
The Number Seven
What is it about the number seven that fascinates us? With a pair of dice, seven is statistically the most probable number to be thrown. Fortunes have been made and lost on that premise. In many holy texts, the number seven is ubiquitous.
Seven is mentioned over 700 times in the Bible, starting off as the number of days it took to create the world and going from there. There are seven seals in the Book of Revelations. Seven trumpeters blew seven Shofars, ram’s horn trumpets, for seven days around Jericho, until the walls crumbled, and much more.
There are seven unique notes in our common musical scale, the eighth note being the octave above the first note. There are seven colors in a rainbow. The moon has four distinct phases: new moon, first quarter, full moon and third quarter, each of these approximately seven days apart.
There are seven Chakras. Last but certainly not least, and probably the most important reason that humans are fixated on the number seven, is that there are seven visible planets in the heavens. The most obvious of these are the Sun and Moon. The others are Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
These seven planets have provided a foundation of belief that has been drawn upon for millennia. They became the Gods of the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, as well as most other cultures. In Vedic astrology, they can define almost every aspect of our life, from birth to death and beyond.
