You’ve probably heard of Feng Shui, but you might be confused about what it means– or even convinced that it’s just an Eastern philosophy that is not relevant to you. But think again! There are very practical reasons that you should know about why this makes sense! Watch this video to answer what you’ve always wondered: Does Feng Shui really work?
(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/tcdshui.)
Transcript:
Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of The Clutter Diet Book and on-line program, and I am not a trained Feng Shui consultant, but I do want to talk to you about some of the practical aspects of Feng Shui that really work, and they have nothing to do with crystals or mystical energy or anything that you may or may not believe in. It has to do with the science of how your brain works and psychology, and I want to explain how I’ve used this in my life and how I’ve explained it to lots of my friends and colleagues, and it makes tons of sense.
When people walk into my house they say, “It feels so good in here,” and, “It feels like you.” And you know what, it should, because what I have done with this practice is I have infused all of my values and my goals and my objectives about my life – everything that’s important to me – about who I am and who I want be, into my environment very, very intentionally. So, the way I have done that is I have taken one of the basic practices of Feng Shui, and I have made them make sense for me. So, there is something called a bagua, which you see here on the screen, which is essentially a tic-tac-toe board of nine different categories of things in your life. So skills, knowledge, and wisdom; family and prosperity; and romance and relationships. These are just a list of categories arranged in a certain way; you don’t even have to do it this way if you don’t want to, but, you know, why re-invent the wheel?
So here it is. There’s this nine category structure. What you can do with this tic-tac- toe board is you can overlay it on the floor-plan of your house so that you can see which rooms fall into which categories or you can overlay this onto your desk, or you can overlay this over a room, anywhere where you want to be intentional about these categories of your life. So you can shrink it and grow it however you want to. The whole point of it is not that there’s something magical about which room is in which category, but it just gives you a place to start. It’s a framework, it’s a structure. That way you can start placing things to be intentional about those areas in your life.
So there is a place called The Helpful People and Travel area which is a certain corner of the house. In that area I have a china cabinet and inside there I have this little wire sculpture of a yellow Volkswagen. This is something my brother brought to me from South Africa. A local artist had made it; it even has the spare tire in the front trunk, just like a real Volkswagen. So every time I walk by that china cabinet and I see this, it reminds me, first of all, that my brother loves me and he brought me this present, but really it’s making me remember that I want to go to South Africa. This is representing my desire to travel to South Africa. So, now what’s going to happen is when I’m out in the world, because I have had a visual cue of this every single day in my home, when I hear something about a trip to South Africa, if there’s a discounted air fare, or a cruise, or something, I’m going to pay way more attention to that because I’ve been getting reminded of this in my house.
What this is doing scientifically is activating something called the Reticular Activation System (RAS) in your brain. This is the filtering system of your brain. It’s the same thing that if you were going to want to buy yellow Volkswagens would make you see Volkswagens everywhere when you’re driving around. I know this has happened to you. This is what allows us to discover opportunities around us as we focus on those desires that we have.
So Feng Shui really, to me, is just the same as putting little post-it notes all around my house, little private jokes to myself, all over the place that constantly reinforce and remind me of my values, goals, and intentions for my life. That is why my house feels like me, because it is an extension of my brain. So this is the very little real science-based symbology of why this is going to work. So if you like crystals and energy and all of those ideas, that might even work better for you. But if you don’t believe that, it doesn’t even matter. I hope you see my point.
There’s another aspect to the practical elements of Feng Shui which has to do with furniture placement and arrangement and the flow of the house. What they’ll talk about in Feng Shui studies is chi, and energy, but it’s really just, to me, talking about human factors, is what they call it in industrial settings. You know, what are the limits and the needs of the human form and the human interactions and dynamics in a space? So yea, we need a walkway to be a certain width because we don’t feel good if it’s not, and we need to have certain space for chairs to be pulled out, and we need to not have furniture blocking those walkways. There are lots of things about blocking the flow of the way we move in space that make complete sense practically and have been long explained in this tradition as a more mystical element.
So I choose to think of it in a more practical way. You can think of it however you want. I don’t want to have my back to the door, for example, because I know that, you know, in our brains, way back there we have been taught that we don’t want to not see the saber tooth tiger coming behind us. So we naturally are going to feel better facing the door, facing whatever is coming our way. That’s why Feng Shui teaches that you should not have your back to the door with your office chair, for example. All of this makes complete common sense to me.
So choose what you like out of this whole idea and leave the rest, but do look at Feng Shui in a practical way and get rid of clutter, because it represents confusion, indecision, procrastination, and a lack of clarity about what these goals and intentions are for your life. I promise you if you get this intentional and start arranging things, you not only will know more clearly where everything is, because it will have a reason to be there, but you will start to recognize these opportunities and things when you are out in the world because of the constant reminders.
I hope this makes sense to you. If you would like to talk about this with our team of consultants and get extra special help, you can come and join our program or learn more about it at https://www.clutterdiet.com/learnmore. I’ll see you next time. May you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
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