Feng Shui 101 – Enhancing Your Life by Enhancing Your Space
posted by Ann Bingley Gallops, of The Organized Life

There was great energy in the room for my “Feng Shui 101” workshop on October 21! Everyone who came was interested in learning how to improve their lives with Feng Shui, the art and science of enhancing your life by enhancing your space.

Feng Shui has been used for thousands of years and is still a very big part of Chinese culture, slowly making its way to the West. In fact, Feng Shui is all around us. One prominent personality, Donald Trump, has been using it in all his buildings ever since he found out that Feng Shui could help him make more money!

If you weren’t able to make it and are curious about some of the things we talked about, here’s a sample:

Everything in our surroundings has a physical and psychological effect on us. Feng Shui enhances the beneficial aspects of our environment, while minimizing the not-so-beneficial ones. It’s about enhancing your health, abundance and well-being, so that you’re better equipped to live the life of your dreams.

Feng Shui literally means Wind & Water, which is a great metaphor for describing one of its most important concepts: how chi (life force) energy flows in our lives. It aims to harmonize our man-made environments with the ways of nature. For example, Feng Shui doesn’t like straight lines or sharp corners because nature doesn’t create things that flow this way: they’re unnatural.

Feng Shui works on two levels: knowing which changes need to be made, and knowing why you’re making them. It identifies how chi flows and where it is blocked, because blockages in your space are likely to correlate with where you are blocked in your life. Feng Shui “cures” are designed to correct those blockages.

We use three tools to analyze and work with any space: Yin & Yang, the Bagua (energy map), and the Five Elements. These tools were developed in ancient China as a way to identify the dynamics in any space.

Yin & Yang symbolize the balance of “feminine” and “masculine” polarities in a space.

The Bagua is an eight-sided energy map that describes the most important parts of your life. It’s the tool we use to align your space with your life so that you can bring intention and purposefulness to every important part of your life including your career, your love life, your health and more.

Finally, the Five Elements – Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water -- are used to balance and harmonize specific visible and invisible energies in your space.

Here are just a few more key concepts: place the most important piece of furniture in each room in “the Command position”, which is in the place farthest from the door, slightly diagonal to it (think of the best seat in the restaurant!). This will give you the best vantage point from which to be in control of your environment.

And of course, clear clutter! If there’s one thing that “chi” gets stuck on, it’s clutter: you can’t have good Feng Shui in a cluttered environment! And things that are well-cared-for signify your intention to take the very best care of yourself, too!

There’s so much more, so I hope you’ll take one of my future workshops at IGC, or give me a call at 646-382-3878 to find out more.

posted by Ann Bingley Gallops, of The Organized Life