Feng Shui

Has your home lost that loving feeling? Do feel nurtured when you are at home? Is it lacking vital energy that makes you feel alive and nurtured? Maybe it’s time to add some romance to your home. Using Feng Shui principles can be a simple way to make your home loving and inviting. Your home is a place where you can create a tranquil haven from the hectic outside world. Adding some romance to your home does not mean that you have to decorate it in a particular way, such as a Victorian-styled home with lots of lace and floral patterns. Romancing your home is rather a way to create a beautiful, inviting and harmonious living environment, which you can express through your own personal decorating style.

Feng Shui is widely used to create harmony and happiness in all types of relationships: romantic, family, friends, and work associates. One of the most important objectives in Feng Shui is that of family happiness. One simple way to support harmonious family relationships is to have a dining table that is round or oval in shape to encourage a smooth flow of conversation and energy. Feng Shui also puts importance on diffusing obstacles that can create negative energy, such as overhead beams, a protruding display or bookcase, or knives exposed in the kitchen.

Overhead beams can represent heavy energy bearing down on you, especially if the beams are over your bed. Look around your home to see if any of these obstacles could be creating an uninviting home for you. It is also a challenge to be romantic in the bedroom if your computer and television are there vying for your attention. It is best to locate these items in another part of the house. If you must have a television in the bedroom, place it in an armoire so that it can be hidden away when not in use.

Once the obstacles of negativity are diffused, you can bring in positive, enriching energy by displaying symbols of love and romance. Try keeping things in pairs, such as a pair of candles or have a pair of rose quartz hearts on your bed side table. Images of love birds or mandarin ducks are often used to visually represent being in a loving relationship. You can also strengthen relationship energy in other rooms of your home with the pairing of Yin and Yang opposites, such as artwork depicting water and mountains or statuary of a man and woman.

Color is very much a part of creating romance in your home and will affect the overall feeling you have in a room. Are your color choices encouraging a loving and harmonious living environment? The bedroom is often considered to be the most romantic room in your home. What are the dominant colors in your bedroom? The following color guide may help you in choosing the romantic atmosphere you are looking to create.

Pink is known as the color of love and will give your room a soft approachable feel.

Red is a strong passionate color that can create feelings of power and excitement. In your bedroom, it is best to use this sparingly as an accent instead of painting all walls in the color red.

Green is a calming color and gives a sense of safety and stability to many people.

White is the most common color that people use on the walls is their bedroom. Although it creates a fresh and relaxed feeling, it has a tendency to be a little on the cool side. Consider warming things up a bit with flesh-toned sheets or a painted accent wall behind the head of the bed.

Blue is another calming color, and like white has a tendency to be a little on the cool side. Again warm things up through your accent colors and accessories.

Creating your own romantic home might take some effort. However, once you have applied the principles of Feng Shui and inviting colors to your environment, you will be able to enjoy the results each time you come home at the end of the day.

About the Author
Diane Alba-Means is the author of Feng Shui Fashion Makeover for Success ~ A Woman’s Guide to Empowering Your Personal Style. She is passionate about combining the principles of Feng Shui with her background in fashion and design to show people a fun and exciting way to empower their lives. Her approach is grounded in over 20 successful years as a color and image consultant, decorator, teacher, writer, speaker, and Feng Shui expert. What is your color mood today? Find out for FREE at http://www.HawaiiFengShui.com.

Learn more about Feng Shui

Bottom line: it doesn’t really matter whether or not you believe that Feng Shui methods are important to home decorating. When you get ready to sell your home, you’ll find that employing Feng Shui practices can add perceived value to your home in a buyer’s mind. Feng Shui ideas just might help sell your home faster, and for more money. In case you’re not familiar with the concept of Feng Shui, here are some tips for incorporating it into your house.

First, engage the senses of potential homebuyers in as many ways as possible. To engage the sense of sight, make sure your home offers lots of horizontal space. That means keeping the tops of counters, dressers, and shelves as clear as possible. To engage the sense of smell, use cinnamon or pine scents, which have been proven to be more effective than vanilla or floral scents. To engage the sense of sound, place a pleasantly gurgling fountain near the front entrance or have gentle music playing.

As is the case with all home sales, first impressions are important, and Feng Shui can come into play at the front door of your home. Keep it clean, turn on front porch lights if the viewing will be after dark, place a nice doormat in the entry, and have flowers or lush plants on either side of the entryway.

To bring moving energy into the house, begin getting your own stuff out of the house to make room for the new owner’s stuff. It not only sets in motion a powerful energy, but it also gives you a head start on your own packing.

Since the kitchen is the most important room in the house, as far as most buyers are concerned, spend extra time making sure yours is friendly and exudes a feeling of health and prosperity. Keep counters immaculately clean, organize your pantry, and keep all wastebaskets out of sight.

If it’s possible that potential buyers might catch sight of a bathroom when they first enter your home, it’s critical that you always keep the bathroom door shut. It’s also important that potential buyers never see a toilet until they actually open the door and expect to see one. When they do inspect the bathroom, it’s also critical to make sure the toilet lid is down. Both of these are powerful Feng Shui techniques for creating positive energy impressions.

Again, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Feng Shui enthusiast or not. Using Feng Shui concepts can add perceived value to your home, which can mean a short selling time and a higher sales price–both of which are always appreciated!

Copyright © 2006 Jeanette J. Fisher

About the Author
Jeanette Fisher teaches home sellers five home staging principles to get their homes ready to sell. Free Home Staging information: http://homestaging.us How to “Prepare Your Home for a Top-Dollar Sale” with free 21 proven action steps: http://preparehome.com

Learn more about Feng Shui

THE PREMISE

Feng Shui is an ancient Chinese art that has been practised for thousands of years. It is based on the idea that there should be a “balance” or harmony in the world. Everything around us has its proper place. If something is out of place and the balance is disturbed, this disruption can materialize as a feeling of uneasiness in the people around it, or as violence or lack of prosperity in the area.

Feng Shui, in all its various forms, acts to restore that balance and harmony. This balance can be in difference ways, such as health, prosperity, wealth and love. And a lot of it really works. The cities of Hong Kong and Singapore are prosperous capitals compared to their neighbors because they are located in places where the Feng Shui is perfect for a bustling metropolis. Even the house of Bill Gates, richest man in the world, is said to be located in the perfect location in the hills to bring its owner great wealth.

But why does Feng Shui not work for some people? In order to answer that, we need to look at its history.

THE HISTORY

Feng Shui originated from ancient China, a land that developed other skills and arts such as medicine, martial arts and the origins of chemical warfare. The knowledge of these skills were highly priced, and the masters of these skills understandably did not want their secrets to be known to others, for fear that the knowledge could be used for wrong purposes, or that the masters would lose their status and prestige once the knowledge became commonplace.

It is therefore expected that the masters might not have handed down all of their knowledge to their students. These students might have compiled whatever knowledge they had, and guessed the remainder that they did not learn from the masters. Some of these students were geniuses, able to replicate the miracles their masters had performed. Others were not so skilled, but used whatever knowledge they had to make a living for themselves. This scenario, when applied to Feng Shui, explains the various schools of Feng Shui that exist today. Some schools do work wonders, but there are also those that produce very little tangible effect.

There are many people who call themselves Feng Shui masters these days, more so now with the growth of the internet. So how do we tell which ones can really help you? Unfortunately, there isn’t much we can do. After all, someone can say they are a master of a reputable school of Feng Shui even though they are merely charlatans. The best thing we can do is to find someone who has had their lives improved via Feng Shui, and get the name of the Feng Shui practitioner who helped them.

THE FAITH

However, another important aspect of getting Feng Shui to work is your belief in it. Just like the idols of the ancient Aztecs and the Cross of the Christians, Feng Shui figurines and artefacts act as “focuses”. It will work if you believe in it.

For example, in modern pharmaceutical tests, the researchers always say that a drug is successful because it worked on a large percentage (say 75%) of their test subjects. But what about the other 25%? If the drug really works, why didn’t it work for them? It could be that their body’s physiology was different. But in most of the cases, the reason is psychological. If you truly believe that the medicine will not cure you, it won’t, no matter how good it is. “It’s all in your mind”, as the psychologists like to say.

The same goes for Feng Shui. If you buy a Feng Shui figurine but think it’s just some voodoo magic that probably won’t work anyway, I can assure you that it won’t work for you. You need to have faith in it. If you believe that Feng Shui can help you improve your life, it will.

For more information on Feng Shui, you can visit this Feng Shui page:

http://www.mandarin-ducks.com/fengshui.html

About the Author
Steven maintains the Mandarin Duck Feng Shui website at http://www.mandarin-ducks.com . It provides information on how mandarin ducks are able to help improve relationships using Feng Shui principles.