“All items produce sound, smell, color, texture, or shape and have various energies that can clutter and block optimum function. Having too many items can dilute the special energies of items that you love and that are purposeful in their placement,” explains feng shui consultant Jami Lin. “The less clutter you have, the more your favorite items can be featured and radiate their life-enhancing energies.”
This doesn’t mean you should pare down your belongings until your home is as bare-bones as a Zen monastery. I have a friend who prides himself on his clutter-free existence. By rejecting possessions, however, he reveals his reluctance to place value on anything or to make commitments to people, community, and personal goals. The objects with which we surround ourselves—particularly those we prize most—say a lot about us. The point is to highlight your treasures—the things that give you joy to use, wear, or look at, regardless of their monetary worth—and eliminate those that have no particular significance. Getting rid of clutter is like weeding a garden so the flowers have room to thrive.
What to save and what to toss is an entirely personal matter. The renowned English designer and craftsman William Morris believed you should “have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” The same idea is at the heart of Marie Kondo and The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: don’t keep anything that doesn’t “spark joy.” That’s good advice to follow when you are trying to decide what stays and what goes. If you still can’t make up your mind, box items you aren’t ready to part with yet, label the boxes, and store them for a period of time, maybe six months to a year. At a later date, you can reconsider how important they are to you.
THE BAGUA
The Chinese believe that all life is interconnected, that our environments influence us and we influence our environments. To a feng shui master, your home presents a detailed and revealing picture of you—it shows which parts of your life are in good working order and which ones could use a little TLC.
Some popular types of feng shui employ an octagon-shaped tool called the bagua (pronounced bah-kwah) to determine which parts of your home correspond to which areas of your life. This device has links to the I Ching, but you don’t need to plumb the depths of ancient Chinese wisdom to use the bagua. All you have to do is lay it over a sketch or floor plan of your home. See diagram on the following page.
As you can see in this diagram, the bagua is divided into nine sectors, called gua, each one relating to a different facet of your life:
• Health: Physical well-being or challenges
• Fame/Future: Your public image, how you project yourself in the world, your career, future goals, and potential
• Relationships: Marriage or romantic partner(s), your attitudes toward love and relationships, interactions with a partner(s)
• Creativity/Children: Children of the mind or body, self-expression, creative endeavors
• Helpful People/Travel: Friends, associates, support network (including doctors, attorneys, accountants, mechanics, etc.), travel
• Self/Identity: Your self-image, your sense of identity, your work or purpose in life
• Wisdom/Knowledge: Your attitudes toward knowledge, your spiritual path, how you learn and share information
• Family/Community: Your parents, extended family, heritage, neighbors, and community
• Wealth: Your finances, your ability to earn, attract, and hold on to money
USING THE BAGUA
The entrance you use most often to go in and out of your home is the starting point for analyzing your living space with the bagua. This may be a side or backdoor, or even an entryway through a garage, rather than the front door. If you live in an apartment building, the door to your own apartment is more important to consider than the main entrance to the building.
Align the arrow on the bagua at the center of the wall in which this door is placed, so that the octagon is superimposed on your home’s interior. You can do this in your mind’s eye, or physically lay a bagua over a drawing of your home’s floor plan. Your entrance will fall in the Self Gua, Wisdom Gua, or Helpful People Gua.
Some schools of feng shui say you should use the front door as your reference point, even if you generally enter through the backdoor, but I haven’t found this practice to produce accurate results. You may want to try both methods and decide for yourself which one works best.
Now you can see which gua correspond to which rooms or areas of your home. Once you’ve identified the different gua in your home, you can quickly see which parts of your life are being adversely affected by clutter and set about clearing them.
I once visited the home of a couple of Texas artisans who wanted to know how they could improve their finances. Most of the time they entered and left their home via the garage. When I mentally positioned the bagua over their floor plan, their Wealth Gua turned out to be almost completely occupied by two very large closets that were jammed full of stuff. I suggested that they immediately start using their front door instead, which would rearrange the order of the gua in their home. I also recommended getting rid of some of the clutter in their closets in order to make room for new moneymaking possibilities to enter their life. A week after they started using their front door, the woman won $1,500 in a contest and the couple sold $5,000 worth of their artwork. The next week, the man (who is also a realtor) sold a half-million-dollar house he’d had listed for more than two years. You can bet they’re believers now!
You can also analyze each room of your home using the bagua in the same way. Position the bagua so that the arrow lines up with the entrance to the room (or the wall in which this entrance is placed). The different gua will align with the various parts of the room. In this way, you can fine-tune your home and the related parts of your life.
For instance, you may notice that although your living room is generally pretty neat, the section that corresponds to neighbors is cluttered. This might show that even though your social life is relatively happy, you are experiencing some problems with your immediate neighbors. Clearing the clutter in this portion of the room can enable you to clarify the situation outside your home.
The bagua can also give you a bigger picture if you superimpose it over a plot plan of your yard (or, if you live in an apartment, over the entire building). Line up the arrow with the entrance to the property—your driveway, for instance, or the main entrance to an apartment building. The back left portion of your yard is the Wealth Gua, the back right section is the Relationships Gua, and so on. Like the interior of your home, your yard graphically describes what’s going on in your life.
Shortly after I got divorced, a tree in my yard that had died during the previous year (while my marriage was deteriorating) fell down in a big storm. Interestingly, the tree was located just about where the Relationships Gua and the Creativity Gua intersect. The dead tree obviously symbolized the end of my marriage, but its collapse turned out to be a positive symbol: My former husband had not been very supportive of my creative endeavors, and when the dead tree toppled over, it indicated that the divorce had cleared the way for me to spend more time writing and painting.
As this example shows, the condition of your yard also impacts your life. Keeping your property clutter-free and well maintained has a positive effect on your health, wealth, and happiness. In Part Two, I offer a number of feng shui cures that you can do outside your home to increase the benefits you attract.
WHAT DOES YOUR HOME SAY ABOUT YOU?
If you’re like most people, some areas of your home are more orderly than others—like my friend who only cluttered up his Relationships Gua. A cluttered Family Gua, for instance, suggests confusion, stress, or disharmony among family members. A messy Wealth Gua usually indicates that your finances are unsettled, chaotic, troublesome, or that you aren’t comfortable handling money matters. A Wealth Gua that’s jam-packed with stuff, like the one in the home of the Texas couple, shows that profitable opportunities are blocked and/or your income is stagnant.
A friend who admits to being the world’s worst housekeeper has a particularly unsightly Wealth Gua in her home. This bright and talented woman is always struggling to make ends meet. She comes from a family that overemphasized wealth and used money as a tool for manipulation. Not surprisingly, she has some issues concerning money and is unconsciously undermining her financial success by cluttering up her home. Although she often talks about cleaning and organizing her messy house, she never seems to get around to it—and probably won’t, until she decides to address her confusion over money, values, and self-worth.
In the process of clearing the clutter in your own environment, you may find that you encounter some emotional resistance. Even though you haven’t worn that coat or used that waffle iron in years, you may be reluctant to let go of it. Ask yourself why you are holding on to something—the answers could be quite revealing.
What’s so fascinating about feng shui is that once you recognize that you are creating your own life situations with your attitudes—and that these attitudes are mirrored in the physical condition of your home—you can rectify the problems. By controlling clutter, you can literally take control of your life.
As you begin clearing the clutter from the various gua, you’ll notice changes starting to take place in your life. Often these changes occur over a period of time, but sometimes they happen almost immediately. The day my “significant other” started tearing down walls and ripping up carpet in the master bedroom of a house he’d purchased for our winter home in another part of the country, I began feeling agitated—even though I was two thousand miles away and thought the project wouldn’t get underway until the following week. I felt disoriented and disrupted—just like the physical changes that were taking place in the master bedroom. Walls were coming down, new windows and doors and closets were going in, and so on. You may be amazed at how even a few, simple adjustments can affect your finances or love life. For this reason, you may not want to tackle everything at once. Instead, choose one gua—or a portion of a gua—and put that in order. Wait a while and see what changes come about before cleaning up another section.
MISSING GUA
Unless your home is a perfect square, rectangle, circle, or octagon, you may be missing part of or a whole gua. Usually this means that a portion of your life is absent, problematic, or unimportant to you. Don’t despair—feng shui provides cures for just about every irregularity, including missing gua.
If you are a homeowner and can physically remedy this deficiency, you may want to build a deck, patio, garden, or other addition to complete the missing sector. If that’s not an option, you can fill in the gap with what’s called a “symbolic corner.” Using your imagination, extend the footprint of your home to a point where the missing walls would join. Place something here to mark the symbolic corner—a plant, light, flagpole, statue, birdbath, large stone, etc.
If you live in an apartment and can’t make major changes in the building’s structure, you can symbolically cut holes in the walls that chop up your living space and eliminate a gua. Simply hang mirrors on the walls that cut off the gua to symbolically expand your apartment beyond its physical limitations. Or, if you prefer, hang pictures of landscapes with distant views to create the illusion of space beyond the actual walls of your apartment.
SYMBOLIC ASSOCIATIONS
As we’ve already seen, much of feng shui relies on symbols and symbolic associations. In the process of uncluttering your home, consider the associations you attach to the things you choose to keep. Function, monetary worth, and sentimental value are only part of the picture. Even if an area is clutter-free, the symbolism of the articles you place there can have tremendous impact. Think about the meaning of a particular gua and whether the items you plan to put in it are compatible with the gua’s significance—and your own intentions.
Here’s a story that perfectly illustrates what I mean. A divorced woman I know wanted to find new love, but her relationships never seemed to go beyond an initial date or two. When I examined the Relationships Gua of her bedroom, I discovered the reason. On top of a chest of drawers in this section, she’d placed a jewelry box, and inside the box were pieces of jewelry her former husband had given her—including her old engagement and wedding rings! These items had monetary value and she didn’t want to part with them, but the symbolic connections kept her bound to her ex and prevented her from attracting a new partner. Soon after she moved the jewelry to a safe-deposit box, the woman began a new relationship.
• Lights used outside can “fill in” missing sectors of an L-shaped building. A tree could produce the same effect.
You can intentionally use symbols for specific purposes or to produce desired results. Coins, crowns, gems, champagne, and pictures of castles or Cadillacs, for instance, are symbols we associate with wealth. When placed in the Wealth Gua of your home or workplace, they encourage prosperity. We connect hearts, flowers, and doves with love, so these symbols can have a beneficial influence when placed in your Relationships Gua. Although some symbols mean pretty much the same thing to everyone, others are personal and may hold special significance for you alone. One spring, for example, a bird built a nest in a wreath I’d hung on my front door; soon three baby birds appeared. I took this as a positive indicator of creativity and new opportunities coming my way—and indeed, I soon received a contract to write a new book.
Shapes are simple symbols, too. Circles, for example, are universal symbols of wholeness and union. Arrows point in a certain direction and suggest movement. In feng shui, we can tap the deeper meanings inherent in shapes to create the circumstances we desire. Often, feng shui cures (including some of those in Part Two) use shapes to produce effects. The following list briefly explains the meanings of some familiar geometric shapes.
SHAPES AND THEIR MEANINGS
circle = wholeness, continuity, unity, harmony, heaven
square = solidity, permanence, stability, earth
triangle = movement, change, direction toward a goal
rectangle = growth, expansion
curved or wavy lines = flexibility, interaction, adaptability
straight lines = rapid movement, single-mindedness
Although we tend to think of numbers as tools for counting and quantifying, they also have symbolic associations. Two, for instance, represents partnership. As you go about reducing clutter in your living and work spaces, keep in mind the number of items you choose to leave or highlight in a certain gua and the significance attached to them. If you hope to attract a mate, you don’t want to clear away all but one object in your Relationships Gua!
Chinese tradition considers the number three and its multiples—especially nine—to be lucky. The following list explains the feng shui symbolism generally connected with numbers.
1 = individuality, beginnings, focus
2 = partnership, polarity, balance
3 = expansion, creativity, action, opportunity
4 = stability, solidity, form
5 = change, movement, instability
6 = harmony, supportiveness, give-and-take
7 = introspection, solitude, wisdom
8 = permanence, business, money
9 = completion, fullness, good fortune
Even the materials used in your home or office furnishings have symbolic associations in feng shui. According to the Chinese Wu Xing philosophy, the world is composed of five elements—fire, earth, water, wood, and metal. Each of these elements depicts a different aspect of ch’i and operates in its own unique way to produce a specific effect. Fire stimulates, earth stabilizes, water softens and blends, wood expands, metal strengthens and concentrates.
As you go about reducing clutter and creating order in your life, you’ll want to take into account the elemental balance in your living and work environments to prevent “elemental clutter.” Too much fire in a room can cause tension and instability; too much metal can result in rigidity. In much the same way that you might prepare a recipe, you can combine and adjust the elements in your home or workplace in any way you choose to bring about the conditions you desire. For example, add metal objects to children’s bedrooms to help them concentrate and focus on their studies. Add wooden items to your office to encourage new business and financial growth.
You don’t have to be a feng shui master to incorporate the five elements auspiciously in your home or workplace—the following table shows which everyday objects fall into which elemental category. (Some actually incorporate two elements—a brick fireplace, for instance, blends fire and earth.) Your goal is to combine the elements in your environment so that all are represented and no single element overwhelms the others.
THE FIVE ELEMENTS
FIRE |
EARTH |
WATER |
WOOD |
METAL |
electricity |
brick |
glass items |
wooden items |
pots and pans |
candles |
stone |
sink |
paper items |
silverware |
fireplace |
ceramic |
toilet |
plants |
refrigerator |
stove |
tile |
tub |
linens |
hand tools |
lighting |
marble |
pool |
books |
other metal items |
computer |
porcelain |
plumbing |
newspapers |
|
heating system |
rugs |
aquarium |
|
|
TV/sound system |
|
washing machine |
|
|
clothes dryer |
|
windows dishwasher |
|
|
CLUTTER IN THE WORKPLACE
Many of us spend almost as much time at work as we do at home. Therefore, it’s important to use feng shui in your place of employment, too. In China, huge multinational companies as well as tiny noodle shops employ feng shui practitioners to help them optimize their business prospects.
The building in which a company is housed describes the condition of the business itself. Have you ever noticed how some locations never seem to be able to support a business for very long and the occupant turnover rate is quite rapid? From a feng shui perspective, it’s usually easy to see why.
You can use the bagua to analyze your workplace, just as you did your home. Simply superimpose the octagon over a floor plan or diagram of the store, office building, factory, or wherever you work to see which gua relate to which sections of the operation.
Workplace clutter can increase stress, interfere with clear communication, cause delays and mistakes, disrupt plans, and result in general confusion that can impair the prosperity, success, and well-being of all concerned. In some workplaces, such as restaurant kitchens and factories where potentially dangerous equipment is used, clutter can even lead to injuries.
In a work environment, clutter has a detrimental effect on each individual in the organization as well as on the overall company. Most of us have experienced problems associated with clutter in our workplaces. Perhaps you’ve wasted time hunting through stacks of file folders that weren’t put away properly, or missed a meeting because the email announcing it was buried in your inbox. As companies cut back on their workforces to save money and employees are required to handle ever-increasing workloads, clutter-free environments become even more essential to the smooth operation of business. In chapter 5, I offer some quick and easy tips for improving your work environment by clearing physical and atmospheric clutter.
The various gua describe situations similar to those they relate to in a home. The Helpful People Gua, for example, represents suppliers, distributors, colleagues, bankers, lawyers, advisors, etc.; the Relationships Gua symbolizes professional contacts and interactions between workers. Obviously, the Wealth Gua and Fame/Future Gua are very important, and careful attention should be paid to these areas. If your business uses a cash drawer or safe, put it in the Wealth Gua. If travel is a major part of your business, keep this area in top-notch condition.
Some years ago, I worked for a firm that was housed in a beautifully renovated schoolhouse. The offices were conveniently laid out, with high ceilings, lots of windows, and attractive color schemes. The lobby was handsomely furnished with antiques. However, a large, practically empty conference room occupied the Wealth Gua. The room was rarely used—in fact, one of its primary purposes seemed to be for storage of boxes of stuff that nobody knew what to do with. Shortly after I left the company, it ran into financial trouble, and before long most of the employees had been laid off. I often wonder what might have happened had that important section of the building been better utilized.