Chapter 3
Beginning at the end of your driveway, the life force known as chi follows a path that leads it to your front door, into your home, through the hallway arteries to all of your rooms, and then out the back door. Ideally, chi shouldn’t encounter obstacles along the way. Clutter is one of the main sources of blockages that can upset the course of free-flowing chi and cause your home to be stagnant and out of balance.
The primary life force that surrounds us all is the sun. But the wind is what moves the invisible energy force, or chi, around us in a way that the ancient Chinese believed would breathe health and happiness into our lives. Remember, “feng shui” means “wind and water,” both nature elements that “flow” energy into our environments. Like ripples of water flowing toward us, positive chi energy can wash over us, revitalizing our spirits, but can also dissipate quickly, especially when it hits an obstacle. The key is to keep paths open to allow the chi to replenish itself along its unencumbered path.
Chi can encounter many outside forces along the path to your front door: land formations such as hills or large rocks, plants and vegetation, small bodies of water, or the clutter from your everyday life. What kinds of clutter might be in the way of chi? How about kids’ toys, gardening tools, patio furniture, yard decorations, and even that rusty old car you can no longer drive? All of these items can block the positive chi from entering (and blessing) your home.
Even today, many Chinese believe that all possessions, whether inside or outside of the home, are symbolic of our chances and opportunities in life and that too much junk along the path to your home can literally choke your potential. But think about the logic behind the symbolism: Clearing your driveway will enable you to freely come and go from your home, creating a free and easy path to and from work each day. Not having to worry about whether you’re backing over Junior’s tricycle or that new tray of flowers you just purchased but haven’t had time to plant can be a wonderful way to start (and end) each day! Store the driveway clutter on shelves in the garage where possible, and pitch the old stuff you’re no longer using.
Clutter can mimic the path of chi into and through your home. Like a tornado, it can follow the chi in through you and your family members—leaving its own “path of destruction” near doorways, in hallways, and on staircases. These are all prime areas where chi must be allowed to flow most freely.
The path to your front door represents your health and well-being to the rest of the world. Even too much of good things like plants and interesting yard decorations can point to a deeper lack of self-confidence—or a fear of not having enough. Do you care too much about material things, or about how others perceive you? Be careful what you show to outsiders on their path to your front door.
Once you open the door, note whether it opens nice and wide. It should, so that your opportunities have the most room to enter your home. If your door is too tight, you might discover that your opportunities are also limited. If you have a screen door, keep your main door behind it wide open as often as you can; this will let in the maximum amount of light, and it will signify to the world that you’re ready for new and wonderful things to happen!
But before swinging your door wide open to welcome guests, be sure there’s no clutter behind it. Because of its location as the primary entrance to your home, it is likely the primary dumping ground for coats, shoes, bookbags, packages, mail, and much more than you can even imagine. Is this the first impression you most want to leave on your guests? Probably not—so deal with this clutter by adding coatracks, shelving in your hall closet, and a basket to help you organize your incoming mail. For school projects and related papers, create an “in” basket by attaching plastic file shelving to the inside of the closet door. Here, papers can be stored in an orderly, “out-of-sight” manner until a time when you can later sort through them.
If your door opens to a straight path leading back out of the house via a back door, you have the feng shui challenge of “rushing chi” to contend with, so here it would be okay to create a few intentional boundaries along that path to slow down the energy and allow your opportunities to linger a spell. You can place a smallwater fountain near the front door, or perhaps a pillar with a plant on it in the hallway. If it is big enough to divert your eye’s attention, it’s big enough to slow down the chi. You can also use a screen or a wind chime to slow down the energy.
Yard Full of Chi: The ideal home location will maximize the flow of every kind of energy. This house is located in the center of the property, facing south. The hill to the north brings dragon energy down from heaven (and guards the rear). The slope up to the front of the house carries chi from the earth.
Much like the front door projects an image of you to the rest of the world, your entranceway or foyer reflects the image of who you are into your house. It picks up on the energy of the front door and brings that image right on inside.
The entrance is still part of the mouth of chi, so it’s important to keep the airways open in the entranceway so that good chi can “breathe” throughout your home. If you have a large entrance to your home, you won’t have to do much to enhance this area from a feng shui standpoint. But if your entrance is narrow, you would greatly benefit from a metal wind chime hung from the ceiling. The door, when opened, will immediately start circulating the chi, sending it out from your entrance to all areas of your home.
What is chi?
Chi is the Americanized phonetic spelling of qi, the force of life that flows through objects and nature in general. Chi flows through your life, and your surroundings. The goal of feng shui is to direct chi in a more positively flowing manner.
If there’s a window near your entrance, make sure you slow down the chi with some billowy curtains, mini-blinds, or a plant in front of the window, especially if you’ve got a wind chime helping to spread good chi. You don’t want it to go running out the window, do you?
Let’s face it: Most closets are scary places. Sure, they can be neat and orderly storage places for our most useful possessions (like raincoats, boots, hats, gloves, and winter apparel), but more likely they are the museum of many things we no longer use—or worse yet, have no idea what to do with anymore. Just how many coats does a person really need to have in his closet?
Since they are convenient hideaways for everything that would normally clutter our hallways, closets can become the storage hot spot for things that really belong in other rooms of our homes—or, better yet, in the trash bin. We are always one unexpected guest away from stashing more stuff than belongs in there, and typically one full weekend away from clearing it out again afterward.
But why should the closet be any different from any other room of your home? It’s just a smaller version of other rooms, only it is a space that’s specifically designated to store things that would be clutter elsewhere. However, this doesn’t mean you should pile papers, knickknacks, old shoes, gardening tools, and more from the floor to the coatrack inside your closet. Rather, you should carefully place items that you need for the current season so that they are readily accessible, and be sure to leave enough room for your guests to hang their coats as well. Off-season coats and accessories should be stored in plastic containers in your attic or basement until the seasons change and they become appropriate again.
One of the main reasons closets become stuffed well beyond their capacity to close is that people have a tendency to hang onto old coats that are no longer worn but carry some kind of memory for them. For instance, you might still have your twenty-six-year-old daughter’s high school jacket—or the snowsuit your six-year-old son wore as a baby. Some of these items would best be stored in the attic. Baby clothing can be handled creatively by framing an outfit or two with baby pictures and hanging the display on a wall in your family room (or the family corner of the bagua in any other room).
If you truly have a lot of important stuff that you must keep but don’t regularly use, consider off-site solutions. For a monthly rental fee, you can store everything from old tax records to small fishing boats. Of course, you may want to purchase insurance if you include such priceless objects as family heirlooms or antiques.
For hallways, the most common problem is that they are too narrow, which can be translated in feng shui as the symbol of a narrow mind. Open up the space with hall mirrors and a round crystal to reflect light anddouble the space. The crystal will also help get the chi flowing in many directions.
Hallways are definite clutter-magnets, because they are situated directly along the path of chi and attract clutter as it is brought into the home from outside sources. How many times have you gone to a garage sale, or a sale at a local department store, and come home with new things that looked really cool but for which you haven’t quite found a place yet? Such wonderful little finds can quickly pile up in the hallway, as they await their final resting spot in your updated décor.
The way to curb clutter in the hallways is to make a rule that whatever comes into the home must immediately be put away. Also, if you can’t visualize exactly where the new items will find their place in your home, then don’t purchase them! There’s nothing more wasteful than buying things you really don’t need or want—and everything in feng shui needs to serve you somehow.
Like hallways, staircases are very important in feng shui because they represent the secondary “arteries” that carry energy throughout your home. If your door opens to a staircase that leads down a level, your positive chi will run down the steps; if it opens right to a staircase (as is often the case in apartments), you’ll get too much negative chi at once. Place a small mirror on the outside of your front door to shield yourself from the rush of negative chi.
Clutter on staircases will also impede the flow of chi. What kinds of clutter typically accumulate on the steps? Shoes, books, clothes, and toys are common culprits. As these items begin their upward climb toward our bedrooms and attics, they leave a trail of clutter that represents unmade decisions about their worth. Are these things still meaningful to us, and if not, why are we leaving them in a place where they not only block chi, but also are on display for everyone who comes to our front door? Do you really want others to see that you haven’t quite decided what to do with those ratty old tennis shoes that you keep around for God knows what reason?
Feng shui practitioners generally hate spiral staircases because their corkscrew shape accelerates chi as it passes through. If you have one of these staircases, place a small potted plant on one of the levels to slow down spiraling chi. Just don’t overload the stairs, or you’ll defeat the purpose!
Sometimes the design of a staircase can present unexpected obstacles for chi. If you have a staircase that appears challenging in any way, you can lessen the challenge by adding some visual elements like family pictures, décor items with a particular theme, or somethingthat shows movement and progression. Using such accents will provide the mental message of “You can do it!” to anyone climbing your stairs.
Just be sure not to overdo your enthusiasm with too many “upward bound” photos or pictures, as they can have the opposite effect of slowing chi to a lingering stance on your stairs to absorb all of the excess energy. Chi needs freedom to climb to its highest potential in your home!
Disturbing the peace with “noise clutter” can be disruptive to chi. When you walk the path of chi through your home, be mindful of whether there’s too much noise in the home—and do what you can to tone things down so that chi can do its healthy work.
Once it is free to roam to and through your home, chi circulates around it and then recycles itself for another round. This is a healthy, productive cycle in feng shui, and it is the ultimate goal as well. You have much to learn from this continuous cycle of chi. Like the recycling of chi, you, too, should be recycling the items you choose to have in your life. For each new item you purchase, you should try to give away another, particularly if it’s one that’s being intentionally replaced, such as a broken lawn mower or a too-small ladder. These kinds of things can be donated to charity if at all possible or else thrown away. The important thing is to make sure that you don’t allow the new things to overpopulate your living space—crowding old, useless items into the crevices of your home and its immediate surroundings.
Recycling clutter in and especially around your home is a positive first step, but it takes discipline and more permanent solutions (such as fixed storage areas in closets or a garage or shed) to really stay on top of things. If you don’t create lasting solutions to your clutter problems, you will still have lots of clutter and, as a result, lots of blocked chi. Clutter will continue to pile up even when you make regular attempts at clearing it.
As serious as it sounds, blocked chi can be dealt with effectively in several easy-to-implement ways. Here are six quick fixes:
Deal with the clutter, and deal with it in long-lasting ways. Create permanent storage areas where your necessary items can live when they are not being used. If you feel chi is blocked somewhere, whether inside or outside of your home, it probably is and the situation needs to be remedied immediately.
Cleaning a blocked room regularly will help prevent the “dust-magnet syndrome” from occurring. The less the clutter, the easier it will be to keep dust particles from covering the tops of all your furniture. But freshening up can go beyond cleaning—you can also freshen the air with some scented candles or incense.
When chi is stuck, the air seems thick and heavy; it doesn’t appear to move freely throughout the room. You can get the air (and chi) circulating again by installing a small ceiling fan, hanging a wind chime, or opening windows where and when possible. Natural wind-movers are considered the best option in feng shui. Electrical alternatives are less desirable since their electrical force can interfere with the natural energy of chi.
Sometimes, all a seemingly stagnant room needs is a little color and movement. Paint one or two walls a vibrant color, then add a movable hanging sculpture that dangles from your ceiling. This kind of change can literally get chi moving again in the room, unblocking it with a terrific new energy.
Plants and animals are fantastic chi-movers. Pets in particular can circulate chi throughout your home just bymoving around, or by wagging a tail. This can help stuck chi to keep circulating in a more positive direction. Just be sure not to overdo it with too many plants or pets, as excess is never considered a good thing in feng shui.
Often, as a last resort, you can completely rearrange the area where clutter seems to be blocking chi. This can help you gain a different perspective on the area, so that you can break yourself of the habit of dumping clutter there. This is especially helpful when there are other clutter-a-holics in your life who seem to be drawn to this particular space as a dumping ground.
You needn’t make huge, sweeping modifications to the areas of your home where chi appears to be blocked. Feng shui consultants don’t typically suggest such broad overhauls. Often, the smallest changes can be the most meaningful ones—and they can be just enough to make the difference in how you look at chi-inhibiting clutter.