The Spiritual Feng Shui newsletter Issue 17 May 2008 Shoestring Feng Shui Coloring Without Paint Also: Feng Shui Tip Inspirational Quotes Dear Friend, Welcome to The Spiritual Feng Shui newsletter for May 2008; it is good to have your company, as always! We often hear from people that they don’t have the money to start a Feng Shui practice – so we are looking at the myriad of ways to improve the Chi of your home, on a shoestring budget. Color is one of the defining aspects of your home – but how can you change your color scheme without painting your walls? A great one for those of you who are renting, or time- or cash-strapped. We also have inspirational quotes and Feng Shui tips, as usual. May peace and harmony reign for you in May. 0x Feature Article: Shoestring Feng Shui - Put your wallet away – and get into Feng Shui! 0x Q&A: Paint-Free Color - How do I change my home’s color scheme without painting? 0x Feng Shui Tip – The Little Things 0x Inspirational Quotes Enjoy! Mike Z. Wang Author of The Spiritual Feng Shui Thespiritualfengshui.com Unit 616, 220 Lake Promenade, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, m8w1a9 Feature Article: Feng Shui on a Shoestring Have you often thought that Feng Shui is the exclusive province of well-off, housebound people – that if you can’t afford to buy all new matching furniture, or aren’t in a position to paint your house, then you’ll just have to make do? In fact, the exact opposite is true! There’s no reason for you to live in a crowded-feeling, mish- mash of colors and styles, nor in a stark boring home, with no life at all. Feng Shui is about energy, not money – so keep reading for our best Chi-enhancing tips for a small budget! It isn’t the size that matters, after all :-) If you are a regular reader of the newsletter, you will be very familiar with one thing – the first step in making any Feng Shui enhancements is to clear up clutter! If you begin adding pieces — no matter how well placed, how perfectly colored, or how evocative and beautiful they are — and your home is crowded and messy, the new pieces will only add to the confusion. Cleaning up costs absolutely nothing, except a little time and willpower! Part of cleaning up clutter is organizing everything. For this you’ll need storage containers … but if your wallet is a little thin right now, don’t tune out! You can make boxes yourself – for the very cheap (but still cheerful) try covering cardboard boxes with colored paper or bright paint. If your budget is just a little bigger, timber is quite cheap, and can even be assembled by those with ten thumbs, like myself! All you need is a hammer and nails, and you can either sand and stain your boxes, or paint them to change your color scheme. Use them to hide clutter out of sight, make life easier for yourself when you want to find something, and add to the life and energy of your home! Zen gardens for your desk are often recommended when you want to enhance your Career and Success Gua. Of course, you can buy ready-made kits over the internet, and even at your local mall if you are lucky. However, all the makings of a Zen garden can also be found in your own garden, your local park, or your closest country retreat. The main ingredient is sand – if there is no beach near you, wash the silt out of sandy soil, or buy a small quantity from a garden center. Zen gardens also often include smooth, attractive rocks, and these are much more personal and interesting when you have collected them yourself, rather than buying them over the ‘net. Not to mention infinitely cheaper – they are free! Polish your rocks with a rock-cloth – a very fine grade of soft sandpaper. You can also lacquer them with hairspray if you like. If you can source some petrified wood, or a miniature statue, these are also beautiful and inexpensive additions to your desk-garden. As is the case with so many things in life, a lack of money can easily be countered with a little investment of time. For objects that you want to add to your house – lamps for light, paired objects to enhance your Love and Relationships areas, ornaments of a specific material to enhance wood, metal, or earth energy – spend some time looking around antique and second hand shops. This can also be a fun weekend activity to do either with the kids, or with your partner. Metal can be polished, clay can be washed, and wood can be sanded and polished – so try to look past the shabbiness or superficial dirt on things, and see them for what they are. Also see them for what you can help them become! Often an imbalance of Chi is purely due to the layout of furniture in a room. Again, it costs nothing but time to re-arrange your furniture, and you’ll often find that the new layout gives you a lift every time you walk into the room for several weeks. High on life! In your bedroom, the optimum position for the bed is diagonally opposite the door – having a wall at the head of the bed increases your sense of security, and being away from the door keeps the energizing Chi (which is also disturbing, when you want to doze off!) away from you. In the other rooms of your house, use your intuition to assess how the energy flows around a room. Is the furniture arranged so that you feel you are in a thoroughfare whenever you sit down? Have you placed furniture slightly away from walls, creating dark spots of nothing in the room? Do the windows light up your workspace in the room, or only the floor immediately in front of them? Of course you will be a bit limited in your explorations here — we all have a set number of pieces to go in a given area. Think about whether everything is necessary, or whether some things could be moved to another room, to give you more flexibility in your desk-dragging, sofa-shoving adventures! Three of the most important elements in a Feng Shui practice are all free – light, fresh air and noise. Simply opening your curtains in the morning, and your windows when it is warm enough, give you two of these elements. If you live in an apartment without windows, candles are a cheap and cheerful way to add light to a space – and also some revitalizing fire energy. To get fresh air into a windowless space, use a fan and keep doors open. Pleasant noises will also make a big difference to the feel of your home – you can use wind-chimes, available very cheaply and easily. Water features are another good option here – the smaller ones don’t cost too much, and can make you feel as if you are sleeping, cooking, or working in a tropical paradise! Alternatively, try to get into the habit of leaving your stereo on for periods during the day … don’t shuffle around the house in a dead silence. Use instrumental music, rather than pop music or the television, for background noise when you are working – this minimizes your distractions. While money can make a Feng Shui practice more flexible, quicker and easier, it is by no means necessary to make your home a haven of love, light, peace and productivity. Making rather than buying, keeping your home clutter-free, and just getting out your furniture-shifting gloves will make a big difference to your home, without making a big impact on your bank balance! Q&A: I don’t have the money, time or will to paint my whole home – what are some of the easier ways to change the color scheme and enhance the Chi of my house? Color is one of the most important elements of a Feng Shui practice, and it is true that painting your home is one of the easy and effective ways to create a different color scheme. But there is more than one way to skin a cat! (so to speak…) For the same effect as painting your home – creating large swathes of color that dominate and define a room’s personality – you can hang large sheets of colored material. This method of changing color also has the effect of bringing softer Yin energy to your home. Choose fabrics like muslin, cheesecloth, or mohair rather than plain cotton, for softer and more appealing effect. If your budget is a slightly longer shoestring (!), you can go for something like a tapestry or an oversized framed painting. Actually, all of the materials in a room give you a simple, quick and cost-effective way to change its color scheme. Lamps can quite easily be re-covered by you at home – remove the old fabric and use it as a guide to cutting the new fabric. Bedspreads are an easy way to change a room’s color-feel, and so are the cushions on your sofa. Your sofa itself is also quite a large piece of furniture – if you cover this with a large soft swath of material, similar to the ones you may have hung on your wall – you have an instant character change for your living room. Sofas aren’t the only things that can be covered with material – phone and coffee tables, nightstands, even filing cabinets and the tops of bookshelves can also be softened and re-colored with fabric. The only thing to be mindful of is the fact that fabric is quite a Yin-charactered item. If you overdo it the energy in a room can be softened to the point of stagnation! Painting sounds like a simple thing to do, but if you have investigated it you have probably also found that it is a rather expensive thing to do! A good way to get around the expense, if you are in your own home, is to simply change the color of the trim in a room. Painting the door frames, the window frames and sills, the architraves and picture rails if you have any, can lift the entire mood of a room. It is also a good way to create different themes in different rooms, while keeping most of the house fairly consistent. For example, it is better to use blues, purples and blacks in your office space – but these same colors in the middle of your house, in your health area, are not ideal. At the same time, you don’t want to create a rainbow, paint-by-numbers color scheme for your home. Changing only the trim in each room is a way to solve the consistency versus appropriate coloring conundrum. If you are either renting, or on a tighter budget (just as with the painting issue), you are probably not in a position to re-carpet your home. Rugs are an obvious and much cheaper alternative. A more striking and effective change, if your floorboards are suitable, would be to remove all of the carpet in an area – then sand and polish the floorboards yourself, to save money. This can bring stimulating wood energy to an area, as well as giving a space a cool and focused atmosphere. It also gives you more flexibility in coloring the rest of the room, as you no longer have carpet which must match other objects. Changing a room’s color scheme can be the most enjoyable part of your Feng Shui practice, and one that has the most impact – don’t disregard the idea just because you aren’t able to re-paint! Feng Shui Tip: The Little Things Did you know every space in your house can be enhanced according to the Bagua map – often much easier and cheaper than reorganizing or redecorating entire rooms. Your desk has Career and Success, Love and Relationships, Knowledge and Mentors Guas … as well as all the rest! So, for example, does your kitchen table, and your outdoor entertaining area. Place a candle or a pretty ornament in the Career Gua of your desk – or in the Family Gua of your kitchen table – or in the Fame and Reputation area of your front yard. The little things can make a big difference! Inspirational Quotes: There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either. ~Robert Graves Don't make excuses - make good. ~Elbert Hubbard Frugality may be termed the daughter of Prudence, the sister of Temperance, and the parent of Liberty. ~Samuel Johnson