Principle 1: Know What You Want
In most homes there are many details of the layout, furniture placement and home decor that could be improved through feng shui. If you try to make every possible feng shui adjustment you risk diluting your efforts by putting time and effort into minor corrections.
Having a clear goal in mind for what you want to accomplish with feng shui helps you identify the areas of your home that deserve priority attention. When your feng shui activity is focused on one main issue at a time, the energy shifts that you trigger will be targeted to that aspect of your life.
Even if you feel you want to change everything in your life, it’s a good idea to proceed with just a few targeted changes at first. If you try to do too much at once, you may become overwhelmed with choices, get bogged down in lots of details, and lose your momentum. You may even start feeling that things are too much of a mess to fix, and become discouraged.
Use the Ba Gua to Define Your Goals
The ba gua defines which areas of your home — and which locations within each room — affect each of nine key “life aspirations”:
• Career
• Creativity & Children
• Fame & Reputation
• Family
• Love & Marriage
• Money & Prosperity
• Knowledge & Self-Awareness
• Support & Travel
What aspect of your life you would most like to improve right now? Review the list of feng shui categories and think about which are relevant to your key issue. For example, let’s say you are most concerned about money. Clearly that falls into the “Money & Prosperity” category, and others may be relevant as well:
- An artist hoping to bring in more income through her creative work will also want to work with the “Creativity” areas of her home.
- A manager hoping for a promotion to bring in a higher salary will be interested in feng shui factors affecting his “Career” areas.
- And if you feel that lack of recognition for your skills and abilities is part of the reason that promotion hasn’t happened yet, the “Fame & Reputation” area deserves a look as well.
I recommend identifying one main “gua” and no more than two related ones on which to focus your feng shui activities at any one time. Do not try to do everything at once! Now you are ready to identify where those priority areas are in your home, evaluate potential problems, and decided what solutions and improvements to implement.
Quick Tips 1-3 in Fast Feng Shui: 9 Simple Principles for Improving Your Life by Energizing Your Home help you define specific goals for what you would like to accomplish through feng shui.
Go to Principle 2.
