Adding Feng Shui to your landscape

Beauty almost always includes positive Feng Shui. Good modern design often means simplifying, so it often unknowingly incorporates basic Feng Shui.

Here’s a link to 10 backyard renovations, each and all of which bring beauty in simplicity. There’s only one problem: notice how angular and yang they are. If you like these ideas, soften the lines (bringing yin energy in) and enjoy the results.

http://tinyurl.com/mwazxdb Zen outdoor fountain

How important is your front door?

If your home is considered as a body, the front door is the mouth. The chi (energy) comes in through the door and fills your home.  If you want to help insure that positive energy comes in, pay attention to what Feng Shui has to say!

Someone is approaching your front door. It is dull, perhaps cluttered, not terribly attractive.OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAWhat mood gets conveyed to the approaching visitor? Nothing very positive, nothing very welcoming. When you open your door, you are greeted with, at best mild positive to negative and angry. You’ll have to deal with that.

But let’s change the picture. You stand at the end of the walk and visualize what would lift your spirits, make you want to come into the home? Flowers? A wonderful, colorful door, outlined by a trim that sets of the color of the rest of the house?  A welcome matt in good condition, and a pleasing door knocker or a wreath reflecting the season.

Laura@mainelynautical.com

Laura@mainelynautical.com

Someone approaching your home now is greeted by a home that welcomes and invites. Without their knowing it, their mood has been positively affected by the energy of your home. You brighten and lighten their mood without even saying hello.  Is it important? Could it make your life easier and more positive? Yes. Take a critical look at your entrance and make it as wonderful as you can. It will be well worth it.

Oh – you come in through the garage? Use the front door at least once a day. Don’t close the mouth of chi just because you car is more important than your home and the people who come to it!

Proud and Grateful

An excellent service for locating local service providers has started growing by leaps and bounds.  It’s called Thumbtack.com and it may well be in your area.  Check it out.  But why would I be pushing a thumbtack at you?  Simply because I signed up, and quickly accumulated 4 reccomendations from folks familiar with my work.  You can check that out at: http://www.thumbtack.com/or/ashland/feng-shui/effective-feng-shui-for-home-or-business This is not a quick and dirty service, they actually check you out. As you will see there’s a rather legnthy interview process which is also verified.  Since people tend to do business with people they know and trust, I appreciate the throughness of their approach.  Facebook has come up with it’s own –Stick (that’s right – Stick, could be Schick, but we won’t go there…), but then Stick wants to go into your address book and pull names and addresses out. No thank you!  In any event, if you do check this out, I’d enjoy your impressions. You might even want to add your own business.

Widening the Field

The more I study Feng Shui, the more I understand that what began “how to site your ancestor’s graves,” has important implications for the troubled world we live in today.  I just finished teaching an introductory course, the sort of thing retired folks might like to hear so they knew the Chinese were not sending voodoo into the US.  It went very well until the final session, when I wanted to use some video about Permaculture.

After all, good Feng Shui comes from observing how nature works and then augmenting it, letting it be even more bountiful than it usually is.  It was an excellent way for my seniors to start to grasp a bigger concept.  Several of them were bothered that ‘this isn’t Feng Shui.’  They certainly are to be honored for their choices, but I would like you, dear reader, to consider that Feng Shui can widen and widen.  May you find new uses, and when you do, let me know?  Thanks.

The Archive is Live!

For some months now I’ve known that the monthly newsletter I send out for free gets looked at and then usually deleted.  Often times later there is the desire to retrieve that information, but alas, the email has been flushed,  So when I got the chance to create an archive of the past two years efforts, I jumped at the chance.  Now it’s up and ready for use.  I’ll add a category for it, but right now I wanted to let you know it’s out there and handy as a reference tool for those who wish to try doing some Feng Shui on their own.  I think you’ll find some tips and tricks that will increase your happiness, reduce your stress, increase your nourishment, and make you more prosperous.  Not bad for a freebie eigh?

Click here Dorothy – you won’t be in Kanas anymore!

Planting, Cleaning, Feng Shui

This time of year I find myself pulling all sorts of flotsam and jetsam from the garden.  Then I remember that all the dead stuff is as much a part of the cycle as water is for growth.  No yin, no yang.  So what are we to do – what would Feng Shui have to say?

Simply break up the dead material into as fine pieces as you can and use them as compost.  Breaking them up synergistically helps them break down into nutrients for living plants and soil.  For the weeds which are trying to take over the world, put those into a 5 gallon bucket and fill it with water. Weight it down with a stone and let it rest for 3 days.  Then pour the water onto you living plants.  This weed tea is a valuable fertilizer that costs you nothing.  You can then add the “tea leaves” to the compost pile.

Remember, using chemical fertilizers and weed killer, you destroy the life of the soil.  Which means a) you must always use more and more chemical fertilizer because the soil can no longer do it’s work; and b) you have just decimated an entire living ecosystem in the interests of instant results.  It’s not the way Nature works, it shouldn’t be the way you work.

What’s Feng Shui about this?  You are using everything to build better nourishment and health.  You are cleaning out a space, but not discarding, rather recycling.  The results is aesthetically more beautiful and far more nourishing.  That’s what the correct use of Feng Shui can do – so see you in the garden?

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