Feng Shui: The Art of Living
Don’t you just love those tiny little books you can get while you’re checking out at a bookstore? I once bought a Tarot Card book set from such a stand that featured the tiniest, most adorable Tarot Cards you’ve ever seen. I so could have made a Wiccan Barbie, if I had been into Barbies at all. I wonder what happened to that set…
For Christmas this year, I was gifted with a tiny feng shui book titled Feng Shui: The Art of Living. Written by Rosalind Simmons, the book is filled with small suggestions that can make a big impact in improving your living space—and perhaps making your life better as well. After all, feng shui isn’t only supposed to increase the aesthetic appeal of your abode and work space—it’s also supposed to help increase your health, wealth, love, and general happiness if used correctly.
Most of the tips in this book can be found in other books (such as the wonderful books by Lillian Too), but it does serve as a great starting point for people new to the art of arrangement. Using fresh flowers and fresh living plants to add life to your living space, for example, is included. Other tips include placing a pair of mandarin ducks in your living space to help improve your love life, skipping the dried flowers since they are known to represent dead energy, and not allowing mirrors to face one another so the energy they reflect will not bounce around in sheer craziness. (Wouldn’t it be cool if we could see the energy? I think that would help us so much with our placement designs!)
In all honesty, though, some of the best feng shui tips you can use or share with friends are so simple and easy to use. Keeping your home clean, for example—in terms of both actual dirt as well as lack of clutter—is perhaps the best feng shui cure you can use. Keeping everything in your home in good repair, from the faucets to lights and furniture, is also important. One of my favorite tips is making sure all of the furniture faces the door in order to avoid unwelcome surprises; I can’t even sit in a restaurant unless I am facing the rest of the room!
What are your favorite feng shui tips? Feel free to share them here, or to use your favorite feng shui book for your next Wichita book club meeting.