Feng Shui for the Home

Sometimes we don't feel that happy to be home. It may be related to the nature of the space or our relationships with other members of the household. We may struggle to find the motivation to get things done. We may have a home that's beautiful, neat, and have the latest technology yet we don't love coming home to it. Do a quick check of your home by asking yourself a few questions:

Is your home conducive to marital harmony or is it creating stress in your relationship?

Is finding a place for things a challenge? Is deciding what to keep or release easy?

Is there a place where you feel most yourself?

Do you avoid inviting guests because of your home?

Is there arguing about noise, cleaning up, or decor choices?

All of these issues are easily addressed with feng shui. Your home can be arranged to meet the functional and emotional needs of those all household residents using your own furniture, artwork, and other contents.

Making your home environment more harmonious will have a positive affect on relationships in the home.

When we select a home there's so much to think about - the price, location, the school system, parking, distance from work and family. It's easy to overlook the effects their homes have on their interpersonal communications, their family life, their love life, their work life, their sleeping habits, their health, and their peace of mind.

In the Western world, we rely on architecture and interior design to layout and decorate our homes. Both offer fine tools for achieving a certain look – such as contemporary, traditional, country, eclectic, or French provincial styles. Designers offer guidance on color, current design, and home technology trends. What they don’t offer is a way of understanding how a home can make those who live there happy, argumentative, depressed, creative, lonely, social, overwhelmed, less stressed, safe or healthy.

For that level of understanding, we must turn to the East, to an ancient tool of understanding the person-place relationship: ‘Feng Shui,’ as it is called, shows us how to give our homes a ‘Person-Home Check-Up’ to see the obvious and less obvious problems the home is causing those living in the it. It also offers us simple ways to fix our home problems, once we’ve identified them, enabling us to transform our homes into wonderful places to live.

There are a few approaches or schools of Feng Shui. The most modern and American approach is ‘Pyramid Feng Shui.’ Pyramid Feng Shui gives us good tools for giving our homes a ‘Person-Home Check-Up’. The tools incorporate the latest information on the person-place relationship from the fields of biology, psychology, anthropology, physics and other social sciences.

Feng Shui comes to us from China, prompting many to assume adding Chinese decor. It does not. Historically ancient China provided the world with things such as paper, gunpowder, the compass, and printing. We use all of those today in a very American way. The same is true for Feng Shui; we use the knowledge Feng Shui provides to make our homes happier places to be in, while retaining our American style.