What is Feng Shui? It's a frequent question I hear as I work with clients and speak to groups across the country. The simple definition is that Feng Shui is a design system for placing the objects and colors around you in balance and harmony with the natural world. Feng Shui focuses on how you want to live in your home surrounded by your favorite things.

Our indoor environment has a powerful effect on what you attract into your life. When the energy (or chi) around you is blocked or unbalanced, your prosperity, health, and relationships can be adversely affected. Feng Shui provides a system for unblocking this stuck energy and letting good things flow into your home.

The words feng shui mean wind and water, and they refer to the gently flow of balance and harmony that we all want to feel in our homes.

Are you yearning to rev up your love life? Looking to encourage family harmony in your household? Want to earn more money or grow your business? Need to control clutter before it controls you? Or do you just need a good night's sleep? A few simple Feng Shui improvements can bring all of this and more.

Based on a 5,000-year-old Chinese art and science, Feng Shui evolved as people saw how their surroundings determined whether they would just survive or thrive. As people moved from farming to urban societies, they modified this Feng Shui planning to fit their environment.

Even though the roots of this ancient practice are Chinese, contemporary Feng Shui improvements can be made to fit all cultures and all decorating styles. You don’t need to decorate your home in an Asian decor to appreciate the balance and harmony that Feng Shui can bring to any home.

Feng Shui isn’t a religion or superstition. Rather, it is the practical art and science of keeping your indoor environment balanced. Contemporary Feng Shui is based on common sense, good design principles, regional geography, and a lot of a skilled practitioner’s experience and intuition about balance and order. It’s often a simple matter of placing the right objects, colors, and shapes in the right locations to achieve harmony with nature and with yourself.

Or, Feng Shui can involve removing something from your home that is not sending a positive message for you. For example, here is how Feng Shui worked for my client Kelly.

When I arrived for a home consultation with Kelly she complained that the gold sailing ship she had placed on a table in her living room wasn’t working. She had read somewhere that displaying a gold ship would make wealth sail into her home, be she was still spending money as fast as she earned it. And Kelly admitted that she didn’t even like the ship.

I explained to Kelly that because the ship had no special meaning for her, it couldn't help attract anything positive into her life. Instead, she needed to surround herself with objects and images that represented her personal goals. To make matters worse, Kelly had placed the ship so it pointed out of the room instead of in, a symbol of good energy sailing right out of her life.

The simple Feng Shui solution for Kelly’s problem was to remove the ship from her home.

Kelly quickly sold the ship on an online auction site, then used the proceeds to buy a print of a villa in Tuscany, a place she and her husband hoped to visit. She told me her living room immediately felt better when she hung the picture. Soon the couple’s cash flow started to improve, and they were able to start saving for their dream trip.

Try a few simple, low-cost, and real-world Feng Shui changes for your home and see how they attract wealth, harmony, and love in a way that seems almost magical.

Start making Feng Shui changes today with the tip-a-day calendar in the new e-book from Feng Shui Master Practitioner Carol M. Olmstead. Click here to order your copy of "365 Feng Shui Secrets" from the e-book store at BellaOnline.com.


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