It’s a new year, new season—time for new love! Tracee Dunblazier gives us a rundown of the best ways to clean our homes to attract love with Feng Shui.
If you’re not familiar with Feng Shui, it’s the ancient Chinese art of the placement of objects and connection to nature and your environment, to support and regulate the flow of energy in your home.
The Chinese New Year began on the second New Moon of the year and ushered in the Wood Goat for 2015. The vibe of the New Year, heralding the winds of change and new opportunity, begin to blow at the end of the year, so for me, I usually begin the process of making changes around the home before the New Year.
Of course it’s always important to have a good idea of what you want in your life, or at very least, what you don’t want. The three most important principal’s for opening your mind, heart and home for love are: cleaning and clearing, preparing to receive and harmoniously having the object of your desire.
Love comes to us in our lives, in many ways, subtle and overt. The more we are able to recognize the subtle ways that love comes to us, the more harmoniously we will embrace the overt ways we engage in the giving and receiving of love. Believe it or not, our human consciousness needs to give love more than we need to receive it…and the Jedi mind trick here is that receiving love is a natural response to having given it.
The more you give love freely, the more it finds its way back to you.
Keeping that in mind, here are the changes to make in your home to manifest more love.
Clutter-Free Zone
The most important thing to do when you want to have more love in your life is to create space for it. Getting rid of clutter, cleaning out drawers and having as much surface space in all the rooms of the home, but especially the bedroom, is vital.
Once you have cleared all that space and had a garage sale or taken a few loads to the GoodWill, now it’s time to clean, I mean really clean all of those spaces. Start with the bathroom and kitchen. Those two rooms in the house are where energy is piped in and dumped several times a day. You really want to scrub the baseboards and walls, all of the appliances and fixtures and keep the lid down on the toilet. Take my word for it, there is nothing sexier than a clean bathroom corner.
Satellite for Love
A person’s preparedness to give and receive love is always evident in their home if you really look. Take a moment to take your own inventory. How much extra space do you have? How clean is your environment? Do you have past memorabilia up everywhere in your home or is it concentrated to one area? On a scale of 1-10, 10 being ready, how prepared are you?
The southwest sector of the home is the direction that governs love and marriage in Feng Shui, and there are quite a few enhancers to support love and relationship in your life. My favorites are: planting a lime tree in the Southwest sector of the garden, placing pictures of Peonies or two ducks in the southwest corner of the house and bedroom. These are all symbolic of a happy relationship.
There are a couple of things that you want to look out for, like making sure there are no sharp corners or jagged edges (we call those poison arrows). If there are, they are easily remedied by hanging a multi-faceted crystal, a wind chime with five bells or tubes or by covering it (for example: if it’s a table corner). Also, you need to keep memorabilia out of the southwest corner, even shrines to your wedding, those are best kept in the east for health and family. You want new and flowing energy in the southwest sector at all times, so if you like to keep fresh flowers in that corner, make sure to throw them out before they completely wilt. Having dead things in the marriage corner is not optimum.
Live in Harmony
If you have the relationship that you want with yourself you will easily be able to live with the new love that you draw to you.
Yes, take a couple of minutes to chew on that before you swallow, it’s a big piece.
The center of the house radiates harmony to all other places in the home and therefore, all of your life situations. This year, according to Flying Star Feng Shui, the center of the home is afflicted with the Quarrelsome Star #3. Having this star in the center, the area of the home that supports harmony in the entire house, isn’t the end of the world, it just needs to be subdued with a few different fix possibilities. The first is placing a picture or small statue of a blue rhino or elephant (easily found online) in the center of the room. I like to tape a picture under my coffee table. The next is Ksitigarbha’s Staff, a small, four inch brass statue meant to disperse disruptive energy, or a fire red ball, again, meant to disperse and dispel discordant energy as it is brought into the house.
Just a Word
For those who may be reticent to include these rituals in their spring cleaning for fear that they are not in alignment with their religion, it’s important to know that Feng Shui is not a religion and you are not worshipping anything to participate. All of the symbols are ancient archetypes that relate to all of the elements that make up our Universe; heaven and Earth, water, fire, wood and metal.
The entire practice is meant to cultivate your awareness, by getting to know your nature and the nature of the flow of the Universe and how the two relate and interact. However, how you relate to the creator is more expansive than the elements of your Universe, and by all means bring your relationship with the creator into your use of Feng Shui.
Most of all, the whole point is to pay attention and care to your environment and to yourself, finding new and conscientious ways to express and receive love in your life.
[Image: via Jen Badalamenti on Flickr]
