Finding a way to improve your home’s look and feel is an important part of feng shui. Although the art of placement is often about making changes to your home to create a change in your life, sometimes we need to change our homes simply because we don’t like the way they look or function.
You don’t have to have a reason to employ feng shui other than you simply want to go from an environment that you endure or put up with to one you enjoy.
Simply put, tolerating your home creates negative energy.
It’s true. When you have something in your home that drips daily annoyances, that water (energy) has to go somewhere.
Where does it go? Outward in your life. It drains you of energy every time you look at that thing that you just make do with.
Take, for instance, my kitchen pantry shelves.
They were all sized exactly the same height apart. There were five of them but I didn’t have one shelf that I could store a roll of paper towels or a tall canister on, so those things either went on the top shelf or the bottom one that sat about two inches off the floor.
Now mind you, these were staple items I used almost daily, like rice or pasta. I don’t like my food on the floor. Talk about bad feng shui.
So, one Saturday, I unloaded the bottom shelf and the one above it, and go out a hammer and carefully removed the fifth shelf and the wood cleat that supported the shelf, and I lowered it three inches. Those three inches helped me gain some pantry sanity.
Now I have a whole shelf that I can put bottles of olive oil, potato chip cans or tall canisters on easily. It makes me happy when I open that door and don’t see rice sitting on the floor.
What’s even nicer?
After making this change my pantry was better organized and more efficient, and now I actually have more storage space out of my pantry. It also makes me happy to see my staples where they belong.
And this is the point….
Aggravations at your home, or around your home, or in your décor, drain you.
Look around your home.
What is it that bugs you? The one window in the corner of your bedroom that always looks odd because there’s not another one on the other side?
Whether it’s a design feature of your home that gets on your nerves or something that you interact with that doesn’t work the way it should (like my pantry shelf), over time that energy brings you down.
This is especially true in a kitchen or bedroom.
Whenever you enter a room, your eyes automatically go to the defect or the thing that annoys you.
It’s not that you’re a perfectionist. It’s just how humans are wired. It’s because things that we perceive as “wrong” could hurt us when we were running across plains trying to escape being eaten by a wild animal. That’s in your DNA.
Of course, a pantry shelf won’t eat you, but that toilet that doesn’t seal properly and is constantly running can drain you of money and is a sound that represents a leak – and that symbolizes draining wealth and health, and listening to it is a drain on your nerves and your pocketbook.
Why is that? Because it’s a thing you know that needs to be corrected, and having the knowledge of something that annoys you or that needs to be fixed eats away your spirit and energy.
There’s enough out in the world that we have to manage outside our four walls and that taxes our energy and spirit, but inside your home, your surroundings should feed your energy and lift your spirit.
Find those tolerations you’ve been putting up with and take an inventory of how they have pulled at your energy or have become a weight on you.
That might be just what it takes to correct the problem or create something more beautiful, more organized, or efficient.
Your home should support and nurture you, not tax you and make you tolerate living there.
That’s definitely not good feng shui, but fixing it is.
