8. Get Organized at Home
If you love your things and love to
be surrounded by them, the trick to keeping your home stress-free is to
have your things well-organized. If everything is kept neat and you know
where everything is, then your abundant collections and favorite
things can bring you as much joy, comfort, and calm as a de-cluttered,
spare space might bring somebody else. Visit a home goods store and
purchase some inexpensive organizational tools, such as baskets, bins,
and crates, to make your organization efforts run more smoothly.
9. Get a New Look
While change does cause stress,
sometimes a lack of change is the bigger culprit. If you’ve lived in the
same home or apartment for years and haven’t redecorated in all that
time, chances are you’re pretty fed up with the way things look. In
fact, your furnishings, linens, and artwork might even be out of date or
old looking.
Rejuvenate your perspective by
refreshing a room or a few rooms. If there’s old wallpaper from a
previous tenant on the walls, take it down and replace it with a coat of
a vibrant paint color. Get some new linens to match. Consider
purchasing a new rug or lamp to add more character to the room. And
don’t worry; you don’t have to break the bank here. There are tons of TV
shows and books available nowadays that teach you how to do really
impressive home decorating without going broke.
10. Stress-Free Feng Shui
The ancient Chinese art of placement,
called feng shui, has become a popular and important trend in
decorating in the West. Feng shui masters are widely available for hire
by those decorating a home or office, or designing and building a home
or office building. Feng shui classes are hot, and it’s easy to find
books on how to decorate or redesign your home using feng shui
techniques.
Feng shui is a highly
complex system that uses Chinese astrology, mathematical calculations,
and Chinese philosophy. There are several different schools of feng shui
that advocate different methods. But like many things that come from
the East to the West, feng shui has begun to transform for use by
Westerners. The methods are simpler and more intuitive.
11. Think of the Environment as a Metaphor
The basic premise of feng
shui, particularly Westernized feng shui: environment as metaphor. People who
practice intuitive feng shui decorate according to what “feels right,”
what arrangements, items, configurations, and colors make the energy
feel good and flowing in a room. If you’ve ever arranged your furniture a
certain way or placed an item somewhere and thought, “Oh yes, that’s
just right!”, then you understand at least a little about intuitive feng
shui.
12. Consider the Bagua
Many feng shui experts use the bagua,
an eight-sided shape that you imagine overlying your house. The corners
are filled in to make a square. In the bagua, each of the eight sides
represents a different area of life, such as money, relationships,
creativity, health, and family. Whatever part of the home is in this
area represents that part of your life.
But working with the bagua is just
one way to apply feng shui to your home. Besides the colors, shapes,
and elements associated with the different sides of the bagua, feng shui
also uses light, movement (wind chimes, mobiles), water, plants,
crystals, and symbolic representations of positive things to activate
and enhance different areas of the home.
13. Follow Some Feng Shui Tips
The tips that follow are general feng
shui tips designed to enhance the positive energy and decrease the
negative energy in any household. Just remember, feng shui is most
effective when used intuitively; try any of these suggestions that
appeal to you or feel “right,” but don’t worry about following those
that seem difficult, uninteresting, or even silly.
• Keep your cupboards and refrigerator well-stocked with fresh, healthy food, which represents abundance.
• To increase energy for prosperity, keep your stove immaculately clean.
• If your bathroom is in your
prosperity corner—the corner to your upper left as you enter the
room—your wealth could be getting symbolically flushed down the toilet.
Keep the toilet lid down, keep the bathroom door shut, and hang a mirror
on the outside of the bathroom door.
• Make sure you can’t see yourself
in a mirror when you are lying or sitting up in bed. If you can, cover
that mirror at night. Seeing your shadowy image in the dark can be
frightening.
• If you have a television in your
bedroom, cover it at night. The energy it emits can negatively affect
many areas of your life, including your health.
• Healthy living things add
positive energy to any environment: A well-kept fish tank or turtle,
dogs, cats, birds, and healthy plants all improve your home’s feng shui.
• Sharp objects send off “poison arrows” or negative energy that can have a detrimental effect.
14. Make It Your Own
The most important way to
use feng shui in a stress-free manner is to have fun with it. Because
feng shui works so well when used intuitively, if things feel right and
good to you in your home, don’t worry if they don’t match one particular
book’s advice. Because the actual, original version of feng shui is so
complex, you have to take any contemporary all-or-nothing feng shui
prescriptions with a grain of salt. Any easy-to-understand feng shui
text is by necessity simplified and could easily be, in your particular
case, inaccurate or misconstrued. In other words, use advice from feng
shui sources if you find it enjoyable and it results in a living
environment that pleases you.
