Saturday, December 8, 2007

Why my Love Life is a One Car Garage

I’ve long been a dabbler in Feng Shui. And by dabbler, I mean that I own 47 unopened books on the subject and can correctly pronounce the term.

Recently, I discovered an HGTV show centered around the teachings of Feng Shui called Fun Shui. In it, the host Stephanie McWilliams does Feng Shui focused redesigns on people's homes in order to help them improve certain areas of their life. Then, they follow up with them a few months later to see if it helped.

The show inspired me to actually crack open a few of the books and learn a little more than the few things I that I do know - like not having your bed positioned with your feet pointing towards the door because it drains your energy, or that clutter is bad because it blocks your progress. (I seem to have a lot of blocked progress in the floor of my bedroom closet and surrounding my desk.)

In Feng Shui, there is a map, or bagua, that you place over your house plan that shows what is controlled by different zones of your home. You place the map based on where your front door is located.



My house is rectangular with the front door in the exact middle of the front wall (career zone), so it seemed pretty straightforward. Based on this, I came to the conclusion that the Wealth area of my home was in my living room, and most specifically in the corner where my TV is located. I thought this was kind of neat – maybe a sign that I would one day soon earn my wealth in connection with TV, possibly working on that sitcom I always dreamed of writing. This would also put the Love area of my home where my reading and office area is located – so maybe I should consider signing up for an online dating service, since my computer was located in the Love area.

Then I read more.

It seems, anything that falls behind the front door and is covered by the roof is part of the map. So, if you have a piece of your house that juts out, then that expands the entire square or rectangle to include that area and any other area outside of your home that would fall in the square if you completed it based on the outer edges of the jutted out piece. Which means that my garage at the back of the house is part of the house, and therefore, its outer edges cause the back deck, adjoining grassy area, and parking pad to also become part of my home for the purposes of Feng Shui.

Basically, that means that my Wealth area is where I keep my garbage can, and my Love area is a one car garage with a bunch of old, dusty clutter in the corner.

This explains sooooooo much.

3 comments:

Bonnie said...

Hee! That's brilliant!

Stephanie McWilliams said...

Hi there, Joni!

Thanks for the great plug for my show! And I'm glad you're re-connecting with feng shui. Yes, the placement of the bagua can be a tricky thing to understand and quite often, depending on the size of the jutting shape or the overall FEEL of the home, I sometimes toss all the rules out the window entirely. Feel free to email me with any questions you might have, post your floor plan and I can make comments right here on your blog, etc. It would be my pleasure to help out in exchange for your kind mention of the show...

My email is stephanie@evolvingarts.com, my blog is www.evolvingarts.blogspot.com and my website is www.evolvingarts.com so feel free to pop over for a visit!

Lots of love,

Stephanie [McWilliams]
Host of HGTV's Fun Shui

Bonnie said...

Thanks for turning me on to this show. I just watched "Bachelor Pad to Bold" and I'm sold. Great show! (And how cool that the host came to comment. Bless those Google Alerts!!)

XO,
YCB.