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Rebuilding After a Disaster with Feng Shui in Mind

by Karen on March 4, 2012 in Blog, General, Green and Sustainable, Health, Outdoor Feng Shui, Spiritual, The Bagua

With all the tornadoes flying around this past week, I thought I’d give those badly affected a little checklist to consider if they have to rebuild. In order to be brief, I’m going to assume you know a bit about the feng shui that I practice or have read my book.

I would highly recommend, if you have the resources, to hire a feng shui consultant (hopefully one that is very comfortable with the design process like an architect, landscape architect or interior designer) to help you navigate the rebuilding process with the best feng shui outcome. But if that isn’t in the cards, consider these ideas below:

1. Place the names of your insurance agents and companies, government agencies, designers, contractors, employers, family members, and feng shui consultants – or anyone else that you need help from – in your helpful people box. Even if you are staying in temporary housing and no longer have your old box, remember, you can simply wrap the names in aluminum foil or anything metal. If you want to write notes to them like “Thank you ________ for being so helpful to me while I rebuild my home and life back.” so much the better.

2. Do a ground blessing on the land before rebuilding. Make up whatever ritual you want to, or use a traditional one. I’d recommend the “Exterior Ch’i Adjustment” if I were choosing a traditional feng shui ritual.

3. During re-construction, consider:
∙ Spray painting the sub flooring with the bagua color pattern before you lay down the final floor materials.

∙ If you have the chance – redesign the home to make the building shape complete – no “missing pieces.”

∙ Create a winding path to the front door and make the door visible and easy to find from the street.

∙ Create flat ceilings overhead – at least in the bedrooms if possible (and no exposed beams if possible.)

∙ Avoid placing ceiling fans directly over where you spend a lot of time (especially the bed.)

∙ Design the bedroom such that you can get your bed up against a solid wall and not in line with the bedroom door…and preferably place the bedrooms in the back half of the house.

∙ Spray paint a circle of red around the hole where the toilet goes before it is set. Then you will not ever need to counterbalance it later!

∙ If you had mirrors up against walls to keep noisy neighbors away, etc, try placing them between the studs if you have the chance to get them inside there! You can place mirrors inside the walls wherever you need to – like if you want to push the toilet away from a bedroom space or a kitchen, etc. Or if your bedroom has to be over the garage, you can place the mirror under the flooring between floor joists facing down to push the garage energy away from the bedroom, etc.

∙ Consider healthy home and sustainable building advice when rebuilding. Now’s your chance to get a lot of design mistakes remedied – take advantage of it! Put the laundry room on an outside wall, seal the slab floors that were wicking up moisture into the house, choose flooring that is not toxic like synthetic wall-to-wall carpet, properly vent the gas stove, etc.

Reframe this as a “fresh start” or a “new chance to get it right,” and it will be a lot less painful to rebuild. Looking back with regret is not a powerful or resourceful state. “A conviction to create the healthiest home for you now” is much more powerful during this time.

One more thing. If you can not get over your grief, or fear, or sadness, or any other unhelpful emotional state, give me a call and I’ll be happy to help you work through (actually eliminate) these states. This kind of thinking is exactly why I designed a program called the “Feng Shui Your Mindset” Program.

Good luck and be well.

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Are you Bugged by Feng Shui? Q and A

by Karen on June 23, 2011 in General, Green and Sustainable

Question:

I started applying feng shui to my 2 bed flat on Sunday. On Monday afternoon my lounge and kitchen was covered in over 4 dozen large, black, blue bottomed flies – freshly hatched. I cleaned up in disgust. On Tuesday my flat was again covered in over 5 dozen more flies. I sprayed and cleaned up. ON Wednesday the same. I had searched and looked everywhere and suddenly found a large breeding area under my new washing machine. Cleaned up the whole area, sprayed again. More flies. My hubby found another lair inside the under sink cupboard area – sprayed them. By the evening it was covered in flies again. In desperation I have filled every crevice and opening with towels. By lunchtime today there were again almost 2 dozen flies. I have continued feverishly implementing feng shui but has this unleashed some horrid incident????? HELP. Wendy C

Answer:

Of course, my first response whenever I get questions like this where I have not seen the place is, “It depends.” You write that you were FEVERISHLY implementing feng shui…how clear were your intentions as you were implementing? Did you envision the outcome that you desired when making the changes, or were you perhaps in a panicked state that created an energy pattern that resulted in more flies to keep the panic vibe going? Also, I have seen people feng shui with thoughts like “Nothing ever works for me so my guess is this won’t work for me either” and everything totally works out for them the way they THOUGHT, as opposed to the way they DESIRED and ENVISIONED or INTENDED.

Going past the intentions,here’s how I might proceed. First, I’d think through the logical, “mundane” things like, “Could the flies have been incubating under the new washing machine since it has arrived and just so happened to have hatched just after the feng shui was put in place?” Seems logical. You did mentioned that the machine was new, right? Maybe the warehouse that it came from was a cesspool for flies. I also don’t know about incubation periods or fly breeding grounds spreading in a house, so perhaps a bit of research is in order. You might see that the whole timeline thing makes sense once you do the research or call the warehouse.

If you pass the logic test, I might go into language and symbolism and try to find commonalities. “Has something been BUGGING you lately?” I might get more specific and ask if you are bugged in the area of life that these bugs seem to be coming from. Perhaps that will give me more clues to follow.

After that, I might ask for the list of every feng shui change you implemented, how long it has been there, how fast you were intending the change to happen, how fast things in your life are actually changing besides this event, and see if there’s something amiss or off balance with your work. If everything looks good and you say that you are indeed getting fast results from your changes, then I might conclude that this is merely the “end of a cycle,” and that sometimes reactions that were already in motion play out faster than normal, creating a brief time of chaos. The “feverishly” word does make perfect sense for this to be happening. Sometimes, when people make many fast changes to their space, it triggers a type of quick “crumbling” effect. In other words, it speeds up all the things that were going to break down over the next year and smashes the timeline into, like one week — which looks like feng shui is working against you. But it is merely all the weak links in your chain breaking, so you can strengthen them with your repairs – which now makes the space strong enough to manifest the new life change that you intended. Plumbing and electronic devices are the classics for this, but I wouldn’t rule out infestations showing up at all.

So, bottom line, it could be a mundane thing that you just need some extermination help, or it could have something o do with your feng shui – but I’d need way more info to be sure.

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Feng Shui for Health: Your Healthy and Eco-Friendly Challenge

by Karen on June 11, 2011 in Blog, De-Cluttering, General, Green and Sustainable, Health

One of my certification course students from Phoenix sent me over her healthy-home to-do list from her course homework. I thought was so good, I thought I’d blog about it. See if you can check them all off yourself! (And if you need a consultation in Phoenix area, let me know and I’ll put you in touch with her.)

1. Avoid sponges, waterproof gloves and cleaning products treated with antimicrobial chemicals.. Anti-microbials are pesticides added to protect the life of the product, not the health of the user.

2. Cleaning the air is like making sure your lungs work. Open a window each day to let fresh air in and pollutants out:especially when cleaning.

3. Shed some light. Allow yourself and your pets health promoting qualities of natural daylight – artificial light all day, everyday can develop into health problems and depression.

4. Replace toxic cleaning products with healthy alternatives; incorporate white vinegar and baking soda into laundry regime.

5. Clean dryer lint filter after each use; your dryer will work more efficiently and you will reduce air particles in your environment.

6. Stop using fragrance laundry products. Healthy, fresh laundered items have no smell… better yet, air dry the sheets, you will love it.

7. Put a water filter on your shower head… Over 2 gallons of potentially toxic water is emitted through the skin in one shower. Cost $25.

8. The smell from the dishwasher is a chemical cocktail from an enclosed shower. The heat volatilizes the chlorine in the water activating air pollution. Add chemicals and fragrance from soap and phew.

9. Avoid colored towels and toilet paper. Those bright fluffy towels contain chemical dyes from aniline (coal tar) – to make the color last additional chemical toxins are added. So if you have faded towels, where did the dye go? partially in the laundry and partially absorbed through your skin.

10. 100% cotton is better than polyester but beware it is the most contaminated of all natural fibers, seeds are treated with fungicides, herbicides and pesticides. The healthy choice is certified organic cotton and toilet paper bleached without chlorine, unscented and uses no dyes. Having a recycled content is also a kind choice for the planet.

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Different size and shaped pipes at a power plant

Feng Shui Your Body: The Nitty Gritty of Processed Foods

by Karen on March 29, 2011 in Blog, Green and Sustainable, Health

I have a friend who has taken prescribed anti-depressants for years. It’s not working anymore, and she is already at the maximum dosage allowable. Her doctor says she’ll have to ween herself off (which may take about nine months to a year) and then switch to a different drug.

I asked her if she was interested in the name of a Naturopath who could help her through this “detox” with natural extracts, etc. and she said, “Oh no! I’m too afraid of that natural stuff!” Well, to me this sentence was so funny I had to laugh. But, much to my surprise, she was serious. (But I guess if you turned the question around on me I’d probably say that I was afraid of chemicals in pharmaceuticals, so go figure.)

And then, a couple of days later at a dinner party where I brought a cheese and fruit plate, everyone was commenting on how especially good the cheese was. I said it was an organic white cheddar. My 50+, college-educated friend asked, “What’s organic?”

I guess I run in a smaller circle than I thought, but I’m amazed at how the average American has bought into the fact that pharmaceuticals are the only answer to everything, and that it does not appear to be important to really take a good look at the quality of stuff you put in their mouths! This is the stuff that fuels your body after all.

I think of myself not as a food zealot, but as more middle-of-the-road in my quest to make sound choices for my body and environment. But perhaps when considering the total population, I’m more on the fringe than I thought.

So, to help people make better food energy choices, I thought this month I’d concentrate on basic food ingredients in processed food. It is really a must to read labels these days AND understand what the label is actually saying.

According to a book by Mike Adams entitled “Grocery Warning,” the following are on the top of the list when it comes to the most dangerous ingredients in conventional foods:

1) Sodium nitrite — it’s carcinogenic, found in most processed meats like hot dogs, bacon, sausage. Used to make meats appear red (a color fixer chemical).

2) Hydrogenated oils — causes heart disease, nutritional deficiencies, general deterioration of cellular health, and much more. Found in cookies, crackers, margarine and many “manufactured” foods. Used to make oils stay in the food, extending shelf life. Sometimes also called “plastic fat.”

3) Excitotoxins — aspartame, monosodium glutamate and others (see below). These neurotoxic chemical additives directly harm nerve cells, over-exciting them to the point of cell death, according to Dr. Russell Blaylock. They’re found in diet soda, canned soup, salad dressing, breakfast sausage and even many manufactured vegetarian foods. They’re used to add flavor to over-processed, boring foods that have had the life cooked out of them.

So how do food companies manage to hide excitotoxins and taste additives to their foods? It’s easy: They just keep changing the words to confuse consumers. Once customers learned to avoid MSG / monosodium glutamate, the food companies started using yeast extract. And now, two years after Mike started sounding the alarm on yeast extract, many companies have switched to torula yeast, which accomplishes the same thing. Other hidden sources of MSG include: Autolyzed vegetable protein and Hydrolyzed vegetable protein.

THE INGREDIENTS “STACKING” TRICK

Food companies also use the good ol’ ingredients stacking trick to intentionally leave you with the wrong impression about what’s really in their food products. For example, one company makes a nutrition bar that’s absolutely loaded with sugar, but they way they’ve arranged the ingredients prevents sugar from appearing as the #1 ingredient. Instead, the first ingredient is rice. But looking down the label, you’ll find all the following forms of sugar, all in the same nutrition bar: Sugar, Sucrose, High-fructose corn syrup, Corn syrup solids, and Dextrose.

Add all these up, and the #1 component in the bar is, indeed, sugar (or sugary substances). But the manufacturer has used ingredients stacking to make you think the top ingredient is actually rice.

It’s a clever, dishonest technique used by food companies to lie with food labels. Remember, the longer the ingredients label, the less healthy the food. Read those ingredients lists before buying foods, and if you discover chemical names that you can’t pronounce, don’t buy the food. “Chemical energy” is usually not “feng shui harmonious energy” in the body!

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Plants as a Cure – Here’s the Top Ten Air Cleaning Ones!

by Karen on March 21, 2011 in Blog, Green and Sustainable, Health

In light of the Japanese radiation leak situation, I’ve been seeing some news shows demonstrating how to seal yourself in a room to protect yourself against radiation particles. The downside is that they say after three hours, you have to open up the room to get some fresh air. I thought, what if you put some natural oxygen-makers in there with you? Fresh houseplants are good for both a healthier home and a well-feng-shuied one. (For gosh sakes, please don’t seal yourself in a room with some synthetic “plug-in,” synthetic oil burner or candle, or other chemical compound fragrance to breathe – lungs don’t like it one bit!)

Interior plants are great assets to a home for two reasons:

#1 They literally eat up indoor air pollution and re-oxygenate the air.
#2 They soften the feel of the room – creating a more inviting, “yin” condition…especially if you have corners protruding into a space (typically called a poison arrow or “sha chi”)

I’m not an authority on nuclear power plant pollution by any means, but I thought I’d take the time to give you all my ideas for the best typical house plants that not only warm and soften up a space, but help undo any typical interior air pollution that comes from off-gassing materials inside the home. (If you’ve got any “new home smell,” you’ve got indoor air pollution.) This might be helpful for those that need to rebuild after this disaster, or even those who are building or remodeling right now.

According to Organic Gardening magazine, the top ten air cleaning plants are:

(And being the landscape architect that I am, I have added the official botanical name as well)

1. Areca Palm – Chrysalidocarpus lutescens

2. Reed Palm – (I’m guessing here at what plant they are talking about – Rhapis Excelsa or Rhapis humilis, usually called “lady palm” perhaps? That’s why the latin names are so important!)

3. Dwarf Date Palm – Phoenix roebelenii

4. Boston Fern – Nephrolepis exaltata (Bostoniensis)

5. Pothos – Epipremnum aureum

6. English Ivy – Hedra helix

7. Australian Sword Fern – Nephrolepis exhalta or Nephrolepis cordifolia

8. Peace Lily – Spathiphyllum (there are many varieties: “Mauna Loa” & “St. Mary” are a couple)

9. Rubber Plant – Ficus elastica

10. Weeping Fig – Ficus benjamina

Another “healthy-choice” tip for your plants if they get dusty, or need any type of pest removal is:

#1 to wash leaves with a mild detergent solution (1 teaspoon detergent per quart of water)
#2 dip cotton swabs in rubbing alcohol and remove pests
#3 in a spray bottle, mix 2 tsp. Vegetable oil, 1/8 tsp. dishwashing detergent, and 8 oz. warm water. Shake and spray.

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Breathe Easy: Top 10 Tips for Your Lungs

by Karen on March 11, 2011 in Blog, General, Green and Sustainable, Health

Feeling stiffled in life? Maybe its your indoor air quality! Let’s feng shui it with some tips from the American Lung Association, because, believe it or not, according to them, indoor air quality is more often than not more toxic than outdoor air because of all the synthetic construction materials and products in homes these days. Here is the American Lung Association’s Top Ten Tips for a Healthy Home‚ especially for people have ANY breathing maladies:

1) Declare your home a smoke-free zone. Secondhand smoke can cause serious health problems, especially for children. Ask smokers to take it outside.

2) Good ventilation reduces indoor air pollution. Leave doors between rooms open most of the time for better air circulation. Open windows when possible to allow for a good supply of outdoor air. Install exhaust fans in bathrooms to remove moisture and chemicals from the house.

3) Keep humidity levels low with a dehumidifier or air conditioner, as needed. Clean both regularly so they don’t become a source of pollutants themselves. Fix all leaks and drips in the home, as standing water and high humidity encourages the growth of mold and other biological pollutants.

4) To prevent carbon monoxide poisoning, have all fuel burning appliances inspected by a qualified technician once a year. Install a carbon monoxide detector near your sleeping rooms.

5) To keep dust mites and other allergens to a minimum, clean regularly. Wash bedding materials in hot water (at least 130¬∞). Consider replacing carpet with area rugs that can be taken up and washed often.

6) Fit your gas range with a hood fan that exhausts the air outside. Use the fan or open a window when cooking to remove gas fumes.

7) Check commercial cleaning products and pesticides for toxic ingredients, and use according to manufacturer’s directions. Ventilate your home well when using these products. Consider switching to less toxic alternatives.

Test your home for radon. Use a radon test kit labeled “Meets EPA requirements.”

9) Never leave a car or lawn mower running in an attached garage or shed. Avoid the use of unvented heaters or charcoal grills indoors.

10) Call your local Lung Association at 1-800-LUNG-USA for more information about avoiding indoor air hazards in the home.

Do what you can to up your air quality and spread the word!

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Birds, Bees….Now, Study Shows Negative Effects of Wi-Fi in Trees

by Karen on January 31, 2011 in Green and Sustainable, Health

OK, OK. I know… some of you are still wanting to hide your heads in the sand about all this Wi-Fi stuff — after all, it may mean contemplating reducing the time that little hand-held device is actually in your hands. But another vote for ditching it just came out. Wageningen University and Research Center in the Netherlands was ordered to study a phenomenon of trees that are displaying disease in the city of Alphen aan den Rijn. In the entire country, about 70% of all urban trees are showing symptoms of disease without signs of bacterial infection. The result concluded that both electromagnetic fields created by cell-phone networks and wireless LANs and ultrafine particles emitted by vehicles are the oh-so teeny, and even invisible objects that are entering the trees and breaking them down. (It also found that the Wi-Fi radiation inhibits the growth of corncobs – look out farmers!)

So let’s review. We’ve got bees dying, birds dropping out of the air “for no apparent reason”, and now trees turning up lame and dying….hummmm…anybody want to slip the bluetooth headset off yet?

We cannot escape our connection to the same biology that these living organisms are made of! When are we going to get real with ourselves. A while back I predicted that someday in the distant future, there would be “Cold Spot” signs on the windows of coffee houses and bookstores to say “this is a place free from unhealthy microwave radiation” instead of a “Hot Spot” sign saying “come in and enjoy the microwave radiation that we will blast through you for free.” Perhaps the word “distant” was a little off? I hope so.

And if I have one more hope by writing this, is that you get these things out of your kids hands – and jean pockets. Our future may depend on it!

Although I didn’t hear of this study from this website, I’d recommend checking out Microwave News for additional studies and other information about the effects of non-ionizing radiation (microwaves) and AntennaSearch to find out where these towers are around you!

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Pie for Breakfast?

by Karen on October 21, 2010 in Blog, Green and Sustainable, Health

I just got back from my 6AM yoga class and thought I’d share what I was having for breakfast. I’m not one for a giant breakfast after yoga. I like to fill up slowly after a good stretch. So, for breakfast, I have my “guilty pleasure-but-still somewhat healthy” breakfast – pumpkin pie. Unlike the picture shown, I make my pie without a crust, (who needs the extra fat and carbs and remember I’m gluten-free) so it’s kind of like pumpkin pudding in a bowl. It feels and tastes very satisfying, and I also like the fact that I’m getting some fiber and whole-veggie nutrition. Over the years I’ve heard of others loving pumpkin pie for breakfast like me, so I thought I’d share this in case you wanted to give it a go. Also, there are so many pumpkins seriously on sale right now for Halloween, that I thought you might want to pick up a couple for pie or maybe even a soup (its like hot pumpkin pie in a bowl too!) What a great way to make the most of the local food harvest.

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If Everything Collapsed, What Would You Do?

by Karen on September 27, 2010 in General, Green and Sustainable

My job as a feng shui and healthy lifestyle consultant is based upon being a keen observer of patterns. If you see X in the environment followed by Y happening in life over and over, you can start to predict the future every time you see X right? So once you see X in that specific pattern, you can choose to take actions to prevent Y by shifting X in some way. That’s feng shui in a nutshell.

Well, I just watched a show a few days ago on Planet Green that is still haunting me today. It was called “Collapse.” Basically it was an interview about a guy named Michael Ruppert who seems to, with all his beyond-top-secret “Q” clearance and his background as an LAPD detective among other things, be a keen observer of the patterns happening in the world today. He has been labeled a doomsday conspiracy theorist for years, but unfortunately, all the things he was freaking people out about in the past (about the economy for one thing) has actually taken place – or is currently taking place today. At the end of the show he makes some suggestions about what resources would be valuable in the future that might be worth picking up today (hint:anything made from oil like fertilizer, plastics, vehicles, commercially-grown food – and oh yea, money – would be off the list.) We’re talking about seeds, good soil, and gold – and “know-how.”

Watching this show lead me to think about how to survive during a complete and total (money is worthless in this scenario) economic collapse, and what immediately popped into my head were my grandparents. Luckily for me, as a kid, I got to see how “living off the land” actually worked. My grandparents were the last generation in my family that really did what it took to get along fairly self-sufficiently. Although in my neighborhood, many of my friends were raised with things like Dixie cups to rinse your mouth out in the bathroom and Hostess Ho-Ho’s as snacks, I had the luxury (although I was embarrassed about it then!) of seeing first hand how to make just about everything yourself.

Curing meat

My grandpas both had a farms that included cows, pigs, chickens, and a garden – just about everything you needed to survive. I’m still in awe about how one grandpa got meat to cure in his smokehouse. How did he know so much about so many animals…and gardening…and maintaining farm equipment? Talk about man’s men – these dude’s were a cross between TV’s Survivorman and Martha Stewart! I still remember one grandpa’s home-made liver sausage – I have never tasted anything like it. Unfortunately, he died with the recipe in his head. (I’m sure he thought “Everybody knows how to make liver sausage – so why write it down?”) Martha would have killed for this recipe.

And speaking of Martha, my grandmothers did everything from sewing, making rugs and things on a big loom, to canning and freezing fruits and veggies that were grown in the garden. One of my fondest memories with one grandma was making cinnamon rolls from scratch – I don’t remember exactly how long it took to make that dough, punch it down once it rose the first time, and then roll it out and “cut it” with a string – but in kid time, it was FOREVER! But when you tasted them, well…as you can see, it was memorable.

Also, I remember some of the home remedies that my grandparents did. From mustard plasters when you had a chest cold, to putting soot from the fireplace on a wound (I’m still not sure I remember how this one went – was it because it was “sterile?”) they managed to have a “live-of-the-land” helpful technique for almost any minor ailment.

Cotton Feed Sacks

If you had the chance to hang around me long enough, you’d hear stories like how I didn’t know you could buy jelly until I was about 12 because we always had homemade (my grandma hung a sack of concord grapes in the basement so the juice could drip out so she could make the jelly,) or another story about how my grandma used to take us kids to the feed store with grandpa when he needed some grain to feed the livestock, so we could pick out the fabric we wanted out pajamas made out of. What you ask? Well, believe it or not, the feed sacks were made from cotton that has been pre-printed, so once you emptied the sack, you had fabric to use. Oh this story got me plenty of sympathy in the past where, as a teenager I used to tell my friends that my PJ’s were made out of feed sacks. Of course, I left out the part about the fact that the sacks were very soft, pre-printed (and probably 100% organic) cotton. I didn’t get my wish for a store-bought dress for my 8th grade graduation. Instead, I had to suffer through wearing a crappy, hand-made, custom-tailored-to-me one.

So what would YOU do? Is it time to have a survival-skill backup plan? Do you know how to grow and can the fruits vegetables you may have to grow, slaughter, and cure meats (or be vegetarian!), loom fabric and and sew clothes, make your own soap (I swear, they did that too)? I’m thinking the most people can do these days is make homemade ice-cream, (that is, if they have that fancy Williams-Sonoma electric ice cream freezer.)

I’m thinking that maybe we should start really getting serious about making self-sustainable local “eco-communities.” If everyone in the local community knew at least knew one of the skills that my grandparents did, perhaps we could survive an epic economic dump if we pulled together. There are communities like this popping up in some places and I hope they are writing things down.

Maybe you have to go back a few more generations than me, but when thinking about catastrophic survival, my new motto is going to be WWGD – What Would Grandma and Grandpa Do?

Gotta go buy some seeds now.

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