Q&A Sunday: The Best Place for a Feng Shui Plant

Guest User May 16, 2021

Where is the best place to put a plant for feng shui?

Two of my favorite places to put a plant based on feng shui are Kun (relationships) or Xun (wealth) in your bedroom. These are two of the most popular areas of the feng shui bagua that people love to work with, and I recommend starting in your bedroom because any changes there affect you the most.

Plants are really having a moment right now! Working with plants is beautiful because they’re living things that you can cultivate, so they encourage you to invest in and take care of something outside of yourself. They also represent growth, vitality, and healing. Another thing that’s really great about plants is that you can pay attention to how they’re growing, and what that represents. For example, I have a money tree that I got about ten years ago that started out just a couple of feet tall. Now it’s almost as tall as me! It’s reassuring to see a tangible representation of my own abundance and growth, not only financially but also spiritually.

Xun is connected to wealth and money, but also to how prosperous and worthy you feel. Many people have a great deal of money, but that doesn’t necessarily bring fulfillment or feelings of abundance. When you feel worthy, and recognize that you are a treasure, then you can truly magnetize and attract abundant things to you. You can feel like you have more than enough, which is really what Xun is about. This is a great area to activate with a plant.

The other area that people are most interested in is Kun, or relationships. Most people think that activating Kun will help them attract a partner. That’s true, but there are so many layers to working with this gua. It’s also related to femininity, the mother, and taking care of yourself. You might want to activate that area to invite in a romantic partnership, but you might also want to deepen or heal your existing partnership. Maybe you’ve recently come out of a relationship, and you need to work on healing your relationship with yourself — that’s also related to Kun. Other reasons you might want to work with this gua are wanting to connect more to the earth, or to heal your relationship with your mother. If any of these intentions resonates, this could be a great place for a plant!

If you want more guidance on where to put your plants, I’d recommend working with a practitioner who can help you figure out what would be most supportive for your unique situation.

by Anjie Cho

Thanks for reading our "Q&A Sunday". If you have personal questions, we encourage you to check out Practical Feng Shui or hire one of Anjie's Grads.

If you’d like to learn more about feng shui, check out Mindful Design Feng Shui School at: www.mindfuldesignschool.com

Q&A Sunday: Bathroom in the Wealth Area

Guest User May 2, 2021

Do you have any advice for a bathroom in the wealth area? Is that bad?

The way that I approach and teach feng shui is to not label things as good or bad. That’s the easy way of looking at the world: this is good and that is bad, or I am right and they are wrong. When you look at the world this way, you’re creating separation.

A bathroom in the wealth area isn’t the most desirable, but I wouldn’t call it bad. In fact, I encourage you to not use the word “bad” in general. You have to have a bathroom somewhere, and you have to work with what you have. Often, we’re attracted to feng shui that may be challenging. This isn’t necessarily negative, because with the greatest challenges come the greatest rewards. We’ve all been through challenging times, and there is so much beauty that can come from them. For instance, you might reach out to people or ask for help. You could create connections, or start to see others with more compassion as you realize the kinds of things that people go through.

Another thing to note is that most people lay the bagua incorrectly, so without looking at your floor plan, I can’t tell if your bathroom is actually in the wealth area or not. If you want some help figuring this out, you may want to check out Mindful Design’s free bagua kit or our Practical Feng Shui course.

If you do have a bathroom in the wealth area, called Xun, the first thing I would ask is whether you have any problems with wealth. If not, this isn’t something you need to worry about. If you do, there are ways that you can correct this. One way is to put a plant in your bathroom to activate and uplift the qi in this part of your home. You can also work with a feng shui consultant to look at what you can do for your specific situation.

by Anjie Cho

Thanks for reading our "Q&A Sunday". If you have personal questions, we encourage you to check out Practical Feng Shui or hire one of Anjie's Grads.

If you’d like to learn more about feng shui, check out Mindful Design Feng Shui School at: www.mindfuldesignschool.com

Q&A Sunday: Abundance, Giving, and Receiving

Guest User April 25, 2021

How can I work on bringing in more abundance?

This is a popular question, and I invite you to read through some of my earlier blog posts on feng shui and abundance as well. Today, I want to talk about how we can approach this from the perspective of giving and receiving. There’s a Zen saying that there’s no giver and no receiver. I encourage you to think about what this means to you. It might sound paradoxical, and there are many ways to unpack this statement.

I invite you to contemplate how you give and receive, and what generosity means to you. In BTB feng shui, we were taught by our teachers to honor something called the red envelope tradition, and this is something we teach our students at Mindful Design School. It’s a way to formally exchange energy with our students, since we are offering them teachings. At the same time, my students are also my teachers because they help me to become a better teacher.

Whenever you do give something, you can think about why you are giving. Is there a balance in what you’re receiving? How can you be generous in new and different ways? This concept connects to the feng shui area of abundance, called Xun. In feng shui, the opposite areas of the bagua are closely related. Opposite Xun is Qian, which has to do with benefactors and helpful people. How abundant you feel is directly related to how you can invite helpful, supportive people into your life, and the way to invite more helpful people into your life is to become a more helpful person. A lot of people want to work on wealth, and it’s something I get asked a lot about as a feng shui practitioner. Often, however, what people really need to work on is how to give and receive. How can you become a benefactor to others, and how can you receive what is offered to you?

A lot of people, myself included, have a hard time receiving wealth. One lesson that many of us are learning is to not help other people so much that we hurt ourselves, and to be open to receive when people do offer their help and support. In addition to being open to support from others, it’s important to be able to support yourself too.

If you’re working with abundance, I encourage you to think about your relationship to giving and receiving. How can I give and support others, and how can others support me? Feng shui isn’t just about moving things around. Changing the objects in your home is just one way you can start to manifest these deeper philosophical concepts in your physical world.

by Anjie Cho