Beauty as a Birthright: Is Beauty Impermanence?

Anjie Cho March 30, 2022

Anjie Cho in a white shirt smiling. There is text against a background that looks like a starry night sky. Text says "Beauty as a birthright: Decoding the beauty culture. Is beauty impermanence? Special guest Anjie Cho, founder of Holistic Spaces"

Anjie Cho was featured on Beauty as a Birthright

In our first guest episode, we chat with New York based architect and founder of Holistic Spaces — Anjie Cho — who combines interconnectedness and interdependence of spaces through the mastery of the art of Feng Shui.

She is the author of Holistic Spaces: 108 Ways to Create a Mindful and Peaceful Home, a book inspired by the intersection of feng shui, green design, Buddhist and Taoist philosophies, and environmental psychology. Anjie is also a teacher of dharma arts and meditation in the Shambhala Buddhist lineage and for Dharma Moon. She is the feng shui expert at The Spruce, a regular blog contributor to MindBodyGreen and has been featured in dozens of publications including: the New York Times, Domino Magazine and BuzzFeed.

In this episode, we get to know Anjie beyond her successful professional achievements to chat intimately about how she defines beauty. Anjie shares about her upbringing as a Korean-American in Los Angeles, and how being an "outsider" led her to being a Google famous goth! From grey hairs to the practice of Japanese floral design — Ikebana — we chat about the the impermanence and the imperfections of beauty.

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

Jewelry and Art in Everyday Life

Guest User August 4, 2021

Today I wanted to talk about different types of rituals that you can incorporate to bring more art into your everyday life. Did you know you can also apply feng shui principles to your body, in addition to your spaces? The core of feng shui is about looking at your qi, which is life force energy. Your energy is not separate from your space, other people, or the cosmos.

One way that I like to enhance my qi in my everyday life is through the jewelry that I select. Sometimes, I do this by wearing representations of animals that inspire me. For instance, I have a bee necklace that was given to me by my flower teacher. I didn’t wear it a lot at first, but later I felt very called to wear it. One of my healers actually told me that the wasp was an animal I could learn from at that time. Learning from an animal doesn’t always mean you have to read about it or listen to someone speak about it. You can also learn through wearing something that symbolizes that animal.

I also received a beautiful turtle bracelet a while ago. I love the turtle, because there’s a really beautiful story from Buddhism that talks about how precious each human life is, and I think sometimes we forget that. Wearing something like this on my wrist is a constant reminder of how precious our human lives are. I wear it intentionally on my right wrist, which is for giving. The left hand is for receiving. This Buddhist story is about how each human life is as precious and rare as a blind sea turtle swimming through the ocean. Once every hundred thousand years, the sea turtle comes up to the surface and happens to pop its head up through a yoke that’s floating in the middle of the ocean. That is how rare our human lives are. This also gives me a spiritual reminder to value every single person that I interact with, and to value all that I receive in my life.

Lastly, I also like to wear my jade bracelet. In feng shui and in Asian cultures, jade represents purity, long life, and good luck. It also has a weight to it, and it reminds me of my Asian lineage. The color is quite interesting too . It’s a light green, which is connected to the wood element in feng shui. Wood is about growth and vitality. My jade bracelet also has some white, which is the metal element, and metal brings in this idea of beauty and precision. This is something I’ve been working with recently: how can I start to see more beauty in all aspects of my life?

I hope this inspires you to bring more awareness to your personal feng shui, and to invite more beauty into your life through the things you intentionally put on your body.

by Anjie Cho

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

How to Feng Shui Your Beauty Cabinet

Guest User November 18, 2020

originally written for mindbodygreen

In feng shui, areas and objects in your spaces represent something deeper. Your beauty cabinet, for example, is where you keep skin care products, hair styling tools, makeup and other toiletries, all tools that assist you in showing your best face and your inner radiance to the world. Giving your beauty cabinet the attention it deserves will maximize its potential and can reflect positively in how you view yourself and how you show up in your life.

Whether you have a beauty cabinet chock full of the latest products, or you just have a few precious bottles that you use daily, here are 3 tricks to give you and your beauty cabinet some radiant energy!

Toss the expired items

I think it goes without saying, but just in case... be sure to go through and toss any expired items. It may be hard to let go of some of your favorite or most expensive products, but it's important to know that using them past their expiration date can actually negate their effects! Using expired skincare products can essentially mean putting bacteria on your face, which can lead to irritation, inflammation, redness, bumps, rashes, swelling, and even infections.

Keeping them around isn't great feng shui either. The symbolism of a cabinet crammed with expired items is that your body is also cluttered with this similar energy, which is the opposite of radiant. We want to attract freshness and spaciousness instead of outdated, forgotten and spoiled qi.

Add Citrine to the Center of your cabinet

When I think of radiance, I immediately think of citrine, a quartz crystal with orange tones. Love is In The Earth, my crystal bible, states that citrine “promotes a radiance from within the self, culminating in a constant happy disposition. It brightens even the darkest corner of one’s perceived reality, and helps one to ‘laugh without restraint’.” I think we could all use some of that!

The reason why it goes in the center is that when we lay the feng shui bagua map on your cabinet, the center area relates to health and overall well-being. It also touches all the other 8 areas of life in the feng shui map, including but not limited to career, abundance, and relationships. The center touches all the aspects of your life! Among the many benefits of this stone include the ability to cleanse negative energy as well as clear itself. It will keep your beauty cabinet filled with bright and positive qi.

Change out your vanity light

The lighting around your beauty cabinet helps to bring clarity and light to whatever you're doing, whether it’s putting on makeup, washing your face, or brushing your teeth. The light also represents fire energy in feng shui. Fire energy is all about radiance, like the sun at high noon. It's a good idea to clean and dust off the bulb and fixtures periodically.

Something to consider as you’re choosing a lightbulb for this area is the temperature. If you happen to have a CFL or LED bulb (as opposed to an incandescent), opt for a bulb with temperatures of 2700K or 3000K (kelvin) or higher. The higher the number, the cooler the color of the light. You don't want to go much cooler than 3500K, or it will feel blueish.

by Anjie Cho