Feng Shui for Friendship and Community

Photo by Anjie Cho Architect PLLC

I’ve noticed that a lot of people are yearning for more friendship and community right now. The holiday season in particular brings up a lot of feelings around belonging connections with other people. It’s a time when many people are thinking about creating a greater sense of family, whether that’s with their family of origin or their family of friends. 

There are a few places in your home that relate to friendships, and one important one is your dining table. A lot of people nowadays aren’t using their dining tables for the purpose of dining. Especially since the pandemic began, many people are using the dining table as a substitute desk for their work-from-home space. Even before the pandemic, I found that many people didn’t end up eating around their dining room table. While eating around the kitchen island is fine, it’s also important to eat around the dining table sometimes if you want to invite more friendships into your life. Your dining table represents how you connect to your community. It’s the place in your home where you can break bread and enjoy a meal with close friends. 

If you are looking for more friendships, deeper friendships, or more community, take a look and see if your dining table is being neglected. If it is, one simple thing you can do is to just start using it. Even if you have to use your dining table for work or other purposes as well, try cleaning it off and giving it some attention. Then, start eating some of your meals there. 

You can also notice whether there is enough space around your dining table for the friends you want to invite into your home. If there’s just enough room for you and your immediate family, you might want to make space for more friends by adding an extra chair.

If you live in a smaller home and don’t have room for a dining table, do the best you can with what you have. You might need to make accommodations when you do have friends over, and move some of your personal things out of the way to make space for them. You can also create smaller place settings so that there is more room for people to sit and move around. It also might be that you need to go out in the world more, and create connections with friends at restaurants or at other people’s homes.

by Anjie Cho

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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

A Feng Shui & Flower Conversation

Recently I was chatting with Katie Hess of LotusWei about feng shui and flowers. We realized there were so many fun tips that we could share with you, so we hopped on an Instagram Live for a fun chat on how to bring in more love, connection & community through flowers & feng shui. You can watch our conversation here!

Right now, many of us are really craving community and authentic connection with the people in our lives. Feng shui and flower essences can both be helpful tools for cultivating these qualities, and they work really beautifully in tandem. Together, they help us focus on both our inner worlds and our sacred spaces. Here are a few of our favorite ways to use feng shui and flowers to invite more love, connection, and community. 

Feng Shui & Flowers for Communication

One thing that’s always relevant to creating deeper relationships is communication. If you can’t communicate well, it’s hard to make connections or ask for help and support. In feng shui, communication is related to the metal element and the doors in your home. Your front door, as well as other doors inside your home, represent your mouth. How you treat your doorways can offer clues about how you communicate. Many people have clutter behind their doors that prevents the door from opening a full 90 degrees. This is equivalent to someone mumbling, or speaking without fully opening their mouth. It also blocks your ability to receive connections, because you’re only allowing a small portion of qi (life force energy) to come in. If one of your doors can’t open fully at the moment, try clearing out whatever is behind it to welcome more energy and connections to flow your way. 

One flower essence that pairs well with opening up your doors is cannonball, a gorgeous flower that grows on trees in southeast Asia. This flower increases our ability to hold space for others, be more vulnerable, and get in touch with our own vulnerability. Cannonball is one of the flowers in LOTUSWEI’s Open Heart blend, which also helps us to be more curious and engaged. 

Stone fruit flowers like bonsai plum and nectarine are also really great for feeling supported. They can help you to feel like you are surrounded by love and friendships, instead of feeling like you are under attack or that something bad is going to happen. 

Feng Shui & Flowers for Friendship

When it comes to friendships, one area to look at from a feng shui perspective is your dining room table. Many people who tend to have shallow friendships or who have trouble holding onto friendships have their dining table right by the front door. This often correlates with people coming and going frequently in your life. Also, if you keep friends in the most public part of your home, closest to the door, that doesn’t encourage vulnerability and intimacy. If you would like to cultivate deeper friendships and your dining table is near the front door, try bringing it further into your home. If you can’t do that, you can use a mirror to reflect your dining table and bring it back into your home energetically. You may also want to pay attention to how many chairs you have. If you only have one chair and you are wanting to build a community around you, try making space for the people you want to invite in by adding more chairs. 

Jade vine is a flower essence that can help us to really connect and engage with people, especially people we wouldn’t normally connect with, and in unexpected ways. It helps us feel protected, which can be especially helpful for introverts who can sometimes feel drained after spending time with others. Jade vine gives us a sense of protective strength within ourselves that allows us to deeply, intimately engage with the people around us. 

Feng Shui & Flowers for Love

In feng shui, we use a tool called the bagua map, which is a mandala laid over a home. It has different areas that correspond to different areas of life.

One of these areas is called Kun, and it’s connected to love and partnership, as well as the mother element, all internal organs, the color pink, and yin earth. It’s also about healing yourself and your feminine side, and being soft and receptive. To find this area in your bedroom, stand in your bedroom doorway looking in and find the far right corner. Notice what you have in this area. Is there a prickly cactus plant? A pile of dirty clothes? Take a moment to notice what is in this corner of your bedroom. Think about what that symbolizes to you, and what you can learn from that. 

If you do want to cultivate more softness, the flowers in LOTUSWEI’s Infinite Love (Hong Kong orchid, wild hawkweed, fireweed, and pink magnolia) can be really supportive. To use this in tandem with feng shui, you may want to spray the Infinite Love mist in the love and partnerships area of your bedroom, with the intention of clarifying that area. 

Another part of the feng shui bagua that can be related to love is Xun, which represents abundance and prosperity. It’s also connected to your self-worth. If you don’t feel worthy of receiving love, or you are stingy when it comes to giving love, this might be an area that you want to work on. Xun is the far left corner when you are standing in your bedroom doorway looking in. Once you’ve located this area, you can also notice what you see there and what that means to you. 

If you want to deepen your sense of self-worth, you might want to work with LOTUSWEI’s Fierce Compassion blend, which includes rhododendron, hollyhock, and rose. You can spray the mist in the abundance area of your home, or you can bring in a painting or photograph of one of these flowers. Another way to work with flowers is to create your own artwork. If you’d like, you can display it in your home, and the act of drawing imagery is a healing practice in itself. 

We encourage you to work with the flowers and feng shui principles that feel most resonant to you, and we hope this helps you start to cultivate more love, connection, and community in your life! 

by Anjie Cho and Katie Hess

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Katie Hess is a flower alchemist, author of Flowerevolution and founder of LOTUSWEI, one of the world’s leading floral apothecaries. With her signature elixirs featured in O, The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times and the LA Times, her flower-powered community is thriving in over 15 countries.

Follow Katie on Instagram: @iamkatiehess

Visit Katie’s Website: lotuswei.com

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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

Feng Shui for Your Dining Table

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

When was the last time you used your dining table for dining? What about the last time you used it for something other than dining? We often tend to use our dining tables for other activities, including working. This is probably especially true recently, with so many people working from home. Sometimes, we even use our dining tables as a storage area.

Your dining table is a space to nourish your body, and a place to connect with your friends and family. It represents how you take care of yourself as well as your relationships. Your home represents you and is affected by you, so when you neglect certain areas of your home, it can reflect upon how you treat different areas of your life. 

If possible, take time every day to eat mindfully at your dining table. Just like you wouldn’t want your friendships or nourishment to become neglected, it’s important not to neglect your dining table and allow it to get cluttered or dusty. If you are working from home currently and space is at a minimum, it’s possible that you do need to use your dining table as a desk as well. Instead of eating amongst your work papers at the end of the day, take a moment to put away the items connected to your work before you sit down to eat. Sometimes we’re in such a rush because we have a poverty mentality and we think we are running out of time. In reality, it doesn’t take that long to set up a nice meal for yourself and eat mindfully. 

If you don’t have a dining table, create a small space dedicated to eating mindfully, at least once per day. I encourage you to make a dedication to take care of yourself in this way.  This might mean clearing off the coffee table, turning off the TV, and finding a beautiful placemat and dish for your dinner each night. Details like this can make your meal a more nourishing experience. By making space for a lovely meal, you’re making space to nurture yourself. 

If you want to learn more feng shui tips for each room in your home, be sure to check out my book, Holistic Spaces: 108 Ways to Create a Mindful and Peaceful Home.

by Anjie Cho

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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