The Feng Shui Specialists Online Feng Shui Practitioner Certification Course Module Two

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Welcome back! You are about to begin Module Two of the Feng Shui Specialists Online Certification Course for Feng Shui Practitioner. The first few modules of this course are designed to put you in the mindset of the original thinkers who came up with this system of Qi movement and planning.

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It may seem like a lot of philosophy at first, but you will learn the more difficult parts with more ease if you understand the dynamics behind the practice.

We immerse ourselves in principles and then we will begin the practice. Try not to get ahead of yourself; this is the groundwork for the wonderful work you will do in the future as a Feng Shui Practitioner.

In Module One we learned that there are:

8 Dynamic Truths in Feng Shui. (Handout # 1)

Four Principles and Four Commitments.

The Four Principles are:

1. Everything is alive.
2. Everything is connected,
3. Everything is conscious
4. Everything is always changing.

The second half of the 8 Dynamic Truths of Feng Shui are:

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The Four Commitments of Feng Shui:

1. Live with what you love,
2. Put safety and comfort first,
3. Lighten your load, i.e. get organized!
4. Express yourself through your environment.

In Feng Shui we believe that All Lasting Change Comes from Within.

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Feng Shui is meant to balance and harmonize our inner and outer domains, so they are congruent. The outer must directly represent the inner and vice versa

Therefore, the symbolism of the things in our home shapes and reinforces our identity in either a positive or a negative way. Objects reveal aspects of our inner world, they can help us move towards integration and unity. How we place things in our home can be a vehicle for realizing our potential. Here we separate our consciousness from the subconscious. We now know that logic and reason comprise 12% of our brain’s usage while 88% is subconscious. Most of what gives form to our world comes from our subconscious, not our conscious mind.

A good barometer or insight into ourselves is take a look at the art in our home. Art is a perfect indicator of what’s going on in our unconscious.

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Feng Shui encourages the practice of Mindfulness. We learn to place items and arrange our environment with thought and intention.

Please read two articles on Mindfulness: https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/what-is-mindfulness-definition/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/what-matters-most/201711/3-definitions-mindfulness-might-surprise-you

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Let us continue our discussion about The Four Commitments in Feng Shui.

#1 Live With What You Love:

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After touring your home, room by room, you’ve had a new experience of your environment. You’ve become aware of certain feelings inside you as you observed your home. As you entered your environment, with fresh eyes what spoke to you and what wants to change? Some of you may have had the experience, where you say to yourself. “ Yikes, I do not believe I have been living with this!” Go ahead and act on that impulse. Get rid of it!

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From this moment on, anchor this experience in your environment. The feelings, the thoughts the memories. Allow your stuff to represent who you are now and allow your stuff to take you into your future, exactly the way you want to have, do and be in it.

From this day forward, do not live with anything that you do not love.

Artwork by Marlene Morris

Consider this: If your artwork or furniture is left over from a past relationship and the memories do not please you, get rid of it. (We’ll discuss how you do that coming up.)

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People live with so many things that they don’t have to. Only allow those items that give you joy and a good feeling to be around you in your environment.

Once a couple found they were having some stormy times in their marriage. In the bedroom they had hung a famous movie poster. The poster was a hideous scene from a well-known movie and the wife, on her side, looked right at the poster when she was in bed. On the man’s side, he looked straight into the bathroom. The woman explained that she was hesitant to move the poster because her husband was in that movie and it was an important memory for him. In the bedroom, the relationship is NOT between him and his career, but between them. The poster was replaced with a romantic poster of “the kiss.” representing unity and romance. The bathroom door was kept closed, so each of them had a view that was more conducive to love and relationship than before. It worked. They reported greater improvement in their closeness and more intimacy. He got to keep his poster and hung it in his office.

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Art is a good indicator of what’s going on in your unconscious. Usually we choose art because it matches the sofa, it matches the rug, or because there’s a nail already there. If we choose art to represent the images we want to have of our life, our goals and our wishes, we will shift our consciousness every day to that higher, aspirational level. The purpose of art should enlighten and inspire you.

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The process of touring your home is to elicit your own creative genius from within and give you a new set of Feng Shui eyes with which to look at the environment around you.

Pay attention to what your stuff is “saying.”

Observe what you are hearing.

Make the changes to reinforce the positive and uplift your mind, heart and soul.

This does not mean you have to spend a lot of money. You don’t need to change all of your furniture; you might need a can of paint or two and you will just need to enhance the balance and the color scheme with a rug, throw pillows, art, accessories, accents and touches of color!

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To decide what should go or stay: Ask yourself these key questions about your stuff: Six Questions will help you gain a clearer expression of yourself through your environment:

1. Do I love it?

2. Do I need it?

3. Does it reflect who I am?

4. How does it make me feel?

5. Does it need to be fixed or repaired?

6. When am I willing to begin?

From today on, you need to live with what you love. Your intuition knows exactly what works for you. You are constantly being driven to your greater good. Follow what appeals to you. You are on a steady path for renewal.

#2 The Second Commitment is: Always to put Safety and Comfort First.

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This thought-process requires that you baby-proof your home. Even if you don’t have a baby. The point being, if you have sharp edges in your home, like a coffee table, you’ll never feel quite safe in your own home.

Your subconscious will be afraid of the pain the edges can inflict.

Your subconscious reacts to subtle clues and retains a feeling of danger while you go merrily about your business. Think of a time when you were conscious about being in an unsafe place. This may be how your subconscious is feeling all the time when there are booby-traps in your environment; things you aren’t even aware of.

Here’s an example: When my friends had a baby, they were very conscious of the sharp edges that the baby might bang into when he started to walk.

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The biggest offender was the coffee table. They slit a garden hose in half, sideways and slid the hose over the edges of the coffee table. For years they lived with their hose-padded coffee table edge covers, but no one got hurt. I remember going to visit them when their son was in junior high school and they still had the hose around the coffee table. I asked them why it was still there, and they laughed, looked at each other and said, “I guess we forgot to take it off.” Funny and true.

Baby proofing your house means looking for wires that could trip you, edges that could bruise you, cabinets that protrude and you could hit your head, unlatched doors that swing out, low passage ways; anything that might cause injury.

Take a look around your house to make it a safe place for your visitors and for you. This is all for the benefit of your subconscious and what it might be feeling without you even realizing it.

This action also makes the room look cleaner and less cluttered.

So, we have #1 and 2: living with what we love and putting comfort and safety first.

Bottom line: Safety and comfort are the parents and beauty is the child. Beauty is born out of safety and comfort. If we walk into a room and we love it, then we know safety and comfort have been addressed and implemented. We feel safe and at ease.

#3: The 3rd Commitment is to: Lighten Your Load. Clear the path for the energy to flow.

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Dumpster is a sacred word in Feng Shui. Rent one for your birthday and use it.

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Look at it this way: If you make a meal in your kitchen and you let all the bowls, and spoons and the pots and pans, blenders and such pile up, and then you add the dishes, the glasses you used for dinner, which you never cleaned up and you leave them for a week, you have not only a mess of clutter, but you’d also have foul odors and breeding bacteria and disease.

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Can you imagine a professional chef cooking a 5-star meal in a kitchen cluttered with dirty pots and pans covered in yesterday’s crusted old food?

Think of the stuff in your house doing exactly the same thing; piling up, blocking free access, creating psychic illness inviting energy bugs. It’s creating energetic discomfort. As you begin to look at your life through Feng Shui eyes, you’ll see how, if you remove the offenders you’ll open life up and let the live energy flow in. As a result, you will achieve an inner and an outer paradise. Get rid of your excess. Let it return to the world to nurture and sustain those who don’t have enough. If we let things go, we will attract to ourselves what we need and want. You’ll function better and more creatively.

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We all secretly desire to become more organized, don’t we? “Get organized!” The phrase rings in our head. This may be the most difficult part. But it is the key. And, because everything is always changing, you’re going to have to always be organizing.

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When we know that everything is alive and connected and we know that everything is always changing for the better, we need to know that each and every possession has a home. Truly, it means simplification. Remember when you just had one blender? And now you have four of them in the garage in case you get that second home in the mountains and you’ll need it? Give it away. (Those solutions coming up).

Terah Kathryn Collins tells this story in her classes: A professional organizer sent out flyers to her previous customers announcing a contest. Whoever could send her the most unusual thing they had in their garage or storage unit, she would give four hours of professional service to the winner. She received a lot of strange things. But the item that won was a goat bra. The people who bought it never had owned a goat, had not planned on owning a goat, but said it was a really good price.

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How many goat bras do you have in your home, garage, and storage places? This process is about mindfulness. You don’t need duplicates.

Systems experts can’t wait to get their hands on your stuff and organize your stuff. They thrive on your chaos. Hire them, or roll your sleeves up.

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When we simplify, organize and downsize, we become more fluid and creative. We allow the energy to go back to its source and not be encumbered in any way with the physical plane. As a society, we might be standing in front of ourselves and getting in our own way because of our excess. There’s no room for the new to come in. We must provide the open door and the space for the new to enter, unencumbered.

Here is a little tip: Your stuff secretly mates in the night. Two pens become four. Papers. Magazines. They all mate, reproduce like rabbits and suddenly you have a colony.

Here’s a motto borrowed from my dear friends the Slob Sisters, Pam Young and Peggy Jones:

They say, “If you haven’t danced in it, sat on it, mailed, watered or read it, in a year dump it.”

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If you miss your stuff, you can always go visit it on the weekends at the nearest Good Will.

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There is an Old Chinese saying, if you want change in your life move 27 things in your house. Start today. Move 27 things. Keep a list.

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Here are the Seven Rules for Clearing Clutter:

When you come across an item that you can live without ask yourself: Should I:

toss it?

store it?

give it away?

put it away.

donate it?

recycle it?

sell it?

Create 7 boxes and label them accordingly: TOSS, STORE, GIVE AWAY, PUT AWAY, DONATE, RECYCLE, SELL. Next, go through each room and decide where your stuff should go, place it in the correct box. When the box is full, replace it with an empty one. Labels are key, do it or you won’t remember which is which. (see chaos below)

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This process takes a while. You have to acquire the boxes, label them and then approach each room one at a time. Only do one room in a day. When you have filled the boxes, take them out to your car, deliver them to the proper places and begin again in the next room.

It will take you a week or more to go through each room, but when you do you will have created space for the Qi to flow and enter.

Watch: The Story of Stuff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GorqroigqM&vl=en

Commitment # 4: Express Yourself Through Your Environment. Many Americans are stifled in their creativity because they have so much stuff hanging around everywhere. Stuff underfoot, stuff overhead, stuff, stuff, stuff.

Think of it like a painter who faces a canvas that’s been painted over 20 times. The canvas is caked with layers of old paint and old thoughts. Get organized. A smart painter begins her work by first clearing the space, preparing the canvas and setting up her tools.

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Clear your canvas of the layers of paint, rid yourself of unnecessary stuff and achieve a clean, clear, open flow for Qi to breathe in your home.

Then, let your energy flow; let your creative energy thrive in this new uncluttered environment. This is your birthright.

Be like a detective and investigate your space.

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Make sure every item in your environment expresses who you are, who you want to become and that it represents wholeness and completeness.

It is no accident that Feng Shui Practice has come to the West to let us claim our birthright and clear our spaces to bring in fresh Qi.

If you bring things into order, then you will live in a dynamic environment which is a creative and empowering.

Choose to consciously acknowledge that you live in a dynamic universe “who” is constantly changing around you. You want to tap into the natural force of Qi and have it always serving you and affirming your thoughts and actions. You want to recognize that you are connected with everyone and everything is gloriously alive and bursting with goodness.

Bottom Line:

If you live with what you love, then you’ll take yourself to paradise. Comfort and safety will come first, and beauty will be born out of them. Clearing your path by lightening your load is they key so you can express yourself completely through your environment. When you simplify and organize you become more creative. The Qi can flow. Creativity cannot function and flourish in clutter.

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Your personal paradise is the place in which you will achieve your maximum potential and your ultimate fulfillment and purpose, unblocked by anything physical and totally connecting you to the energy of the universe.

Remember, energy needs to flow. If you block it or bottle it; it will back up or explode.

Allow your things and your space to represent your present and future exactly as you desire it to be.

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There is an old Chinese Proverb that was written in the 1^st century. It is a nice guideline for the internal energy work we do.

Hand out #2 Chinese Proverb:

Where there is light in the soul, there is beauty in the person,

Where there is beauty in the person

there is harmony in the home.

Where there is harmony in the home

There is honor in the nation,

Where there is honor in the nation,

There is peace in the world.”

Link to listen to song version: https://www.omniglot.com/songs/bcc/cp.php

The Chinese centered their lives around order, flow and generational sequence. It is imperative to understand that when becoming a Feng Shui Practitioner. The principles and philosophical beliefs will make more sense to the western-schooled mind and open up the pathways of intuition and understanding of the methods they used.

We must first, as practitioner clear and cleanse our own homes and spaces. That is an important step in being able to coach others. We set the example by being the example. Please read:

Homework:

1. Read the translation and explanation of the original 1^st century poem:

https://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=gb&id=10383

1. Read Pages: 20-29 and 41-48 in Feng Shui, The Easy Way.
2. Take the Module 2 Test

Coming up next, we will have a brief introduction to Chinese Philosophy. The Origin of Qi, Yin-Yang and the foundations of Feng Shui. Then we will move onto the Five Elements, The Bagua Chart and the Nine Squares of Life.