FACE YOUR SPACE, MEET YOUR CHALLENGE

WORDS: DR ANNA MARKOVIĆ PLESTOVIĆ

When you look at your workplace, or at your home, and think of what and how you want to accomplish there, you have to ask yourself “does this space do that?”

If your place increases productivity, lifts morale, rein­forces identity, facilitates prop­er interactions, boosts creativ­ity, lifts the energy, and, above all, makes people smile, then it probably is designed in accor­dance with teachings of Feng Shui. It should be so, because Feng Shui is the ancient Chinese science and art that can help you find the best, most harmo­nious, most supporting design for your space. Its aim is to find out how the space you are living and working in can provide you with maximum support across all (or at least most) areas of your life.

On the other hand, if you look at your space, ask yourself the question “does this space do that?” and the answer is “no, it does not do that” or “it does that in some aspects, but…” then there is at least one area of your life in which you are fac­ing obstacles and holdbacks, re­gardless of the efforts you are putting in to make things hap­pen, to accomplish your goals. As a rule, we tend to materialize in our space the obstacles we face in our life, and it is by rec­ognizing and dissolving or re­defining these spatial obstacles that Feng Shui can “heal” the problems in life through chang­ing interior arrangements.

Feng Shui is a complex science and an art, which re­quires quite a lot of knowledge and experience to properly di­agnose a place and to devise ef­ficient solutions. Feng Shui does that by reading patterns man­ifested in spatial and material forms, assessing the informa­tion about qualities and mean­ings retrieved from position and orientation of your place, from its external shape and internal structure, as well as from ar­rangement of furniture, color schemes and other character­istics. It also reads the pattern of your personal energy and the patterns of time materialized in your space. In the end it puts layer after layer of patterns atop each other and finds the inter­secting points of harmony and disharmony, points to be healed and points to be enhanced.That is why I usually advise against the popular do-it-yourselves one-size-fits-all Feng Shui, since it is highly unlikely to have any true effect.

Still, you can use some Feng Shui to change your life, but be prepared to forget all about the popular “do”-s and “do not”-s listed in magazines, and everything you ever heard about three-legged toads, wind chimes, mirrors and other “feng shui cures”. Better give up run­ning around vacuuming, scrub­bing and dusting in order to “enhance your Feng Shui”. In­stead, if you really want to find out what holds you back, find out which part of your place you avoid to see, avoid to think about. Be prepared to face your life`s challenges in your space.

Take the floor plan of your space (or make a sketch if you do not have one), and try to re­member when did you made the last major alteration in each part of the space. Besides changing floors, furniture or overall color scheme which can be counted as major alterations, you can also take into account rearranging existing furniture. Think about every part of the space, not just the rooms. When did you change something in your hall­way or in your pantry? Is there a room that you do not use? When did you thoroughly sort through which closet? If you have stor­age places for rarely used items, when did you last check wheth­er you use all of those? Write it down on the sketch or plan, like “3 years ago” or “last Tuesday”. Go into as much details as you can.

When you feel you cannot possibly remember any more dates and changes, locate the place that has not been dis­turbed for the longest time. That is probably the spatial ex­pression of the obstacles you are facing in your life. You can go into self-reflection, trying to establish what is it that is keep­ing you from changing that spot, what type of values and mean­ings are you preserving by keep­ing the spatial status quo of an­other times, or, you can simply and swiftly introduce some rad­ical changes in the area, and see what happens.

By making radical chang­es to that specific spot, you en­able energy to circulate freely, dissolving old forms that have become obstacles, and defin­ing new, more supporting forms for your present life, the actual state of affairs.