What Does Your Home Want to Tell You?

Guest User May 11, 2022

Living room with grey cough, black reclining chair, circular table, windows, and large abstract art. — Photo and design by Anjie Cho Architect PLLC

Something that we teach our feng shui students at the Mindful Design School is the importance of deep listening. How often during a conversation do you find yourself thinking ahead to what you want to share, instead of really listening to what the other person is saying?

I also invite you to think about listening when it comes to your home. It’s possible that you haven’t ever taken the time to listen to your home before. Your home is a place that has been there for you — it may have changed locations, outfits, or colors many times throughout your life, but your home has always been there to support you in some way. You’ve been in a relationship with this entity, your home, for many years. Maybe your home has been something you’ve relied on, or even something you’ve resented, but have you ever stopped to listen to it?

If you haven’t taken the time to listen to your home, I invite you to give it a try and see what your home has to say. If you keep doing the same thing over and over again, there may be a lot of messages that you are missing. When you instead stop and pay attention to the world around you, you can start to receive messages that you never would have known otherwise.

In case this has encouraged you to start listening to your home, I want to share a few practical ways you can do this. First, I would recommend taking some time to sit in your favorite part of your home. You could set a timer for nine minutes, and just sit there in silence and listen. See what arises, and allow a voice that may have been forgotten for a long time to come forward.

You could also do the same thing with the part of your home that feels the most difficult or challenging. Go to that place in your home, spend nine minutes there in silence, and receive whatever messages your home would like to share with you.

Listening to your home and acknowledging it can be a practice. In this way, you can start to be grateful to your home not only by relying on it, but also by stopping and allowing yourself to receive something from your home. Your home has always been there for you, so how can you now be there for your home? What wisdom can you receive from it?

by Anjie Cho

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

Are Fake Flowers Good Feng Shui?

Guest User March 23, 2022

Have you ever wondered whether it’s okay to use fake flowers for a feng shui adjustment? I get this question a lot, so I wanted to share my perspective.

In feng shui, we say that fresh, living flowers can unstick things that are stuck. They also help to lift the qi and the mood in your space. Flowers are a really important part of my life — I’m actually an Ikebana flower arrangement practitioner. Ikebana is quite a deep practice that’s about mindfulness, and it’s really a kind of meditation in action in the Zen tradition.

My teachers have taught me that fake flowers don’t impart the same qi as real flowers because they are not alive. If you want to have fake flowers in your home, that’s okay, but you wouldn’t use them for feng shui.

I also want to challenge you to think about why you would want to substitute something artificial for something real, especially in this day and age. Right now, a lot of our shared in-person experiences are being reduced, and when we do meet, we’re using online platforms instead. When this is the case, why would you also want to substitute something as beautiful and impermanent as flowers with something artificial? Usually it’s because people want their flowers to last longer, they don’t want to have to worry about taking care of their flower arrangement, or they feel that fresh flowers are too expensive.

But the impermanence of flowers is really what creates their beauty, and there are so many teachings we can receive from flowers. How can we look at life and really appreciate things that are fragile and precious, and show age? Not wanting to look at these things is like not wanting to age or show wrinkles, but this is part of the human experience, and it makes our lives so precious and rich.

I encourage you to treat yourself to some real, fresh flowers! You deserve it.

by Anjie Cho

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

Mindfulness of Spaces

Guest User May 12, 2021

Anjie Cho was featured on Mindfulness in the City

Buddhism teaches that we are interconnected and interdependent. This includes the spaces and environments that we live in and engage with everyday. Many of us spent more time at home in the past year than what we are accustomed to. What did that feel like? Did you cultivate a new relationship with your spaces?

How can we begin to connect to our world and see the beauty in each moment? Let’s investigate how mindfulness meditation can include awareness of the spaces around us.

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