In this post, we go over the rules of feng shui and how to add it to your home or living space.

What is Feng Shui?

Feng Shui is an ancient Chinese philosophy, meaning “wind and water,” with a history spanning over 4,000 years. It addresses six life aspects: health, wealth, love, family, career, and well-being, through self-awareness and environmental changes.

Feng Shui is not a strict set of rules but a personalized, long-term practice adaptable to one’s lifestyle and goals. It fosters a connection between our inner energies and surroundings.

People turn to Feng Shui when seeking positive life changes and invite good energy with intentions. This practice incorporates ancient Chinese wisdom like Yin and Yang and Chi energy, aiming to harmonize the energies in one’s space.

Don’t miss out on our guide: Everything About Feng Shui.

How To Use Feng Shui

Applying Feng Shui is the difference between passive acceptance for the way things are, and taking responsibility for your life.

Chances are, if you’re reading this it’s because you want to make a change. Lucky for you, Feng Shui can help you do that.

Understand that Feng Shui isn’t a nonsense woowoo practice with no base of reality. Instead it is simple wisdom that is within reach of anyone who wants to “take control of their life” or “co-create with the universe.”

Feng Shui is a practical philosophy and part spiritual practice, because you are bringing your awareness to your space and how it affects you and your “energies”.

You do this by paying attention to how your life is going right now, then apply Feng Shui to help remedy the areas you desire.

Although the best time to apply Feng Shui is when you move into a new living space, since there is new energy to tap into, you can always make gradual adjustments to your current living space to “free up” and “unblock” any energy flow.

By making gradual changes in your current living environment, you are able to notice the effects happening to your being.

Since Feng Shui can neither be bad nor good, taking your time to slowly add, remove, and replace items in your space will give you the time to see if it makes your life easier and better, or harder and less satisfying.

Feng Shui is very personal and different person-to-person. What works for you may not work for everyone else.

What are Feng Shui Rules & Principles

Here we will go over some fundamentals when it comes to feng shui practices. Feel free to experiment with what your gut tells you to try. As long as your heart and mind are filled with good intentions, the outcome will carry a better essence.

Here are 4 principles you must keep in mind when applying feng shui:

Keep your goals and desired outcomes in mind. Generally speaking, most people want to have a apply feng shui to their future vision of what they want their life to look like—but the best approach is to focus on the present and how you want your days to look like. Let go of your fixed ideas of achievement.

Feng Shui works best when you focus on what gives you productive energies in the now, with a general direction you want to go in life—without being energetically stuck in your ego’s specific desires (be flexible and you will acquire successes that you haven’t even thought of).

Listen to your intuition. Many issues in your space will be fixed by listening and honoring your gut instinct. Feng Shui is largely an intuitive practice, much like analytical psychology, or eastern philosophies.

Although your conscious mind seeks solidified information on Feng Shui, something in you is already a wise feng shui practictioner—at least when it comes to particular furnishings in your living space. Consider both your intuition and feng shui fundamentals.

Feng Shui is not a magic bullet. This practice isn’t inherently going to lead you down a direct path to winning the lottery or finding the love of your life. Do not use feng shui with the intention of controlling your life towards very specific goals. Instead, consider it a way to align your desired energies to a desired direction of life.

This is an intuitive practice that invites what is meant to be yours and what the will of the world wants for you, with some influence from your comparatively puny will. Your rigid desire for a certain career position won’t give you fulfillment, that’s the lie of your ego—

Feng Shui will help unblock energies that are stifling your potentials that will bring your fulfillment (this can also include your egoic goals, but it will definitely attract other means of fulfillments you hadn’t even considered).

Be present. You want to build a living space that makes you feel good right now. Because a living space that feels good now may also be the one that makes you feel good tomorrow and so on.

This practice is a slow building-up of energy in your environment and inner life (outer and inner journeys always happen simultaneously).

Building up the energies in your home, by inviting and unblocking, will unlock potentials that your conscious and unconscious minds will actively and passively attract (with or without your conscious consent).

How To Add Feng Shui To Your Home

Measure the impact a piece has. Anytime you add or remove an item from your space, make sure you measure the effect it has been having in your space and on you.

For example, if you feel compelled to remove something from your study, use your brain and consider why you feel called to take it out of the space. You might reflect on it and discover that it is inviting yin energy that you find stifling in your purpose-driven yang space.

The more awareness you build on how and why pieces impact you, the more you build your understanding on the abstract concept of “energies” in your life.

This is most noticeable when you clear out clutter or throw out items from past toxic relationships—you free up energy to invite, or “manifest” something new and better.

Measure the energetic intention’s relationship with time. Sometimes you will add an item to your space because you feel that it will bring a certain outcome into your life. Take note how long it takes for that item’s energy to inspire and invite that result into your life.

If it doesn’t, you will grow more aware of how much is stifles your energies as it slowly attains the status of “clutter” in your life. However, if you notice positive changes happening in your life, take note of what they are and how much time there has been between dedicating an item to your space and the related, or many times, unrelated result that you’ve attracted.

This is where the idea of a “lucky” item comes into play. Somehow in some way it’s been blessed, the same way a loved one will make you dinner “with love”—it just tastes better, and carries positive meaning/energies into your life.

Observe each item’s positive or negative effects. Sometimes dedicating a new item to your space will invite an undesirable outcome into your life. You can consider this item as “cursed” or at least blocking/stifling the energies in your room.

Yes, I’m aware that this sound superstitious, but understand that Feng Shui is the act of affecting your inner life by changing your outer circumstances—and your mind works by telling stories and attaching meaning to the things in your life (consciously ***and unconsciously). People heal from their traumas by understanding their past, their own “myth”.

You are using Feng Shui as a energetic practice in the present to further your own “human myth” or “hero’s journey”. These stories, which are inherent to the storytelling human mind, takes everything in your life into FULL account—that which is within your conscious narrative, the periphery your mind neglects, and the unconscious entirety that is the World beyond your comprehension.

A simple example of this is adding a portrait to your space that the household dislikes and is vocal about, which ruins your mood and costs you an opportunity. Your mind can unconsciously consider the addition of that portrait as the beginning of a chapter in your life that you don’t want to have.

Consider adding items similar to dating, it’s easy to overlook red flags, but it ultimately shifts you into living out bad habits and being less fulfilled. The good news is that sometimes “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”. Go to a thrift store and you’ll find an exciting item that someone else found to be clutter.

Respect the process. Be patient and take things slowly. The human animal dislikes sudden change and is prone to self-sabotage when it makes an overzealous “innovative” life change. Add and remove a few items at first and measure the changes.

Let these changes and your intuitions influence the following changes. But don’t change too much at once or you might overwhelm yourself, your household, and your environment. You won’t be able to measure what items created which changes, or how long the results took to occur.

Change is also very overwhelming—how many times have your started a new diet out of the blue, only to self-sabotage within a few days. This happens because you aren’t respecting yourself, more specifically your body and mind.

Although stopping cold turkey works—it only works 1 out of… let’s say a thousand times. If you’ve been attempting huge changes that go nowhere, it’s because you aren’t respecting your mind and body—while your conscious mind is up for the task, the unconscious mind/body is being put into shock.

The unconscious mind is stronger than your limited conscious mind, always. This is why forces stronger than your conscious will always set you back, and sometimes worse. You are better off being patient and actually getting somewhere instead of making huge, sudden changes and getting nowhere.

There’s a reason why “slow and steady wins the race”.