Anjie Cho was featured on mindbodygreen

It's time to say hello to the Black Water Tiger, and bye-bye to the Year of the Ox. The lunar new year falls on February 1 this year, and with the Water Tiger, we can welcome some new dynamic energy. The water element also indicates a greater opening up of collective wisdom all around.

Every Chinese zodiac animal has a unique relationship to the Tiger, which may give you some insight into how to flow through 2022. Keeping the energetics in mind, we've pulled together a Chinese astrology forecast, feng shui tip, and a plant ally for each of the 12 animals.

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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

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.

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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.

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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

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