Q&A Sunday: The Water Element as a Precious Resource

Photo by Anastasia Taioglou on Unsplash

Photo by Anastasia Taioglou on Unsplash

Can you talk about how water is connected to wealth and abundance?

Water is one of the five elements, or five phases, that we use as a tool in feng shui. In addition to water, the five phases include earth, fire, wood, and metal. Water is the element related to wisdom and career, as well as wealth. Your wealth and prosperity is a resource like water, and it flows like water.

I talked recently on the podcast about how fixing a leak in your home is a way of recognizing that water is a precious resource. Even one drop of water is so precious and meaningful, and we can receive a lot of teachings from that. When we take the time to care for our home, and take care of things like leaks, we also begin to consider ourselves precious and valuable. Something as simple as acknowledging a leak in your home, rather than ignoring it, and taking the time and effort to fix it, is really a way of recognizing how precious water is. This also connects to valuing the wisdom of others and our own innate wisdom, since water is connected to wisdom. 

Feng shui translates to wind and water. Feng is wind, and shui is water. These are the most important elements that we need as humans to thrive. We need our breath, which is wind, and we are made up of mostly water. We need these two things in order to thrive. 

I encourage you to look at how you work with the water element in your life. It could be something as simple as fixing a leak. It could also be thanking the water that you consume. We need water so much, to cleanse and hydrate our bodies. The small gesture of thanking water and acknowledging its preciousness will trickle back to how you value your own preciousness. 

by Anjie Cho

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

Greenwashing and How to Avoid It

With the increased focus worldwide on taking better care of our planet and preserving our natural resources, marketing campaigns have started to focus on sustainability as a selling point in many fields. This is an awesome move if the company really is an active advocate for preserving water, energy and the like; however, many times companies toss a green marketing claim to consumers based on little to no actual action. Customers who fall for these claims and purchase advertised products from companies who aren't actually green are doing little to help save our planet and, in reality, may be unwillingly doing more harm than good. We call this "greenwashing."

Fortunately, greenwashing is a villain that can be stopped relatively easily if consumers are careful and pay close attention to products they purchase. The most accurate way to avoid being greenwashed is to properly research "green" products before purchasing. If your favorite detergent company has just launched a green cleaner, take the time to check facts about what exactly makes this new detergent qualify as green.

On this same note, avoiding greenwashing is about more than just ensuring that you buy holistic products. The idea behind going green requires that we do everything in our power to reduce the carbon footprint each of us leaves on the world. In this way, we can directly save many of the non-renewable resources we're currently flying through. That said, even if a product really is "green" on the consumer side, if the company is required to use more energy and produce more waste in order to create the product, perhaps promoting its production isn't the best thing for our planet. Just like you research your products, research the companies who make them. Are they really following a green initiative or just trying to make a buck off the good efforts of others?

I'm very happy to see the overwhelming number of new environmentally friendly options on the market, but remember the reason for these products. If we aren't actually conserving the earth's resources, perhaps these campaigns are less "green" and more "greenwash."

by Anjie Cho

Non-Toxic Cleaning Products

No doubt the reasons for purchasing highly advertised and recommended cleaning products are almost all, if not entirely, based on the goal of keeping your home clean so that your family can live a long, healthy life. Unfortunately, purchasing these chemical agents most often accomplishes exactly the opposite effect, filling households with tainted air supply and ultimately resulting in a plethora of health issues including, but certainly not limited to, asthma, allergies, eye irritation and nausea.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has noted that indoor air quality (IAQ) can be anywhere from two to five times as polluted as the air we breathe outside. This is due to a range of factors including chemicals in decorating materials (like paint) and highly toxic cleaning agents. Store-bought cleaning products come with a laundry list of hard-to-pronounce chemicals, all of which you repeatedly release into your family’s internal atmosphere every time you use them to provide a “clean” environment. Fortunately, it’s perfectly possible to do away with these cleaning materials once and for all and still rest easy in a clean, non-toxic home. 

Switching to homemade, non-toxic cleaning supplies is as easy as looking up time-tested recipes online or in books and committing to using these substances in place of toxic agents. The best part? A healthier family isn’t the only positive outcome to making this change. Eliminating toxic cleaning supplies from your home is also a great way to ensure that children don’t accidentally come into contact with these harmful materials, whether snooping around in cabinets or lovingly offering “help” during cleaning times.

Aside from creating an all-around healthier living environment for you and your family, going green and non-toxic in the area of cleaning can save money by a long shot. Rather than paying per bottle for toxic concoctions, there are numerous ways to combine safe, cheap, regular household chemicals to create non-toxic cleaning supplies for your home, and many of these substances can be purchased for pennies on the dollar, especially in bulk. Not to mention many of these products also have other uses in the home, from laundry detergent to cooking to more.

On a global scale, reducing the use of toxic chemicals in your home also increases the quality of the outdoor environment as well as the amount of safe drinking water available to our population. When you use toxic cleaners, chemicals are released into the air, and though they most immediately pollute indoor air, they eventually make their way outdoors and, ultimately, into the ozone. Pouring chemicals into drains and washing them away results directly in pollution of the water supply we use for safe use and consumption, thereby reducing the already tiny 1% we have for use.

by Anjie Cho