In addition to wishing you a happy new year, I wanted to offer some direction from a feng shui point of view on how to welcome 2021, and a few things that I’m doing. The start of a new year, whether it’s the western new year, lunar new year, Jewish new year, or another date that marks a new cycle, is a good time to reflect on the passing of time and also to welcome in new energies, especially with ritual. In feng shui, we do a lot of rituals that relate to the home.

My approach to feng shui is to begin by looking at the home, because we can make changes there that feel doable and even exciting. However, it’s really important to see that our inner environments and our homes are interconnected and interdependent, and they’re not separate from each other. There’s a lot we can learn from our homes.

One thing I like to do to welcome the new year is to acknowledge that my home is something that is connected to me, and not separate from me or from any of us. This helps me appreciate my home and environment. Even simple practices like offering gratitude to your home can start to change the qi, or energy, in your life and in your spaces.

Another thing I’m doing is to start working on a beautiful journal I received from a friend. Part of what I’ll be doing there is looking at how I can begin to simplify my life, and also reflecting upon what I learned this year. I did a self-led meditation retreat over the holidays, and something that’s been coming up for me is that although it’s been a really challenging year for all of us, I’m grateful that the pandemic brought us together on a global level, and we all began to see how we’re all interconnected and interdependent. Even oceans can’t separate us. We’re all connected in this vast network, and we can resonate with other people from all over the world.

This network of connection includes our homes, too. Like I said above, we’re connected to our homes and our spaces. You can talk to your home in English, in another language, or just talk through your energy, but I recommend you offer thanks to your home somehow. Then, make a list of what you’d like to keep and what you’d like to let go of, and how you can simplify. It might also be interesting to see if there’s anything you can do in your feng shui to correspond to how you are simplifying your life.

I hope this gives you some ideas for how to welcome 2021, and I’m wishing you all a happy new year!

by Anjie Cho