Q&A Sunday: Welcoming New Friendships

What is a good way to welcome new friendships in your life? Not just superficial friends but actually friends with whom you truly connect and are supportive?

Charmaine B.M., Morganville, NJ

Hi Charmaine, 

Thank you so much for your question! It's a great one, because many people run into the same issue as we get older, in that it's not as easy to welcome new friends into our lives. It's harder to meet people, and we also tend to grow apart from former friends. Not everyone walks the same path, and sometimes friends don't serve us as well once our paths diverge. 

My first suggestion for you is to look at the location of your dining room and dining table in your home. How close are they to the front door? In your case, it's better if the dining room and table are further towards the back of the home. If they are close to the front door, is it possible for you to move the dining room or table towards the back of the house / room, past the mid-line? Your dining table represents how you break bread with people, interact with them and connect with them. When the dining area is close to the door, it may indicate superficial friendships coming into and leaving from your life quickly. Kind of like "dining and dashing!"

If you do have the situation in your home with the dining area near the front door, but can't change it, there's still hope! The second option, if the first is not available to you, is to place a mirror in the dining area. Choose a large mirror (the larger, the better) and set it up so that it reflects the dining table towards the back of your home. This means that when you look at the mirror, you're facing the back of the home. This energetically pulls your dining table back further into the home and therefore further into the feng shui bagua layout of your home. This may seem a bit confusing, so I encourage you to submit your floor plan, and I can specify which wall to use. 

I also suggest using your dining area often, if you don't already. These days we often neglect dining tables and end up using them as landing places for old mail, working at home and essentially everything but eating! In fact, if you're working at your dining room table too often, that could signify that you are spending too much time on work and not enough on cultivating friendships. Take some time to clean off your table, and host a dinner party or a few friends to activate that energy. 

Finally, activate the Benefactors area of your home. You're not just looking for superficial friends, but for people who can connect with and support you. This means you're looking for Benefactors, helpful people in your life who comfort and encourage you. To welcome these relationships, activate the Benefactors area of the bagua. You can do this by adding a heavy statue in this area to provide support and stability. You can also add plants to your Benefactors area, especially plants with red flowers. Red is auspicious in feng shui, and green plants stimulate new growth and new beginnings. 

If you'd like, send your floor plan along, and we'll take a more personal look at your dining area. If you're already working with a consultant, consider getting into the question a bit deeper and looking at your specific situation. Are you meeting lots of friends but not connecting? Do you not meet anyone? Do your friends often betray you? It's important to answer these questions so that you can take steps to adjust your space and life to make room for great friends!

by Anjie Cho

Thanks for reading our "Q&A Sunday".  We will be answering questions submitted by our readers. Click here to submit any Feng Shui or Green Design questions!

Q&A Sunday: Mirrors and Spirits

I have recently been getting into feng shui with the background of the I Ching and qi gong and have been enjoying your podcast. I am wondering if you had heard the same thing as I have, that mirrors only reflect energy but they are doorways for spirits to walk between the world. I have personally experienced a dark spirit walking through a mirror while I was sleeping, which is very dangerous and disturbing. Have you heard of this? What are your thoughts?

Samantha B., Bellevue, WA

Hi Samantha

Thank you for your question. For this one, I thought I’d have one of my beloved feng shui mentors, Barry Gordon, provide an answer. It may be more than you expected and not what you were looking for, but I think it’s a thorough and enlightening response :)

From Barry Gordon:

There's more than one answer to this question, depending upon whether you’re looking at it from the personal viewpoint or the universal viewpoint of natural mind. I’m a physicist, Feng Shui Master, and shaman.

There is a lot of confusion about mirrors in the more traditional forms of Chinese Feng Shui. The ultimate purpose of Feng Shui is to change that Qi of the person being helped. So from that viewpoint, we need to look at the effect of the mirror on the person’s mind. When I look at a mirror, I do not experience energy coming towards me. I experience the increase in spaciousness created by the mirror effect. So mirrors do not push energy away, they actually pull energy in, because they pull your mind in.

Since mirrors create the effect of enlarging a space, they also have a feeling that one is being pulled into or could move into the mirror. So metaphorically and perhaps neurologically, mirrors can appear to be a doorway. They are not a physical doorway. They're a mental doorway.

So, in your dreams, when you’re totally in your mind, the mirror can become a doorway. Your subconscious mind cannot distinguish very well between physical imagery, your experience of the physical world through the gates of your perception, and mental imagery which has much broader and more gates of perception available. That’s why so many healing techniques and methods to create a new future use visualization.

You have personally experienced a spirit in a mirror during a dream. I’ve also experienced them in mirrors and many other objects in the waking state. There are spirits all around us all the time, but our gates of perception have been trained not to allow them into our consciousness. They are sentient beings just like us. They just have less physical substance, so they're less physically real. But just like us, they have different levels of trauma and wounding. The more wounded ones are the ones we usually think of as dark. Their structure is created from the resonant magnetic gravity of lots of negative emotional energies that were never resolved or reintegrated into their creators before their death and are now floating around in the Tao, the zero point energy.

From another viewpoint, they are you. We have been taught and trained so deeply that there is an outside and an inside, that is, a you and other than you, that we totally believe it into reality. But the teachings of so many spiritual traditions say the opposite. And quantum mechanics says the opposite. There is no separation. There’s no real boundary, only an imaginary boundary between you and anything you experience as other. We only have mental emotional boundaries.

The bedroom, the bed, your body, your thoughts and emotions, your sense of identity, your "I" are all experienced in your mind, which, according to the last paragraph, is not really yours. It’s like when you look at one of those paintings that looks like a particular image, but the longer you look, you realize that there is also a different image than the first one seen, another way to look at it.

When you believe the ghost in the mirror to be real, you are caught in your personal addictive relative reality trance. When you step back and witness the trance through meditation or other method, you are free and fearless.

by Anjie Cho

Thanks for reading our "Q&A Sunday".  We will be answering questions submitted by our readers. Click here to submit any Feng Shui or Green Design questions!

Check Out A Feng Shui Designer's Blissed-Out NYC Apartment

featured on MindBodyGreen by Emma Loewe

Today on Holistic Home Tours, we’re checking out the New York City home of interior architect and feng shui designer Anjie Cho. 

Perched in the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan, Anjie Cho's space feels worlds away. The interior architect has used her knowledge of feng shui to deck out her new apartment—which she shares with her husband, Jeremiah, and their two Chihuahuas, Javier and Pearl—like only a pro could. She's letting us in on how she used feng shui to create an oasis in the middle of the city, and you're going to want to take notes.

What are three words that describe your design philosophy at home?

Simple, bright, calm.

What was the first room you tackled when you moved in?

Definitely the bedroom. We needed a place to sleep, and in feng shui the bedroom is thought to be the most important room in the house since it represents who you are. Since I have a home office, we split the bedroom up with some white fabric panels to create separate spaces. My husband loves how soft and tent-like these feel.

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