5 Ways to Add More Relaxation to Your Home

Photo by Taryn Elliot on Pexels

Photo by Taryn Elliot on Pexels

After a day jam-packed with full-speed busyness, (and let’s face it, for most of us that’s pretty much a normal day), slipping your shoes off and melting into your favorite, comfy spot at home is likely high on your evening to-do list. That is, until you get home and that transition from ‘doing’ to ‘unwinding’ isn’t as smooth as you’d hoped. Don’t give up. Try these five simple steps to convert your home into a more serene, relaxing sanctuary.

Dedicate a space.

There are areas of your home that are ideal for work and for play. Set aside a space dedicated to relaxing, too. It doesn’t have to be an entire room. Create a nook or corner dedicated to relaxation. Folding screens can help differentiate the space from the rest of the room. If a good book is your ideal way to unwind, add comfortable seating, a shelf of books or a small table to hold your current reads, and proper lighting to the space. If music or movies are more your style, design your space accordingly.

Get organized

It’s hard to relax amidst clutter. Set-aside some time to organize and properly store your stuff. Look for storage solutions that complement your personal style. Look for baskets, bins and other containers that work as décor accents, as well as functional pieces. 

Light matters

Sunlight is a natural pick-me-up, but too much can be more stimulating than calming. Use light filtering shades for some privacy, as well as to create a softer, more tranquil effect. In the evening, use dimmer lights and candles to create a spa-like ambiance. As an added bonus, use a lavender scented candle to help promote relaxation. 

Colors count

Bright colors energize; soft, earth-toned shades soothe. If you’re looking to add more peacefulness to your home, incorporate tranquil blues, greens, and neutrals like gray, tans and white into your sanctuary spaces. Keep this in mind when you’re looking for accessories, too. Whether that peaceful space is a nook or whole room, stick with serene hues for your furniture, pillows, rugs and other accents.

Unplug

Your dedicated downtime space should be free of high-tech distraction. Learn to leave the phone, tablet and laptop aside. That reading nook we talked about above should be device-free to eliminate the urge to check your email just one more time or to count how many likes your last Instagram post garnered.  

Above all else, make your space yours. The best way to relax and unwind is to create a space that you feel most comfortable in.

by Anjie Cho


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

A Feng Shui & Flower Conversation

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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. 

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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


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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


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

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Jewelry and Art in Everyday Life

Photo by Tessa Wilson on Unsplash

Photo by Tessa Wilson on Unsplash

Today I wanted to talk about different types of rituals that you can incorporate to bring more art into your everyday life. Did you know you can also apply feng shui principles to your body, in addition to your spaces? The core of feng shui is about looking at your qi, which is life force energy. Your energy is not separate from your space, other people, or the cosmos. 

One way that I like to enhance my qi in my everyday life is through the jewelry that I select. Sometimes, I do this by wearing representations of animals that inspire me. For instance, I have a bee necklace that was given to me by my flower teacher. I didn’t wear it a lot at first, but later I felt very called to wear it. One of my healers actually told me that the wasp was an animal I could learn from at that time. Learning from an animal doesn’t always mean you have to read about it or listen to someone speak about it. You can also learn through wearing something that symbolizes that animal. 

I also received a beautiful turtle bracelet a while ago. I love the turtle, because there’s a really beautiful story from Buddhism that talks about how precious each human life is, and I think sometimes we forget that. Wearing something like this on my wrist is a constant reminder of how precious our human lives are. I wear it intentionally on my right wrist, which is for giving. The left hand is for receiving. This Buddhist story is about how each human life is as precious and rare as a blind sea turtle swimming through the ocean. Once every hundred thousand years, the sea turtle comes up to the surface and happens to pop its head up through a yoke that’s floating in the middle of the ocean. That is how rare our human lives are. This also gives me a spiritual reminder to value every single person that I interact with, and to value all that I receive in my life

Lastly, I also like to wear my jade bracelet. In feng shui and in Asian cultures, jade represents purity, long life, and good luck. It also has a weight to it, and it reminds me of my Asian lineage. The color is quite interesting too . It’s a light green, which is connected to the wood element in feng shui. Wood is about growth and vitality. My jade bracelet also has some white, which is the metal element, and metal brings in this idea of beauty and precision. This is something I’ve been working with recently: how can I start to see more beauty in all aspects of my life? 

I hope this inspires you to bring more awareness to your personal feng shui, and to invite more beauty into your life through the things you intentionally put on your body. 

by Anjie Cho


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

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