##  Feng Shui Basics: How Your Space Can Affect Your Mood 

**“The light is what guides you home, the warmth is what keeps you there.” ~Ellie Rodriguez**

One day I came home and just sat in my driveway for a while, wondering why I wasn’t happy about going inside my house. I wasn’t depressed, and I had a loving relationship with my family.

Even though I was married to the love of my life and just had a beautiful baby boy who I couldn’t wait to see every day after a long day of work, something about coming home was simply unpleasant, and it irked me that I wasn’t able to pinpoint it.

Every time I walked in the front door or roamed around my home, I’d find myself picking at little things, like the lighting and the colors on the wall. My gut told me that something was wrong with the interior look of the house, since we hadn’t touched it since we moved in.

“Why is it so dark in this room? Who likes this color anyway?” I’d ask.

I questioned whether that was really the cause, but when a student of mine began talking to me about Feng Shui after class one day, a light bulb went off, and I sought the help of a Feng Shui specialist.

**The interior design of my home was affecting my mood.**

How do you tell your wife that you feel weird about coming home and then blame it on the decoration? Worried that she might think it was a bigger issue, I sat her down and communicated my feelings.

“Honey, I really don’t know what it is. There’s something about walking through the front door that makes me feel uncomfortable. I think it’s something about the space.”

She said that she felt the same way and proceeded to talk about the discomfort of the living room, while I complained about the hallway and office. I felt much better knowing that I wasn’t crazy!

After that, we splurged on new paint and said goodbye to our ugly bare white walls and awkward furniture placement.

That’s when I started learning about how your physical space can affect your mood and life.

**I want to share with you some key insights into home decoration and how it can make you more productive, happy, and peaceful.**

## **The Importance of Colors**

Colors can alter your mood. It’s important to play around with colors to find the right balance for you. Here’s a quick color to mood chart for reference:

**Red** : Passion, power, stimulation, and high energy. (Suggestions: dining room, bedroom, or upholstery)

**Orange** : Creativity, happiness, enthusiasm, and communication. (Suggestions: accenting, throw-overs, or pillows)

**Yellow** : Cheerfulness, light-heartedness, and mental stimulation. (Suggestions: kitchens, not bedrooms)

**Green** : Growth, harmony, nature, safety, peace, and healing (Suggestions: bedroom, bathroom, or office)

**Blue** : Trust, loyalty, confidence, faith (Suggestions: accents around the house and in bedroom)

**Purple** : Romance, luxury, nobility, wealth, spirituality, and motivation (Suggestions: bedroom)

**Black** : Power, independence (Suggestions: picture frames)

**Brown** : Stability, humility (Suggestions: living room)

**White** : Cleanliness, vibrancy (Use sparingly; too much white can feel cold)

Use this as a general reference and then play around. Look at a color, its various tones, and notice your mood. Have fun and mix and match. The idea is to use colors to your advantage instead of letting colors control you.

## **Furniture and Decor**

Most people simply put everything against the wall when it comes to furniture placement. This creates negative energy and dead space.

Energy should always flow, so you don’t have to make everything so symmetrical all the time. Balance is more important than symmetry. The rule of thumb is to think outside the box and don’t decorate in the most obvious way. Mix furniture and decor with a wide range of variety, vintages, and textures.

When it comes to the decor and furniture, if you want more of a strong and independent look, incorporate circular, oval, and arched shapes along with granite, marble, and flagstone. Artwork and decor with metal, stone, brass, iron, copper, or gold is integral as well.

For leadership and creating a healthy emotional interaction between people, you should use artwork that involves sunshine or any form of natural illumination along with pyramids, cones, natural sunlight, feathers, silk, or wool.

For more order and sensuality, use furniture with squares, rectangles, ceramic, tile, and brick.

For creativity, intuition, and flexibility, integrate more wood, floral upholstery, wall coverings, drapes, pillars, and columns.

For a more relaxed and spiritual environment, integrate anything with water, crystals, glass, or mirrors.

It’s important not to overdo too much of any element. Use variety and balance.

## **Photos around the House**

Another important aspect to decoration that many people overlook is photography. Make sure you have pictures of you, your partner, and family hung more prominently around the house than pictures of others.

It’s nice to walk in the hallway and see a photo of you and your partner smiling by the sunset on your last vacation. This will also create good vibes when guests come over and see your positive experiences in photos around the house.

Go get some inexpensive frames and start printing and hanging some of those awesome digital pictures you have sitting in your phone and computer.

## **The Power of Light**

Light is one of the most important aspects when it comes to achieving harmony and balance. Skylights and windows are critical. Make sure your windows are never broken or dirty.

You can cover your windows with blinds or curtains. Blinds can be more affordable, depending on the material and you may opt for—paper, bamboo, wooden, or plastic. Curtains can provide more coziness and privacy.

## **The Importance of Sound and Silence**

It’s important to pay attention to the sounds around your house and get rid of anything that is noisy or disturbing to you. Everything that has a frequency creates the sound in your house: the music you play, water from a fountain, appliances, voices, and laughter.

You can begin by making these changes:

  * Play more calming and meditative music throughout the day.
  * Add a fountain that recycles water to your room.
  * Hang up a chime in the corner of a room or on the front porch.



The key is to add more of the sounds that bring joy to your life and remove the ones that bring any negative energy.

## **Using Scent to Uplift your Home Environment**

One of the greatest senses we have is smell. Smell is like touching or tasting something from a distance. It’s a subtle thing that can have a huge impact on our mood.

Start lighting more candles, incense, and oils to produce pleasing smells throughout the day. You should also add more healthy blooming flowers like jasmine, violets, and gardenias throughout your home.

Items involving odor can appear expensive, but they’re well worth the value they bring to your day.

You don’t have to spend all your money on decoration. Less is more. Just start poking around. When you move into an apartment or home, the house is usually very cold and bare. Homeowners do this because they don’t want their own peculiar decoration to keep you from moving in, so they keep it neutral, but I urge you to play around.

Consider changing that same drab color lingering all over the place.

It’s time to take a close look at your space so that you can remove anything that brings negative energy, add things that bring you positive energy, and make your family feel more comfortable and happy around the house.

Remember, your home is your sanctuary.

  * Nice post, you may want to stay away from using red and yellow in the bedrom, however, as they are high energy colors and can impact your ability to get a good night’s sleep!

  * Hey Rachel, Thank you for your kind words and the Excellent suggestions! In my experience it took me some time to get the right balance and harmony and letting any color be too overwhelming can have the opposite affect like you mentioned. Thanks Rachel!

  * Although I don’t practice Feng Shui, i can definitely agree that space matters. I just rearranged my room and I feel absolutely different! There’s more space – more breathing room – and I’m more productive! 

I can’t splurge much on paint and furniture but little changes go along way and it actually helps me to get more creative in how I can make my working environment work for me. 

  * Glori, Congratulations on the redesign! Paint can get expensive. To save some money what you can do is paint one wall so you still get some variety without breaking the bank. We did that in the beginning. 

Also play around with your digital photos. Find the fun ones. You can even get picture frames at the dollar store. For $15 you could have some mood enhancing photos hung as decoration in the room also.

  * Great post! Very helpful. Thanks so much! 

  * Thank you Chelsea!! I’m glad you enjoyed it!

  * Great post! I disagree about having a red bedroom – too stimulating

  * Daria, Thank you for the great comments! Point well taken! I believe there are some tones of red could be less stimulating but either way I like to no never have a single color to be too overwhelming and vibrant definitely, especially in a sleeping environment like you said.

  * Thank you for your post Omar! I really embrace Feng Shui and I am slowly and thoughtfully transitioning my home. Sending you and your family much light for a fabulous 2013! Liz

  * Great post  I will use some of these ideas when we buy a place later this year. What could you suggest for someone renting to improve the space by not changing anything too much? All my walls are cream (very dull), I find my dining and kitchen (all in one) space really plain and boring. Any suggestions would be great 

  * Hey Liz, thank you! Report back and let us know how the transition is going.

  * Hi Beck, The most impactful thing you can do in a rented apartment is painting the walls. It can have such a tremendous impact on the feel of the place. Try to make sure it’s ok to paint the walls from the landlord. Some landlords can make a fuss about it but mentioning up front that it’s important for you to be able to paint the walls can help. They usually repaint the walls in between every tenant anyway. Be careful about painting authentic wood (or anything thats not meant to be painted) in a rented apartment because the landlord may get upset. Walls are painted and repainted however

In terms of color, it’s really up to you. For us we painted two different colors in one room so it wouldn’t be overwhelming. 

Because colors on the wall don’t always appear the way they look on paper, I’d recommend testing out the paint on the wall first with small tester samples. I wish there was an easier way to test but I don’t know of one.

We’ve definitely painted a wall and a few days later noticed it doesn’t look like we expected so we had to repaint over it. Painting can be hard work so try getting as clear as you can about color and design before doing the hard work.

A few side notes, there’s matte, semi-glossy and glossy. Glossy means there will be like a light reflection when light is cast on it and matte retains a flat color even when light is cast on it. That’s a personal preference. 

Also a trip to IKEA can help because they have a lot of great looking rooms to get ideas from and a lot of pieces of decoration you can use.

As always, have fun with the experience!

  * Colors have a huge importance for Feng Shui, for life. Recently I found out that my synesthesia paintings emanate energy. Because of synesthesia I see colors when I hear names and words. Since years I paint what I see, I paint names and inspirational words. Recently people were telling me that they feel an energy flow coming from my paintings. They even recognize themselves in the paintings. This is so fascinating

  * This amazing! Would love to see your work.

  * Sophomoric and obvious. But I am feeling good about my orange chimney…