Growing up the smell of cornbread stuffing buttered the air at Thanksgiving. White flakes of coconut and red cherries buoyed among bits of fruit and cream in Mom’s prized crystal bowl. Good china served up turkey, browned buns from the oven and fresh cooked string beans from the stove. The love poured into this meal made the kitchen hum and warm conversations wafted throughout the house. The kitchen is the hub for all of life’s happenings. We prep our meals and plan our lives here. It is the sacred space where we quietly listen to our thoughts over morning coffee and console the hurts of family members after dinner. We celebrate milestones and receive endearing hugs among the pots and pans and crockery. It is the domaine for all our life’s stories.
Kitchen design has a profound effect upon our emotions, our hopes and our successes. The nature of this room offers opportunities for closeness and having real conversations. The strength of this bonding time creates a feeling of safety and helps us to gather our confidence and walk with our heads held high across the threshold and into the world. To modern sensibility it’s influence is seemingly imperceptible, but it has the power to influence our choices and destiny.
If your past holidays have been peppered with tension, I encourage you to try the following Feng Shui adjustments that, I believe, will help bolster any troubled waters and in the process help you uncover levity too. Not all may pertain, but I still encourage you to note, “the kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink”. Choose what fits your home’s design and decor. I wish for you a very happy holiday.
Select pleasing colors according to your home’s palette and your personal aesthetics but keep these Feng Shui and Five Element principles in mind while choosing. According to Professor Lin Yun white is the best color for the kitchen. It shows off the colors of the food. White, the color of the Metal element, is compatible with the kitchen’s basic element fire (fire overcomes or melts metal). Avoid all black kitchens because black, the water element, destroys fire. Do not choose red or there will be too much heat and the cook will always be hot tempered. Red and black accents are fine. Apple green is a color that signifies hope and the vitality of spring.
The stove is the key to family prosperity and harmony. It has a significant role as wealth generator, creating family unity and keeping us free from legal trouble. When we lovingly prepare our food it nurtures us, our lives become fuller and we manage what life delivers with ease and grace.
If you stand at the stove and face a wall then you either turn your head left or right to see what is going on behind you. This takes you off balance. Over time your body will conform to this unconscious posture that influences your attitude where you may feel out of control and ill at ease. You may experience a downturn in finances or plain bad luck. In regards to the stove placement, you want to see what is going on behind you by placing a mirror on the wall in front of you. It should be the width of the stove and ideally doesn’t cut off the top of the tallest person in the household when you look into the mirror. Some stoves have a microwave above, if this is your arrangement then place a convex mirror (which takes in a 160 degree view). Visualize your heart trouble resolving and an upswing in your finances.
If members in your family argue a lot, especially about money, you may see your finances diminish. There is a kitchen design detail that influences this conflict: the stove is in line with two doors on either side. Adjust this inauspicious placement by hanging a 40 mm faceted crystal or wind chime on both sides of the stove between the door and the stove.
When there are two levels to a home, there is the possibility that a bathroom can be built over the kitchen, this is typical in older homes. When a toilet sits over the stove, the family’s health and finances are in jeopardy. You can place a mirror, facing down, on the floor behind toilet. It will lift the image of the stove, transcendentally removing the toilet.
If you see a kitchen as you step through the front door there will be digestive upset. This can cause money problems. You can have strange, odd or unexplained diseases/illnesses. Draw the eyes elsewhere with color, art, sound or greenery. Or divert the eyes traveling directly into the kitchen by placing a 40mm crystal hung on a red cord between the front door and the kitchen to lift the Ch’i and the life of the family members affected. To ease the symptoms of a stomach ache: wear the colors red and/or yellow (the colors of Fire and Earth in the Chinese Five Element System).
If the kitchen door is overwhelming the door of the bedroom of a person who is struggling with an eating disorder, that’s a problem. The kitchen can swallow that bedroom and, in a sense, swallow that person’s resolve to get better. That eating disorder can get even worse. The cure may seem odd but it is a mirror on the big door to pick up the image of the smaller door so that you have two bedrooms. Instead of a kitchen swallowing up a bedroom or a bathroom swallowing up a bedroom. If there is no door in the kitchen. Hang a crystal ball. if the larger door is on the bedroom there is not a problem.
My heart is smiling because you give life your best. May love and joy continue to surround you everyday. And keep creating beauty! It feeds our souls in a myriad of ways.
Allow me to help you arrange your home where you feel fully supported. I am available for a full consultation service or for an hour telephone conversation. Details are at this link Feng Shui A La Carte. Think of it as a fairy godmother for your house.
