Organize Your Desk With Feng Shui

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You are your home. Over the past 5,000 years, the Chinese have proven with time-tested accuracy that you can enhance your life when you enhnce your home decor with feng shui. 

Feng shui, which literally translates as “wind and water,” provides simple and simply wonderful ways to design your environment to benefit your career, relationships, and finances. While the design of all areas of your home is equally important in bringing harmony to your life, your desk, its placement, and the way it’s accessorized are significant in bringing about creativity in your personal and financial affairs.

To understand how feng shui works, consider the stress you feel when you have much to do and little time to do it. Now add to the mix a cluttered, disorganized desktop. When there is no room on your desk, there is no room to think. When you clear your desktop, however, you also clear your head. You become better organized, less stressed, and allow new possibilities, ideas, and creative solutions an unfettered path to enter.

Because feng shui works via your unconscious response to what you see and experience in any given environment, imagine all the life-enhancing possibilities the following desk-decorating tips will make in your life:

• Avoid Jessie James Syndrome: Never sit at a desk with your back to the door. (Jessie would never have been able to count his bounty with his back to the door). If this situation can’t be avoided, place a small mirror in front of you so you can see someone entering the room. Being startled from behind creates insecurity; at your desk, this means financial insecurity.

• Design your desk so everything you need is easily accessible simply by spinning around in your chair or reaching across the desktop.

• Position your light source so it doesn’t create a “shadow of darkness” on the desktop. Avoid glare and use natural lighting to “lluminate” creative possibilities. Direct light for optimum efficiency: Right-handers should direct the light over their left shoulder, lefties over their right shoulder.

• Surround yourself with art and accessories that make you happy. Good feng shui means placing yourself amid furnishings you find beautiful, functional, and/or symbolic. What art and accessories symbolize personal or financial success to you? If you love to travel, consider placing beautiful travel photographs in metal frames on your desktop (metal represents abundance). If you’re an accomplished gourmet cook—or simply an accomplished gourmand—a metal gravy boat could serve as an ideal pencil holder. Even if you only use your desk to pay bills, consider accessorizing it with a beautiful, empty metal bowl to symbolically provide a place to hold your wealth.

Wherever in your home you choose to use feng shui—the ancient Chinese art of placement—you can positively enhance your wealth, health, and happiness quotients. How you nurture your physical environment is as important as how you nurture your body, mind, and spirit. In this case, even your desktop can become a mirror of your soul.