Bedroom Tips – Achieving Balance in the Bedroom
Posted on 19. May, 2012 by admin in Feng Shui Bedroom
Out of all the rooms in the house the one that I get asked the most questions about, the one that seems to cause people the most Feng Shui problems is the bedroom. It is pretty ironic really that this is the room that causes people the most concern because it is the room where we should be at our most relaxed, our most restful and our most secure. The last thing we need when we go to bed at night is to be sitting in bed worrying about the energy in our bedroom, after all it’s hardly conducive to a good night’s sleep.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised though that the bedroom causes so many problems. One of the fundamental principles of Feng Shui is balance but when you have a room that is used for two activities at either end of the yin yang scale, sleep and sex, then where exactly do you start with the interior décor? Decorating the room in very pale colours is great for sleep but not so good for your love life if you both fall asleep every night before your head hits the pillow, and red silk sheets and mirrored wardrobes may do your sex life a world of good but do you both want to be wide awake at 2am every morning?
The truth is that when decorating your bedroom you need to keep the word balance in mind. Above all the bedroom is a place for sleeping, our bodies need sleep to sustain us for the rigours of the day ahead and so the bedroom should primarily be decorated in pale colours and soft fabrics. Pale pinks, creams and light browns are excellent colours for the bedroom as they are not only yin colours but colours that represent love. Use these colours for most of the wall decoration, bedroom furniture, bed linens and floor coverings. They will form a soft backdrop to your bedroom creating a restful sanctuary to which you can retire at the end of the day.
Of course the bedroom is used for more than sleeping and a healthy and happy life is one in which you have an active love life with your partner. To add sparkle to your bedroom add high energy colours as accent colours. Paint a feature wall in dark red or bright pink, add red, gold or bright pink cushions and throws to the bed, place lamps at either side of the bed with dark red or gold shades. These bright additions are sure to create a special place that you and your partner can both love and enjoy.
Once you have the colour scheme balanced there are some basic principles that you can follow to ensure the energy flows naturally around the bedroom. Make sure the bed is pulled away from the wall as this allows energy to circulate around the whole bed. It also means that both you and your partner feel equal in the bedroom as you can both get in and out of the bed easily. Metal bed frames can disrupt the flow of energy so if your bed frame is made out of metal cover this in fabric and ensure head boards are made out of wood or covered in fabric as this means your head, the most vulnerable part of your body, is protected while you sleep.
Finally we come to the question of mirrors. These are often a necessity in the bedroom, especially if you want to make sure that your appearance is just right before you leave the bedroom in a morning. However they do have the effect of speeding the flow of energy around a space and so in a bedroom can cause problems with sleeping patterns. The best advice that I can give is to have a mirror in the bedroom if you need one, but cover it with voile before you go to sleep at night. This will ensure that energy will flow around your room calmly and peacefully while you sleep, helping you to get the rest that you need to face the world another day.
Feng Shui Bedroom – How to have a restful night’s sleep
Posted on 02. Dec, 2011 by admin in Feng Shui Bedroom
I returned home to France this week to discover that somebody had plans for me. Unfortunately the plans did not include a nice restful few days which is what I had hoped for, nor did they include a weekend away in a nice hotel in Paris. No the plans were much more mundane and involved decorating our five guest bedrooms.
I can’t really complain too much, although I must admit a trip to Paris would have been nice. I used to hate decorating but since moving out to France have actually found I quite enjoy it. It provides me with a huge amount of thinking time as I slap paint on the walls. As I painted the walls of each bedroom I found that I was automatically redrafting the chapters of the new book I was intending to start writing this week. Admittedly I kept having to leave the decorating to make a few notes but at least the bedroom walls got painted eventually which has hopefully bought me a few bonus credits this week.
We like our bedrooms to look fresh and crisp, a restful haven that people can retire to at the end of a days training and so the predominant colour is white with just one feature wall and the cushions, furnishings and pictures adding a splash of colour. Our guest bedrooms face south east, south and south west and so the colours we have chosen have been (yes you have guessed it) turquoise, red, beige and brown and we both have our favourite rooms. I love the dark red colour scheme of bedroom 3 whilst Jason prefers bedroom 4 which now has a pale turquoise wall. In saying that they are all beautiful in their own right.
When decorating bedrooms you need to ensure that you get a balance of yin and yang, with slightly more emphasis on the yin as you want bedrooms to be calm and peaceful environments which promote a restful night’s sleep. If your bedroom is in a yin area of the home it is always best to decorate these rooms in dark or pale colours as opposed to bright colours . If the bedrooms are, like most of ours, in a yang area of your home then it is perfectly OK to add a splash of bright colour but ensure that you restrict the splash of colour to just one feature wall. If you feel after you have repainted the room that the energy in the room has changed to more yang than yin then add in some softer, lighter furnishings to achieve a more equal balance.
Next week I am in the UK delivering my last two courses of the year and after that I will be turning my attention to my book. I am determined to have the first draft completed by the end of this year but find that there is always work to be done at Le Plantis which keeps getting in the way. Not that I am worried though, it is written in my destiny that my book will be published in 2012.
Feng Shui Bedroom – Helping Your Guests Get A Good Night’s Sleep
Posted on 07. Oct, 2011 by admin in Feng Shui Bedroom
This week I have done a lot of travelling. That in itself is not unusual as I often find myself working in many different locations, but what has been slightly unusual this week has been the number of different cities I have worked in. This week I have been travelling so much that I have found myself sleeping in four different beds over the last five nights. And as I sit now at Gatwick airport typing this whilst I wait for my flight home I can’t wait until tonight when I can crawl in to my own bed which will be the fifth bed this week and hopefully get a good night’s sleep.
I love travelling but I have to say that sometimes it does make me a bit drained to say the least. And when I do feel drained I know it is time to stop and take a few days off, or at least take a few days where I can work from home. Luckily according to my diary I now don’t need to travel until the 19th October which for me, the way I feel at the moment, is a real blessing.
Sleeping in different beds can be very unsettling at the best of times, but I have to say that some hotels do not make the experience any easier. Over the last fifteen years I have stayed in many hotels, some which have been absolutely superb and some which have been downright horrible. And price or size is no indicator of whether or not I am going to get a good nights sleep. Whilst I have enjoyed a fantastic night’s sleep each time I have stayed at the expensive but wonderful Hyatt in Warsaw, an equally expensive and world renowned chain hotel in Amsterdam with its abundance of mirrors and electrical equipment in the bedroom left me feeling more than a little frazzled at the edges when I eventually gave up trying to sleep and crawled out of bed just before dawn. The next time I found myself working in Amsterdam I stayed at a small guesthouse in a village just outside Amsterdam, paid a fraction of the cost and had the most marvellous night’s sleep in a tiny room which though simply furnished had exactly what was needed in a hotel bedroom, peace and tranquillity.
This week’s hotel bedrooms have not on the whole promoted a good night’s sleep which is probably why I feel more than a little bad tempered, a rare feeling for me. The hotels that I have stayed in this week have been neither expensive nor particularly cheap. They have all been what I would call reasonably priced, mid level hotels providing functional and practical rooms, a place for someone to rest their head after a busy day. With that in mind you would expect some thought to have gone in to the design of the room, but no, what all of these hotel rooms had in common was a terrible layout which rather than aiding sleep made a restful night’s sleep virtually impossible.
Take the hotel room I stayed in a couple of nights ago. The hotel had been built about a century ago and therefore my bedroom was huge, much bigger than I had expected. A corner of the room had been taken to make a large ensuite bathroom which meant that the bedroom was a large L shape. The bed however had been placed in the smallest part of the room which meant the area around the bed was very cramped, I’m not a particularly large person but I was touching the wall when I walked down the side of the bed. It also meant that when lying on the bed I couldn’t see the door, bad Feng Shui as it leaves you feeling insecure, especially when you are in a hotel with lots of strange noises in the night!
This was a nonsense bed placement especially given the size of the room. The large space was dominated by a huge wooden desk, with a large mirror on the wall behind it and a set of four mirrored wardrobes. Ironically, given the fact that I couldn’t see the door, I could see myself reflected numerous times and from many angles in the mirrors (another mirror was placed on the wall next to the bathroom door). Mirrors are always tricky in guestt bedrooms as whilst they do disrupt the energy in a bedroom they are necessary in a guest bedroom where you can’t really walk out of the room to check your appearance. However to promote calmness mirrors should be kept to a minimum and a small one at head height really does suffice. To have so many mirrors reflecting light, energy and me was definitely not conducive to a good night’s sleep.
The room last night was just as bad. It could have been a lovely space if the hotel owners had decided to keep it as a double room. However, I guess with hotel space at a premium in London, the owners had decided to make the bedroom a triple room which meant that the double bed was pushed up against one wall and a single bed was pushed up against the other. Although the single bed had a solid headboard the double bed didn’t (a first for me I think in a hotel) and to make matters worse was half covering the window. After checking in to the hotel at just before midnight and feeling exceptionally tired I couldn’t even bother to unpack and just crawled in to the double bed. I managed to get just under five hours sleep before waking up and after an hour of restlessly tossing and turning decided that I may as well make use of the large flat screen TV as the owners obviously felt it was what guests wanted.
So, apart from feeling uncharacteristically grumpy what is the purpose of me spending this week’s post moaning about the state of the hotel bedrooms that I have stayed in this week? Well it dawned on me this week (at about 3am one morning) that when talking about Feng Shui bedrooms most Feng Shui consultants, me included, tend to focus on the main bedroom of the house. In doing this however what often gets forgotten is the guest bedroom. It is just as important that Feng Shui should be considered in your guest bedroom as your guests will want to get a good and refreshing night’s sleep and feel comfortable and happy in your home, a space they are not used to.
So what is important to consider in a guest bedroom? Below I have highlighted the five most common problems with guest bedrooms that you should aim to avoid in order to give your guests the best possible chance of getting a good and restful nights sleep in your home.
First and foremost you should give careful consideration to the placement of the bed. The bed should not be pushed against the wall as this prevents energy from flowing around it. From a practical perspective this can sometimes be difficult in a guest bedroom as they are often smaller rooms that may double as another space, for example an office or storage room. If this is the case in your home, pulling the bed away from the wall even by a few centimetres will help the energy flow and this can be further enhanced by placing a large red cloth underneath the bed. It is important that this is done as poor energy flow around the bed is the primary problem that will prevent a person from getting a good night’s sleep.
Secondly, the bed should be positioned so that when lying on the bed the occupants feet are not pointing at the door. Neither should the occupant be at an immediate right angle to the door. Both of these positions are problematic as it can leave the occupant feeling nervous and insecure, leading to a broken nights sleep. Even in the smallest guest room if this is the position of your bed the problem can be overcome by placing some sort of barrier between the bed and the door. A perfect cure for this problem is a Chinese screen which can be very inexpensive, takes up hardly any surface space, looks visually appealing and has the added advantage of helping to make your guest feel as though they are being given an added level of privacy in your home.
Let us now turn our attention to mirrors. The question of mirrors is a difficult one in the bedroom, and even more so in a guest bedroom. Ideally you would not have a mirror in the bedroom as it can have the effect of bouncing energy around the room, a state you want to avoid as this will disrupt sleep. The difficulty however, especially in a guest bedroom, is that you do not want your guest to feel as though they have to face the world, or at least the members of your family, without having the opportunity to check their appearance first. For practical reasons it is best if you can provide your guest with a mirror inside a cabinet or cupboard that can be folded away out of view at bedtime.
The final two problems with guest bedrooms relate to clutter. These are very common problems as often a guest bedroom is used for other purposes. Even if you have a dedicated space in your home which is used for guests quite often over time the normal day to day clutter that you accumulate can start to encroach on this space. Whilst I am not advocating that you don’t use the guest room for storage or for other purposes, especially if it is little used as a guest room, I do suggest that you at least tidy stuff away and make it’s primary purpose a bedroom whilst your guest is staying with you. Storage boxes can be very cheap to buy and books, clothes, bills, old photographs and any other items you may keep in the guest bedroom can be temporarily removed and stored elsewhere. Equally if you use the room as an office any computer equipment can be either removed or covered so that your guest does not feel they are sleeping in an office which believe me does not make for a good night’s sleep.
Finally, on the subject of clutter, the final problem can be that of your guest cluttering the bedroom with their belongings. This again can be very common if there is no dedicated storage in the room for them to put their belongings. Make sure that your guest has wardrobe space and drawers in the room so they do not have to live out of a suitcase whilst they are staying with you. Suitcases in the middle of the room and clothes draped over chairs and folded at the end of the bed are not conducive to sleep.
For me, as my flight is now about to be called I am returning to my own bed for the next 12 nights, a rare treat in Autumn which for me is always busy. Sleep is one of the most valuable commodities in the world, and we should never take our own, or our guests comfort for granted. Just a little bit of thought when arranging guests bedrooms can really make a world of difference.
Feng Shui Bedroom – Avoid The Top Ten Bedroom Problems
Posted on 21. Jan, 2011 by admin in Feng Shui Bedroom
Last week as promised I presented to you my five principles for ideal bed placement. This week, continuing the bedroom theme I am going to spend the majority of this post talking about how to solve some of the other common problems that can occur in bedrooms. The list below are the top ten problems I come across when I assess people’s bedrooms. Hopefully after reading this you will be able to assess your bedroom for potential challenges and create a bedroom that is a restful, secure place to recharge your internal batteries at the end of each day.
Counting down from 10 the most common problems I see are:
10 – Bookshelves in the bedroom
Having books in the bedroom especially if you have lots of books on a bookshelf stimulates your mind and does not promote a restful nights sleep. The easiest cure is to take the bookshelves out and place them in another part of the house. If this is impossible or impractical cover the shelves with either cupboard doors or fabric so that you cannot see the books when you go to bed at night.
9 – A Sleigh Bed
Sleigh style beds are becoming very common and I have to say they look very stylish in a bedroom. The problem with this style of bed however is that the head and the foot curve in which can give the impression of pressing down on the occupants of the bed. To cure this problem lift the energy by placing a crystal or stylish light fitting above the bed.
8 – A Bed that is too low to the ground
If your bed is too low to the ground then energy cannot flow underneath effectively. Beds ideally should have plenty of space between the mattress and the floor. If it is not practical to put the mattress on a base then you can place a red sheet or cloth the exact size of the bed underneath to stimulate chi.
7 – Beams over the bed
Exposed beams above the bed cause problems in a number of ways. A beam lengthways down the bed can cause two people in a relationship to live separate lives as it has the impact of dividing the couple. If you are not in a relationship it can still be challenging as it has the effect of weighing down on a person causing problems and worries. A beam across the bed can cause illness in the part of the body that the beam crosses, so if it crosses the legs a person can find they have aches and pains in their knees or legs, crossing the chest can cause chest pains and breathing problems and if it crosses the head the person can suffer from headaches or migraines.
Covering the beam by putting in a false ceiling or taking the beam out altogether is th best solution although this is often not practical and to be avoided if the beam is load bearing. There are however other solutions that can be more practical and which are just as effective.
Hanging two bamboo flutes from the ceiling above the bed so that they cross the beam making a shape like the bottom of an octagon has the benefit of drawing any negative energy upwards. Alternatively you can disguise the beam with drapes of fabric that are in the colours that correspond with the bagua area of the bedroom, so pinks and creams if your bedroom is in the relationship area, reds or turquoise if it is in the wealth area or shades of green if it is in the family area.
6 – Sloping Ceilings
Having a similar effect to beams a sloping ceiling over the bed can make the occupants of the bed feel the weight of worries and problems as they sleep. In this instance it is best to hang a crystal above the bed, hanging it from a piece of red ribbon or thread that is 9 inches in length.
5 – Clutter under the bed
Clutter under the bed, whether this is in drawers under the bed or piled in boxes has the effect of blocking the natural flow of chi around and underneath the bed. There is only really one cure for this, take the boxes out and store them somewhere else.
4 – Mirrored Wardrobes
A lot of people seem to favour mirrored wardrobes but they can really disrupt the natural flow of energy and have a very destructive effect on a natural night’s sleep. If you really must have mirrored wardrobes try and find someway of covering them during the night, whether that be by placing a decorative screen in front of the wardrobes or by hanging some voile across the mirrors.
3 – A Metal bed
A metal bed can disturb the flow of energy around the bed harming the restful effects of positive chi. If you have a metal bed, or even just a metal headboard, you can minimise the negative effects of this by covering the metal with a soft sensual fabric.
2 – An Ensuite bathroom
We are now getting to the top two most common problems that I see and at number 2 is an ensuite bathroom. Ensuite bathrooms are now very common in most modern homes and it is very rare that I run a course where nobody has an ensuite bathroom in their bedroom. Bathrooms are not bad but can, if not carefully designed and decorated lead, to the draining away of chi. The first thing to remember with bathrooms is to adhere to the principles of good bathroom management ensuring that they are clean, everything is kept in good working order and objects that match each of the senses are in place. To strengthen positive chi in the bedroom even further always ensure you keep the bathroom door closed when sleeping
1 – A TV or Computer in the bedroom
Without question, the most common problem I see with bedrooms is a TV or a computer in the room. This really is not to be advised but I accept that sometimes a bedroom has a multiple of uses. If you must have a TV or computer in your bedroom place it in a cabinet or cover it with a cloth or a blanket when it is not in use. A TV is a conduit of fast flowing electrical energy and can harm sleeping patterns leading to a disturbed night’s sleep
I hope that you have found this information informative and useful and it will enable you to assess and make changes to your bedroom if necessary. Always remember that no problem, or very few anyway, are insurmountable and with just the minimum of changes you can bring about truly positive change to your home and life. If you are going to make changes to your bedroom ensure that you do so with intention and make a note of the positive changes that occur in the days, weeks and months ahead.
