Feng Shui for the New Year – tips for creating positive energy in 2018
Denver Public Library/Virginia Village Branch, Saturday, January 27, 2018 @ 2 PM
Fresh flowers keep the energy fresh in your office.
In this one-hour workshop, Feng Shui for the New Year, you will learn how the energy of spaces and things impacts us and how we can create positive energy for 2018. You will be introduced to some tools of the practitioner – the Bagua and the Five Elements – and how to use them to make changes in your environment based on your goals. And, you’ll be introduced to some excellent Feng Shui teachers through their books (all available at the DPL.) Bring a floor plan of your home or office to work with. Get off to a great start for a great year!
It’s time to sign up for your Vision Board workshop! This is the third year that I’ve hosted Vision Board Workshops using Feng Shui principles and I’m happy to report attendees have seen great success, sometimes in unexpected and remarkable ways. It’s been very exciting for me to see this unfold and I invite you to try this amazing technique to co-create your year with your heart and soul! Three workshops to choose from:
Creating a Vision Board is about transformation. It’s about listening to a calling deep inside to transform yourself and your year. Who makes a Vision Board? Anyone who wants to plan their year, seeks clarity, and is brave enough to ask for what they want.
Your heart is the strongest muscle in your body; do what it says!
A Vision Board is a collection of images that represents the hopes, goals, and dreams you have for your future, often created around the New Year. The images are mounted on a poster board and hung in a place that you can see every day. Vision Boards are proactive, intentional, and fun.
We will use Feng Shui organizing principles — the Bagua, Five Elements and Yin/Yang balance — to design and make our boards. With Feng Shui guiding us, we will make sure to balance our visions with work, rest, and play.
The workshop fee is $30 and includes materials, (poster board, scissors, tape, glue stick and magazines) but attendees are encouraged to bring their own folder of images. Upon registering, each attendee will receive a how-to-get-started list and an outline for the workshop. Start collecting your images now! Each attendee will leave with their own personal 2018 Vision Board at the end of the workshop. Secure your spot now by emailing me (see link below); payment for the workshop (Paypal or check) is due one week before.
Here’s what one recent Vision Board participant said about the workshop:
Thank you so much for the magical, inspiring workshop. I do believe you transformed our lives with your wisdom and clarity. You are so skilled at guiding this process.Just loved it!
Louisa, Workshop Attendee
Register for the workshop of your choice by emailing lwgrillo@thrivingspaces.com — be sure and specify which workshop you’d like to attend.
If you are interested in hosting a private Vision Board workshop for your friends, book group, work colleagues or fellow board members, just contact me. I like to have a minimum of 8 participants but am happy to come to you and give the workshop in your space.
Come to a workshop to start and enrich your feng shui journey. Keep checking here for more workshops! Vision Board workshops using feng shui principles are coming in January 2018.
Feng Shui for the Holidays – learn some basics of feng shui and use your new knowledge to help you enjoy the holidays – from enhancing family harmony to creating a nurturing and supportive environment for celebrating and honoring your traditions.
The Peace Cellar, 3143 S. Broadway, Englewood, CO 80113, (720) 242-6531
Tuesday, December 5, 2017 5:30 – 8:30 PM
Private workshop for The Junior League of Denver – learn more about The Junior League here.
Arrange your space to support your life – an introduction to feng shui –In this two-hour introduction to Feng Shui, you will learn how the energy of spaces and things impacts us — and how we can take control. You will be introduced to some tools of the practitioner – the Bagua and the Five Elements – and how to use them to make changes in your environment based on your desires. We’ll also discuss some feng shui tips for the holidays and preparation for the New Year. You’ll even have a chance to test your new knowledge!
Saturday, January 27, 2018 @ Virginia Vale Library Branch – 2 PM, Free
Feng Shui for the New Year – tips for creating positive energy in 2018 –In this one-hour workshop, Feng Shui for the New Year, you will learn how the energy of spaces and things impacts us — and how we can create positive energy for 2018. You will be introduced to some tools of the practitioner – the Bagua and the Five Elements – and how to use them to make changes in your environment based on your goals. And, you’ll be introduced to some excellent Feng Shui teachers through their books (all available at the DPL.) Bring a floor plan of your home or office to work with. Get off to a great start for a great year!
Virginia Vale Library Branch, 1500 S Dahlia St, Denver, CO 80222, (720) 865-0940
I love sharing the practical tips and tools of feng shui in workshops; everyone asks great questions and we all learn from each other. The simple practices of feng shui can help us meet our goals by showing us how our environments can support us. This ancient Chinese system of organization believes that human beings are happiest when their environments are in harmony with their goals. Summertime — when we live both indoors and outdoors — is a great time to connect with our environments! Learn more at two workshops coming up!
Intro to Feng Shui: Tips and Tools for Your Home.
Comfy, balanced yin/yang space.
Thursday, June 22, 2017 @ Peace Cellar boutique in Englewood. 7 – 8 PM
3143 S. Broadway, Englewood, CO 80113
Sponsored by Lindsey Friedman and Susie Limmer of Colorado Home Realty.
This one-hour workshop will introduce basic feng shui principles, present some practical tips and tools, and show you how to apply them in your home.
You can use feng shui to create a beautiful garden — in a large or small space!
Feng Shui Your Outdoor Spaces! Saturday, July 8, 2017 @ Schlessman Library in Denver. 2 – 3 PM (please note NEW DATE; this was changed from Sunday, July 9)
100 Poplar St, Denver, CO 80220
Sponsored by Denver Public Library.
Whether you have a large, open yard or a small covered patio, feng shui can help you create a space that serves your needs. We’ll use the feng shui organizing tools of the Bagua, Five Elements and Yin/Yang balance to help design your perfect space with auspicious shapes and colors, furniture, art and plants.
Come and learn more about feng shui and leave with some ideas to implement immediately!
One of my favorite aspects of feng shui is that it doesn’t require you to make huge changes in your space to bring change into your life. Whether your goals are to increase your energy, enhance your well-being, attract more prosperity or fame (to name a few), small changes can begin the process. Small changes made with intention–getting rid of old or outdated items you no longer use to make room for new; clearing off your desk at the end of the day to prepare for the next; making your bed in the morning to create calm at the end of your day; removing everything from a kitchen counter except what you use regularly to encourage healthy eating—help your environment support your best you. All are feng shui practices that are easy, effective, and quick.
Clean kitchen counters with pantry items ready for use!
Small changes = big difference
I was recently reminded of how the small changes we make to our spaces and our lives can also help change the world. While reading one of my favorite feng shui tomes, A Guide to the I Ching, a translation from the Chinese by Carol K. Anthony, I came across this important passage:
Every step of progress leads not only to our own success, but to a better world. Our smallest self-improvement is of the greatest importance to ending suffering in the world, and to bettering the human condition, for how things are in the world is a reflection of the accumulated effort of human beings to follow the good within themselves.
If you’ve got an hour, you can clean out your spice drawer (and change the world)
Wow! We can feel good about cleaning out a drawer or a closet, but we can feel even better knowing the success we create for ourselves is also bettering the world!
Got an hour?
Here are other small feng shui steps you can take toward self-improvement–and positive world change–that can be accomplished in less than an hour:
Cull stale herbs and spices and questionable pantry items from your kitchen. Checking expiration dates makes this an easy task.
Review all your first-aid kits–in the car, drawers, and backpacks—for expired products. If you ever need to deal with a bee sting, you’ll be glad your Benadryl is potent.
Look through your bathroom drawers and medicine cabinet to make sure all your makeup, medicines, and ointments are current. Toss out what’s old and replace what’s necessary.
Take a trip under your kitchen and bathroom sinks to get rid of aging, potentially toxic and caustic cleansers.
Clean out your closet. If you don’t have time for a full-on purge, pick one area to focus on. Clean out a sock drawer, your scarf display, shoe collection, or tie rack (small steps, remember?)
Take a close look at all the notes, magnets, and artwork hanging on your refrigerator–discard or recycle what no longer speaks to you. Same goes for your kitchen bulletin board!
Feng shui reminds us that we’re at our top physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual power when we are living and working in a harmonious space that allows us to balance work, rest, and play. When we intentionally set up our environment to create this balance, we are supported to maintain it in our daily lives.
I was disheartened, but not surprised, to read recently that more than half of all American workers left their vacation time unused. In a 2015 survey, that amounted to a whopping 658 million unused vacation days in one year! For the past 15 years, according to Project: Time Off, Americans have been taking fewer and fewer vacations. We are the only country that doesn’t require employers to provide vacation time, but that is not the only problem. Equally at fault are the employees who simply don’t take the time off they are entitled to!
We’re working our way to disharmony, imbalance, and burnout! When we don’t take care of ourselves, things fall apart around us, including our relationships and our physical and mental health. I understand that not everyone feels they can afford to take time off, but I also think that we’ve lauded work over other ways to spend our precious time, and have made being busy a badge of honor. How do you balance work, rest, and play? Feng shui can help.
Here are some ideas:
Create a Vision Board that showcases ALL aspects of your vision – including work, rest, and play. Post it in a place you see every day and make it a point to review it several times a day. Let your subconscious soak it in.
Set an alarm on your phone or computer to take a break during the day – a walk outside, a visit to a co-worker, a brief closed-eye meditation.
Make your bed every morning. This “accomplishment” feeds into your sense of taking care of yourself and being a powerful, organized person.
Clear off your desk at the end of the day. This is another way to signal to your subconscious that you work smart, and that when your workday is done, you make time for other activities.
Speaking of your desk, place something on it NOT work related that makes you smile. A small Eiffel Tower, an animal statue, a squeeze toy – you catch my drift. This will communicate that you are more than your output, that you have a personality and life beyond your work.
Turn off all electronics 30 minutes before heading to bed.
Keep electronics to a minimum in your bedroom. If you must have a TV or desktop computer in your room, house it in a cabinet that has doors you can close when it’s time to sleep.
Create a beautiful oasis of calm in your bedroom so that when you’re prepared for bed, the space is ready for you to rest and relax.
And, finally, take that vacation! Hang a 12- or 18-month calendar in your office or at home and mark your vacation days. Keeping them visible will remind you to plan something special and commit to doing it!
Work is vitally important to all of us, but so is rest and so is play. I hope these ideas help you find the balance that will keep you both happy and productive every day.
In her latest book, Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert talks about the essence of living a creative life and she tells us that we can all lead one if we do just one thing. It’s not giving up our day jobs to give us the time to create. It’s not having a “muse.” It’s not even having a great creative gift, like writing or painting or singing. It’s simply living a life that is driven more by curiosity than by fear. This is the perfect mindset for creating a vision for your future. You don’t have to know what you’re going to be doing. You just need to be curious about what you want your life to look like. As 2016 comes to a close, it’s the perfect time to assess how the year has gone and ask yourself what you’d like to see for the upcoming year. Creating a Vision Board is an enjoyable, creative process using your curiosity to make a personal, pictorial vision of your 2017.
I am often asked how creating a Vision Board is different than writing down a plan. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” is one answer because looking at a vision board is faster than reading a plan, if speed is what you’re after. But there is also a longer answer, which involves science: our brains respond to pictures immediately and without thinking. There’s a bypass going on when we look at a picture – we bypass our conscious mind and we respond to it. If I ask you to think of your house, you don’t see the word H-O-U-S-E. You see an image of your house! Images are powerful communicators.
Attendees from a Vision Board workshop show off their completed boards!
We know this from our dreams. Dreaming (day or night) is how our subconscious communicates with us – not always clearly. Finding and using pictures on a vision board is one way for us to communicate with our subconscious while we’re awake and guiding the process. Why is that so important? Well, because science also tells us that the subconscious is running the show.
Co-creating with your subconscious, by placing images that speak to you on a board that you look at daily, helps you to manifest your visions as reality. That’s what makes Vision Boards so powerful.
Start collecting your images NOW and learn how to balance and harmonize them on a Vision Board using feng shui principles at three workshops in January 2017. The $25 workshop fee includes all materials for your board. For more information, an FAQ on collecting images and to register, contact Lorrie Grillo @ lwgrillo@thrivingspaces.com or 303.882.7275.
Get curious about your 2017 and create some “big magic” with a Vision Board!
Creating a Vision Board is about transformation. It’s about listening to a calling deep inside to transform yourself and your year. Who makes a Vision Board? Anyone who wants to plan their year, seeks clarity, and is brave enough to ask for what they want.
A Vision Board is a collection of images that represents the hopes, goals, and dreams you have for your future, often created around the New Year. The images are mounted on a poster board and hung in a place that you can see every day. Vision Boards are proactive, intentional, and fun.
We will use Feng Shui organizing principles — the Bagua, Five Elements and Yin/Yang balance — to design and make our boards. With Feng Shui guiding us, we will make sure to balance our visions with work, rest, and play.
The workshop fee is $25 and includes materials, but attendees are encouraged to bring their own folder of images. Upon registering, each attendee will receive a how-to-get-started list and an outline for the workshop. Start collecting your images now! Each attendee will leave with their own personal 2017 Vision Board at the end of the workshop.
Here’s what one recent Vision Board participant said about the workshop:
The past few days have been so fun and uplifting working on my vision board. It is now front and center in my walk-in closet, where I will take in its powerful images two or three times a day! It feels really good! Thank you so much for the magical, inspiring workshop. I do believe you transformed our lives with your wisdom and clarity. You are so skilled at guiding this process.Just loved it!
Louisa, Workshop Hostess and Attendee, October 2016
Register for the workshop of your choice by emailing lwgrillo@thrivingspaces.com — be sure and specify which workshop you’d like to attend.
Feng shui is the ancient art of aligning objects in the external world to support us on our internal journey, our life’s work. It’s operating whether we’re conscious of it or not! If your work is leading you to set up a home office, then taking into consideration the correct alignment of objects is a way to boost your productivity and set yourself up for success.
A home office is more than just a desk in a room. According to feng shui, for maximum productivity a home office should
Fresh flowers keep the energy fresh in your office.
Enhance your financial goals
Serve your current needs and goals while keeping you open to future possibilities.
Here’s how to get started:
Find the right space. At home, it could be the guest room or formal living room that never gets used. A separate space is ideal so you can close the door at the end of the day. Feng shui believes that to live fully, we must balance our lives with work, rest, and play so you don’t want to see the work on your desk while dining with your family. If you must use an open area to the rest of the home, like a formal living room, then consider room screens to separate the space. In addition, if you will be meeting with clients at your home office, consider the area that they must walk through to reach you; that unused formal living room at the front of the home might be perfect.
Love your desk. You will be spending a lot of time in relationship with this piece of furniture so treat yourself to a desk that you love and works for you (right height, material you’re drawn to, shape where you can reach everything you need). Do you prefer an open or closed front desk? An open desk is one that enables others to feel more connected to you. A closed front desk helps to create boundaries between you and others. There are also hybrid desks, with partial fronts.
Place your desk in the command position. The command, or power, position of a desk is one that helps you feel safe, comfortable and primed for work. It’s one where, when you are sitting,
You can view the door (or doors) into the room.
You are out of the way of the energy flow from the door.
You have a solid wall behind you.
You have a wall (or some other barrier) to one side of you.
Put your desk (and you!) in the power position.
Place other furniture based on how often you will use it. Need your printer on an hourly basis? Then it goes close to the desk. Do you see clients in your office frequently? Then set up chairs for clients in the place where you want to meet them.
Make room for enough storage. The bane of most home offices is not enough storage, which often means that stuff gets piled on the floor or on chairs. In feng shui, clutter equals stuck energy and stuck energy means stalled finances. A healthy financial life is all about flow; clutter anywhere clogs the flow of energy. Use both open and closed storage; open storage (bookshelves) intentionally invites new energy, like future clients; closed storage (file cabinets) keeps work confidential and secure.
Use plants and art to beautify and personalize your space! Plants are a great way to fill in a corner to soften angles or make an odd-shaped space feel more rectangular. Select art that you love, says something about you and supports your work.
These simple feng shui recommendations will help to make your home office a place you look forward to going to every day!
According to feng shui, everything in the world is comprised of five elements, usually in combination and always in a state of change. They are Fire, Earth, Metal, Water and Wood. These elements are expressed in myriad ways. We humans, for example, express as the Fire Element – active, passionate, moving, being, changing, creative — and wow, did I see that creative elemental aspect of our energy at the Cherry Creek Arts Festival this past weekend in paintings, mixed-media works, sculptures, rugs and more. Having artwork in our homes and workspaces is a wonderful way to bring ALL the feng shui elements into our lives. And, having all of the elements in our spaces helps to balance them energetically. My clients often ask me to help them identify the elements in their artwork. Here are some examples of art from the Cherry Creek Arts Festival and how each piece expresses one or more of the feng shui Elements:
Jaana Matson wood and fiber art from Cherry Creek Arts Festival July 2016
This work, by artist Jaana Mattson, is comprised of a fiber (wool) picture embedded in a wooden frame and is a fabulous example of the Wood Element (wood frame, and fiber, made from plants). The green and blue in the fiber picture are the colors of the Wood Element while the white in the clouds balances the piece as the one of the colors of the Metal Element.
These whimsical, square, ceramic plates (below right) made by Nancy Gardner and Burton Isenstein, hold several different elemental energies but are primarily Earth Element, as they are made with clay (from the Earth). Yellow is an Earth color, while blues and green express as the Wood Element and the black represents Water, while white is Metal.
Ceramic plates by Nancy Gardner and Burton Isenstein from Cherry Creek Arts Festival July 2016This sculpture says Fire Element at the Cherry Creek Arts Festival July 2016.
This sculpture (left) says Fire Element with its primarily color – red, and the pointed flower petals. It is nicely balanced out with some Water Element as the flowers are coming out of black (Water Element color) vase. Created by Christine & Michael Adcock.
This vase (below left) features a waterfall made of glass by artist Thomas Spake and it expresses as the Water Element. If used as a vase, it will hold water, creating more Water Element energy.
This vase expresses the Water Element with its cascading waterfall.
And, the vase is asymmetrical (the waterfall is only on one side) another attribute of the Water Element.
Artist Jerry Brem paints bookshelves full of books. Books are expressions of the Wood Element (books are made from paper made from plant pulp . . . ) and since there are so many books in each painting, Wood is the primary elemental energy of these pieces.
Books, books, books – express the Wood Element. At the Cherry Creek Arts Festival July 2016
However, the books are stacked in rectangles and squares and those shapes express as the Earth Element. Plus the books are in all different colors – and those colors express as all of the five elements. One of these paintings would bring a balance of the elements into a space.
Metal sculpture made with metal squares expresses . . . the Metal Element!
This piece, made by artist Anthony Hansen, is made of metal squares and expresses as you might have already guessed as . . . the Metal Element! The white color also expresses as Metal Element. The square shapes bring the Earth Element into the piece and the blues and greens help to balance the Metal with some Wood energy.
Whimsical wall hanging features Fire, Wood and Earth Elements.
Lastly, this sweet sculptural wall hanging (left) is a nice balance of the Fire, Wood and Earth Elements. The owl expresses as the Fire Element (animals are Fire) but it is made with paper and an actual book, which as we know from one of the examples above, are expressions of the Wood Element. The color of the book, yellow, nicely stabilizes the entire piece with its Earth elemental energy.
The art at the festival each year is phenomenal for its creativity and variety and ability to delight, attract or repel! The important issue, for all you feng shui practitioners, to remember is to have art that you LOVE and expresses who you ARE at this point in your life. Now, when you select your art you can determine which elemental energies the piece brings into your space.
