A quick summary of each area

Prosperity:
Purple, green, gold and red
Associated with the Hip
Associated with number 8


Fame/Reputation:
Red
Triangular, pointy objects
Associated with the Eye
Associated with number 1
The element is Fire


Relationships/Love:
Pink, red and white
Associated with all major organs of the body
Associated with number 2


Creativity/Children:
White
Round objects
Associated with the Mouth
Associated with number 3
The element is Metal


Helpful People/Travel:
Gray, black and white
Associated with the Head
Associated with number 5


Career/Life Path:
Black
Undulating, free-form shapes
Associated with the Ear
Associated with number 6
The element is Water


Skills/Knowledge/Wisdom:
Blue, black and green
Associated with the Hand
Associated with number 7


Family:
Green
Rectangular, columnar, vertical objects
Associated with the Foot
Associated with number 4
The element is Wood


Health/General:
Yellow and earth tones
Square, horizontal and flat objects
Associated with all other body parts not mentioned above
Associated with number 9
The element is Earth

The effects of clutter

Clutter is related to instincts of self-protection and hoarding, on the one hand, and to feelings of insecurity on the other. Clutter corresponds essentially to the Earth element. If Earth is negative, you worry. Positive Earth nurtures. The person who clutters needs nuturing, or needs to be provided with nourishment and support. If you tend to clutter, you should ask yourself what you need to feel secure and happy, and what it si that you believe about yourself that prevents you from having it.

Clutter near the doorway always indicates resistance to going out into the world. If you have doorway clutter, you have to struggle through a lot that seems to stand in the way of your goals. You tend to barricade yourself in and fear letting go.

Cluttered shelves overhead, or things piled up to the ceiling indicate that you are apprehensive that something unwanted might befall you.

Clutter caused by things stored under your bed causes chi to stagnate and generates "sha", which your body absorbs when you sleep. If you have things stored under your bed, even if they are neatly stored in boxes, remove them and store them somewhere else - your health will improve.

Your home breathes like a living body. Its breath, or chi, comes in and out through the doors and windows and flows through the corridors and rooms. When it flows unobstructedly it imparts the sensations of ease and comfort. But when it's flow is obstructed due to clutter, the opposite happens: your chi becomes obstructed, the elements in your body become unbalanced, and your health and affairs suffer.

From Feng Shui, Step by Step
by T. Raphael Simons

Breathe You Are Alive
following the breath breathing in, I calm my body. breathing out, I smile. dwelling in the present moment, I know this is a wonderful moment..

Remove hazardous elements from Health area

General Health area:

Wood will uproot the earth in this area, so get rid of anything symbolizing wood here. This means green items too! Small plants are the exception and can stay.

Tall rectangular objects and columnar objects don’t belong here.

Spiral staircases are a doozy – the chi keeps falling through, and with the spiraling pattern the chi gets dizzy and disoriented. You can counteract this effect by painting the underside of the stairs with the color of the area you are in, or place mirrors under the stairs to reflect the chi back up.

From Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life
by Karen Rauch Carter

Remove hazards to family area

Family area:

Metal is hazardous in this area. White is the metal color and also does not belong here.

If you have a gun in the house, do not place it in this area or it will become deadly metal.

Get rid of round objects in this area.


From Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life
by Karen Rauch Carter

Remove hazards to Skills and Knowledge

Skills and Knowledge area:

Get rid of clutter here. Thinking clearly requires a clear space.

Alcohol, drugs, poisons, and cigarettes all cloud the thought process and are detrimental to this area.

Newspapers (full of stupid people doing stupid things) don’t belong here.

So this is not a good wallpaper choice?

From Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life
by Karen Rauch Carter

Remove hazards to your career

Removing hazardous elements from your Career area:

Get rid of any dirt in this area. When you mix dirt and water, you get mud! Pictures of mountains and clay pots can even muddy up the water. No squares either, since squares represent earth (which is made of dirt…) The same goes for earth-tone-colored items.

Remove pictures from this area of anything you would never want to do in your life.

From Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life
by Karen Rauch Carter

Remove Hazards from Helpful People and Travel Area

Feng Shui activity for today:
Remove hazardous elements from the Helpful People & Travel area:

Take a moment to stop and see where all your help is coming from. Trace the road money travels to get to you.

Helpful people do not want to hang around a bunch of junk. A mess in this area of the house gives helpful people obstacles to negotiate, so get rid of the junk!

Drains may undermine the support you need to prosper. Tie a red ribbon or red tape around the outgoing pipe to stop your chi from flowing away, and place mirrors in the area to keep the chi up.

Dust and dirt, broken items, trash cans, toilets, reminders of bad times don’t belong here.

From Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life
by Karen Rauch Carter

You don't want your helpful friends to have to navigate a road like this one!

Symbols and anchors for your center

Feng Shui activity for today:
Add a symbol

Earth is the element for the center. Add a healthy plant to this area. Include things made of earth here – china, ceramics, clay tiles or pots, bricks, natural stone flooring.

A bowl of fresh fruit symbolizes good luck, prosperity, hospitality and health.

Laughter is the best medicine. Place anything you find funny here – blooper videos, pictures of yourself and friends in fun moments, gag gifts. If it brings a smile to your face, it belongs here, so you can place a child’s hand-drawn picture or an old love letter here.

The shape for this area is square, and horizontal or flat items also belong here. Triangular or pyramid-shaped objects work here.

Symbols of earth, such as a globe, pictures of mountains, crystals belong here. They ground you and put you in touch with Mother Earth.

Fire works here, so if your fireplace is in this area, that’s great. Candles will also work. Stars and sun symbols should be here – sunflowers, sundials, pictures of sunrise or sunset, starfish, the Star of David, the Stars and Stripes.

Any religious object you connect with works here.

From Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life
by Karen Rauch Carter

Mountain Alphabet by Andrew Kiss

5 extra minutes

Still working in the General Health area of our homes:

This area is the epitome of balance of the yin and yang energies. If your physical body is in balance, you can “give it your all” and achieve everything you set out to do. This area reaches out and touches all the other eight guas of the home.

Declutter activity for today:
Take a minute to look around the areas of your house. Which area still needs a little extra work? Set your timer for five minutes and get to work decluttering and balancing that area. You know what needs to be done!

After five minutes, stop! That’s it for today!

today's declutter exercise
suggested by our very own Melissa

Note from twofeathers: I wanted an image to illustrate this post, so I put the words "5 extra minutes" into a yahoo search for images and came up with this! The web page title is: Villa with pool at 5 star Altea holiday resort.

And I thought.. wow. This is the kind of thing we are working towards as we work the Prosperity Project. This is the carrot at the end of the stick. So I decided to post it with the suggestion that as we clean, we remember WHY we are cleaning.

Sacred Art for Rest and Relaxation

Today we have a beautiful slide show featuring sacred art by Francene Hart. If you like her work, visit her website. There are many more images, and she has original art, fine art prints, and art cards for sale.

And here is a page of free music downloads (classical this time) from downloads.com. If you don't want to download, you can always add tracks to your "play list" - at least it says you can. I have never actually done that, so I am not sure how it would work. I do, however, routinely download music from this site.

Harmonize and healing with color

Feng Shui activity for today:
Add a color

Yellow, gold, and other earth tones will enhance this area. Yellow bananas in a fruit bowl, the green plant with brown potting soil, yellow flowers will work here.

Red will energize this area. Red candles, placemats, table runners, a red-tassled lampshade, a red throw on the couch, a big bowl of red Christmas ornaments will bring energy to this area.

Yin Yang harmony by Rick Faist

From Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life
by Karen Rauch Carter

Finding your center

Declutter activity for today:

Stand in the center of your home for a moment and close your eyes. Feel what this area is telling you. What needs to happen here to bring balance and improvement in your life? Let this area tell you what needs to be done. Does it need de-cluttering? A general tidying up? Do things need to be put away, or brought out from hiding? Once you have a sense of what this area is asking for, set your timer for 5 minutes and do it. That's it, we're done de-cluttering for today.

This beautiful mandala is by Paul Heussenstamm, I thought it would help us get centered for today's de-cluttering exercise.

General and healing area - an overview

Moving into the General Health area of our homes
Bringing balance to the center of our homes will bring:

• More optimal health
• A sense of balance in life
• Betterment in all life situations

While this may sound really short, and not very important, consider this: If you are not feeling healthy and well, you will not be able to enjoy your prosperity. If you do not have a sense of balance in life, you will find yourself constantly struggling to keep up with this and let go of that. If you seek betterment in all of your life situations, the prosperity and well being you achieve will be well grounded, well founded, and of a much more permanent nature.

Stabilize your Family area with symbols

Feng Shui activity for today:
Add a symbol stabilize

Wood is the element for this area, so wooden picture frames with pictures of your loved ones are great here. Any wooden item will do, even toothpicks and chopsticks. A bowl of pine cones or acorns is symbolic here, along with anything made of paper, wicker, rattan, or bamboo.

Rectangular or columnar objects belong here. Water also works here – pictures of beautiful Venice canals, a water bed, and undulating forms (water takes any shape) are fine here.

From Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life
by Karen Rauch Carter

Family photo project

Still working in the Family area of our homes

The energy in this zone of the house influences how safe and secure you feel in life and how you relate to family members (blood relatives or not). The energy here is your foundation in life and deserves special attention.

Declutter activity for today:

Today, lets take some time to organize our family photos. If you have lots of loose photos in a lot of different places, gather them all together into a "photo box". Do you have photo albums waiting to be filled? Take the time to organize your photos to make it easy to begin to put them into the photo albums. Don't have any photo albums? Why not go and buy some, and fill them up this weekend as a fun "family" project? Maybe you have all your photos in photo albums already. If so, that's great! Maybe this evening would be a great time to dust them off and spend a few moments enjoying them.

Colorize your family area

Feng Shui activity for today:
Add a color to your Family area.

Wood is the element for this area, and green symbolizes wood. Green t-shirts, a wooden bowl filled with avocados or artichokes will work. Green plants can be nurtured here.

Water feeds wood, and black symbolizes water, so anything black will help things start to flow with family, children, and basic money needs.

From Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life
by Karen Rauch Carter

Grab some garage sale stuff

Declutter activity for today:

Find three items that are worth at least $5, that you have outgrown or that you never liked in the first place, and put them in a box for our group’s garage sale this spring.

If you think you may change your mind and remove the items from the box, and put them back on the shelf. Email Shirley and we can store the items for you so you won’t re-clutter your home with things that you know you do not need.

This should take less than five minutes. That’s it for today!

This idea is from our very own Melissa!

Family area - an overview

Day Twenty-One:
Moving into the Family area of our homes

Working to balance and enhance this area of your home can assist in the following ways:

• You may feel more secure in all areas of your life
• Improve your sex life
• Build a stronger foundation that allows you to meet life’s challenges with more confidence and less stress
• Improve family relationships and bring harmony into family matters
• Start being treated like one of the family by non-blood relatives
• Enhance your business and increase your income
• Get a promotion
• Create a situation where you always have the money to pay the bills
• Find balance with your emotional stability
• Improve your physical and mental health
• Make better choices in life

Add substance to Skills and Knowledge

Feng Shui activity for today:
Add a symbol

Books are the perfect enhancement for this area. Use bookends that symbolize a skill you would like to master.

Light will energize this area. Lamps with light bulbs, lanterns, candles work here, hence the sayings “Shed some light on the subject” and “Gain enlightenment.”

If you kitchen is in this area, create the intention that all your food becomes “food for thought.”

Symbols that remind you of wisdom belong here – a lamp of knowledge, the scales of justice, a judge’s gavel, a chess game, a straight-A report card, intelligent dolphins will work.

Symbols of mentors or wise people – a statue of Solomon from the Bible, the three Wise Men, Merlin the magician, Yoda, Einstein, or Gandhi can be depicted here.

Metal works here – as in “Sharp as a tack” and “Razor-sharp mind.”

Water invites wisdom your way. Place wood here with the intention that it attract wisdom. Place your meditation items here, or an altar of thanksgiving. This is the area for your hobbies and crafts.

From Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life
by Karen Rauch Carter

Book Drop

Still working in the Skills and Knowledge area of our homes:

This area may not seem glamorous, and you may think that you should focus your attention on the Prosperity area of your home, but this area deserves equal attention. When prosperity starts to show up in your life, if you don’t have the wisdom, skills and ability to handle the increased resources, the money will flow right through your hands. Enhancing this Wisdom (Skills and Knowledge) area will allow you to more easily accumulate the things you want out of life.

Declutter activity for today:

Books and magazines. We buy them, we read them, but do we really need to keep all of them? Today is a good day to go through that stack of magazines, and browse your bookcases. Pull out any books and/or magazines that you do not love, do not use, and that you will probably never read again.

Box them all up and add them to our upcoming Prosperity Project garage sale, or take them down to your local thrift store. Now enjoy the feeling of freedom that comes from freeing up space in your life.

Enliven your Skills with color

Feng Shui activity for today:
Add a color

Blue is the color for this area. Anything blue will do. Hang your blue jeans in a corner.

Black symbolizes water and is appropriate here.

Wood is the element for this area. Green symbolizes wood, so use green plants, dollar bills, green clothes, green paint.

This cool picture is a National Geographic wallpaper of the day. You can visit their website and get all kinds of cool wallpapers, or you can go here and get this image for your computer desktop.

From Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life
by Karen Rauch Carter

Another hot spot fire drill

Declutter activity for today:
A Hot Spot Fire Drill

Find the one Hot Spot that is still out of control. When you walk into a room, the Hot Spot is the first thing you see. Before it becomes a clutter inferno, set your timer for 3 minutes. Quickly grab any items that do not belong here and put them away. Throw away any trash. Put away the items have just been left out. That’s all! At the end of three minutes, stop. We are done decluttering for today.

FromSink Reflections
by Marla Cilley

Skills and Knowledge area - an overview

Bringing balance into the Skills and Knowledge area of our homes will help to:

• Make better grades
• Make better decisions
• Be more creative
• Be a better businessperson
• Attract opportunities, situations, and people to help in all areas of your life
• Tap into your inner wisdom more often
• Find the inner strength and will to begin a seemingly ominous or overwhelming task
• Have better relationships

Get your career moving

Feng Shui activity for today:
Add a symbol

Water is the element for this area. An aquarium, a fountain, or a vase of good clean water will do. Symbolic water works too – a snowy scene in a picture, a watercolor painting, starfish, or seashells work great here.

The shape of water is free-form and undulating, so any shape will work, except for square shapes (which symbolize earth, and we don’t want earth damming up our free-flowing water.)

Mirrors equal water (and they let you see how fabulous you look dressed for your new career!) Place the mirror at a level where you can look yourself in the eye and see your entire head, so you will get ahead in business.

Glass is another water element – vases, aquariums, fish bowls, stemware.

Metal of any kind works here, as well as round items – coins, bells, plant pots, light fixtures.

Hang symbols here of the Life Path you want to be on. If you want to be in the music industry, pipe music into this area, or place instruments or CDs here. If you want to be a stockbroker, a picture of Wall Street or a copy of the Wall Street Journal should be here. While you are adding symbols of your life path, be sure to remove pictures of things you would never want to do in your life.




Two activities to help the energy in your Career area:

Place some uncooked rice in a bowl. Take all the miscellaneous change you accumulate each day and place it in the bowl. Do this for thirty days. After thirty days is up, count up all the change, and give 10% to your favorite charity or a homeless person.

Write down the things you think you want out of life, or the things you think you need to begin a career, on pieces of paper – one item per paper. Fold up the papers and place them in a bowl, and stir them with a big spoon or your hand each day for nine days. All of your intentions and requests that once did not have any chi behind them will now be enlivened and start to work for you because you are stirring them up.

The rubber meets the road

Day Eighteen:
Still working in the Career area of our homes

When it comes to traveling on your life path, are you stopped at a red light? Is your life path filled with potholes? Are you stuck in gridlock and there’s no exit in sight? Bringing balance into the Career area of your home will work as your 24-hour roadside assistance program!

Declutter activity for today:
If you are looking for direction in your life, or are scattered from so many possibilities and choices, go to your closet and check your shoes. They are the “rubber meeting the road” when it comes to your getting anywhere. Arrange all your shoes in the closet so they are facing the same direction. Find one pair of shoes that you no longer need, and put them in the box of items for our garage sale. That’s it for today! Get on with the fun stuff today!

From Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life
by Karen Rauch Carter

Waterfalls and money flows for rest and relaxation

For today's viewing pleasure we have a slide show featuring waterfalls and an mp3 download to go with it. So just sit back and enjoy the show, imagine that money is flowing into your pocketbook, your bank account, your life, your projects, your ideas and your plans for the future.

You can get a free mp3 music download to go with this slide show here, or just visit downloads.com.

Your career in black and white

Feng Shui activity for today:
Add a color

Water is the element for this area, and black is the feng shui symbol for water. Put your black briefcase here, or that Men in Black poster.

White symbolizes the metal that creates water. Anything white will attract good vibes for your life path. Books have black-and-white pages, so find a book about your career path and place it here.

From Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life
by Karen Rauch Carter

Take care of it now

Declutter activity for today:

There’s one item that every time you walk by it, you think “I’ve got to get that taken care of.” It could be a piece of paper on the floor, and every time you walk by it, you think, “I should pick that up and throw it away.” Or perhaps it’s a button that you set aside meaning to sew it back on your jacket. Right now, take just a minute and go take care of whatever that one thing is. You will feel so much better when you’re done!

I bet "mama" was pretty big in the "take care of it now" department!

This decluttering idea
came from our very own Melissa

Career area - an overview

Day Seventeen:
Moving into the Career area of our homes

Creating balance in this area of your home can help you to:

• Get a job
• Get a new, better, or more meaningful job
• Enjoy your work
• Have business pick up
• Make more money in business
• Follow your heart!

Attracting helpful friends

Feng Shui activity for today:
Add a symbol

Place a picture or symbol of any helpful person that is meaningful to you: Mother Teresa, Jesus, the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King Jr, the Virgin Mary, angels, Deepak Chopra, pastors, teachers, creditors, realtors. You can place their business cards, books, tapes in this area. Who do you want to help you?

When you place a bell here, your request will be heard.

Water is a symbol of spirit – certainly a good help!

Helping hands, even a simple outline of a hand on paper, will work here if it has the right intention behind it.

Symbols of favorite places, whatever makes your heart sing when you think of being there, belongs here.

Opening to Angels by Willow Arlena

FromMove Your Stuff, Change Your Life
by Karen Rauch Carter