The Ultimate Happiness Prescription – Deepak Chopra

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The Ultimate Happiness Prescription was the thinnest book on the stack so it bumped the 400, 500 and 900+ page monsters aside. Deepak Chopra rides to the rescue on a day hijacked by too much real life. Good message for the frazzled, in any case. The book explores spiritual and neurological dispositions toward emotional equanimity and follows each of seven keys (Deepak Chopra likes to write self-help books in lists of seven) with some simple steps to move your happiness set point up on the scale.

It’s quite sensible, not very woo-woo at all. Body awareness provides clues to how you really feel about events, circumstances and decisions. Chopra examines the interrelatedness of matter, the energy field consisting of the entire universe and you in it, as he tells you to pay attention to what you feel and where in the body you feel it. Stress affects certain areas, anger and fear others—by bringing awareness to physical feelings you can mitigate and even heal what might be making you unhappy, or unwell.

There’s a very good section on being present in the moment. Nothing new about the teaching—it is thousands of years old—but it is a powerful catalyst for change. The point is that happiness can only exist in the moment because the past is over and the future does not yet exist. That seems obvious but we cart around so much baggage that we seldom devote full awareness and appreciation to the present. Chopra recommends a mindfulness practice to increase present-moment awareness. He emphasizes the benefits of meditation as well.

I tend to like Chopra’s audio and video lectures more than his books. Those events seem to treat subjects in greater depth than the slim, nicely laid-out books. But The Ultimate Happiness Prescription is worth the relatively short amount of time it takes to read it and probably worth a few re-reads, too. The activities Chopra suggests and the points he makes apply to every type of self-improvement effort. In the end, he delivers an introduction to the quest for enlightenment—not some exalted mystical state but a better, saner, more intelligent and, well, happier way to live in this world.

The Ultimate Happiness Prescription: 7 Keys to Joy and Enlightenment   Deepak Chopra | Harmony Books 2009

Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui – Karen Kingston

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It’s been a year of releasing things to make room for whatever brave new world is pushing up from this 21st century compost heap. Just now I am hauling boxes of books to the used bookseller and donating the overflow to the library. So hard to let go of a book. But we are overwhelmed by hardcovers, paperbacks, museum catalogs, picture books–and we need the space.

One yellowing paperback that gets to stay is Karen Kingston’s Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui. I’ve blogged about her books before. She works from the premise that clutter is a reflection of the inner you–uh oh–and that there are reasons that go beyond mere traffic flow and hygiene to become clutter-free. It’s a very basic primer, setting out the simplest principles of Feng Shui and exploring the reasons how and why clutter happens–and what you should do about it.

One interesting idea is that unfinished projects, even when neatly stowed, are clutter because they block the energy flow in your life. That afghan half-completed and folded neatly in the craft box? Clutter. Organized shoeboxes of photographs waiting for the day they slip into an album? Clutter. Paper clutter is a biggie and other people’s clutter can be fatal. It’s a huge mistake to take in the family leavings–Aunt Theoora’s carved walnut dining set and gilt-edged china are clutter in your attic. If you have a serious problem with stuff bequeathed to you that piles up–and up and up–you could create unhealthy conditions in your home and even block fire exits.

But the typical clutter is more modest–a closet crammed with clothes that might fit again someday or just need a zipper fixed or a new hem. Kitchen cabinets house seldom- or never-used appliances–when was the last time you made air-popped popcorn or homemade waffles? Charming collectibles can be clutter–porcelain kittens are cute but they take time to dust and proliferate all over shelves and tabletops. Email should be use-and-lose, not save-to-deal-with-later; ditto snail mail.

Kingston offers some pain-free, or almost pain-free, ways to get started clearing out your clutter. She tells you how to do a simple space clearing to get the energy moving and motivate you to get out the trash bags. Space clearing, a spiritual practice, is best done after you lose the clutter but it can jump-start things for the habitual procrastinator. A single junk drawer could be the opening sortie–you might feel so virtuous that you immediately tackle the garage.

And while you’re at it, Kingston says not to overlook your body and your mind. A daily meditation practice can interrupt the useless chatter and worry loop that occupies your mind most of the time. A detox and a cleaner diet will help your body to get rid of the junk you dumped in there. I love to imagine the sleek, pared down surroundings of the annoyingly healthy person at the conclusion of all this admirable Feng Shui–boundless energy sparkling over everything. Just as soon as I get these last few boxes of books out of here, and dust all the bookshleves, reorganize the remaining books, reshelve all the books on the window seat, the chest, the floor…

Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui   Karen Kingston | Broadway Books 1999

Related post:

Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui 

Secrets of the Talking Jaguar – Martin Prechtel

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The Mayan culture has a rich tradition of shamanism that is as wild and wily as any indigenous spiritual way. In Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, Martin Prechtel, a Puebla Indian who hitchhiked to Guatemala and landed in Santiago de Atitlan, relates his own initiation into Tzutujil shamanism by an irascible ninety-year-old wise man nicknamed Chiv. Nicolas Chiviliu Tacaxoy was a famous shaman in the Tzutujil tradition and he believed Martin had been sent to him to train.

It’s really quite a good story—Chiv, the initiating shaman was a respected elder in the village, a powerful healer and sage. Prechtel was a mess, an Indian kid disenfranchised by the simultaneous marginalization and forced assimilation of his tribal culture, set adrift by the early death of his mother, penniless, open to adventure and drifting below the border in Oaxaca and then in the Mayan Highlands. But his visionary justification for all the rough adventures that befell him served him well enough. He had the gift of seeing what happened as portents and milestones on a pilgrimage, his own journey to discover who he was.

Daily life in the colorful village is brutally hard and beautifully symbolic. Ritual is shot through with grace, miracles abound, the gods and the people live in an intimate alliance that must be renewed continually with celebrations, ceremony, contributions and veneration. Prechtel learns deep qualities of attentiveness and mental toughness. He undergoes difficult trials to prepare him to hold the teachings and the power of a sacred lineage. He drinks a lot of local moonshine and learns to listen for the true voices of the rain, the spirits and the wind.

I knew Santiago for some of the time Prechtel studied with his master and lived there as a respected shaman although I had no knowledge of him. I was an outsider without the curiosity or courage to penetrate the closed traditional society and there was no ancient shaman to invite me in. I saw—and feared–the army post at the edge of town, the unease at the assassination of the mission’s Catholic priest and the anticipated reprisals, and the unsmiling faces and breathtaking embroidery of the women in the market. I could sense much of what Prechtel laments about the destruction of the villagers’ culture and vivid spiritual life but he fills in the facts.

The world he stepped into in the 1970s as a guitar-toting vagabond no longer exists. The beliefs he was entrusted with, the skills he was carefully taught, the sacred Village Heart, the medicine bundle of objects that would help him to invoke the power of the gods, all accompanied him into exile—back home to New Mexico. But before he was forced to leave, he trained with a wickedly funny trickster and gave his own heart to the place and its people. As a traveler, I could only glimpse the outside edges of what was forfeit to a modern, uncomprehending world. Martin Prechtel captures the old truths in the pages of a book, keeping them safe for the day when they might emerge into the light of the Highlands once again.    

Secrets of the Talking Jaguar   Martin Prechtel | Penguin Putnam

The Fire Starter Sessions – Danielle LaPorte

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Danielle LaPorte crams a lot of type into The Fire Starter Sessions—bold black large fonts and tiny san serif and some red, italic and gray here and there for emphasis. It’s as visual as it is legible. The messages are hard to ignore—which is the point. TFSS is a wake-up call from a Type-A, high-enthusiasm, self-help guru who believes that balance is overrated and doing what you say you’re going to do is the secret of success.

LaPorte is pithy, funny, hip, direct and wise. She’s produced a caffeine-jolt of a book that stuffs you in the mouth of the cannon, aims it at a Really Big Goal and lights the fuse. Since death is inevitable, LaPorte writes, your only intelligent choice is to live your passion—and then she tells you how to do it. Part attitude, part tunnel vision and part divine inspiration will start a business, achieve enlightenment, capture the heart of Rhett Butler, sail you through medical school, raise joyful kids, compose a symphony, invent the next technology after Apple.

All the clever turns of phrase, colloquialisms, cussing and conniving keep the pages moving and the message coming. No slacking, no drudgery, no fuzzy thinking, no selling yourself short. First define your self because, like it or not, you are a brand. Know thyself—and really take some time to find out what floats your boat and which is your favorite flavor. Get spiritual—not all tangled up in religion–uncluttered by meditation, yoga, tree-hugging, journal-keeping, making time and room to just be so the creative ideas will arrive in that cleared space.  

TFSS is crammed with suggestions for positive thinking, from post-it notes with one-word reminders to ditching the daily planner and immersing yourself in the flow. Pick your heroes, Gandhi and Lady GaGa, and write down four of their traits you admire—then acquire those traits. Make art that feels good—why would anyone want evidence of your enforced industry? It will have struggle written all over it and you won’t have had any fun. Remember that inevitability thing about death? Don’t waste your life.

Starting fires looks like your best and only choice as you devour big chunks of this book. It is served up in big chunks, so you won’t be perusing it sedately. From the flaming red cover to the pyromaniacal advice inside, The Fire Starter Sessions will incite you to blaze a new trail through the weedy dullness of your days, embrace your most combustible ideas, prioritize what is sacred to you, and shine.

The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms   Danielle LaPorte | Crown  2012

Peace is Every Step – Thich Nhat Hanh

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Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk who organized the Buddhist Peace Delegation to the Paris Peace Talks in 1969, has written numerous beautiful slender volumes dense in mindfulness philosophy and practical teachings. Peace is Every Step, introduced by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, translates the mindfulness practice into ordinary life. It is infused with the gentle wisdom Nhat Hanh has shared with readers and audiences since the turbulent 60s and is no less appropriate for these tumultuous times.

Nhat Hanh’s point is that we cannot just work for, legislate or impose peace—we have to become peace to have any influence on our surroundings, our government and on the health of the planet. His is a very empowering teaching. By paying close attention to the moments of our lives, we enter that still space of perfect balance, of being fully present in the now, and release all chaos and confusion.

The book is divided into three main sections—each consisting of subheads with precepts, inspiration and examples to make mindfulness absolutely clear. Breathe! You are Alive outlines how to eat, wash the dishes and walk mindfully with instructions about the attention to the breath that returns your consciousness to the moment. Transformation and Healing deals with anger, love and compassion. Nhat Hanh explains a way to hug using three deep meditation breaths to anchor yourself firmly in the connection. It sounds a little bit awkward but extremely cool. Peace is Every Step talks about real awareness of the immediate and extended world around you, seen and unseen suffering, and how to contemplate clouds when you are the river.

Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the great masters of mindfulness meditation and his appeal to many people is his approachability and his no-fuss notions of how to live a richly rewarding and generous life. From politics to ecology to watching leaves color and fall in autumn, Peace is Every Step is a prescription for healing ourselves and our fractured planet, a do-it-yourself manual for replacing fear, enmity and confusion with a serene and sustainable existence.  

Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life   Thich Nhat Hanh | Bantam Books  1992

DO – A.C. Ping

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No, try not! Do or do not! There is no try. I just love that. Yoda is my guru. And A.C. Ping leads off a second packed volume of his self-help trilogy with Yoda’s line from The Empire Strikes Back. DO is the lime-green paperback, appearing between Ping’s other well-received books, BE and FAITH, and it is packed with pragmatic tips and observations culled from traditional and new age spiritual teachings. Ping wastes no time getting to the call to action. This is a serious guide for personal transformation and its mantra might be “no excuses.”

There are lots of good examples of the teachings in action, from the certainty required to manifest through creative visualization to an admonition to “Change your story” when it isn’t going well. Accompanying the advice are methods for doing so—not thinking about it or trying to do it but moving in the direction of your dream. Ping talks about the risk inherent in putting everything on the line, and the necessity for doing so. He gets pretty explicit about it, confessing incidents when he convinced himself to take the easy way out and then missed an important opportunity for growth.

“There is no road” said poet Antonio Machado. “We make the road by walking.” (Another favorite quote.) DO is the imperative, the active verb that machetes the underbrush and clears the way. There is nothing startling and brand new in Ping’s prescriptions. You can find advice about meditating to build inner strength and clarity, evaluating energy transactions between people to determine whether they are positive, writing intentions down to concretize them, daring to be honest and authentic even when it makes you uncomfortable, cultivating the patience to wait for exactly what you want and need and then going for it. The virtue of the book is that so many of the classic teachings about self-realization and creating your own life are contained in one place.

DO would be a great carry-along for a blast of inspiration when you’re stuck in a line or commuting to work. It’s a practical workbook with space to make your own notes as you adapt the ideas to your life and experience. In some ways, this is a compact primer of common sense but it’s full of universal principles, not homespun. Ping’s message is a digest of all the nuggets of wisdom in all those volumes of self-help you’ve read—or despaired of ever reading. Dip into it in the library or the bookstore and see if it speaks to you. Just do it.

Do   A.C. Ping | Marlowe & Company   2004

Lost and Found – Geneen Roth

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Geneen Roth has a problem with money. In Lost and Found, she details failed investments with a longtime embezzling accountant and an entire life savings lost in the Madoff Ponzi scheme. The Madoff debacle inspired the book—and it inspired the deep introspection that led to an examination of what money had meant to her as a little girl. All things are related, very good Buddhism and very good money wisdom.

Roth is a workshop leader and the author of a bestselling book Women Food and God. She has spent decades battling her own dysfunctional relationship to food—yo-yo dieting and every unhealthy diet and bingeing practice on the planet make her a knowledgeable and compassionate weight issues coach. But her meditation and inquiry practice, so useful in sorting out the food thing, also provided the ground and the strength to help her cope with overnight impoverishment at age 56 (with a hefty mortgage and no idea how money works at all).

The book gives numerous examples, culled from Roth’s endless discussions with fellow financial sufferers and interviews with holistic financial advisors and people she quizzed in checkout lines and at parties. A fugue state is a customary reaction to money conversations and attempts to grapple with understanding personal economics. A sense of panic or exhaustion is not uncommon. Unwillingness to probe for the early beliefs about money we learn in our families—very uncomfortable scrutiny for most of us—leads too often to financial illiteracy and abdication of responsibility. The abdication comes with very high interest or outright fraud. Who takes your money—MasterCard or Madoff?

The same issues surrounding food cluster all over money and it is the topic even more radioactive than sex or politics for party chatter. Roth recommends sitting on a meditation cushion and steeling yourself to look, unflinching, at what comes up. But she assures us that a willingness to confront the past is precisely what will free us from it. If you grew up with concepts of scarcity—they are probably as much about unconditional love and enough attention as they are about your bank balance. In fact, those issues are likely reflected in your bank balance. If money was a wall to hide behind in a loveless house then you may avoid having it to dodge the risk of a loveless relationship. Or you might have inherited the conviction that people who have money are greedy or predatory or “bad.” Maybe money equates for you with loss of friends or social position. Maybe it confers on you a sense of entitlement or a lack of empathy. There are as many ways to be out of harmony with money as there are erroneous myths about it.

Money isn’t real, Roth reminds us. At least not real in the same way as sunshine, shelter, sustenance and people. Money is part of what you can’t take with you but it does give you freedom to make choices while you are an embodied wage slave or fortunate heiress. And an important way to view investments is to follow the money to where it works. Does the high tech stock keep climbing on the backs of child laborers in the developing world? Are you benefitting from that windfall the energy company reaps from drilling—and spilling–in a fragile environment? Should you be putting your money where your beliefs are—at least some of it?

Lots of good advice and shrewd observation in this tale of goodies and gambling. Geneen Roth might not have a million dollars anymore—actually, she never had it, Bernie Madoff did—but she managed to keep her house and even patch the leaky roof on it.  In the process of dealing with loss, she found a few major fault lines to address and rediscovered what really mattered to her–a significant windfall, in her opinion. 

There may be no FDRs with the political will to tackle the great American 21^st Century Depression (call it what it is, please) but there are some profound individual antidotes to be applied. Audit your own mind, isolate your own money issues, let go of hereditary beliefs and allot some investment to your own good causes. Figure out how to fill the holes in your soul with compassion, not compulsive shopping. And steer clear of anyone Roth chooses as an investment advisor—she admits she’s still trying to figure all that out.

Lost and Found: One Woman’s Story of Losing Her Money and Finding Her Life   Geneen Roth | Viking   2011

Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There – Sylvia Boorstein

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I’ve been revisiting some of Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings lately and thinking about consciously living with more mindfulness. That seems like a fairly gentle way to de-stress, be present in the moment and very focused on whatever I am doing. Sylvia Boorstein’s Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There is a down-to-earth how-to for elevating the quality of your life without making yourself crazy. It’s not a story; it’s a primer for giving yourself a meditation retreat that will establish or deepen a mindfulness practice. You don’t have to be a Buddhist to follow the schedule and reap the benefits. You just have to do it: sit, walk, eat, sleep. Simple–but not. Most of us don’t retain the skill, through childhood and into adulthood, of just being with ourselves.

Boorstein counsels you about setting up a retreat–in a formal retreat center, a borrowed cottage or a room of your house with the phone turned off and the family on hold for a couple of days. You structure the get-away however you can, even if you can’t actually get away. Prepare your exit strategy from daily responsibilities–someone else may need to walk the dog, cook the meals, collect the mail, etc. You’ll be busy doing nothing. Organize the most basic necessities–comfortable clothes, good meditation cushion, timer or alarm clock with a pleasing tone, a shawl or cover-up to ward off chills, walking shoes–unless you are lucky enough to be staying on a warm beach and living barefoot.

Walking and sitting meditation periods alternate between and around meals and sleep. It can be hard to just sit and empty your mind. Minds chatter–Buddhists call this monkey mind–and it can seem impossible to turn those streaming thoughts off. But that’s why they call it a practice. Let the thoughts arise, note them and let them go. Eventually they will go. At some point, you will become aware of your breathing. Focus on the breathing. Return focus to your breathing when a thought interrupts. No big deal. Do it over and over and the thoughts will get bored and go plague somebody else. But it takes practice and you don’t make a big competition out of it. Take a break and take a walk.

Here’s how you walk: find a clear, quiet, private place. If it is in your garden or along a wooded path, be sure you can traverse it without a lot of interruptions. If you are home and your path is a hallway, clear it so you can walk unimpeded. Set the timer or the alarm on your watch. Then stroll. Don’t check the time. Walk for half-an-hour. Begin by becoming aware of all the sensations of your whole body–the feeling of the breeze, sunshine, relaxed shoulders, relaxed breathing. Gradually your steps will slow and then you can focus on the sensation of your bare feet touching the floor or the movement of your knees as you step. If your mind starts up with its flotsam and jetsam routine, go back to the whole body awareness and run through the progression again. Stop when the alarm goes off.

There are many brief instructions for various ways to approach the sitting and walking practices and how to overcome the dread monkey mind, or at least get it to chill a bit. Boorstein relates the actions of the retreat to the precepts of compassion and awareness that are central to Buddhist teaching. But the lessons are logical and pragmatic, not didactic. You’re not becoming a Buddhist–you are becoming a more peaceful person. A peaceful person knows how to eat mindfully. There are ways to pay attention to the food, to your reactions to it, to the sensory impressions you have, to the acts of chewing and swallowing. Those tricks make you very present to the moment of eating a meal.

Throughout the book, there are short stories and anecdotes to illustrate a precept, a practice or a common pitfall. It’s very easy and very doable. You don’t de-stress by stressing over how you let go of stress.  You do discover more of who you are, buried under all the layers of your busy, disconnected life. You could follow Boorstein’s guide for a weekend, a week or a lifetime. Every activity–or lack of activity–can be folded into regular daily life. Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There is a kind of Mindfulness 101.  You don’t even need a retreat to try these techniques. You can practice them for a half hour here and there in the carnival of your quotidian. Little by little, they will help you to get past all the noise and really hear the music.

Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There: A Mindfulness Retreat with Sylvia Boorstein   Sylvia Boorstein | HarperSanFrancisco   1996

Everyday Zen – Charlotte Joko Beck

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The Laundromat is atypically uncrowded and I get two jumbo washers right next to each other so I don’t need to take a deep breath and remind myself to accept life “just as it is.” I was ready for it, though, after spending the morning immersed in Charlotte Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen, a book-length collection of dharma talks on Zen practice, its purpose (no purpose) and the philosophy behind it all. I did manage to misread the SOAK and WASH cycles and dumped the detergent and bleach in the wrong ones. Oh well. Perfection is not the point, after all.

Beck was a plain-speaking, no-nonsense Zen teacher (she died in June at age 94) who covered the Zen precepts from basic practice to enlightenment with stories, examples and candid directives. Sitting zazen—the Zen term for a meditation session—seems uncomplicated: sit, breathe, empty your mind. But it is a rigorous practice that exacerbates or initiates aches and pains and could torpedo your psyche. Get too emotionally uncomfortable, a very real possibility, and you might abandon the effort in order to avoid confronting your callous, misguided and unattractive dark side.

The dharma talks explain how—and why—to persevere. “From the withered tree, a flower blooms” is Beck’s favorite quotation from classic Zen teachings, much repeated. Uh oh. Guess who’s the withered tree in this metaphor? The flower represents your progress—maybe a joyful breakthrough or an experience of inner peace. Don’t count on a big explosion of light, O Buddha-wannabe. Imperceptible change is the norm—very incremental. Sit down on your cushion and settle in for the long haul.

It’s a seductive practice, though, tough as it may be. “Enlightenment is not something you achieve,” Beck writes. “It is the absence of something.” Sounds nicely minimalist and elegant, unlike the life of someone with every towel and bathmat in the house putting the soap in the wrong cycle and trying not to splash bleach on herself. I think I soaped too early the last time I was here, too.

Beck cautions that to seek enlightenment is futile and ambitious. Zen is a progressive clarification, a lifetime of lifting veils, shedding misperceptions, accepting the moment. She details ways to handle anger, pain, disillusion, confusion, even breathing. She punctures all the bright balloons of dreamy, nirvana-like states and says simply that you get better at knowing what is true for you and making decisions about your life as you progress.

Duality and individuality are false notions in Zen. Everyone and everything is connected, no separation, no difference. That maniac neighbor who screams and cusses at his kid for six hours straight on Saturday night? You. Every Presidential candidate with his hand out for corporate largess? You. That prune-faced fourth grade teacher who kept you in for almost every recess all year? You. The Dalai Lama? You. All the same. Zen is great physics. Nonduality contradicts James Hillman’s theory of The Soul’s Code, the book I read before this one. Hillman builds his work around the concept of individual fate. Zen is a zebra of another stripe. Not only are you interrelated to the entire universe but nonattachment is a central issue and benefit of all that focused sitting.

Nonattachment loosens the bonds that lash you to your desires so your life becomes calmer, less driven to get and do things, less tinged with disappointment at all you want but don’t have. People who aren’t in the grip of attachment tend to have fewer things, Beck says, but that’s really irrelevant. What is crucial is that you can tell the difference between what is impermanent and what is important. Soap cycle—impermanent. Clean towels—a greater good. All the toys in the toy box? Fine. Few or no toys–make do with your imagination? Also fine. You become free, light and smarter about how to live.

Zen isn’t for everyone. But it isn’t some esoteric practice reserved for a few hardy initiates either. Sit every day, according to Beck, and you’ll gradually open your life to a quiet joy and a peaceful acceptance of each moment as it is.

Everyday Zen: Love and Work (Plus)   Charlotte Joko Beck | HarperSanFrancisco  1989

Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui – Karen Kingston

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The nice thing about reading whatever I like every day is – reading whatever I like. The tough thing is finding time in a crazy-crowded schedule to read for hours and then blog about it. So, occasionally, I read what I am living and use the overlap to facilitate some pressing activity.

Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui by Karen Kingston is the perfect book to read when you are in the middle of a massive clear-out of an apartment you have lived in for more than 17 years. This space, with its seasonal mice, #$%^&* noisy neighbors, backyard barbecue smoke—eeuw, smells like we live over a cheap restaurant—has a fabulous Central Park West location, alas. Plus, it’s rent stabilized, a bonus that effectively traps you with the neighbors, the vermin, etc. etc. due to below-market rent. Salvation Army is getting a lot of pristine homeschooling materials and quality toddler toys as I dig into closets and empty boxes.

I am reading a John Pawson book (a cook book, actually) for inspiration in streamlining our culinary collection. Dumping a ton of old writing and marketing papers, music CDs, DVDs, various handmade souvenir baskets, pottery, folk paintings and furniture. It is a painful and horrible exercise but we are rediscovering square footage and closet space we had forgotten we had. Kingston’s prescriptions promise room for all kinds of good things to happen so I’m buying into it. Clear your clutter; change your life.

Clutter, or just seldom-used stuff, causes energy to stagnate, according to Kingston. This is a classic Feng Shui concept and the remedy is to make space to get the energy moving again. In the past, when I did a modest clear-out, I immediately got a lot of new business. So, a major release should effectively upend the economic mudslide that has buried our small enterprise and restore some fiscal sunshine. One hopes. In any case, the Karen Kingston advice is coupled with her original version of space clearing—a process and ritual that cleans the energy in a structure and banishes negative influences and the remnants of old events. Books get a special mention in Clearing Sacred Space—pretty helpful when you are staring in dismay at 14-foot-high walls of books that need dusting, sorting and selling to the used bookstore. We will always have books but we will also have eBooks and this place doesn’t need to be a set piece from Fahrenheit 451 to honor our love of the printed volume.

If you have a recurring problem in any area of your life, Kingston suggests you lay the Feng Shui bagua map over your space and find the area that relates to the problem: career, family, romance, health, wealth, etc. Check the area for clutter, items that are no longer used or were always unloved, furniture with sharp edges, even spider plants. Too many downward-hanging items encourage low energy and depression. Spiders droop attractively and produce lots of baby plants which increase the downward energy. So the recommendation is to use uplighting, ferns or other greenery that grows up, pots and cups on shelves rather than suspended from hooks. Peace lilies and dwarf bananas are good for cleaning the air and grow nicely upward.

Not every idea will work in a space-challenged apartment but the more you are aware of the message of your surroundings, the faster you can change the vibe. And, if you have a missing area, there are Feng Shui “cures” listed for tackling the imbalance. The wealth area is missing from our apartment—aaaargh. Remedies might be to hang a rainbow crystal in the window overlooking the missing area or position a mirror to reflect light there. I’ve already strung two rows of Tibetan prayer flags along the railing inscribing the phantom wealth area and we have a wind chime there but it clearly needs a bigger boost of positive. A severe paper edit—business and marketing papers, drafts of documents, bills and banking paperwork in a cabinet–and maybe a crystal might help. But the space clearing when this huge project is finished could be just the auspicious touch we need.

Space clearing is a ritual that unsticks the energy, releases old, negative vibrations and purifies the surroundings. Kingston pioneered the practice using her own talent for sensing energy and years of study with Feng Shui, meditation and indigenous shamanic practitioners. She recommends using a trained professional for the work but tells you how to do it yourself if there is no one else available. Whether you believe in the ability to affect energy fields or not, using fresh flowers, clapping, bell ringing, candles, smudging and intention to clear the space is a pleasant completion of the weeding out. There are many books about Feng Shui and a fair few about space clearing. But Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui merges both methods in a simple set of directions and explanations that make sense and could motivate you to push through the messy clean-up part to the celebration of better energy flow when you are through.   

Creating Sacred Space With Feng Shui: Learn the Art of Space Clearing and Bring New Energy into Your Life    Karen Kingston | Broadway Books  1997