You may recall from a previous feng shui post about career and family area enhancements that I discovered some problems that aren’t necessarily found in most feng shui books.  Well, I was at it again but this time the problems were primarily in the career area.

Just as a recap, for those of you not familiar with Feng Shui, there are 9 areas of importance in your home and they are as follows:

• Prosperity area
• Fame area
• Relationship area
• Family and ancestors area
• Health area
• Creativity area
• Knowledge area
• Career Area
• Travel and helpful people area

Each of these areas are a part of a bagua and the bagua is a map that goes over your floor plan or layout of your home.  This map is used to assist you with improving the feng shui of each area.  Each area has its own set of colors and/or elements that you should or should not use in that particular area because hypothetically it can lead to either great success or major problems.  So, for instance, the “Family and Ancestor area” relies heavily on the element of wood.  If you have a fireplace in that area, this symbolically destroys the element of wood.  Since this area is related to family and ancestry, if you have fire elements in this area, you more than likely experience constant feuds with family members or a disconnect from your family or lineage altogether.

As you recall from that last post, I made some enhancements to the family area and I did get some better results.  However, the career enhancements still seemed stagnated even after adding the mirror and water feature.  Water is the element for this area so I thought I was doing a great deed by adding water elements to the area.  This area is my office area so naturally it is perfect for my career area; however, there is also a restroom located in this area.  What this symbolizes is chi rapidly going out as fast as it is coming in.  So, enhancing the area actually makes matters worse.  As author Karen Rauch Carter points out in an article about toilets in the prosperity corner, you must counterbalance the area.  In other words, if water enhances the area but there is a toilet in it, then you must think counter intuitively to improve the area.  In essence, fire elements will be counter-balance the area and thus stabilize the rapid loss of water in the area.

The same is true with a toilet in the career area.  When I added the water fountain hoping it would improve the area, it didn’t improve my career but made it even more stagnated.

Another thing that I hadn’t paid attention to is the fact that I had books in the area.  This area of my home has built-in shelves so naturally I wanted to use this space as a place for all my career-related books thinking that it would help enhance the area; but, this turned out to be a bad idea — a seven year long bad idea.  In this area, a bad element is the earth element and since books are made of pulp which is an earthy element associated with trees, this wasn’t a good idea.  Even if most don’t consider this an “earthy” element like mud or clay, it still is an enhancement for the water element which needed to be counter-balanced in this area.  So, I removed all the books from this area and moved them to my family area which is always in need of more wood elements since unfortunately I have a stove in this area.

Another problem with books is that they create shars, or invisible poison arrow energy.  According to Feng Shui, shars can create loss of any kind and in my case, I was losing out on opportunities to grow my career and thus it remained stagnated.  Not only was the element wrong but I also had an enormous amount of shars pointing right at me.  I had a cesspool of negative energy brewing in my career area and I didn’t even know it!

The moral of the story is that you have to learn Feng Shui well and learn to look for problems beyond the examples listed in most Feng Shui books.    Remember, those are just generalized interpretations and your home may be very different from the general information included in the books.  The best option is to get a Feng Shui practitioner to evaluate the problem and make suggestions.  The next best thing to do is to become a sleuth like myself and investigate the problems yourself and then discover how to use elements, colors or arrangements to balance or counter-balance the area so that you can improve your livelihood.

Do you have any tried-and-true methods of feng shui that you used to improve the energy of your home that aren’t necessarily found in a feng shui book?  Share your experiences below in the comment section. Don’t forget to follow me on Facebook, and Instagram @movemetoATL.