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Plant Your Bedroom with Feng Shuiby Sonya Oppenheimer

Wake up to verdant plants and chase away the winter blues. Start the day by scrunching your gardener''s fingers through potting soil to make spring seem just a little closer.

There are a myriad reasons to add plants to your bedroom déécor including, according to Feng Shui, the opportunity to bring peace, harmony, desired relationships, enhanced creativity, even health and wealth into your life through proper placement. Originating in China over 5,000 years ago, Feng Shui is the art of placement to draw in life force--""chi"".

Enter the master bedroom of Ellen Denuto''s circa 1850 house in Denville, New Jersey, and you see the principles of Feng Shui at work. Denuto, a freelance photographer, wants an environment that was not only aesthetically pleasing but also life enhancing.
With the guidance of interior and sacred space designer, Deanna Trust of Deanna Trust Feng Shui, also of Denville, Denuto places plants, furniture and other decorative objects in positions calculated to do exactly that.
At the far wall, opposite the bedroom door in a kitty-corner position, sits Denuto's sleigh bed with a Ficus tree and lamp behind the headboard. ""The bed placement is called ‘‘command position,''"" Trust explains. ""Chi flows; so, this allows chi to flow through the door and to Ellen as she sleeps, gathering energy and getting ready for greater opportunities.""

The solid headboard meets Feng Shui requirements. ""A toothpick headboard would allow chi to pass through, defeating the life-energy gathering of command position. The bed's footboard, lower than the top of the mattress, is also ideal since it doesn't interfere with energy flow.""
This positioning, however, creates a sharp, empty area, known in Feng Shui as a poison arrow——an area of vulnerability. Placing the Ficus tree and lamp in that area alleviates the problem and even enhances the benefits of bed position. ""Ficus have a nurturing element. And green means hope, growth and new life.""

Luckily, plant benefit is not exclusively from live ones. Unable to get a natural Ficus to thrive in that location, an artificial tree has been substituted. Trust explains that a living plant is most desirable and a flowering plant brings even more chi, but a good reproduction will work. ""A dying plant is a symbol of poorness. Dying leaves must be clipped and a dieing plant must be immediately replaced with a more expensive one to nurture wealth options.""

The historic house is loaded with charm. And special problems. ""We had to stop chi from entering the bedroom and running down and out the sloping floor,"" says Trust. Dowsing with a pendulum, the energy-losing area to the right of the bed was located and corrected with the placement of an Anthurium. To the left of the bed is a TV, creating another problem area. A Chinese evergreen, or Aglaonema, is placed on the floor in front of the TV to absorb the negative, immune-system-lowering, electro magnetic field.

A diaphanous scarf, draped over the TV top, adds further protection. Although Feng Shui is an ancient practice, the Black Sect tradition in which Trust trained has been refined by Grand Master Lin Yun to take into account modern technology.

Placement of the three plants in the master bedroom underscores another Feng Shui tenant. One or three plants plus light is the desired balance. The three plants placed here create a pathway to new life, career and personal growth.

Denuto is as much a slave to time as most of us. On a dresser, facing her bed is a vintage, wooden case clock. The swag of dried flowers draped across the clock's top looks like a charming, purely decorative embellishment but is actually meant to soften appearance and time's demanding concept. Trust points out that bedrooms should be yin——soft, feminine——to encourage good sleep.

Although Feng Shui promotes a harmony of yin (female) and yang (male), the bedroom is one place where aggressive yang forces don't belong.

Bathrooms, with outward drainage, are considered strong siphons of chi. To stem the draining of life-energy from the master bedroom, an Aralia sits on the floor of the adjoining bathroom.

Typical of colonial architecture, the master bedroom is on the second floor, down a hallway from the stairway. From a Feng Shui point of view, this is far from ideal. Life energy would enter Denuto's home through the front door, proceed up the stairs and flow through the facing wall without benefit. A mirror on the wall at the top of the stairs does encourage chi to flow upward but an artificial Dieffenbachia in front of it acts as turnstile, aiming the flow toward her bedroom.
And are there advantages to Feng Shuing outdoor plants? ""Absolutely,"" says Trust. But that's a summer story.
http://www.dig-itmag.com/departments/greatindoors_story/68_0_9_0_M/

San Francisco Chronicle Friday, March 19, 1999
Several hundred fashion designers, accountants and seamstresses gathered in the entryway of Esprit de Corp.'s headquarters as a black-clad Tibetan Buddhist teacher reached up his hands and scattered bright red-dyed rice into the air. We pray that Esprit Corp.'s business will be more and more prosperous and more and more successful," said Grand Master Thomas Lin Yun.Lin Yun was visiting the San Francisco clothing company this week to bless and celebrate its use of feng shui, the ancient Chinese art that claims to foster well-being and prosperity through the systematic arrangement of furniture and buildings.

Developed 3,000 years ago in rural China, feng shui is said to promote well-being by fostering a good flow of chi or life-energy through buildings. A growing number of American businesses today are openly bringing feng shui into their workplaces to boost their bottom line. Some are doing it to attract Asian customers - many of whom wouldn't dream of staying in a hotel or leasing an office without the seal of approval of a feng shui master.
"San Francisco is a place where the East meets the West," said Frank Williams, architect of a new luxury apartment building on Second Street that is being constructed with advice from feng shui experts. "This was to make sure that someone with a strong belief in feng shui would be able to choose to live here." But other U.S. firms, including Esprit, are incorporating feng shui for internal reasons that have nothing to do with marketing to Asia. They are hoping that feng shui will foster a more harmonious working environment, which in turn will boost productivity and profits. "We're saying that we love our building, we love the people in our building, and we want to create an environment that everyone feels comfortable in,"said Esprit CEO Jay Margolis.

Business owners who have used feng shui say their own subjective experience has convinced them it works. Glenn Takayama, president of the small Fremont biotech firm Lab Vision Corp., hired San Francisco feng shui consultant Deborah Gee to analyze his office last year. Gee Suggested changes such as moving the reception desk, moving some plants, painting a few walls red, and hanging wooden flutes in Takayama's private office. "I think I'm more productive now," Takayama said. "And everyone comments on the changes to our lobby. They say it's a good feeling to be there and walk through there."

Meanwhile, Berkeley restaurant owner Christopher Kubiak credits feng shui with boosting business at his new eatery, Voulez-Vous on College Avenue. "I'm not too much into energy and all that, and I don't want to have a Buddha sitting by every door, but after feng shui, we saw an 80 percent increase in our business," Kubiak said.

Esprit embarked on its feng shui make over in late 1998. Among the changes it made: painting many of the doors bright colors based on the bagua, adding a small bamboo fountain to the front reception desk, relocating or partitioning some offices, hanging bright-colored banners over certain areas, adding mirrors and Esprit promotional artwork throughout the building and hanging wooden flutes in the bathrooms.

"We worked really hard last year, but we've had much better results in 1999 (after doing feng shui) than we did in 1998," said May. "Is feng shui the determining cause? I don't know. But I do know our financial performance so far is twice as good as last year." "There are hundreds of feng shui practitioners and thousands of American businesses that have received feng shui advice at all levels of expertise," estimated Steven Post, a San Francisco feng shui practitioner who studied under Lin Yun.

Wall Street Journal Thursday, January 18, 1996
"It feels great here. This is a friendly home," says the feng shui consultant William Spear, walking through the entrance of my apartment. "It's not a formal family when there are books in the hall. You're very open, and spreading.

"There's no strong blockage of energy," adds Mr. Spear, 46, author of the recently published guide "Feng Shui Made Easy: Designing Your Life With the Ancient Art of Placement." Practitioners like Mr. Spear and converts like Donald Trump believe adherence to feng shui precepts about the positioning of furniture, rooms and buildings spells prosperity in the workplace, health and happiness in the home.

Frequently described by Mr. Spear as the acupuncture of space, like acupuncture, feng shui is based on the study of electomagnetic energy lines. This 3,000 year-old Asian art, still widely practiced in Asia, is being embraced by Westerners who want to beef up their love lives or their bottom lines. The goal is the smooth flow of energy, achieving harmony with nature. "It's all about the connection between the external environment and the inner self," sums up Mr. Spear, who has offices in Litchfield, Conn., and London.

Mr. Trump is incorporating feng shui principles into his latest development, Riverside South, a Manhattan project with Japanese financing. According to Mr. Spear, the Trumps got lots of company. "As American business people come in contact with players from the Pacific Rim, they can't ignore that these people are using philosophies and looking at their bottom lines with different sets of glasses than Westerners," he says.
"What Bill talks about makes intuitive sense," says Lee Epstein, chief executive officer of Decision Analytics, a San Francisco-based investment consulting firm, who hired Mr. Spear to apply feng shui principles to a 5,500-square-foot office renovation job. "We use sales teams of two people and had thought of having their desks face each other. Bill felt that would be confrontational and suggested we set them at a 45-degree angle with a plant in between. Whether that's flowing the energy in the right direction I will never know. But what he says seems to have worked."
The novelist Cathy Cash Spellman has just called Mr. Spear because she hasn't had a healthy day since moving into her new residence and wants him to come by for a consultation. "In such cases I often find that the corner of the house that rules blessing and health is missing," he says.
Cures for troubled spaces include plants, lights, crystal and mirrors to activate, sedate, remove or redirect energy. Only once has Mr. Spear told a client to abandon all hope and move out. "That," he says, "was the person who lived a mile and a half from a nuclear power plant."
Washington Post
So has business been slow? Sales been down? You could try to remedy that with new employees, better incentives or even a company-wide morale-boosting retreat. Or you could just hire someone to come and "feng shui" your office.
In the New York office of the large furniture manufacturer Haworth Inc., headquartered in Holland, Mich., the showroom has no fluorescent lighting and people are positioned next to their co-workers not according to their likes and dislikes but according to their Chinese horoscope signs.
Anita Fischer, area sales manager for Haworth in New York, introduced the company to the feng-shui way of arranging office space about four years ago. Fischer said feng shui brought "a more-harmonious place to work in" and made customers more comfortable. Has it helped business? She said sales in her portion of Haworth have increased 110 percent since the decor change.
She acknowledged that the increase could be the result of selling the right product at the right time and place, but noted, "It is kind of compelling that it happened in conjunction with the feng shui."
Janine Gordon, president of Emmerling Post Gordon Public Relations in New York, had her office feng shuied after a client did it and urged her to check it out. "Although I myself know very little about feng shui, I was not ready to discount that good feng shui could contribute to positive energy," Gordon said. "If it could contribute to making my team happy and productive, it was certainly worth doing."
It was suggested they add more plants, change the lighting from fluorescent to something softer and add pictures of water scenes, especially near the office on one employee whom was found to be dominantly "water," someone born in the winter, who tends to be changeable, insecure, intense and secretive. Gordon said her business has increased 46 percent this year.

New York Times, Sept. 22, 1994
"While many non-Chinese developers see feng shui only as a business necessity, its focus on harmonizing man-made structures with nature has attracted a growing number of architects and interior designers intrigued with its Eastern philosophy."
Colorado Homes & Lifestyles Magazine
"This centuries-old Chinese wisdom is so in vogue that the American Society of Interior Designers' national headquarters has given its endorsement..."

CBS Evening News, January 6, 1995
"Call it mysticism or call it marketing, after almost 5000 years, feng shui may be an idea whose time has come...again."