Bringing Birightness To 2025 The Year of the Wood Snake

Newe Year Brightness In The Maldives | PhotoBy Jonathon Bennett Copyright Protected

What the Wood Snake Year 2025 Symbolises

The Chinese Zodiac Snake is considered traditionally to symbolise passion, intelligence, strategy and transformation, characterising its inherent element of Fire. This year’s Snake combines the elements of Fire and Wood. The Wood Snake is an active, adaptive creature, quickly changing direction to seize opportunities or avert danger. At significant times it will even shed its entire skin, enabling it to embrace a brand new phase of life. The Snake doesn’t hold on to old baggage.

Bringing Brightness into Your Life

Bringing brightness into your home decor and lighting this year will pay homage to the illuminating Fire element, complemented by wooden furnishing, green hues and plants representing the Wood element.

Imaginative light sources will create a welcome feeling of cosy brightness into your living and working environment. Uplighters will positively transform dull corners and they have a magical effect when placed behind plants. Candles, unscented or ones with natural essential oils, always bring a feeling of relaxation, calmness and romance. A strategically placed mirror that reflects natural or artificial light is another bonus. Aim for your windows and doors to sparkle too.

For gardens and outside spaces, a fire pit, hanging candles and solar or LED lighting will all create a wonderful, bright natural extension to your indoor living space that enriches social communication.

Inviting your Desires

Prepare to prosper, attract good fortune, embrace joy and healthy wellbeing. To symbolise make this year’s new qi yours, buy yourself a yummy new red garment, shoes or scarf. and wear it with intent to attract your desires. Bring a new plant indoors and plant a favourite one in your garden to encourage new growth in your life. Replace any worn out things and remember to write a wish list.

Maybe redecorating is your goal, if so you could take colour inspiration for 2025 from here: www.housebeautiful.com/room-decorating/colors/g63115105/color-of-the-year-2025-list/.

Cleaning up and Letting Go

Cleaning up and letting go at the start of a new year is a remarkably powerful way to invite inspiring positive new things into your life. So take this opportunity to set free anything that is no longer serving you Aim to tie up loose ends, complete unfinished  business and start afresh with a new vision, value what is purposeful and leave the rest behind.

Refreshing your Space

Many indigenous cultures have their own house purifying customs and rituals. A delightful Japanese custom is to place salt crystals in crucibles on the front door threshold to keep bad luck away. The Native American tradition is to cleanse a home with Sage smudging. Frankincense releases past negativity and is used as incense in various faiths. Another house cleansing ritual is to sprinkle holy water blessed by a priest.

A simple, yet effective, way to replenish the atmosphere in your home is to use the sound of a metal wind chime,Tibetan Bells or a small hand bell to release traces of undesirable or stagnant subtle energies and to refine the new refreshed vibrations. You can also spray each room afterwards with your favourite diluted essential oils. It is always helpful to add a few drops of Rescue Remedy if there has been distress or sickness in your home last year.

Moving Forward

Whatever your dream, you can make it real. A new year often means a new home. If you are wishing to move home, I can help you purify your present property to attract the ideal purchaser, and to enhance its saleability using Feng Shui. When you find a potential new property I can conduct a Feng Shui preview to assess its suitability for you and to check that there are no evident negatives. After you move, I would be honoured to help you help you settle into your new home creatively using Feng Shui design and traditional formulas to arrange rooms and furnishings, create storage solutions and plan colours. Please ask me I would be really glad to help you.

Warmly wishing you much happiness and good fortune during 2025, the Year of the Snake.

Sylvia

Smarten Uo Your Space

Successful people are smart about what they keep around them. You will often see keepsakes of their interests and achievements, signs of projects in progress and always a well organised space. There may also be a comfortable chair to sit quietly whilst contemplating decisions. What you wont see is clutter, junk or an ailing plant, nor piles of old magazines or paperwork, dreary, uninspiring artwork or displeasing hand-me-downs.
Get your surroundings to nourish and support you to the full. It is acknowledged by behavioural psychologists that when you see things around you that uplift you, inspire you and bring you a sense of joy, you are more likely to feel well and interact positively. A tidy clear space that looks great, maybe boosted by some cheery colour accents, has a huge beneficial effect on health, mood, concentration and productivity.
When children grow up and leave home, it is an opportunity to repurpose a bedroom and create new space for yourself, for work, hobbies, exercise or tranquility; a sofa bed will suffice for occasional overnight stays. When it is time to move, it will help to sell your home faster and more successfully if you declutter all your possessions before the viewings commence. Definitely do that before moving. Taking old baggage with you will only bog you down, rather than freeing you up to enter a new phase of your life.
Here are a couple of stylish Feng Shui design solutions to manage challenging situations. Lighten up dull areas and dingy corners by placing a plant there and concealing a low-level uplighter behind it, their illuminated joint effect is magical. Turn an empty recess into a smart functional space by installing floor-to-ceiling display shelves for decor items like crystals, battery operated candles and plants or flowers, plus books and essential folders
with matching decorative covers. Placing baskets along the lower shelves is a stylish storage solution for often-used small items. Alternatively, add doors to the lower shelves to create a cupboard for toys, games and so on.
Before you give up on tarnished paintwork, try cleaning it with white spirit vinegar and washing up liquid added to warm water. Add a few drops of deodorising essential oils such as Lemon, Lemongrass, Ho leaf or Litsea to the rinse water, then buff to restore a good- as-new sparkle.
In addition to what you can see around you, this is a quick revitalising method to spruce up the unseen subtle energy in your living space. First of all open windows and remove stuck negative energy by clapping your hands or banging on a metal object whilst walking round, paying attention to the corners and beneath furniture. Then spray the air with your favourite essential oils diluted in water and have positive thoughts while you do it. Shake the spray bottle before use to blend the molecules. It can be done whenever you feel the desire or need to refresh the atmosphere.
The prime smart move is to clear your own head space by avoiding decision fatigue. Streamline your wardrobe to simplify choices. Split complex tasks into several mini-steps, making realistic achievable deadlines for each one and sticking to them. Develop the skill of delegating certain chores to give yourself spare time for doing more important things, or just use that time to relax.
An inspiring worthwhile read:
“Getting Things Done, the Art of Stress Free Productivity” by David Allen More ideas for smartening up your space: http://www.fengshui-living.com/blog/2023/4/13/innovative-clutter-clearing

Man & Nature

Chinese Wisdom that Makes Feng Shui Work

The principal aim of Feng Shui is essentially to find a harmonious balance and a supportive connection between people and the environment that they live in. From a Chinese cultural perspective there is a fundamental interactive relationship between nature and man, space and time, influenced by tangible and intangible factors that generate human reactions.

Following the changing patterns of nature, time is cyclical in Chinese thinking, not linear, and its progress is elliptical as it moves forward. It is hard work aiming for something that is not likely to be achievable at the moment. However as the season or year changes, so does the situation we find ourselves in. The opportunity will be there at the right time, and being in the right place too at the right time is even better. Shi means timeliness.

According to Chinese philosophy our lives are shaped by fate, by destiny or ‘luck’, and by free will. Only our birth is fixed, it is our Heaven fate, because we have no control over the life situation we were born into. The rest is largely up to us. We shape how we progress in life and thereby create our own destiny by our endeavours and consideration, by continuing to acquire knowledge, and by decisions we choose to make. We can also organise our environment to support our needs and desires.

Characters, images and pattern language creatively guide Chinese thinking. Recognising several possibilities or correlations for a situation, as well as analysing it to reach a definitive outcome, becomes effective as well as efficient. This fascinating and preagmatic, yet apparently opposing, blend of left and right brain integration is also used to reach purposeful Feng Shui decisions.

This is a sophisticated example of Yin and Yang, the Chinese concept of complementary opposites as the binary code of life. Everything can be related to Yin and Yang. There can be no procreation without male and female, no shadow without sunlight. It is the different Yin and Yang qualities of Qi that determine its potential to become desirable or undesirable.

To make Feng Shui right, there also has to be Qing, which means feeling or affection, so that the built space we inhabit enjoys a mutually supportive resonance with forms in the natural landscape and in combination they give us protection as well as opportunity.

The connection between nature’s form, heaven’s intangible influences, and human needs, called San Cai in Chinese, is the secret to creating balance and harmony in your home or workplace so that you will thrive and flourish, gain life enrichment and happiness. That connection is where the solutions are most likely to be found.