It’s a little early for spring cleaning, it’s a good time to freshen up your bedroom. The ancient Chinese practice of feng shui offers guidance you can use to improve the comfort and appearance of your room, whether you’re looking for love, wanting to nurture your existing relationship or simply seeking a better night’s sleep.
Feng shui is an ancient Chinese practice that focuses on creating balanced, harmonious environments based on the principles of nature. Its practitioners believe it can help you create a better atmosphere in your home.
Reiko Gomez is an interior designer and a feng shui specialist certified by the American Feng Shui Institute. She’s been studying and utilizing feng shui principles in her work for more than 20 years.
If you truly want to apply feng shui principles to your home, you should consult an expert for a personalized evaluation. But the following tips for the bedroom can give you some general advice on creating a harmonious space.
1. Make your room a place you love. “Make the bedroom cozy, sumptuous and a place you love to be. Add very soft tactile bedding, throws and rugs,” Gomez says. “This relates to the principle of yin and yang. Yin relates to soft, warm, soothing environments. A bedroom ‘wants’ yin energy, so we add items that help create that feeling.”
2. Make your bedroom a true getaway. Gomez also recommends having window treatments that can block out the rest of the world. “Good window treatments could be blackout or regular fabric. It’s important that they fully block the view into your bedroom,” she says. “A bedroom is a private space, and if you don’t feel privacy it can lead to difficulty sleeping or being intimate.”
3. Pick the right placement for your bed. “I know I’m being nitpicky, but I’ve done nearly 1,000 consultations in 20 years and I’ve seen a clear correlation between troubled romance and troubled sleep with bad bed locations,” Gomez says.
She recommends having a headboard to anchor your bed and placing it against a solid wall, not a window. You also don’t want to float your bed away from the walls. “There is no stability in such a situation,” Gomez says. “If you have a bed floating in the middle of the room, the feeling of groundlessness makes it incredibly challenging to sleep.”
But you shouldn’t locate your bed in a corner. “This is OK for a kid’s room, but for an adult looking for a relationship, there is literally no room for another person to get in the bed,” Gomez says. “Each person should have space to easily enter and exit the bed. We want equality and balance with a healthy measure of space in a relationship. You create externally what you wish to achieve internally.”
4. Keep the area under your bed clear. If you’re tight on space, that extra storage area can be prime real estate. But Gomez warns that under-the-bed clutter can weigh down a relationship. “I remember doing a consultation for a bachelor who really wanted a relationship,” she says. “I asked him what was under his bed.”
He had the type of bed where the mattress lifts up on hinges to reveal storage space underneath. “When he lifted the mattress, I saw 10 boxes of tax returns — not very romantic.” She adds that a few months after he removed the pesky paperwork, he was in a serious relationship. (Of course, there’s no way to know whether feng shui principles had a hand in this.)
5. Go for symmetry. The equality and balance Gomez talked about regarding bed placement also applies to items around the bed. “In the bedroom, think of balance and pairs,” she says. “This is a room where design symmetry should be perfect or as perfect as you can make it.” While the bedside tables and lamps don’t need to match perfectly, they should be of equal size and quality, she says.
6. Choose artwork carefully. Gomez recommends choosing artwork that’s uplifting or, better yet, romantic. “In feng shui, a sha is an item that creates a negative reaction. Artwork can be a sha if it brings up feelings of pain, sadness or fear,” she says. “This is counter to the peaceful feeling that we want to promote in the bedroom. So we encourage artwork that’s inspiring or stirs the emotions in a positive way.”
7. If you’re a couple, choose photos carefully. “If you’re in a relationship, make sure to have at least one happy picture of the two of you in the bedroom,” Gomez says.
But don’t bring in the whole family. “I’ve seen dressers loaded with pics of all of the family — Mom, Dad, grandparents — beautiful faces, but not exactly the ones to evoke sexy intimacy,” Gomez says. “Keep those pictures in the living room!”
8. Make your room a place where you can unplug. “According to feng shui, electronics in the bedroom make the space about things like watching TV, doing work and shopping rather than the primary purpose of the bedroom — rest, relaxation and romance,” Gomez says. “The bedroom is a place to power down and get intimate.”
9. But you don’t have to give up your bedroom TV if you don’t want to. Gomez understands that some people love to watch TV in bed. “If that’s you, just make sure you can hide the big black screen when not in use and that the TV doesn’t dominate the room,” she says. The way this artwork conceals the TV is just right. Interesting that it’s a pair of paintings that separate when the TV is on but come together when it’s off. I’m sure there’s a feng shui lesson in there somewhere.
