My House My Story

I’d waited for that day for so long.  After marking time for 18 months,  living with my parents, having separated from my husband and selling our marital home, my children and I were finally moving into our own abode.

This new, modest and to be honest, sad looking house, had strangely beckoned to me the moment I saw it. After the realestate agent let me in I had only to take the twelve or so steps from the front door to the back to know that this was the one.

A 1950s design, it had large windows, an open fireplace, plenty of light and fresh air plus a spacious block to create a garden. It was desperately in need of love and tender care. But the best thing about it though was that it excited me as no other house I’d looked at had. It resonated with me in a way I couldn’t explain. And the children loved it too.

Little did I realise  that that is the way most people fall for a house. It simply resonates.

It was in this house that I discovered Feng Shui. It was one day when I had the radio on in another room while vacuumed my bedroom. I turned it off and heard an interviewer speaking to a Chinese Master about energy and houses.He said many things but one thing stayed with me. He said that the front door lets in wealth. I was intrigued, not realising that I was experiencing a pivotal moment in my life.

Later after eventually studying Feng Shui I came to understand that what he meant was that the front door receives the most vibrant chi or life force energy. And this chi is not just money. It is vitality, energy, love. It needs room to get in and spread around the house to bring luck to those who live there. To the Chinese ‘luck’ isn’t random. It’s something you can hold, possess….or lose.

It took a while to realise that that front door was symbolically saying something about me at that time. And it certainly wasn’t talking about wealth.

The door was small, dark, cramped, set back from the front wall and hardly visible with the metre box on one side blocking the way.

It was a bottle neck, an irritant, a blockage. It was sending a message. Don’t come in. There’s not enough room for you here.

Meanwhile even though on one level I felt lucky that I owned a house, on another level I struggled to make money, had low energy levels, hardly any self confidence, no sense that I could make anything happen, and lived with a ‘need to survive’ mentality. That meant I didn’t take risks because I was scared I’d fail.

Our homes are on many levels an external version of ourselves. We resonate, often because we are on the same frequency as the energy and nature of the house. Feng Shui recognises this and as Karter Diamond in her book Feng Shui for Skeptics explains, ‘it introduces another dimension, one which recognises that our building has a presence beyond the obvious and that it impacts us physically, emotionally, mentally  and even financially.’

With my Feng Shui knowledge I made changes to the house but the most important one was to the entrance. I eventually renovated that front door, buying a new one and moving it out from its obscurity so that it aligned with the front wall. I painted the house a fresh cream colour and now my front door was radiating a new message. ‘Come in you are welcome. There is plenty of room. There is more than enough.’

It was after I changed the door that I felt a real shift. My competence blossomed along with my salary. I found the right people to help me with my low energy levels. I began to take real risks. I worked on my fitness, and my fear. I took the children to Vanuatu for a holiday and travelled to Europe alone for a conference. Triumphantly I eventually sold the house 8 years later for three times more than I’d bought it for and took on an adventure to live in Italy for a year! The children had just left home and were beginning happy and successful lives of their own.

I believe that the experiences we have as we live in our particular home gives us the opportunity to learn lessons. Our houses are our teachers in their symbolic architecture, design, invisible energies, the surrounding environment and in the relationships we have within their walls.

image; Jenn Edgar designs