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

Healthy Living FS & TCM Connections

Healthy Living
Connections Between Traditional Chinese Medicine and Feng Shui
Five main groups of study and practice, known as the Five Arts, are an integral part of Chinese philosophy, culture and tradition. These five complex Arts and their respective modalities have been a fundamental guide to Chinese life since earliest times until today. They collectively encompass the entire span of wellbeing and lifestyle practices. Each Art is complete in itself; they are however all interconnected and their commonality is the concept of Qi energetics, essentially yin and yang balance and five elements relationships.

The five Arts are: 1 Medical (Yi) ie.Traditional Chinese Medicine, includes acupuncture, herbal prescriptions and healing: 2 Observation (Xiang) includes Feng Shui, architecture, writing and appearance: 3 Philosophy (Shan) includes Inner cultivation practices and martial arts: 4 Fate (Ming) includes Bazi and Zi Wei horoscope metaphysics: 5 Prediction (Pu) includes divination and cosmic destiny.

Let us take a closer look at the fascinating similarities and inter-relationship between Feng Shui and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), because to be healthy is to achieve a harmonious balance between your body, your heart/mind and your environment. I always think of a building as being a living organism with feelings, a heart and soul. It needs to be taken care of, nurtured and loved to be able to support its occupants.

Whilst Feng Shui focuses initially on the environment and TCM addresses the human body, they have a similar therapeutic approach to a person’s individual situation - both essentially aiming to facilitate optimum well being. Their shared holistic premise is that everyone is different and supporting each person’s unique state and needs is the absolute priority.

Methodologies used to establish what can be done to help a client also have some remarkable parallels. A Feng Shui practitioner will ask the client to describe the problem/s they are having, what they like and dislike about their surroundings, their personal and work life and so on as a brief to address and will observe whether any areas are too yin or too yang and where the qi flow has obstructions or is over-active.

When taking a client’s case history, a TCM practitioner asks questions, observes the face, skin, general appearance, temperature and tongue and reads pulses to identify what is termed ‘Patterns of Disharmony’ to provide clues about underlying causes of health problems. The three basic influences are lifestyle, emotional outlook and the environment. The five elements correlate to the five paired yin and yang organs and other parts including orifices, tissues and fluids. Different qualities of qi flow through meridian channels to reach the body’s ten organ systems.

Seasonal environmental changes naturally influence whether you keep your home warm or cool and its windows and doors closed or open. The five elements have seasonal correlations in both Feng Shui and TCM. Wood element, for example, correlates to Spring and the colour green, as well as to the liver, gall bladder and various associated body parts and functions in TCM. That is one reason why every Chinese meal has a variety of dishes and colours so that it can be well balanced and responsive to seasonal changes, prioritising yin or yang foods to adapt to the body’s condition and needs throughout the year.

So whilst Feng Shui introduces remedial solutions and physical adjustments to harmonise living spaces in order to help people thrive healthily, in parallel TCM has remedial systems to re-establish a body’s balance and release blockages so that it is better able to heal itself. If you wish to explore the nuances of TCM in far greater depth than this short article can possibly cover, I can recommend reading the hardcover book ‘Encyclopaedia of Chinese Medicine’ by Dr Duo Gao.

Warmest wishes,

Sylvia