Want to improve the harmony of your home and increase the prosperity in your life at the same time? Try applying this easy feng shui tips for your kitchen!
Feng Shui Basics for Your Home
In an earlier post, we discussed the basics of feng shui for your entrance area and front door. Let’s briefly summarize that information here before we turn to specific tips for your kitchen:
- Feng shui is a Chinese system or philosophy of design centered around creating balance and harmony between five basic elements: water, fire, wood, metal and earth.
- Practitioners place furnishings, art, and other items in a specific room or area of a home using a compass or bagua, based on those five elements.
- The feng shui elements can be seen in both constructive and destructive modes. Water puts out fire (destructive) but helps wood grow (constructive).
- The overarching principle or goal in feng shui is balance and the clear flow of energy throughout your home. So a lot of feng shui work is about removing obstacles to the natural flow of your home’s “chi,” or life energy.
As Inês Martins, a highly-respected Miami-based designer, puts it: “We always start from the client’s own essence … to know them thoroughly, to ensure that every detail, every element, every space, finds a perfect harmony with what they really are or [where] they really want to find themselves.”
That’s also the essence of feng shui.
Why the Kitchen Is Important in Feng Shui
Every room in your home governs a certain area of your life, according to feng shui. For the kitchen, that area is prosperity and wealth.
The kitchen is associated primarily with the energy, sustenance, and abundance we take from food. In feng shui, that literal energy (food into calories consumed to fuel our bodies) also symbolizes the more esoteric energy of financial wealth and abundance.
So the key to good feng shui in your kitchen is protecting the unobstructed flow of that energy of abundance.
In fact, the kitchen is so important in feng shui that it’s considered part of the “feng shui trinity” — the bathroom, the bedroom, and the kitchen. Together, these three rooms form a crucial framework for the health and harmony of the home.
Feng Shui Tips for Your Kitchen
You can ensure a free flow of prosperity through your home by ensuring a more open floor plan for your kitchen and immediately adjacent areas, such as breakfast nooks and dining rooms. Generally speaking, if a person can move easily from one area into another, so can the energy.
Also, if at all possible, avoid having your kitchen open directly into a main point of egress (i.e., front or back door), if you want to keep that energy from flowing out of your home altogether.
Install the best lighting possible. Dark, shadowy corners and harsh, glaring fluorescent lighting are equally damaging to good feng shui and balanced energy flow. Aim for building layers and levels of lighting, depending on the appliances and functions of specific parts of your kitchen.
Although the kitchen is often a place that collects “stuff” — gadgets, electronics, utensils, and lots of cookware — it’s always better from a feng shui perspective to drastically reduce clutter.
There’s no need to go minimalist in your kitchen style, though. Instead, adopt a rigorous approach to organization and storage in this all-important room.
Use smaller containers to organize small items in drawers and cupboards. Invest in beautiful, well-made containers for items that will be visible (i.e., on counter tops, etc.). And avoid the trap of the “clutter drawer”!
Colors should be carefully chosen. Yellow is considered an auspicious choice for kitchens in feng shui, whether that’s the pale, soft shades of butter or a stronger, more vivacious butternut squash.
To more fully invoke the feng shui “abundance and prosperity” energy in your kitchen, add lovely fresh cut flowers in sparkling glass or crystal vases; a vibrant, healthy potted plant on a table or passthrough surface; or a bowl piled high with succulent, fresh fruit on your dining table.
And finally, no matter how large or small it may be, one of the most effective ways to enhance the feng shui of your kitchen is to keep it clean and tidy. Neglected spaces tend to accumulate dead, stagnant energy, whereas well-tended spaces keep that energy flowing smoothly.
