The Ancient Wisdom Of Housecleaning

Spring clean with feng shui and you'll get more than just a clean house. In her new book, The Western Guide to Feng Shui for Prosperity (Hay House, 2002), Terah Kathryn Collins writes about real people from all across the country who successfully transformed their lives with the tenets of feng shui.

Prosperity, in the feng shui lexicon, is not just money in the bank. The first step may be overhauling the home—inside and out—but the positive changes spread to all areas of life. The people interviewed for the book reported post-feng shui abundance in many areas and aspects of life, including career, creativity, health, love lives and just plain happiness.

To start the transformative process, Collins offers two basic tips:

• Cultivate gratitude. Appreciate all the richness that you already have before you begin. "You need to shift the internal attitude while shifting the external environment," she says.
  
  
• Get rid of clutter. The byproduct of material prosperity is too many things. The result is stagnant areas in the house that prevent the "beautiful, healthy" river of prosperity from flowing. Says Collins, "It's a dammed stream." Go through the detritus and ask yourself item by item: Do I love it? If you don't, she says, give yourself permission to toss it.

For more information on feng shui or if you want to train to become a practitioner, contact the Western School of Feng Shui, founded by Collins, located in San Diego, Calif., 800.300.6785; www.wsfs.com.

—Barbara Hey