Redecorating after Divorce: How Feng Shui Can Help You Move to the Future
Leigh Kubin tells the story of a woman who held on to the bed she shared during a long marriage with a man who cheated on her just to make him angry. Glenda Tooley recounts the tale of the 50-something man whose living room walls were painted a color he hated, a color his ex-wife chose. Nancy Wesson sees client after client looking for relationships but who have imagery throughout their homes; pictures, statues, books that depict empty chairs, single people or objects, or topics like surviving divorce.
All three are consultants of feng shui, the ancient Chinese practice of arranging a person’s living or work space to promote positive energy, and say they often work with people in various stages of divorce who are stuck in the past and looking to change their lives. “So many of the people I work with are post-divorce,” said Wesson, who owns Focus on Space and consults with clients in Austin, Texas, and Washington, D.C. “Everything in the house screams I live alone and I’m going to be that way forever.”
What is feng shui? According to the International Feng Shui Guild website, Feng Shui “is the art and science of harmonizing a person with their environment and heavenly influences. A living or work environment is then designed in which the presence of the most beneficial qi (life-force or flow of energy) connects the energies of Heaven and Earth with the person. This connection is enhanced by the placement of objects within the house to create the best flow of benevolent qi, the best balance of yin and yang, the most auspicious use of space in accordance with energies present, and by mitigating negative energies and enhancing positive energies.”
Much of what they and others talk about regarding feng shui is common sense. Clear out clutter. Don’t hang on to the ex’s stuff. Open the heart and mind to the idea of a new relationship. The words “energy” and “intention” arise often with the suggestion that if you surround yourself with objects that evoke negative emotions, you will feel negative and be stuck in the past associated with those objects. And if you clean up your house, and presumably your life with the intention of changing things, then most likely you will.
BEFORE THE DIVORCE
Kubin, who hosts the Internet TV show “Feng Shui Your Way” at ON Networks and owns the Feng Shui Training Center in Austin, Texas, said, “Depending on where a person is in the divorce process, they would approach feng shui in different ways. When you’re considering divorce, you would think what can I do in here to make things better? Check in the master bedroom. Ask yourself, ‘Are there things I can fix in here to help this relationship?'”
Kubin advised avoiding triangles in the bedroom since that could invite a third party into your relationship “be it an affair, a job that takes up too much time or the kids coming between Mom and Dad. “The bed itself can be meaningful,” Kubin said. “If it is king-sized, it likely has two twin box springs. Basically, your marriage foundation has a big split in it,” Kubin said.
She suggested taking a red, fitted silk sheet and covering the box spring with the intent to symbolically fuse it together. And if possible, couples should sleep on a queen bed in order to be closer during the night. “Your auras overlap, so you share information you don’t share during the day,” she said. “Orange or peach colors should be avoided in the bedroom,” Kubin said, “because it’s a volatile color that represents change.” To initiate a change, however, she said add an orange pillow but then take it out as soon as the change has occurred.
DURING THE DIVORCE
In her book Fast Feng Shui for Singles: 108 Ways to Heal Your Home and Attract Romance, Stephanie Roberts outlines five phases of a relationship. The first is Centering, when a person finds themselves alone, still healing and not yet dating. Roberts advises deep cleaning the bedroom, using sound — a rattle, bells or even banging on a pot to clear out the energy in the room, and tackling the master bed.
“We spend a third of our lives in bed, and that’s where the most intimate aspects of our love relationships take place,” said Roberts, who has published four other books on feng shui and owns fastfengshui.com. “It’s important to clean up and refresh the energy in and around the bed. If you can afford a new mattress and box spring, great. If you can’t afford that, get new pillows and sheets.”
“At this point,” Kubin said, “it becomes important to look at the journey area of the home, the front and center of the house. They can activate that area with some kind of water,” she said, suggesting an aquarium, fountain or a picture of water. “That will give them fresh ideas on what to do now. It gets you on a different path.”
“All the practitioners suggest letting go of a former spouse’s things. A lot of times people going through divorce are mad. They keep things they don’t love or need or use to spite someone else,” Kubin said. “The energy of that gets stuck with them. They’re doing more harm to themselves.”
Tooley, who owns The Feng Shui Institute of San Diego and offers a class on Recovering from Divorce, Disappointment, and Depression with the Tools of Feng Shui, agreed. “Every time you have a thought about something that has had an emotional impact on you, positively or negatively, it manufactures chemicals in the body the same way it did when you experienced it,” she said. “Everything holds energy. We associate experiences with those objects.”
“Also important is finding your own identity”, said Wesson, who went through divorce herself and discovered feng shui years later. She said she frequently sees women who have defined themselves by their marriage and family as she did. For that reason, she developed a seminar titled “Flying Solo: Living Your Best Life After Divorce.”
“When we’re married, we put our hearts and souls into the relationship and family,” she said. “We set ourselves aside to care for our husbands and our children. When you get divorced, you look up and think, what is my role? What do I do now? Feng shui requires us to look at what we want out of life, and then construct the environment that supports those intentions.”
She also said, “The position of one’s bed is important for feeling secure, a place in the room where you can see the door but are not lined up with it. That way you can see what’s coming, literally and symbolically, yet not feel exposed.”
AFTER DIVORCE
“Once a person has gone through divorce and starts to heal, a time may come when they want a new relationship. An important step in this stage is opening yourself to the idea of having someone else in your life,” Kubin said. “One way to do that is to have a nightstand on either side of the bed. I see single women all the time with just one,” she said. “If you don’t have it, then you’re saying, ‘This is it.'”
She also mentioned having objects in pairs — knickknacks and the images in pictures. “There should be no pictures of just a man or a woman. It’s absolutely about visualizing,” she said. “What you get up and look at every day is what you create.”
This state is the second relationship phase in Roberts’ book, called Exploring. She suggests clearing out 25 percent of the space in places where another person might need to put their things — medicine cabinet, bedroom closet, dresser drawers. “More important is the act of physically creating space in your life for what you say you want,” she said.
“During this phase, a person should also consider what they want from life and a new relationship”, Roberts said. “Get very clear about what you want to attract into your life, and make space for it, so you don’t unconsciously repeat the mistakes of the past,” she said.
SUCCESS STORIES
Wesson, who consults with individuals and businesses, said she has seen feng shui change lives. “I’ve seen relationships change and improve and achieve greater intimacy,” she said. “I’ve seen their fear over things dramatically reduced because they felt so secure in their environment. One woman, a recently divorced executive, wanted to find a new relationship and help boost her business.”
“At first, she was very rigid about any changes to her home,” Wesson said. “But when the changes were finally complete, she cried. She told me ‘I’ve been living in this house for six years. It took moving things around to find that sense of home,'” she said.
Wesson said the woman’s business picked up, she found a new relationship and improved her relationship with her son. “It creates a space that just literally wraps its arms around you,” she said. “I think it is really powerful after divorce. You feel so at risk, even if you know that you are doing absolutely the right thing, you feel so totally at risk. It’s hard to define where you’re headed.”
“The 50-something man Tooley worked with had been married more than 20 years and had several obstacles to moving on,” she said. “His front door had chipped paint, the concrete pavers leading to his house were cracked and some of the address numbers on his door were missing. Symbolically, he was coming from a cracked emotional state and it wasn’t important to find him,” she said.
“His home still held many of his ex-wife’s things two years after the divorce. After talking with Tooley, he got rid of his ex-wife’s things, fixed the front area of the house, re-painted the walls and put up pictures that made him feel good. He also took up a golf, a sport his wife had deemed silly. A few weeks later, his life had changed,” Tooley said. “I was just amazed. He had women calling him,” she said. “He felt uplifted. He did it himself. I just gave him the information.”
“Most of all,” Tooley said, “at any stage of divorce people need to care for themselves. We have to let go and forgive ourselves,” she said. “Really accept and love ourselves and let go of the dreams we had so that better dreams can come in.” And that’s where change really begins.
About the author: Stephanie Obley worked for several years as a journalist in Kansas, Florida, and Utah, covering everything from crime to the environment.
