How does your home feel to you? When you walk in the door, do you feel a sense of calm or chaos? Are you happy to be home or feel like screaming as you run out the door? Do you know why you feel this way? It could be for a lot of reasons. Each of us has a lot going on in our lives at any given moment. We need a place to go to relax from the stress of the day, to be at peace. That place will be different for each of us but as natural philosopher, Pliny the Elder said, “Home is where the heart is.” If that’s true and your home is where your heart is, than I would want my heart to be at peace in my home.
The term Feng Shui means wind and water and is the Chinese art or practice of positioning objects in your surroundings to create energy flow or chi. Your surroundings have an effect on your health and wellbeing, so you want a clear path for the energy to flow freely throughout your home. Clutter is stagnant energy and can prevent energy flow. To encourage positive energy flow, and achieve peace in your surroundings, clearing clutter and organizing your spaces is a good start. Use the PEACE acronym below to help you on your journey to achieve peace in your home by clearing your clutter and organizing your things.
Put like things together – This is the beginning of the organizing process. Group things into categories of like items that make sense to you.
Eliminate excess – Look at the things in each category of like items. Make a decision for each item as to whether it stays or goes. This step will reduce the amount of your things.
Assign homes – The keepers from the step above need to be assigned homes that again, make sense to you. If you take your medicine in the kitchen, that’s a good home to assign to medications.
Containment – Every room in your home, closet, shelf, and your house itself is a container. Now that you’ve assigned homes to your things, determine how you will contain your items in their assigned homes, and make sure you label their homes so you know where to return your things when you are done with them.
Evaluate – As your life situations change, and they will from time to time, you will find that solutions that worked wonderfully in the past, are no longer working so well. That’s when it’s time to evaluate your solutions and tweak them to accommodate these changes.
