Support Your Feng Shui Intentions with Botanicals
Artwork by Maria Katharine Ramsey
One of the beautiful things about feng shui is how it can complement other modalities. Many of our students have creatively integrated feng shui teachings with other traditions in ways that allow each one to support the other.
Herbalism is one of these practices that lines up with feng shui concepts and can support it in many ways. Like feng shui, plants can help us to better understand ourselves and our current situations, while also nurturing our intentions of where we’d like to go.
Here are a few ways to work with the power of botanicals in your home:
Meditate with plants.
In your meditation space, invite in the energy of a plant you’d like to connect to. Sit quietly for a few minutes, noticing what comes up for you. You might want to open up a journal afterwards and write down any insights. If you have access to an outdoor space with plants, you can also do this outside, sitting physically near the plant and observing it with your senses.
Place plant material on your altar.
We always encourage our students to build an altar somewhere in their homes. If you have an altar and botanicals resonate with you, you might want to add a leaf, flower, seed pod, or some other plant material that you have collected. Just as you would with any item on your altar, honor this plant and treat it as a sacred object.
Decorate with botanical art.
You can also bring the energy of a particular plant into your home through art. There is a lot of precedent for botanical art as a healing modality. In Buddhist thangka painting, for example, artists would intentionally select healing herbs to include in a painting, in order to support someone’s healing process. If you’d like to go this route, find a piece of artwork or photograph of the plant you want to work with, and hang it in your home, setting an intention for this piece of art as you do.
Make your own botanical art.
You can also make your own artwork featuring your plant of choice. Use whatever medium you’d like, and get creative! The act of creating is powerful in itself, so this can be a really lovely way to connect to the energy of a plant. You can treat this simply as a creative and explorative practice, or if you’d like you can display it in your home when you’re done.
How do you decide which plants to work with?
There are a few ways to approach this. One way is to determine which gua, or area of the bagua map, you would like to focus on, and then find a plant that corresponds to that gua. For more on this, check out this blog post. You can also consider the time of year and what plants might be supportive. For example, yesterday was the Summer Solstice, the longest day and shortest night of the year. It could be supportive during this time of year to work with a plant like calendula (pictured above) that aligns with the energy of the sun.
Lastly, let your intuition guide you. What are you already feeling drawn to? Is there a certain plant that always catches your attention, or that you’d like to get to know better? Trust those nudges.
If this topic sparks your curiosity and you want to learn more, listen to our podcast episode Feng Shui Botanical Art with Maria Ramsey.