Feng shui tips to avoid money leaks
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As feng shui practitioners, we’re often asked about how to increase wealth and prosperity using feng shui. Along with adjustments to enhance wealth, it’s also important to investigate your home and see what underlying feng shui issues may be impacting your ability to cultivate abundance.
When we do a feng shui consultation, we look at several different layers. One aspect of a consultation is correcting or adjusting something that may be causing an energetic drain. From a feng shui standpoint, an energetic drain can impact your financial abundance. While physical leaks in your plumbing can cause you to spend more money on water and repairs, energetic leaks can deplete your energy in subtle ways, causing anxiety and making it harder for you to move through the world effectively. Your home should support all parts of your life, and the goal is to retain beneficial, positive qi.
There are certain design details in your home that can lead to a drain or depletion of energy, which you can also think of as a leak. Using feng shui principles, you can adjust these leaks, which is an important part of supporting your overall financial abundance. Below, we’ve shared five design details that could be causing these money leaks, and we’ll explain how you can correct them.
Check for actual water leaks.
If there are any water leaks in your home, be sure to repair them as soon as you can. People often ask what it means from a feng shui standpoint when a toilet or sink is leaking, and our answer is always that you need to address this on a mundane level first: get your plumbing fixed! Then, if it continues to happen, or there are other things going on that are related, we may want to expand on that and see what this could mean from an energetic or feng shui perspective. If water leaks are a bigger theme, this could be a metaphor, since water leaks can lead to real money leaks. It costs money to waste water, to hire a plumber, and to fix anything that may have been damaged by the leaking water. If you live in an apartment building or multi-family home, this could be even more costly because it could be affecting other people’s homes as well. In feng shui, money is related to the water element, so it’s important to make sure your plumbing fixtures are in good shape so that your finances don’t drain away like water.
Keep your toilet seat lid down.
The bathroom is connected to the water element in the home, and one feng shui tip to avoid leaks or drains in your finances is to keep your toilet seat lid down whenever the toilet is not in use. While this may seem simple, there is a lot of water flowing in and out of our bathrooms, and it’s really helpful to consider how we can mitigate the loss of water, since this represents money. As you put the toilet seat lid down, you can do so with a mindful intention that you’re avoiding the evaporation of water qi and wealth. This has a practical purpose as well: keeping the toilet covered when you flush it is also more sanitary.
Protect your side and back doors.
In your home, doors are portals for qi to flow in and out. Having doors in certain locations can mean different things, and if you want to learn more about the specifics, we share more about this in our book Mindful Living. Back and side doors can represent a depletion or a vulnerability in a certain area, and one way to protect these openings into your home is to install a shopkeeper’s bell. Other kinds of bells could work also, but a shopkeeper’s bell is ideal. This bell will notify you when the door opens, which can lessen anxiety that may build up from being unaware of what’s coming in and out of your home. It can alert the family of any energetic surprises. If you’re not sure which door to focus on, check out our book or work with one of our graduates to get more information about your specific situation.
Place your stove in command.
Your stove or your primary cooking appliance represents your resources in feng shui. How you nourish and feed yourself and your family directly affects your health, which impacts your ability to bring abundance into your life. To make sure your stove is in command, you want to be able to stand and cook at your stove and be able to see all the doors or entryways to your kitchen or cooking area without turning your head. Don’t worry if your stove isn’t in command right now – we see this all the time, and there are ways to work around it if you aren’t able to relocate your stove. If you can’t see the doors or entrances while you’re cooking, a feng shui correction is to place a mirror near your stove so that you can instead see a reflection of the doorways without turning your head. If you have a complicated situation, this is a great time to work with a feng shui consultant.
Look for bathrooms in the wealth area or the center of your home.
If you’re not familiar with the feng shui bagua, we recommend listening to our three-part bagua episode or reading our book. Essentially, the bagua is a mandala that can be laid over a space, and it’s made up of eight areas around a center. Each of these areas, called guas, corresponds to a different area of life, and each gua also has many other layers of significance. To find out whether you have a bathroom in the wealth area, you’ll need to lay the bagua on your entire home. You can do this by standing at your front door facing in. The far left corner of your home will be the wealth area, called Xun. If your home is not a straightforward shape, a feng shui professional can help you figure out how to lay the bagua on your home and find the wealth area. You’ll also want to notice if you have a bathroom in the center of your home, which is typically easier to locate. Things that are happening in the center of your home are very impactful because this part of your home touches all areas of the bagua.
If you do have a bathroom in the center of your home or the wealth area, this can deplete money and resources. The number one thing you’d want to do if you do have a bathroom in one of these places is to check for leaks and make sure all of the fixtures are working well. Next, since there is a lot of water flowing away from the house in the bathroom, it can be helpful to reverse that energetically by lifting the qi here. A simple way to do this is to add a live plant to represent the wood element near the toilet. The upward growth of the plant pulls the qi up, rather than allowing it all to go down the drain. You could also add the earth element because earth slows the movement of water. To add earth, you could place something yellow or an object made of stone in your bathroom. Lastly, you can place a full-length mirror on the outside of the bathroom door. This will make the bathroom energetically disappear when the door is closed, because the door is no longer a door and instead is a reflection of whatever is on the other side of the mirror. You are effectively erasing the problematic position of the bathroom.
We hope these tips help you in your home! As always, we suggest taking one step at a time – even one simple adjustment can really shift things.