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Episode #67 – Feng Shui How It Can Help Your Health with Cathi Hargaden

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fen shui

When you’re looking to get healthy and improve your fitness, have you considered the environment you live in? If you’re living in a cluttered, disordered world, you’re not fully focused on the things that are important to you: your health and wellbeing. The principles of Feng Shui focus around the balance of energy flow in your body and in your home, removing physical and metaphorical blockages to cleanse your body and allow it to heal.

This week, Feng Shui expert Cathi Hargaden talks to us about how you can bring the ideas of Chinese philosophy into your own life to tackle issues that affect your physical health, such as stress or insomnia. If you’re not sleeping well, your body can’t heal and rejuvenate – not great for getting into shape and feeling fantastic. By making changes to your environment, you could see real change in your physical self as well.

In the modern world, we’re surrounded by technology and therefore by electricity. Could this explain why we find it so hard to shut off at night? There’s a lot of things in our surroundings that might be affecting us, and Cathi talks us through some of the changes you can make, and how they can work.

If you would like to find out more about Feng Shui or arrange a private consultation, you can visit Cathi’s website at www.fenshuimasteryshow.com

To see real examples of Feng Shui in action and to discover how the techniques work, go to www.fengshuimasteryshow.com

Got a question for us about this week’s episode? Contact us and get involved in the discussion! Click Here and ask us a question

SHOW NOTES:

Books mentioned find them at Amazon.com

Tai Pan

Nobel House

Full Episode Transcript

Melissa: Welcome Cathi, thanks so much for being on the program today.

Cathi: Thank you, Melissa, for having me.

Melissa: Now, a big question that some of the listeners may have is what is feng shui and why should we be interested in it as far as it relates to health?

Cathi: Well, first of all, feng shui actually means “wind and water,” two very important elements in the history of China, first of all, but also very important when it comes to, not only wealth but health. And as you know, true wealth is health as well, both mentally and physically.

Melissa: Right.

Cathi: And those two elements, the held philosophy of feng shui comes from a book called “The Book of Changes,” the “I Ching.” I thought about how things are constantly changing in our lives and around us, even within our own body, biologically, neurologically, things ourselves are changing so fast and so is life as we can see.

Unfortunately, this kind of change can cause people to have a nervous breakdown, compromise their mental health, their physical health. And so, feng shui really is an approach to life. It’s an attitude and it’s a philosophy that basically looks up the vibration of the five elements. And as we said, wind and water are all about flowing, increasing a flow of energy. So if I’m just going to give a little example here that as we have blood and lymph that flows in and around our own bodies, and a chi, according to some of the oriental cultures. Then if that creates a blockage in that circulation of blood, we know the repercussions are, it then ends in something like a stroke or a heart attack. It’s the same with the buildings that we are ourselves living in. If there is a blockage to the flow of air coming in around that building, then that also has repercussions for the person living in the house.

Melissa: Wow, yeah. So obviously we want to be more healthy and more conscious about our living surroundings. In fact, there’s a big focus now particularly here in the United States on making your environment as clean and healthy as possible. So how do you set up for this? How do you approach looking at where your house may be now or where your apartment is to make it feng shui-compliant?

Cathi: Okay, well, you can appreciate that the constant of feng shui out in the far east. They’re actually often developing new properties alongside architects. You’d be quite surprised how many architects know very little about feng shui. But most of people, especially people listening on today, they’re not able to go and develop or build their own property. They’re stuck maybe in a mobile home or a caravan, with a small apartment, and you have to make the best of what you have around you. It’s like our bodies, we have to make the best of what we have. And if we relate it to health, one of the big problems people have is insomnia. People are not able to have a good night’s sleep. I’ve been all over the States, and I have been in many different homes there. The problem that stops people from having a good night’s sleep is often there is too many TVs in the home.

Melissa: I totally agree.

Cathi: The electromagnetic energy, not only electromagnetic energy exuding from that. Can you imagine you have one of these boxes focusing on you while you’re asleep? And even if you’ve turned it off, it’s still actually exuding electromagnetic force. So how can your cells in your body develop and recharge themselves when there’s very subtle, and in some cases, very obvious interruption of that rejuvenation process. Plus, you know, also the kind of things that people are looking at the TV, the gruesome, terrorizing, violent scenes, also have an effect on people’s mental health. This then disturbs them and then they wonder why they can’t sleep.

This is very relevant for children and it’s about parents agreeing that this is the law in the household, that we don’t have TVs in the bedroom, and not to mention all the computers and the iPhones, and it goes on and on. But you know, people are really affected by not having a good night’s sleep, because then it puts out their natural cycle, their natural rhythm. And then, the bedroom is very important, what you have in there, because that is the place where you go to recharge, as we said, recharge, and restore yourself. And often, people have got their bed on the wrong compass direction, so lots of people sleep very well in a north-south direction. But you’ll find that they’re sleeping in a direction that’s either the opposite of that or adjacent.

It just doesn’t synchronize with the north-south flow for their particular chemistry or biology. Also, people sleep next door to very close proximity to sockets, plug sockets, and anything else that is deemed electrical. Having any plants in the bedroom is not good neither. Look at the pictures on the wall, what are the pictures saying? Are they pictures of you or is it an abstract picture which basically doesn’t really tell you much at all, it’s not communicating any message about nature or health or a cyclical image or warmth of light.

So the other aspect, I think happens so much in California, but people do really struggle with the lack of light when you don’t have light all year around, so I’m thinking more on the east coast of the States and Europe, where we’re subjected to quite a lot of days without any kind of strong light.

This affects people in, we call it “SAD,” “Seasonal Affective Disorder.” So what you have around you is also influencing that kind of mood, it affects your moods. Colors, what kind of colors have you got in around your bedroom as well as your home? And what kind of lighting have you got? Have you got fluorescent lighting which has been known to cause major headaches on people while they’re working in fluorescent lighting or living there.

So feng shui can encompass so many different aspects to our lives, but you’ll find that it affects everything. As Nikola Tesla once said that if you want to understand the universe, you need to focus on vibration, frequency and energy. And I think it’s the same for feng shui. Feng shui is all about vibration energy and the frequency which emits a message. And all these things I’ve been speaking about in terms of color, orientation, where you sleep, and water underneath the house, layers of land, running through, they’re just a few to mention of how that affects people’s quality of life. We haven’t even begun to mention how clutter affects the flows.

Melissa: Right. Clutter is a big one.

Cathi: It is, and the thing is some of these clutters are so huge that people use their extra room, guest room and then the garage to store a whole lifetime of memories, of lost lives or another life that is now long gone, in terms of “40 years ago, I did this, but I no longer do it.” And the reality is that all this has to go eventually. So it may not be yourself that deals with it as opposed to somebody else coming along putting it into a truck or a bin, and letting it go.

And clutter, I also work within the health professions, and I see time and time again, when I’m going into people’s homes, that they’re in wheelchairs, and the wheelchairs can’t move anywhere because they are so—they’ve actually cornered themselves in. There’s so many boxes and magazines and train sets. You know, I came across a couple who are in their—about 80-84, and they turned up one day in Surrey, down South England. They were sitting outside into deck chairs, and I thought, “Oh.” I said, “You’re having a nice day? Yes, the weather’s very nice today.” And they said, “No, we’re sitting out here because there’s no room for us inside to sit.”

Melissa: Yeah, clutter is a big problem for a lot of people. And I know taking a business course many years back, one of the key things they told us in working with just the basics of businesses and things like that was you had to be ruthless with getting rid of clutter and how to have your desks absolutely immaculate with only things you touched once. So if you touch a piece of paper, you had to deal with it. You had to get it off the desk, on the desk, or into the outbox or the inbox. Or if you had e-mails and stuff, you couldn’t just have everything accumulating; you had to deal with it. And I think that’s why there’s so many experts now that are finding that, not just the physical clutter of things you never throw out of your house, but the technical clutter that you accumulate on all your devices, of not getting rid of or not doing and saving all the time. And that creates, as they said, distractions mentally, so that your mind isn’t always clear to focus on the project or the topic at hand. You’re constantly being distracted by all this stuff over here and all that stuff over there. So I would think that to get your house in kind of an orderly flow would be great for health and mental health.

Cathi: Well, yes, I also run a course on internal feng shui, and because you can’t really separate the outside from the inside. But I have said in the past that if I was to ask somebody to directly change, because that’s what feng shui is about, it’s change, but change in the right place in the right direction at the right time. But if I was to ask them to change, they don’t know what to change, they don’t know how to change. But if we put something in the environment that shifts their focus, makes them question something, makes them realize that they feel lighter within themselves, then that is one foot in the door to the internal shift within themselves.

And so just being around colors, I actually had some people. Some clients who were depressed, and one of the only things that seem to work, one of the only approaches was using feng shui, because I actually told them to look out their environment, told them to say what they did and didn’t like about them, and to get them to take control back and actually shift those changes on the outside. And when they started letting go of their clutter when they started painting the room. That now, they were in control of their own lives, albeit a small area. And it does actually affect people when they actually start moving. People who are depressed don’t want to exercise. They don’t want to move. So if you are getting them to think about, well, what would make it nicer for that person, is it a color? Is it a picture? What is the picture saying? What is it they want from life? What would that picture look like? What’s the message in that picture, because if you think about the advertising world and corporations, their whole focus is on actually subliminally affecting what we buy and we do with our lives. And so I suggest to people, why don’t you set up your own advertising agency within your own environment, so that your pictures are talking to you about where you want to go, what you want do, what kind of energy do you want to feel in your own life, and take back that power within yourself; so that is really important. And internal feng shui is looking at all the five elements related to the organism’s body. So we have the stomach for the earth element; and the heart for the fire element; the liver and gallbladder for the wood element; the mind and the chest, the lungs for the metal element; so I create a visualization and new color to actually to get people to talk to their organs, speak to them, speak to the billions of cells inside them, and create a relationship with those cells and talk to them, because it’s all about connecting with everything that you are, not just the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual as well. This internal feng shui is just as healing as what we do on the outside as well.

Melissa: Yeah, there’s a course in the emerging field now of epigenetics, it’s showing how we can actually change the course of our genetic structure and there are ways for us by practicing things like that to prevent certain cells from turning—or certain things from turning and turning off in our body, so cells that would turn on and maybe allowing cancer or something like that and come in and take over our body, or turning off those cells which are predisposed to let some of these diseases come in.

And a lot of people I’ve talked to, in fact, one doctor that I had on a few months back, was very much focused on restoring people’s cell function through rest and relaxation, and had done blood tests and so forth and said before they did some of these practices of just practicing, like you’re saying, good sleep and relaxing, getting rid of stress, their cells were really—it took them out, looked under a microscope and they look sort of like shriveled up raisins. And as they got better doing these different things to eliminate stress and improve sleep, the cells began to get back to looking like really nice round, red healthy cells.

That, together with epigenetics, is really showing us now that today, you can, by doing these things, make real change in your health. And another thing that comes to mind when you’re speaking about this is you’ll notice, now particularly here in California, if you go to a hotel that’s anywhere near the ocean—and of course we have a huge coastline here, so a lot of the hotels are near the ocean—you’ll notice that a lot of those rooms have very restful, oceany photographs or pictures or paintings in the rooms. And their colors and color schemes are all focused on relaxing and restful-type things. Now, there’s a few avant-garde places-

Cathi: Yeah, but I lived in Santa Barbara one time, many years ago, but I went back there two years ago and I stayed in a hotel near the coast there—well, actually on the coast—and I actually remarked on the interiors of the room because they were so fascinating and I made an inquiry from the manager who told me that the special stone had come all the way from Indonesia, and then the paintings on the wall were from Guatemala and were very colorful. They were colorful, they were of people, and so the feeling that was created in the room was one of “I have returned home.

Melissa: Yeah.

Cathi: And this is very, very good to know, this knowledge, for business, corporations, because if you want to create a feeling in people so that they want to come back again and again and again, then this is the knowledge to have, I can tell you. And not only that, the other aspect that I don’t feng shui deals with as much, being an aromatherapist, I also use the power of aroma.

I operate a B&B which is a B&B, originated in San Francisco, and I operate a B&B over in Windsor in England. And the first things people say when they walk in is the aroma. They always pick up the aroma. They say how stunning it is and makes them feel at home. And then, they comment on the colors, then they comment on the artwork. So can you see that this immediately impacts people on how they feel and their emotions. So imagine how people could make themselves feel in their own home, as well as for businesses and corporations, and hospitals, and I’ve only ever come into one hospital in the whole England, of which I’ve been in many, that really understands the concept of artwork on the walls. All the other hospitals are very dreary. They’re not places to heal.

Melissa: Right.

Cathi: Those are not good places to heal. Everything’s white. White is to deal with metal. It’s to do with institutionalization. It’s to do with control. That’s what the color of white means metal in the five elements.

Melissa: Now, what colors should people think about including in their home, or in particular, in the bedrooms for making it a restful and calming environment? Are there particular ones for everybody or are there different ones for different people?

Cathi: Well, I think there are lot of different ones for different people. I don’t think it should be a one-size-fits-all, so to speak. I think colors like orange and yellow are very good for children and good for getting people’s appetite’s going, if they got problems in that area. Yellow is good for children’s nurseries or any study because it allows people to be in the now, brings people back to now. For the bedroom, lilacs, pale blues, pinks, depends on whose bedroom it is. If it’s a couple, you want something that has a connection, something that has to do with love, that has to do with fire. You don’t have to have red obviously, but you can have a variation of that red. So that could be a pale pink. And if it’s about wanting to communicate, then pale blue, aquamarine. Anything to do with healing, pale green. So these colors, they’re not going to be perfect for everybody because not everyone’s desires. Some people don’t want color and they just want this amazing white or magnolia or off-white. If that is the case, you can always accessorize it, so to speak, and compliment it with having colors on the paintings or the accessories or the upholstery.

Melissa: Yeah, what about paintings or artwork or pictures, you think in the bedroom and in particular you should have like family photos and stuff around or should you stick to, again, restful scenery or things like that?

Cathi: Yeah, it depends. If it’s a couple’s bedroom, then you don’t want pictures of just one person in there because you want a picture that is representing the two people. So pictures of two people happy together and coming together.

So you don’t want pictures of religious icons with one or something. If it is just one person and you’re trying to attract a person into your life, then still have two people in the picture. Failing that, if you want to have a good night’s sleep, then you want pictures of nature: plants, mountains, anything that’s calming. You could also have a picture of the sun going down, that’s because when you’re actually resting when you’re falling asleep. So you don’t want to be woken up by the sun rising, you want the sun going down and resting.

So something that is tranquil and serene. You don’t want to be sitting in a place where you can put the family. You don’t really want family in bed because that’s a private area for you to actually relax and to have reminders maybe of the responsibilities you have or all the places you can take your loved ones and have their photographs there, because the room is for you or for your and your other partner or other significant other.

Melissa: Right, got it. Now, you mentioned before that plants were not a good thing, so there is some theory out there that certain plants can help you in the bedroom. What’s your view on that?

Cathi: No, I would not have plants in the bedroom, and I’ll tell you why, because during the day, the plants have given off carbon—sorry, have given off oxygen during the day. But in the evening, they’re taking oxygen, and that’s why they don’t have plants, and they never used to allow flowers on the walls in the hospitals, because when people are sleeping, the plants would be absorbing the oxygen, and that is obviously required for the people who are trying to heal. So you could put pictures of plants in the bedroom, but I actually wouldn’t put a physical plant in the bedroom.

Melissa: Unless it’s giving off plenty of oxygen.

Cathi: Well, you’ll get about plenty of oxygen during the day, but then take it out before you go to sleep, because it’s going to take all the oxygen back.

Melissa: Right. Another room that’s really important is the kitchen or the place where you’re eating, or where you eat a lot of your meals. I think that’s an important place to have a good mental focus on what you’re doing, which is obviously preparing foods and also consuming them. What’s your advice on having the best feng shui in the kitchen or the dining area?

Cathi: Well, what I do say, comes back to the elements again. It’s not a good idea to have the cooker, which is a fire element next to a water element, the sink. So you normally need something to separate that, and that might be something like an earthen pot, because earth consumes fire and can absorb the water. So how you actually balance that, what you do is you’re balancing out the elements. So earth is like a terracotta pot. Wood is like a plant. Fire would be like a candle. Metal would be something like a crystal. And water would be a curtain that flows like water or actual water, like an aquarium or a fountain, or a picture illustrating the flow of water.

So what you’re looking at in each room, a balance of these five elements because subliminally, when people have a little bit of each of those elements, they start to calibrate a balance within themselves. Now, because we’re all different, which is why I love feng shui because it actually assesses people based on the difference. Then, one person might need more earth than another person who needs more water. So it’s a compromise, if you live with other people anyway. Well, a little bit of each then often serves the best balance for more people. And the other trick is if you have a dining table in the kitchen, to put a mirror over at the side if there’s a wall there about the table, because the idea was to duplicate the amount of food on the table, and this meant that if you had doubled the amount of food on the table, then you would doubly be wealthy.

Melissa: Wow.

Cathi: Yeah, so if you think about historically, to have a bulk of rice in China, you know, you were doing well. You were wealthy.

Melissa: Right.

Cathi: And so to double that amount, this is where you would use mirrors. You use mirrors to add certain things, add mirrors to attract double the amount of an item. Or if you’re not going to put a mirror there—because some people don’t want to be looking up themselves while they’re in the kitchen cooking—you could put a picture there demonstrating a family eating around the table. So I thin—I’m not sure I’m not great on my artists, like Renoir, you know—they’re all having a great time together and they’re enjoying their food. So these are the kind of ideas that you want to put in the eating area because with all the kind of disorders we have, and all the associations that we have about food these days, why is it cross-supplied, it’s so important to get an idea of being healthy around food.

So even if it’s a bowl of fruit in the picture, then it’s just the epitome of balance and you can see all the elements in the bowl of fruit, even that orange. You can have orange for, let me see, orange for earth; red for apple, for fire. You can have, even a lemon for earth. You could have aubergine in there for water. And metal, and what you should do for metal—metal is also visibly symbolized by shapes, so metal is often symbolized by something that is arch in shape or round.

Melissa: maybe the bowl that’s holding the fruit.

Cathi: It could be, yeah. See, I’ve got you thinking. This is the best thing, is once you understand the principles, that I can give them to anyone’s house and say, “You must have a picture with this, this, this, this and this.”

Melissa: Right.

Cathi: Because, if I’m taken to them, this is what they’re looking at, then is this exactly where they want to be going here? It won’t be at all. And this is the problem with a lot of the education system, is it’s telling everybody that they’ve all got to follow the same road. Well, no. Each picture has got to look differently because we all got different emotional, psychological and physical, and spiritual needs within us. So what I say is, “Look, this is how it works. These are the principles. I’m suggesting that in these area, if you can get a picture there that this is the feeling, what would you put up there?”

Melissa: Right. Now, here’s a question, Cathi, is there a place you can go online or maybe at your website where you can see various examples of feng shui in action, or things that you’ve done or others have done?

Cathi: I’m glad that you’ve asked that question because I’m just about to, I’ve already done lots of interviews and put up some YouTube videos—not explicitly with that in mind—but that is my next stage, because I realized that as much as people can hear the ideas and the principles, they love to see things in action. And some of the principles that they’re quite—they can be quite high philosophy, and I’m not underestimating the intelligence of any audience, but it’s always difficult sometimes to hear the theory and then to manifest it physically.

So that’s my next set of videos, is to show that this is a room that’s got the five elements in it. This is a picture that’s got the five elements. And this picture has got this, this and this, and it makes me feel like whatever. So for example, I have a painting called “The Tree of Trees,” because I want to treat myself, and I’m open to receiving all day, every day in terms of new things coming into my life, new people and new ideas. And so, you can see how you’re relating or I am relating to my artwork, so that it’s there and it was a purpose for it. It’s not just something that I bought and thought, “I’ll just hang this up.” It’s something where I’m actually taking time out to consider my environment, so that it connects with me.

Melissa: Right. I think that’s really important. I’m glad you’re going to do a special series on that because I think people would like to see kind of the visual aspect of how you do it and how you’ve done it, and maybe some examples of work you’ve done for others, and how they’ve done it, so they can get the idea. But for people—I just want to throw this in. We’re almost out of time, but I want to throw this in—but for people that think that, you know, “This is a bit out there in woo-woo.” I just want to remind them that they can take a look at a couple of books, historical novels, “Tai-Pan” is one by James Clavell and “Noble House” is one, which focus on how Hong Kong was founded back in the day. And I read those some years ago in oriental philosophy studies that I was doing in college, and those can show you in a very light, fun read how important these elements that we’ve talked about today were on building this huge business empire, a financial hub of the world of Hong Kong, and how all these buildings that were built over time going way back to the 1840s where strategically positioned with all these elements in mind.

And for people that don’t know the history, one of the people that founded Hong Kong trading companies and things back in the day were from Great Britain. And so, they were not masters of feng shui, but they definitely paid attention to it, and you can see in those books—I’ll put links in the show notes to them—how it came to be over time. And how even today, I know friends that are living currently in Hong Kong, how you do not start remodeling a building or anything like that. And the architects there definitely know about what to do, how to do it, and what they can and cannot do. And I haven’t been to Hong Kong, but I know if you go there, you’ll often see like a business high rise, and the door is at a funny angle. It’s not symmetrical-

Cathi: That’s right.

Melissa: -you’ll know that the reason it’s that way is because it’s been positioned to maximize the feng shui elements for that particular building, so skyscrapers or not.

Cathi: I just wanted to say also, it’s not just about space feng shui, and this is a hidden secret that a lot of people don’t know, it’s also about timing. And that is why since 2003, China has elevated itself from an agricultural country, really, to an unrecognizable industrial—I know, it’s still agricultural, but it’s partly industrial as we know—and they will make their ascent and continue to, and possibly reach its peak up until 2023. It’s of no mistake, they calculated it, they knew it was coming and they were ready. And this is the aspect of feng shui. It’s all about being in the right place at the right time. So that involves astrology and numbers, and how you actually calculate them. Everyone has a particular number, and it tells you where you need to be at a certain month or a certain year, and which part of your life do you need to be focusing on.

And so, just to say that the space is important, but what goes with that is when do you do these things, when is the timing. But I don’t want people to see that as an obstacle to getting started themselves right away. You know, after listening to me, they can get started right away on their own homes by just looking up the clutter and letting go. Letting go is a huge part of people’s mental health, it’s because we don’t let go that we create more problems for ourselves. And so I’d like people to at least leave with a few diamonds here. Let go of the space and also something we haven’t mentioned is to cleanse the space, because we’re all walking into rooms where hundreds of people have left before and they’ve left behind their patterns of thinking. And we need to cleanse them. And this is really important because if you don’t, you can often find yourself behaving in ways that actually, it’s not you, but the patterns. We all have patterns. But like snails or like spiders, we weave our own spider’s web, and who wants to live in somebody else’s spider’s web? Even if we they were very, very rich, because we don’t know the yin and yang in everything, the yin and yang so that, you know, why not cleanse the space and live your own spider’s web?

Melissa: Now, what would you recommend for actually cleansing the space? I know I’ve had neighbors near me here in California that have moved into a place and done the sage burning through the house, and they’ve even sometimes done more, it’s like there’s some bad energy there. So I am in the home of people that do different things out here in California. But what would you recommend for if, let’s say, someone’s moving to a new apartment. That can always be stressful and you want to get there and have it be in the best, possible shape. How would you cleanse the space?

Cathi: Well, less and more passive way would be place a bowl in each of the rooms and put in some lemon and vinegar halfway in those bowls and leave them for a couple of weeks. And what would happen is that it’ll act like an astringent on the atmosphere. And it will pull any of the impurities towards it, in that space. Or you can use sea salt in those bowls, without the vinegar and lemon, and leave the sea salt in those bowls, a bowl in each room, for three weeks and the salt will pull the water from the atmosphere. Now, you may ask, “Well, what’s that got to do with anything?” Well, water holds memory, so if the moisture in the atmosphere will be holding the memory of the previous people that lived there and the previous people before that. So to cleanse that, if you bring in salt or rice, it will absorb the moisture in the atmosphere and then after you’ve done for three weeks, you just throw the salt away. Obviously, don’t use it, and you can [inaudible 36:43] the moisture in the atmosphere because we are all living our patterns, often on the people’s patterns previously.

Melissa: Right, well that’s a cool trick and a very inexpensive one too, and one that wouldn’t involve lighting sage on fire through the house. So I think a lot of-

Cathi: Careful, you’re in California with your bush fires. So you don’t want to be setting fire to too many sage bushes.

Melissa: People in California don’t start burning sage and throwing them around.

Cathi: So it’s much safer.

Melissa: Much safer. Okay, Cathi, we’re almost out of time. So where can people find you online? What’s your website?

Cathi: My website, I’ve got two, one is “fengshuimasteryshow.com.” That’s got all my interviews so far, and I will be putting my videos on there as well, demonstrating some of the ideas we’ve discussed tonight. And then, we’ve got “WealthySpaces.com,” which gives you an inkling of what kind of things I do like, one-on-one consultations or over-Skype consultations, workshops. I have webinar products/packages. I will be selling some of the space clearing products as well, because people often say to me, “Which are the best things to use and etc.” You can get me on “wealthyspaces@gmail.com,” that’s my e-mail address, if you want to consider any joint ventures or just consulting, or whatever I can help you with, or work alongside of you. That’s the e-mail to contact me on. And on YouTube as well, I actually have demonstrated how to use some of the forms of space clearing. But I have to say, if this has to be done in California, so you have to very, very careful with the fire. These products are highly-flammable and so just be aware of that. So you can go on to YouTube and my name, “Cathi Hargaden.” It will come up. That particular video will come up and it will demonstrate to people how to do it, but I always emphasize safety. And that’s how you can contact me.

Melissa: Great. Well, maybe we’ll have you back on when you’ve got all your YouTube stuff out too, and talk more about it. And also, a lot of people call in and sometimes write in and ask specific questions about a guest that’s been on, so I always like to say, “We’ll get them back to answer those.”

Cathi: Yes, please do. And also, more and more people are asking me about this internal feng shui, how can they use that, how can they use it as a healing process for themselves. So that could in itself be another session on the show.

Melissa: Right, definitely. Cathi, thank you so much for being on today.

Cathi: Yeah, thanks for having me. I enjoyed it.

Melissa: We’ll see you in the future.

Cathi: Alright then, Melissa. All the best. Thank you. Buh-bye.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

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fen shui

When you’re looking to get healthy and improve your fitness, have you considered the environment you live in? If you’re living in a cluttered, disordered world, you’re not fully focused on the things that are important to you: your health and wellbeing. The principles of Feng Shui focus around the balance of energy flow in your body and in your home, removing physical and metaphorical blockages to cleanse your body and allow it to heal.

This week, Feng Shui expert Cathi Hargaden talks to us about how you can bring the ideas of Chinese philosophy into your own life to tackle issues that affect your physical health, such as stress or insomnia. If you’re not sleeping well, your body can’t heal and rejuvenate – not great for getting into shape and feeling fantastic. By making changes to your environment, you could see real change in your physical self as well.

In the modern world, we’re surrounded by technology and therefore by electricity. Could this explain why we find it so hard to shut off at night? There’s a lot of things in our surroundings that might be affecting us, and Cathi talks us through some of the changes you can make, and how they can work.

If you would like to find out more about Feng Shui or arrange a private consultation, you can visit Cathi’s website at www.fenshuimasteryshow.com

To see real examples of Feng Shui in action and to discover how the techniques work, go to www.fengshuimasteryshow.com

Got a question for us about this week’s episode? Contact us and get involved in the discussion! Click Here and ask us a question

SHOW NOTES:

Books mentioned find them at Amazon.com

Tai Pan

Nobel House

Full Episode Transcript

Melissa: Welcome Cathi, thanks so much for being on the program today.

Cathi: Thank you, Melissa, for having me.

Melissa: Now, a big question that some of the listeners may have is what is feng shui and why should we be interested in it as far as it relates to health?

Cathi: Well, first of all, feng shui actually means “wind and water,” two very important elements in the history of China, first of all, but also very important when it comes to, not only wealth but health. And as you know, true wealth is health as well, both mentally and physically.

Melissa: Right.

Cathi: And those two elements, the held philosophy of feng shui comes from a book called “The Book of Changes,” the “I Ching.” I thought about how things are constantly changing in our lives and around us, even within our own body, biologically, neurologically, things ourselves are changing so fast and so is life as we can see.

Unfortunately, this kind of change can cause people to have a nervous breakdown, compromise their mental health, their physical health. And so, feng shui really is an approach to life. It’s an attitude and it’s a philosophy that basically looks up the vibration of the five elements. And as we said, wind and water are all about flowing, increasing a flow of energy. So if I’m just going to give a little example here that as we have blood and lymph that flows in and around our own bodies, and a chi, according to some of the oriental cultures. Then if that creates a blockage in that circulation of blood, we know the repercussions are, it then ends in something like a stroke or a heart attack. It’s the same with the buildings that we are ourselves living in. If there is a blockage to the flow of air coming in around that building, then that also has repercussions for the person living in the house.

Melissa: Wow, yeah. So obviously we want to be more healthy and more conscious about our living surroundings. In fact, there’s a big focus now particularly here in the United States on making your environment as clean and healthy as possible. So how do you set up for this? How do you approach looking at where your house may be now or where your apartment is to make it feng shui-compliant?

Cathi: Okay, well, you can appreciate that the constant of feng shui out in the far east. They’re actually often developing new properties alongside architects. You’d be quite surprised how many architects know very little about feng shui. But most of people, especially people listening on today, they’re not able to go and develop or build their own property. They’re stuck maybe in a mobile home or a caravan, with a small apartment, and you have to make the best of what you have around you. It’s like our bodies, we have to make the best of what we have. And if we relate it to health, one of the big problems people have is insomnia. People are not able to have a good night’s sleep. I’ve been all over the States, and I have been in many different homes there. The problem that stops people from having a good night’s sleep is often there is too many TVs in the home.

Melissa: I totally agree.

Cathi: The electromagnetic energy, not only electromagnetic energy exuding from that. Can you imagine you have one of these boxes focusing on you while you’re asleep? And even if you’ve turned it off, it’s still actually exuding electromagnetic force. So how can your cells in your body develop and recharge themselves when there’s very subtle, and in some cases, very obvious interruption of that rejuvenation process. Plus, you know, also the kind of things that people are looking at the TV, the gruesome, terrorizing, violent scenes, also have an effect on people’s mental health. This then disturbs them and then they wonder why they can’t sleep.

This is very relevant for children and it’s about parents agreeing that this is the law in the household, that we don’t have TVs in the bedroom, and not to mention all the computers and the iPhones, and it goes on and on. But you know, people are really affected by not having a good night’s sleep, because then it puts out their natural cycle, their natural rhythm. And then, the bedroom is very important, what you have in there, because that is the place where you go to recharge, as we said, recharge, and restore yourself. And often, people have got their bed on the wrong compass direction, so lots of people sleep very well in a north-south direction. But you’ll find that they’re sleeping in a direction that’s either the opposite of that or adjacent.

It just doesn’t synchronize with the north-south flow for their particular chemistry or biology. Also, people sleep next door to very close proximity to sockets, plug sockets, and anything else that is deemed electrical. Having any plants in the bedroom is not good neither. Look at the pictures on the wall, what are the pictures saying? Are they pictures of you or is it an abstract picture which basically doesn’t really tell you much at all, it’s not communicating any message about nature or health or a cyclical image or warmth of light.

So the other aspect, I think happens so much in California, but people do really struggle with the lack of light when you don’t have light all year around, so I’m thinking more on the east coast of the States and Europe, where we’re subjected to quite a lot of days without any kind of strong light.

This affects people in, we call it “SAD,” “Seasonal Affective Disorder.” So what you have around you is also influencing that kind of mood, it affects your moods. Colors, what kind of colors have you got in around your bedroom as well as your home? And what kind of lighting have you got? Have you got fluorescent lighting which has been known to cause major headaches on people while they’re working in fluorescent lighting or living there.

So feng shui can encompass so many different aspects to our lives, but you’ll find that it affects everything. As Nikola Tesla once said that if you want to understand the universe, you need to focus on vibration, frequency and energy. And I think it’s the same for feng shui. Feng shui is all about vibration energy and the frequency which emits a message. And all these things I’ve been speaking about in terms of color, orientation, where you sleep, and water underneath the house, layers of land, running through, they’re just a few to mention of how that affects people’s quality of life. We haven’t even begun to mention how clutter affects the flows.

Melissa: Right. Clutter is a big one.

Cathi: It is, and the thing is some of these clutters are so huge that people use their extra room, guest room and then the garage to store a whole lifetime of memories, of lost lives or another life that is now long gone, in terms of “40 years ago, I did this, but I no longer do it.” And the reality is that all this has to go eventually. So it may not be yourself that deals with it as opposed to somebody else coming along putting it into a truck or a bin, and letting it go.

And clutter, I also work within the health professions, and I see time and time again, when I’m going into people’s homes, that they’re in wheelchairs, and the wheelchairs can’t move anywhere because they are so—they’ve actually cornered themselves in. There’s so many boxes and magazines and train sets. You know, I came across a couple who are in their—about 80-84, and they turned up one day in Surrey, down South England. They were sitting outside into deck chairs, and I thought, “Oh.” I said, “You’re having a nice day? Yes, the weather’s very nice today.” And they said, “No, we’re sitting out here because there’s no room for us inside to sit.”

Melissa: Yeah, clutter is a big problem for a lot of people. And I know taking a business course many years back, one of the key things they told us in working with just the basics of businesses and things like that was you had to be ruthless with getting rid of clutter and how to have your desks absolutely immaculate with only things you touched once. So if you touch a piece of paper, you had to deal with it. You had to get it off the desk, on the desk, or into the outbox or the inbox. Or if you had e-mails and stuff, you couldn’t just have everything accumulating; you had to deal with it. And I think that’s why there’s so many experts now that are finding that, not just the physical clutter of things you never throw out of your house, but the technical clutter that you accumulate on all your devices, of not getting rid of or not doing and saving all the time. And that creates, as they said, distractions mentally, so that your mind isn’t always clear to focus on the project or the topic at hand. You’re constantly being distracted by all this stuff over here and all that stuff over there. So I would think that to get your house in kind of an orderly flow would be great for health and mental health.

Cathi: Well, yes, I also run a course on internal feng shui, and because you can’t really separate the outside from the inside. But I have said in the past that if I was to ask somebody to directly change, because that’s what feng shui is about, it’s change, but change in the right place in the right direction at the right time. But if I was to ask them to change, they don’t know what to change, they don’t know how to change. But if we put something in the environment that shifts their focus, makes them question something, makes them realize that they feel lighter within themselves, then that is one foot in the door to the internal shift within themselves.

And so just being around colors, I actually had some people. Some clients who were depressed, and one of the only things that seem to work, one of the only approaches was using feng shui, because I actually told them to look out their environment, told them to say what they did and didn’t like about them, and to get them to take control back and actually shift those changes on the outside. And when they started letting go of their clutter when they started painting the room. That now, they were in control of their own lives, albeit a small area. And it does actually affect people when they actually start moving. People who are depressed don’t want to exercise. They don’t want to move. So if you are getting them to think about, well, what would make it nicer for that person, is it a color? Is it a picture? What is the picture saying? What is it they want from life? What would that picture look like? What’s the message in that picture, because if you think about the advertising world and corporations, their whole focus is on actually subliminally affecting what we buy and we do with our lives. And so I suggest to people, why don’t you set up your own advertising agency within your own environment, so that your pictures are talking to you about where you want to go, what you want do, what kind of energy do you want to feel in your own life, and take back that power within yourself; so that is really important. And internal feng shui is looking at all the five elements related to the organism’s body. So we have the stomach for the earth element; and the heart for the fire element; the liver and gallbladder for the wood element; the mind and the chest, the lungs for the metal element; so I create a visualization and new color to actually to get people to talk to their organs, speak to them, speak to the billions of cells inside them, and create a relationship with those cells and talk to them, because it’s all about connecting with everything that you are, not just the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual as well. This internal feng shui is just as healing as what we do on the outside as well.

Melissa: Yeah, there’s a course in the emerging field now of epigenetics, it’s showing how we can actually change the course of our genetic structure and there are ways for us by practicing things like that to prevent certain cells from turning—or certain things from turning and turning off in our body, so cells that would turn on and maybe allowing cancer or something like that and come in and take over our body, or turning off those cells which are predisposed to let some of these diseases come in.

And a lot of people I’ve talked to, in fact, one doctor that I had on a few months back, was very much focused on restoring people’s cell function through rest and relaxation, and had done blood tests and so forth and said before they did some of these practices of just practicing, like you’re saying, good sleep and relaxing, getting rid of stress, their cells were really—it took them out, looked under a microscope and they look sort of like shriveled up raisins. And as they got better doing these different things to eliminate stress and improve sleep, the cells began to get back to looking like really nice round, red healthy cells.

That, together with epigenetics, is really showing us now that today, you can, by doing these things, make real change in your health. And another thing that comes to mind when you’re speaking about this is you’ll notice, now particularly here in California, if you go to a hotel that’s anywhere near the ocean—and of course we have a huge coastline here, so a lot of the hotels are near the ocean—you’ll notice that a lot of those rooms have very restful, oceany photographs or pictures or paintings in the rooms. And their colors and color schemes are all focused on relaxing and restful-type things. Now, there’s a few avant-garde places-

Cathi: Yeah, but I lived in Santa Barbara one time, many years ago, but I went back there two years ago and I stayed in a hotel near the coast there—well, actually on the coast—and I actually remarked on the interiors of the room because they were so fascinating and I made an inquiry from the manager who told me that the special stone had come all the way from Indonesia, and then the paintings on the wall were from Guatemala and were very colorful. They were colorful, they were of people, and so the feeling that was created in the room was one of “I have returned home.

Melissa: Yeah.

Cathi: And this is very, very good to know, this knowledge, for business, corporations, because if you want to create a feeling in people so that they want to come back again and again and again, then this is the knowledge to have, I can tell you. And not only that, the other aspect that I don’t feng shui deals with as much, being an aromatherapist, I also use the power of aroma.

I operate a B&B which is a B&B, originated in San Francisco, and I operate a B&B over in Windsor in England. And the first things people say when they walk in is the aroma. They always pick up the aroma. They say how stunning it is and makes them feel at home. And then, they comment on the colors, then they comment on the artwork. So can you see that this immediately impacts people on how they feel and their emotions. So imagine how people could make themselves feel in their own home, as well as for businesses and corporations, and hospitals, and I’ve only ever come into one hospital in the whole England, of which I’ve been in many, that really understands the concept of artwork on the walls. All the other hospitals are very dreary. They’re not places to heal.

Melissa: Right.

Cathi: Those are not good places to heal. Everything’s white. White is to deal with metal. It’s to do with institutionalization. It’s to do with control. That’s what the color of white means metal in the five elements.

Melissa: Now, what colors should people think about including in their home, or in particular, in the bedrooms for making it a restful and calming environment? Are there particular ones for everybody or are there different ones for different people?

Cathi: Well, I think there are lot of different ones for different people. I don’t think it should be a one-size-fits-all, so to speak. I think colors like orange and yellow are very good for children and good for getting people’s appetite’s going, if they got problems in that area. Yellow is good for children’s nurseries or any study because it allows people to be in the now, brings people back to now. For the bedroom, lilacs, pale blues, pinks, depends on whose bedroom it is. If it’s a couple, you want something that has a connection, something that has to do with love, that has to do with fire. You don’t have to have red obviously, but you can have a variation of that red. So that could be a pale pink. And if it’s about wanting to communicate, then pale blue, aquamarine. Anything to do with healing, pale green. So these colors, they’re not going to be perfect for everybody because not everyone’s desires. Some people don’t want color and they just want this amazing white or magnolia or off-white. If that is the case, you can always accessorize it, so to speak, and compliment it with having colors on the paintings or the accessories or the upholstery.

Melissa: Yeah, what about paintings or artwork or pictures, you think in the bedroom and in particular you should have like family photos and stuff around or should you stick to, again, restful scenery or things like that?

Cathi: Yeah, it depends. If it’s a couple’s bedroom, then you don’t want pictures of just one person in there because you want a picture that is representing the two people. So pictures of two people happy together and coming together.

So you don’t want pictures of religious icons with one or something. If it is just one person and you’re trying to attract a person into your life, then still have two people in the picture. Failing that, if you want to have a good night’s sleep, then you want pictures of nature: plants, mountains, anything that’s calming. You could also have a picture of the sun going down, that’s because when you’re actually resting when you’re falling asleep. So you don’t want to be woken up by the sun rising, you want the sun going down and resting.

So something that is tranquil and serene. You don’t want to be sitting in a place where you can put the family. You don’t really want family in bed because that’s a private area for you to actually relax and to have reminders maybe of the responsibilities you have or all the places you can take your loved ones and have their photographs there, because the room is for you or for your and your other partner or other significant other.

Melissa: Right, got it. Now, you mentioned before that plants were not a good thing, so there is some theory out there that certain plants can help you in the bedroom. What’s your view on that?

Cathi: No, I would not have plants in the bedroom, and I’ll tell you why, because during the day, the plants have given off carbon—sorry, have given off oxygen during the day. But in the evening, they’re taking oxygen, and that’s why they don’t have plants, and they never used to allow flowers on the walls in the hospitals, because when people are sleeping, the plants would be absorbing the oxygen, and that is obviously required for the people who are trying to heal. So you could put pictures of plants in the bedroom, but I actually wouldn’t put a physical plant in the bedroom.

Melissa: Unless it’s giving off plenty of oxygen.

Cathi: Well, you’ll get about plenty of oxygen during the day, but then take it out before you go to sleep, because it’s going to take all the oxygen back.

Melissa: Right. Another room that’s really important is the kitchen or the place where you’re eating, or where you eat a lot of your meals. I think that’s an important place to have a good mental focus on what you’re doing, which is obviously preparing foods and also consuming them. What’s your advice on having the best feng shui in the kitchen or the dining area?

Cathi: Well, what I do say, comes back to the elements again. It’s not a good idea to have the cooker, which is a fire element next to a water element, the sink. So you normally need something to separate that, and that might be something like an earthen pot, because earth consumes fire and can absorb the water. So how you actually balance that, what you do is you’re balancing out the elements. So earth is like a terracotta pot. Wood is like a plant. Fire would be like a candle. Metal would be something like a crystal. And water would be a curtain that flows like water or actual water, like an aquarium or a fountain, or a picture illustrating the flow of water.

So what you’re looking at in each room, a balance of these five elements because subliminally, when people have a little bit of each of those elements, they start to calibrate a balance within themselves. Now, because we’re all different, which is why I love feng shui because it actually assesses people based on the difference. Then, one person might need more earth than another person who needs more water. So it’s a compromise, if you live with other people anyway. Well, a little bit of each then often serves the best balance for more people. And the other trick is if you have a dining table in the kitchen, to put a mirror over at the side if there’s a wall there about the table, because the idea was to duplicate the amount of food on the table, and this meant that if you had doubled the amount of food on the table, then you would doubly be wealthy.

Melissa: Wow.

Cathi: Yeah, so if you think about historically, to have a bulk of rice in China, you know, you were doing well. You were wealthy.

Melissa: Right.

Cathi: And so to double that amount, this is where you would use mirrors. You use mirrors to add certain things, add mirrors to attract double the amount of an item. Or if you’re not going to put a mirror there—because some people don’t want to be looking up themselves while they’re in the kitchen cooking—you could put a picture there demonstrating a family eating around the table. So I thin—I’m not sure I’m not great on my artists, like Renoir, you know—they’re all having a great time together and they’re enjoying their food. So these are the kind of ideas that you want to put in the eating area because with all the kind of disorders we have, and all the associations that we have about food these days, why is it cross-supplied, it’s so important to get an idea of being healthy around food.

So even if it’s a bowl of fruit in the picture, then it’s just the epitome of balance and you can see all the elements in the bowl of fruit, even that orange. You can have orange for, let me see, orange for earth; red for apple, for fire. You can have, even a lemon for earth. You could have aubergine in there for water. And metal, and what you should do for metal—metal is also visibly symbolized by shapes, so metal is often symbolized by something that is arch in shape or round.

Melissa: maybe the bowl that’s holding the fruit.

Cathi: It could be, yeah. See, I’ve got you thinking. This is the best thing, is once you understand the principles, that I can give them to anyone’s house and say, “You must have a picture with this, this, this, this and this.”

Melissa: Right.

Cathi: Because, if I’m taken to them, this is what they’re looking at, then is this exactly where they want to be going here? It won’t be at all. And this is the problem with a lot of the education system, is it’s telling everybody that they’ve all got to follow the same road. Well, no. Each picture has got to look differently because we all got different emotional, psychological and physical, and spiritual needs within us. So what I say is, “Look, this is how it works. These are the principles. I’m suggesting that in these area, if you can get a picture there that this is the feeling, what would you put up there?”

Melissa: Right. Now, here’s a question, Cathi, is there a place you can go online or maybe at your website where you can see various examples of feng shui in action, or things that you’ve done or others have done?

Cathi: I’m glad that you’ve asked that question because I’m just about to, I’ve already done lots of interviews and put up some YouTube videos—not explicitly with that in mind—but that is my next stage, because I realized that as much as people can hear the ideas and the principles, they love to see things in action. And some of the principles that they’re quite—they can be quite high philosophy, and I’m not underestimating the intelligence of any audience, but it’s always difficult sometimes to hear the theory and then to manifest it physically.

So that’s my next set of videos, is to show that this is a room that’s got the five elements in it. This is a picture that’s got the five elements. And this picture has got this, this and this, and it makes me feel like whatever. So for example, I have a painting called “The Tree of Trees,” because I want to treat myself, and I’m open to receiving all day, every day in terms of new things coming into my life, new people and new ideas. And so, you can see how you’re relating or I am relating to my artwork, so that it’s there and it was a purpose for it. It’s not just something that I bought and thought, “I’ll just hang this up.” It’s something where I’m actually taking time out to consider my environment, so that it connects with me.

Melissa: Right. I think that’s really important. I’m glad you’re going to do a special series on that because I think people would like to see kind of the visual aspect of how you do it and how you’ve done it, and maybe some examples of work you’ve done for others, and how they’ve done it, so they can get the idea. But for people—I just want to throw this in. We’re almost out of time, but I want to throw this in—but for people that think that, you know, “This is a bit out there in woo-woo.” I just want to remind them that they can take a look at a couple of books, historical novels, “Tai-Pan” is one by James Clavell and “Noble House” is one, which focus on how Hong Kong was founded back in the day. And I read those some years ago in oriental philosophy studies that I was doing in college, and those can show you in a very light, fun read how important these elements that we’ve talked about today were on building this huge business empire, a financial hub of the world of Hong Kong, and how all these buildings that were built over time going way back to the 1840s where strategically positioned with all these elements in mind.

And for people that don’t know the history, one of the people that founded Hong Kong trading companies and things back in the day were from Great Britain. And so, they were not masters of feng shui, but they definitely paid attention to it, and you can see in those books—I’ll put links in the show notes to them—how it came to be over time. And how even today, I know friends that are living currently in Hong Kong, how you do not start remodeling a building or anything like that. And the architects there definitely know about what to do, how to do it, and what they can and cannot do. And I haven’t been to Hong Kong, but I know if you go there, you’ll often see like a business high rise, and the door is at a funny angle. It’s not symmetrical-

Cathi: That’s right.

Melissa: -you’ll know that the reason it’s that way is because it’s been positioned to maximize the feng shui elements for that particular building, so skyscrapers or not.

Cathi: I just wanted to say also, it’s not just about space feng shui, and this is a hidden secret that a lot of people don’t know, it’s also about timing. And that is why since 2003, China has elevated itself from an agricultural country, really, to an unrecognizable industrial—I know, it’s still agricultural, but it’s partly industrial as we know—and they will make their ascent and continue to, and possibly reach its peak up until 2023. It’s of no mistake, they calculated it, they knew it was coming and they were ready. And this is the aspect of feng shui. It’s all about being in the right place at the right time. So that involves astrology and numbers, and how you actually calculate them. Everyone has a particular number, and it tells you where you need to be at a certain month or a certain year, and which part of your life do you need to be focusing on.

And so, just to say that the space is important, but what goes with that is when do you do these things, when is the timing. But I don’t want people to see that as an obstacle to getting started themselves right away. You know, after listening to me, they can get started right away on their own homes by just looking up the clutter and letting go. Letting go is a huge part of people’s mental health, it’s because we don’t let go that we create more problems for ourselves. And so I’d like people to at least leave with a few diamonds here. Let go of the space and also something we haven’t mentioned is to cleanse the space, because we’re all walking into rooms where hundreds of people have left before and they’ve left behind their patterns of thinking. And we need to cleanse them. And this is really important because if you don’t, you can often find yourself behaving in ways that actually, it’s not you, but the patterns. We all have patterns. But like snails or like spiders, we weave our own spider’s web, and who wants to live in somebody else’s spider’s web? Even if we they were very, very rich, because we don’t know the yin and yang in everything, the yin and yang so that, you know, why not cleanse the space and live your own spider’s web?

Melissa: Now, what would you recommend for actually cleansing the space? I know I’ve had neighbors near me here in California that have moved into a place and done the sage burning through the house, and they’ve even sometimes done more, it’s like there’s some bad energy there. So I am in the home of people that do different things out here in California. But what would you recommend for if, let’s say, someone’s moving to a new apartment. That can always be stressful and you want to get there and have it be in the best, possible shape. How would you cleanse the space?

Cathi: Well, less and more passive way would be place a bowl in each of the rooms and put in some lemon and vinegar halfway in those bowls and leave them for a couple of weeks. And what would happen is that it’ll act like an astringent on the atmosphere. And it will pull any of the impurities towards it, in that space. Or you can use sea salt in those bowls, without the vinegar and lemon, and leave the sea salt in those bowls, a bowl in each room, for three weeks and the salt will pull the water from the atmosphere. Now, you may ask, “Well, what’s that got to do with anything?” Well, water holds memory, so if the moisture in the atmosphere will be holding the memory of the previous people that lived there and the previous people before that. So to cleanse that, if you bring in salt or rice, it will absorb the moisture in the atmosphere and then after you’ve done for three weeks, you just throw the salt away. Obviously, don’t use it, and you can [inaudible 36:43] the moisture in the atmosphere because we are all living our patterns, often on the people’s patterns previously.

Melissa: Right, well that’s a cool trick and a very inexpensive one too, and one that wouldn’t involve lighting sage on fire through the house. So I think a lot of-

Cathi: Careful, you’re in California with your bush fires. So you don’t want to be setting fire to too many sage bushes.

Melissa: People in California don’t start burning sage and throwing them around.

Cathi: So it’s much safer.

Melissa: Much safer. Okay, Cathi, we’re almost out of time. So where can people find you online? What’s your website?

Cathi: My website, I’ve got two, one is “fengshuimasteryshow.com.” That’s got all my interviews so far, and I will be putting my videos on there as well, demonstrating some of the ideas we’ve discussed tonight. And then, we’ve got “WealthySpaces.com,” which gives you an inkling of what kind of things I do like, one-on-one consultations or over-Skype consultations, workshops. I have webinar products/packages. I will be selling some of the space clearing products as well, because people often say to me, “Which are the best things to use and etc.” You can get me on “wealthyspaces@gmail.com,” that’s my e-mail address, if you want to consider any joint ventures or just consulting, or whatever I can help you with, or work alongside of you. That’s the e-mail to contact me on. And on YouTube as well, I actually have demonstrated how to use some of the forms of space clearing. But I have to say, if this has to be done in California, so you have to very, very careful with the fire. These products are highly-flammable and so just be aware of that. So you can go on to YouTube and my name, “Cathi Hargaden.” It will come up. That particular video will come up and it will demonstrate to people how to do it, but I always emphasize safety. And that’s how you can contact me.

Melissa: Great. Well, maybe we’ll have you back on when you’ve got all your YouTube stuff out too, and talk more about it. And also, a lot of people call in and sometimes write in and ask specific questions about a guest that’s been on, so I always like to say, “We’ll get them back to answer those.”

Cathi: Yes, please do. And also, more and more people are asking me about this internal feng shui, how can they use that, how can they use it as a healing process for themselves. So that could in itself be another session on the show.

Melissa: Right, definitely. Cathi, thank you so much for being on today.

Cathi: Yeah, thanks for having me. I enjoyed it.

Melissa: We’ll see you in the future.

Cathi: Alright then, Melissa. All the best. Thank you. Buh-bye.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

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