Serene Makeover Inner Edition: Feng Shui Your Life from the Inside Out. Ariel Joseph Towne

      Creativity and Future

      Remember to think like a child to stimulate your creativity, dream big and create a blueprint for your success.

      CHAPTER 8

      Wisdom and Self-Awareness

      Access your authentic Self and your inner wisdom to know yourself better.

      CHAPTER 9

      Faith and Benefactors

      Help is out there for you. Identify the helping hands around you and have faith that you can create anything you want.

      Epilogue

      Now that you’ve finished reading, consider doing it again—backward.

      Introduction

      Why I wrote this book

      I woke up one day a few years ago with chronic back pain. My back hadn’t felt good for some time, but there was no more denying it. It just wasn’t going away. I was having a hard time being positive while I was in pain, and it took everything I had to get through those days. I realized ultimately that it wasn’t about the pain itself, but more about what was happening underneath, inside me. Just like when a light on your car dashboard indicates a problem, it isn’t necessarily the dashboard light that is broken, but more likely something else “under the hood.”

      There were some things in my life at the time that I had left unaddressed, and getting help for this pain was one of them. Finally, I could no longer let things stay as they were. I realized that I had been avoiding getting help for the back pain for a couple of reasons.

      First, I was afraid of finding out something I didn’t want to hear, like that I had a tumor in my back, or a herniated disc, or a life threatening or debilitating illness. And like many people I know (and several people I am related to), I chose to simply do nothing about it instead.

      The other concern was that I didn’t feel as though I had the extra money to pay for whatever the experts might find wrong or their prescribed course of treatment. As I examined this more deeply, I realized that I was playing an old story in my mind, which was that I didn’t have enough to do anything about it. Underneath this idea was the thought that I couldn’t have everything in my life be good all at the same time. If one area of my life was going well, it was inevitable that another part would be suffering—or so I thought. Then I fell in love with the woman who would become my wife.

      In the midst of falling in love, I realized some important things. The first was that I wanted my best self to emerge. I didn’t want to bring anything less than into my relationship because I valued it so highly, and I wanted my best self to be a foundation of our relationship. I made a promise that I wanted to keep: that I would always bring my best self forth. Then I asked myself, how could I make this possible?

      In thinking about other parts of my life, I feel that I have a proven track record of success. One of the key ingredients for this success is that I can make things happen if I know what I’m aiming at. The only downside was that in the past, I generally found that as I was able to create success in one part of my life, inevitably another part suffered. I didn’t like this idea that one part had to suffer in order for another area to flourish. It felt like a form of poverty thinking; that somehow there wasn’t enough to go around. It reminded me of what I thought the world was like when I was growing up, and I decided that I had had enough.

      I hypothesized what might happen if every part of my life was flourishing: win-win in all areas. And as I imagined it, a picture started to emerge, and I liked it. I began taking steps one at a time to address the parts of my life that weren’t feeling balanced, that scared me, or were screaming for my attention.

      I soon realized that things were shifting quickly in a positive direction. I found that the things I had been scared of were losing power, and my life was quickly starting to look like the one I had envisioned for myself. (I think that having someone else in my life that wanted to live the same way helped.) Then I started incorporating more and more of these tips and practices into work with my coaching clients and workshops, and finally created a workshop outline entitled “You Can Have It All.”

      People often aim at improving one area of their life, say their finances, at the expense of another area, like their relationship. My goal with the workshop was to see what could happen if we aim at the entire picture of our life at the same time. Could we step into having it all? I believe the answer is yes.

      I have been living these principles and sharing them with others for as long as I have known about them, and as long as they remain effective tools, I will continue to share them. At the beginning of this year, I made a pact with myself that I began to share with others:

      No more settling for “meh,” “not bad,” or “just ok.” Let's seek to create space for more joy, better health, better sex and more abundance in all areas of our creative and personal lives. I wish you all of your wishes, and my hope is that this book will show you how to manifest them all.

      And so it is…

      Symbol Meanings

      Yin Yang [Balance]

      The universal symbol for balance. For our purposes, the light half represents everything you can experience with your five senses in the physical world. The dark half represents everything you feel with your intuition, i.e. your gut feelings.

      

Eye of Kanaloa

      [Huna Principle]

      A Hawaiian symbol of healing. The root translation of Kanaloa means the great peace or the great stillness. The pattern represents the web of life; the symbolic connection of all things to each other. Generates subtle energy known as Ki in Hawaiian.

      

Lotus Flower [Harmony]

      Meditating on the lotus brings harmony into all aspects of our being, within and without. The lotus is known for producing beauty (the flower) out of something ugly (the mud), which symbolizes our human struggles of taking something difficult and making it into something beautiful.

      

Wave [Flow]

      Feng shui is about how to create more flow in our lives. The wave represents the flow of the river of life. How we allow that flow and how we navigate the river directly affects our experience.

      Preface

      Ever heard of feng shui? In a word, the concept means balance. In a sentence, it refers to the balance of energy within a space. If you’re thinking that feng shui means moving your stuff around, you’re right; that’s the most well-known form of this concept. But there’s a point at which our outer environment stops having a profound effect; it’s really your inner self that allows the good energy you’re welcoming into your home to affect you, so it makes sense that the definition of feng shui can easily be applied to another environment: You.

      That’s what this book is about—feng shui for your “inner house,” or the application of traditional feng shui principles to your intellect, emotions, energetic body and physical body; in other words, to your mental, emotional, spiritual and physical sides.

      If you would like an image, picture a small mental