: Feng Shui On Line Course

In feng shui we call the front door, the mouth of chi because all the energy of your home enters there.

The front door is the threshold between the outer public world and your inner private world. All the energy of your home enters through the front door; it is the first thing you, and everyone who comes to your home notices, and it makes lasting impressions about who you are. Terah Kathryn Collins in Feng Shui Room by Room, calls the front door the “avenue of good fortune that attracts helpful people and opportunities into your home.”

A large part of front door feng shui is maintenance. Ideally, we regularly take care of things such as:

painting the door, taking care of scratches in the paint, or chipped and peeling paint.
replacing burnt out light bulbs
removing obstacles on the path or steps leading to your front door to reduce the likelihood of someone tripping and falling.

But what about the more subtle things? What about:

squeaky hinges
wobbly doorknobs
screen doors that do not work properly
locks that do not work properly
doors that do not open fully because things are stored behind them
doors that stick
or the front door itself is fine, but disorganization is the first thing you see when you open the front door.

And there can be larger issues:

the door does not match the style of the rest of the house
the door is not in proportion: it is either too large, or too small for the house
the front door faces oncoming traffic
there is no landscaping around the front door
there is an unpleasant view
it isn’t a welcoming, or a beautiful entrance
you never use the entrance – you mostly come in the house through the garage or a side door.

Exercise

Today take some time to find out how you feel about your front door. Try this even if you can’t think of any issues around your front door. You might be surprised. When I did my feng shui training we did a guided meditation exercise designed to find out the subconsciousness thoughts we had about our homes. We mentally travelled to our homes, stood before our front doors and opened the door.

I was surprised by the amount of irritation I felt. We had a screen door (much needed because of the windy location) that didn’t work properly. The spring was set too tightly and it would hit people in the back. every time unless someone was with you to hold the screen door open. It didn’t really hurt, but – well who wants to get hit every time they come home? It wasn’t welcoming and it was even a bit hostile. When I got home, as a newly certified Feng Shui Practitioner, fixing that front door was the first thing I did.

It is quite effective to do this as a guided meditation. You simply get yourself into a relaxed state and imagine you are standing at your front door, or the walkway to your home. Imagine approaching your front door, putting your hand on the doorknob and opening it. Imagine stepping over the threshold. What do you see in your mind’s eye? What are your first thoughts? Are there any emotions, either position, negative, or neutral. What do you notice?

You can also do this exercise just by paying extra attention when you use the front door. Some things may be so obvious that you do not need to access your unconscious thoughts to know them!

If whatever comes up is something you can fix or change immediately, today is a good day to take care of it. If it is a larger issue that cannot be taken care of immediately, is there anything you can do to temporarily take care of it? For example, if you cannot paint until the weather gets warmer, would putting a welcome sign or a wreath of flowers on the front door make it feel a little more fresh and welcoming?