If you caught last week’s post, you’ll remember that I’ve dubbed this month Feng Shui February as a playful motivator to boost positive energy in my home environment.
Mindfulness is being aware of what’s happening in our mind, body, and external environment. My external environment has been neglected for too long, so clutter clearing is my “off the cushion” mindfulness tool of choice this month.
This morning I listened to a heart whisper that nudged me to look inside the “drawer” of my Belize photos from last month’s trip to that gorgeous country. Just like clothes and medicine cabinets, photo files need weeding out too.
Opening the “Belize macro experiments” folder, I felt a rush of joy. I spent very little time alone with my camera on that family vacation, but it was still enough to bring back some images that make me happy, slow down my heart rate, and spark my imagination.
With lots of green tones in these rain forest captures, I’m guessing my Feng Shui consultant Carol Olmstead would recommend some of them for the Family/Health/Community area on the bagua design grid. In her book Feng Shui Quick Guide for Home and Office, Carol recommends attention to this area if you want to cultivate social life, strengthen family ties, and improve health (so they would be a good fit for healthcare settings too!). Even if you’re not into woo woo stuff, the grid can be helpful for someone like myself who is paralyzed when it comes to interior design.
More important to me than an ancient tradition’s philosophy is simply sensing in my body how a piece of art makes me feel. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Sometimes you feel good when you look at a photograph or a painting. Sometimes you feel bad. I choose the former!
What I look for when adding fine art photographs to my collection at damselwingsphotography.com is whether the image will ground the viewer in the present moment, quiet their inner chatter if only for a brief second, and elicit a positive emotional response, be that a sense of calm, joy, or wonder.
Here are a few of the images I found in that photo “drawer” that made me feel good. What about you? Which ones evoke an emotional response (either positive or negative)? I appreciate your feedback! Leave a comment below or shoot me an email. These are so new that they don’t even have names yet, so I’ll just give them each a letter below the image for an ID reference point. We’ll just call the photo above “header photo.”
And with that, I’ll let the images do the rest of the talking today…
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