Feng Shui and Bad Guests

May this never happen to you. It just happened to us—someone overstayed their welcome as our guest (by every day they were here). So I sage smudged like crazy yesterday as soon as they were gone, laundered their bedding and hung it to dry on an outside clothesline (where the fabric received lots of wind and sun—which are very purifying things).

Inside my head I made the resolve not to think about them anymore. When that person’s memory came up in my mind, I put my full attention on exactly what I was doing at the moment. That’s called mindfulness, and I occasionally teach a class on it at Daifukuji in Kona. On April 28, 2018 (for the first time) I’ll offer a class at Taishoji in beautiful downtown Hilo. I’ve sometimes counseled clients to do that practice when they are going through anguish or turmoil. For me, after the unsettling guest experience, the mindfulness practice has made me grateful for my husband and our home. He’s the one who strung the clothesline, and he’s the one who orders our natural fragrance-free detergent from the Frontier Coop. In fact, he started and manages our neighborhood buying club to get items wholesale (and with no shipping charge, even to Hawaii) at Frontier. The more I think about it, the more I realize how much I have to be grateful for—and that leaves no space for nagging thoughts of a oafish guest. (There, I said “oafish,” and I feel better!)

The third thing I did was to take the photo that you see. It’s the walkway to our guest accommodations, and look at those sharp pineapple leaves. It’s as I say in Feng Shui for Hawaii Gardens: “Pucker your face into a tight, prune-like scowl. That’s how the energy looks when it has passed by prickly plants on the way to your door.” The pineapples were never meant to stay there, but I just got busy and didn’t move them. The photo is to remind me to move those plant today. You get what you ask for with feng shui.