Feng Shui & Bumpy Roads

Don’t let a bumpy road stand in the way of your good fortune. With a little creativity, there are feng shui fixes for this problem.

When we were in grammar school, my brother Charlie read a book on Eskimos and shared this with me. The word and the pidgin definition has stuck with me all these years.
The Inuit have a word: pie-toke (that’s a phonetic spelling, a guess on my part)—meaning: “nothing one can do about it.” That’s how a lot of people feel when they live on a bumpy road (or have a long bumpy driveway). Well, I’m here to say there is something you can do—red dots.

The reason for concern over a bumpy road is this: If the road or driveway leading to your home is excessively bumpy, good fortune (including money) is seen as bouncing off before reaching you.

Recently, a client sent me an email praising her full calendar as a massage therapist. A few days ago she had sent me an email saying that a client had left a $50 tip. She lives on a very bumpy road, and when I consulted for her, I gave her my standard advice to put a tiny dot of red paint or red nail polish in each hole and on each bump. I told her to say out loud, “This is smooth and flat” (or words to that effect) each time she did it. Shortly after she did that her landlord paved her driveway, which had been gravel. In a sense, he paved the way for good news and prosperity to reach her.

On page 26 of Feng Shui for Hawaii I tell the story of a client who lived on a bumpy road, and it was the first time that I recommended that cure, which I just came up with on the spur of the moment. (I firmly believe that I can’t go to a client and say, “You have a problem—too bad.” I have to come up with some kind of solution.) Not only did my client have good fortune at the time she put the red nail polish on her bumpy road, she called me earlier this year (ten years after she had first put the nail polish on the road). She said that her savings account was going down faster than she wanted it to, so she tried putting red nail polish in the rough areas of her road. It worked—within a week, she inherited $10,000 for someone she barely knew and hadn’t been in touch with for many years!

My dear friend, Carl, used to live in Puna on Hawaii Island. He lived on one of the most ridiculous roads I’ve ever been on. (Puna has some very rough roads, plus it rains a lot.) At my advice, he took a can of red spray paint and very lightly (like a tiny mist) sprayed a bit of red on each rough place on his road. Within a week, he called me to tell of the unexpected good fortune that found him.

The color red is used in feng shui when no other solution is possible. It symbolizes new blood—fresh beginning. It should never be used in lieu of repairing something when safety is an issue. I was teaching about red dots in a class some years ago, and one of the students came up to me a few weeks later and told me what happen to her when she tried using red dots on her car that needed repair. On the same day that she did that her car got totaled in a parking lot. She wasn’t in the car and no one was hurt, but I took it as a message that when safety is a concern—get it fixed—really fixed!

One final note: Since paint and nail polish contain chemicals, be judicious in how much you apply. The key is the symbolism, not the amount of red. You don’t want to harm the environment and you certainly don’t want to create any eyesores.