Using Mirrors to Feng Shui Your Home

What is Feng Shui?

The word “feng shui” translates to “wind-water” in English, but what feng shui represents is the mystical Chinese art of aligning yourself and your energy with the energy of your environment. In general, feng shui promotes balance and teaches you how to invite the energies you want into your home. As you can probably guess, you want your home, which has as much of an energy as any living person, to only collect and disperse good energies so that it affects you and your family in positive ways.

Mirrors, which are associated with the element of water and reflection, are powerful feng shui tools and should therefore be used cautiously. There aren’t concrete rules for feng shui, since a lot of it is up to personal interpretation. There are some traditional beliefs and guiding principles, however, you can adhere to if you so desire. In general, you don’t want your mirrors facing something that could potentially bring bad energy into your house. Here’s a quick list of dos, don’ts, and maybes as you think about where you should hang your mirrors.

Rooms Good for Mirrors:

Dining Room. Believe it or not, the dining room is considered the “wealth vault” of a house. It’s believed that putting a mirror in your dining room will help increase the size of your “vault,” since mirrors in general tend to give the illusion that a room looks bigger than it is. But don’t get confused: a “wealth vault” is different from a “wealth generator.” Having a larger “wealth vault” means you’ll have the ability and capacity to hold more wealth, but it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll just automatically accumulate more wealth like you might think from its name. Still, a bigger wealth vault can only ever be a good thing, so go ahead and hang a big mirror in that room; just don’t hang a mirror facing a window. (See below).

Rooms Bad for Mirrors:

• Kitchen. As it turns out, there’s a reason you don’t see mirrors in kitchens, and it’s because the kitchen is associated with negative energies in feng shui, which you don’t want to multiply. It’s unclear why the kitchen holds so much negative energy, but it’s probably because of all the stress that goes into making a meal, cleaning, etc.
• Bathroom. Even though mirrors in bathrooms are common, the bathroom is associated with negative qi because it’s where we all rid ourselves of our waste. A mirror in the bathroom could collect negative energies and you risk those energies dispersing into the rest of the house, so if you must have mirrors in the bathroom, make sure that they aren’t facing the toilet or the bathroom door. The toilet tip should be obvious, but the reason you don’t want a mirror facing the bathroom door is that it could allow all that negative qi through the door and into the rest of the house.
• To quickly clarify, it’s okay if your mirror is on a wall perpendicular to the door; you just don’t want your mirror to be on the opposite wall from the door in a position where it’s the first thing you see when you walk in.
• Living room. This room is debatable, because, if used correctly and placed wisely, a mirror in the living room could promote beauty, happiness, love, and community. On the other hand, it could amplify the negative energies of your guests. The rule to follow here is a rule that’s good to follow in general: only let positivity into your home, asking your guests to kindly leave any negativity they may be carrying at the front door.

Cautions:

When you put a mirror in your dining room, don’t allow the mirror to face a window. It could attract negative outside energies, collect them in the mirror, and then disperse them into the rest of your home. Since your dining room is your “wealth vault” (see above), this is one room where you don’t want to mix energies.

If you decide to have a mirror in your bedroom, which has neither positive or negative attachments according to the guiding principles of feng shui, don’t hang or place a mirror facing the bed. Some people believe that because you spend hours and hours at a time sleeping, the mirror could steal your soul through the reflection and keep it trapped in the mirror. More practical reasons for not placing a mirror facing the bed is that it’s believed mirrors could cause bad sleep and restless nights. It’s unclear why that is, but if you had a mirror facing the bed and woke up now and then, rolled over, and saw something moving out of the corner of your eye, it could be a little distracting and/or frightening.

When considering options of where to place a mirror in your living room, try to avoid placing a mirror behind the sofa in your living room. Some people place large mirrors between the back of their sofas and their walls because it looks different and seems to multiply the space in the living room. The problem? Having a mirror in this spot could cause instability: literally, in the sense that a mirror in that spot could be physically unstable, but also metaphorically, as it could cause an emotional and spiritual instability. Even in beliefs that seem purely mystical, like feng shui, the physical and spiritual realms connect and affect each other in various ways.

No matter where you decide to hang or place any mirror in your house, this is the most important feng shui tip: Replace broken, cloudy, or scratched mirror surfaces with surfaces that are clean, smooth, and clear. If unbroken mirrors are considered powerful tools that can create non balance in your home, imagine the effects that a defective mirror could have. If one of your mirrors is broken and you can’t buy a new one, simply cover it up with a towel or a sheet. This should prevent any negative energies from coming into the mirror or trying to leave the mirror.

We wish you only good health, long life, and much wealth on your feng shui journey.