Stay Sharp with Brain Food

The FDA has recently declared walnuts to be a drug, due to scientific evidence and walnut makers' claims that the Omega-3 fatty acids in the foods can treat or prevent a number of medical conditions.

Omega-3s have been shown to:

- help lower cholesterol
- protect against heart disease
- treat or alleviate the symptoms of depression

In spite of the FDA's stand, there are plenty of healthy foods with Omega-3s that can also help you stay sharp, reduce your risk of disease and also help fight depression.

It's no accident that walnuts are shaped like brains -- these nutrient-packed nuts may help improve your focus and promote clear thinking.

Other Brain Foods
A number of other foods packed with Omega-3s offer the same benefits. Here are some additional foods you can eat for improved health and brain power:

- salmon
- flaxseeds
- brussel sprouts
- cauliflower
- shrimp
- cabbage

Feng Shui Your Food
A healthy meal incorporates foods of a variety of colors, making your dish both pleasing to the eye and packed full of different nutrients. A spinach salad with gorgeous pink salmon on top and beige walnuts provides a colorful, healthy summer lunch that will keep you sharp until dinner.

How to Balance Your Personal “Chi” for Success, Peace and Happiness

We talk a lot about “chi” in Feng Shui. We often translate the Chinese concept of chi into the word “energy,” but it is actually so much more than that. Chi is present in every living thing and in the earth, itself.

According to Feng Shui Master Lin Yun in the book Living Color, different kinds of chi exist:

- chi that circulates in the earth
- chi that permeates the atmosphere
- chi that animates our bodies

The Chi Within Us
The chi within us could be described as our spirit, our energy or our essence. Without chi, we are merely flesh and bones. Chi is what makes us innately “us.” It's how we are still recognizable after 10, 20 or 50 years, even though every cell in our body has regenerated. Our personal chi defines our looks, our personality, and every characteristic that makes us each individuals.

Balancing Our Chi
In Feng Shui, we can use many methods to balance our chi, including meditations, cleansing and the use of colors (in our wardrobe and in our surroundings). When we balance our chi, we our balancing the yin and yang within ourselves.

Definitions of Yin and Yang
So what is yin and yang? Yin and yang are complementary opposites. Yin energy is female. It is dark, contemplative, quiet, and passive. Yang energy is masculine, light and active. Together, they form a whole -- called Tao -- which is literally translated as “the way.” According to Buddhist philosophy, Tao is the way of the universe, the natural order of things.

With this knowledge, you can see why, if your chi isn't balanced, you may feel stuck, depressed, restless, and unable to live up to your greatest potential. You are working against the natural order of the universe.

Chi must flow, unimpaired, through our entire body. It stimulates our brains, our muscles and our organs. It makes us able to move, think, and live. If chi does not flow well to a specific part of our body, we may experience illness or even paralysis there. If Chi cannot flow to a major organ, we may die.

When we are in balance, on the other hand, we feel as if all is right in our universe, which leads us to accomplish the greatness we were put on this earth to achieve.  A Black Sect Feng Shui consultant can not only help you balance the chi in your surroundings or perform a space cleansing on your home or business, but can help you balance your energy so that you can achieve the success you desire.

12 Colors That Help You To Achieve Your Goals In Life

We know that colors play an important role in Feng Shui. Colors can be used to activate a “missing section” of the bagua in a home or apartment. Colors can be used strategically in your wardrobe for greater fortune, increased wealth, or to enhance your persuasive or sales powers. Painting different rooms of your house in auspicious colors, or using the five-element color cycle, can improve many different areas of your life, and help you attract love, money or success.

But what do specific colors symbolize? Keep in mind that many colors have cultural connotations. For instance, a green hat in China symbolizes marital infidelity. White symbolizes death in China, but U.S.-based brides wear white to symbolize purity. In China, brides consider red to be the most auspicious color.

These guidelines will help you select the best colors to strengthen your chi and achieve your goals in romance, your career, finances, spirituality and more.

Red - The Chinese consider this color one of the most auspicious. Full of fire energy, red is stimulating, powerful and persuasive.

Purple - Purple is as auspicious as red, with the added connotation of money and power.

Yellow - While people in the U.S. often interpret yellow to symbolize cowardice, in Feng Shui yellow or gold is associated with royalty and wisdom. It is not as “high energy” as red, but it represents, tolerance, patience and wisdom -- worthy attributes for leaders.

Green - Like the springtime grass, green represents hope and freshness. A great color for a kitchen or bedroom, it can be both energizing and tranquil, depending on the shade.

Blue - Like green, blue is associated with the element of wood and therefore symbolizes growth and hope. Blue hospital gowns have a calming effect on patients and represent the hope of recovery.

Black - The ultimate in “yin” energy, black creates a sense of depth in mood and perspective. People may don this color for wisdom. Too much yin energy, though, can lead to depression, so people who are naturally “down” should avoid this color.

Gray - The perfect blending of black and white (yin and yang), gray can symbolize the ultimate balance. However, it can also take on characteristics of black and represent hopelessness (as in a gray and dreary day.) Use your instincts when applying this color -- does it feel uplifting and balanced or drab and depressing?

Brown - Symbolizing the depth and roots of wood, brown conveys a sense of permanence and stability. On the other hand, it can also create a heavy, weighed-down feeling. Dark brown can also represent the element of water and take on the yin characteristics of the color black.

Tan - Unlike dark brown, tan is an “earth” color, representing re-birth and possibility growing out of hopelessness.

Orange - Like red and yellow, orange is an auspicious fire color, designed to energize a space.

Pink - A softer shade of red, pink often represents love, joy, and romance. If red is fiery hot passion, pink is pure love and affection.

Peach - An important color in Feng Shui, this blending of pink, red, and orange can be auspicious, as in peach blossom luck. It is a social color, attracting friends and lovers. It is a good color for a single person's bedroom if they hope to attract love. However, peach in a married couple's bedroom could lead to infidelity.

Which colors do you most identify with right now? Which colors are lacking in your life, and would adding them to your home or wardrobe help you achieve your goals?

5 Ways Of Dealing With Depression Without Drugs

Feng Shui can be used to help alleviate depression and feelings of being "stuck," which are so common in today's society. Often, an individual just needs a gentle nudge to return to his correct path, where he can be his true self.

I should know; I've battled feelings of depression and low energy. A combination of Feng Shui, proper nutrition, exercise, meditation and re-connecting with nature alleviated my depression and placed me on a path toward fulfillment.

My career has soared. I have a stronger drive for achievement and activity and I am truly grateful and happy. As a result, I've been fortunate to help many others welcome energy, drive and the feelings of joy and gratitude back into their lives. That is my true path.

1. Feng Shui Your Space: A Feng Shui consultation may be the first step in getting "unstuck." A Feng Shui consultant can recommend ways to shift the energy of a person and space, creating amazing transformations.

When I perform a Feng Shui consultation for a client who is feeling stuck or depressed, I pay close attention to the entrance of the space. The entrance should not be blocked, which prevents energy or chi from entering the area.

I'll also take a look at the work environment, specifically under a person's desk. That part of the office should be clean, clear and permit plenty of leg room.

I often introduce life energy into a space. You can do this in your home or office by adding living plants, fresh flowers, raw fruit or moving water.

There are also specific Feng Shui cures and remedies you can employ. For instance, you can use Feng Shui Wind Chimes To Help With Depression.

2. Reconnect With Nature: It's easy to lose your connection with nature and, for many people, this leads to depression.

Don't you feel rejuvenated after spending a day at the beach or a few hours hiking in the mountains? Try to make nature a small part of your life every day. Spend more time outdoors walking, hiking, cycling or simply sitting in the park appreciating the environment.

3. Diet & Nutrition: Chronic fatigue is an indication that the body's "batteries" have run down. Resistance drops and illness or disease may strike.

Often, fatigue is caused by a critical deficiency of active enzymes in the diet and an overabundance of "dead" foods: processed, preserved and over-cooked foods, eaten in incompatible combinations.

Many fad diets literally starve cells of nutrition and energy and permit toxic wastes to accumulate in the tissues. This prevents the body from generating and directing energy for work or play, since all available energy must be used to keep the body alive.

According to The Tao of Health, Sex and Longevity, denatured, processed, preserved, canned and cooked foods should compose less than 50 percent of the daily diet. Eat fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains to give your body the energy it needs and combat chronic fatigue.

Sun Ssu-mo, the Tang Dynasty Taoist physician who correctly diagnosed and cured the nutritional-deficiency disease beriberi 1,300 years ago, a full millennium before European doctors did in 1642, wrote in Precious Recipes: "A truly good physician first finds out the cause of illness, and having found that, he first tries to cure it by food. Only when food fails does he prescribe medication."

4. Proper Exercise:

"The Tao of nurturing life requires that one keep oneself as fluid and flexible as possible. One should not stay still for too long, nor should one exhaust oneself by trying to perform impossible tasks. One should learn how to exercise from nature by observing the fact that flower water never stagnates and a busy door with active hinges never rusts or rots. Why? Because they exercise themselves perpetually and are almost always moving." (Sun Ssu-mo - Precious Recipes)

In this passage, Sun Ssu-mo succinctly distills the essence of Taoist exercise principles. If we observe nature, we see that rhythmic movement is the foundation for cultivating essence and energy.

Balance and moderation are also key factors. How many times have you started a difficult or time-consuming exercise regime only to abandon it after a few weeks-or a few days? Start slowly so your early success will spark your drive to continue. In addition to structured exercise, look for ways to introduce more physical activity into your everyday life.

The Spring and Autumn Annals tells us: Essence and energy, body and breath, are indivisible: when the body does not move, essence cannot flow; when essence cannot flow, energy becomes stagnant.

Keep your essence moving like a mountain stream by practicing controlled deep breathing balanced with rhythmic physical movement. Body and breath will harmonize and vital energy will circulate to every organ and tissue in the body.

5. Meditation: Meditation purifies the mind and restores the spirit's primal powers by withdrawing all distracting thoughts and disturbing emotions from the mind. Meditation is to spirit what diet and nutrition are to essence - an indispensable tool for cultivating and conserving that treasure.

Emotions are regarded as major causes of disease in Chinese medicine. When unbridled by firm intent, they can cloud our minds and vandalize our precious reserves of essence and energy. To restore conscious awareness, one must empty the mind of all thoughts and pacify all emotions in the solitary silence and peaceful serenity of meditation.

In an article entitled "Mental Muscle" (Omni magazine, June 1992), Kathy Keeton writes:

"When the psychologists Charles Alexander of the Maharishi International University in Fairland, Iowa, and Ellen Langer of Harvard University, taught transcendental meditation (TM) to a group of octogenarians in eight Boston-area nursing homes, 100 percent of those who practiced meditation 20 minutes a day were still alive three years later, while 38 percent of their peers who did not meditate had passed on. This is reminiscent of legends of Himalayan yogis using similar techniques to live more than a hundred years...

Alexander is one of a growing body of scientists who believe that we can muster the power of our brains to stay healthy, to heal ourselves when we're sick, and, quite possibly, to extend our life expectancy."

Combining Feng Shui with proper nutrition, exercise, meditation and time to reconnect with nature will put you on the path to health, happiness, longevity, peace of mind, greater drive and ultimate success.

How many items listed above are you doing? Why not try adding a new one each week for the next few weeks? Please come back and share your results!

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