By Kartar Diamond

Should you ever sleep in your living room? Should you make your dining room your office? When feng shui clients find out where the most positive and productive areas are of their home, the next question is, "How can I benefit from that space?"

Classical feng shui consultants generally agree that a person is primarily affected by the rooms they use most. Nothing competes with the bedroom, unless you have a home office that you literally work in for eight hours per day. So, what happens if you find out that your major prosperity area is in your bathroom or your kitchen?

I rarely ask a client to use a room unconventionally, and yet sometimes this can be done when a person has enough space to split the functions of the room or when they do not care about the formality of the architecture.

For example, I have had clients who really felt no need to use their dining room conventionally. Many people nowadays eat at a kitchen table or bar or in front of the TV in the family room. If it turns out that the dining room has the best prosperity potential, then feel free to set up your office in that location.

How do we figure out where the major prosperity areas are?

Each house is unique and part of its analysis is based on when the house was built and its compass orientation. Of course it is convenient when someone's major prosperity energy lands in the home office or even the bedroom. When you sleep in the prosperity energy you just attract more opportunities to you throughout the day. Every house has one or two major prosperity areas, but the location and direction differs depending on each unique floor plan.

Once I had a client whose bathroom was the most creative space, but before I could tell her that this energy had been wasted on her bathroom, she told me that she routinely gets her best writing ideas when bathing or showering. She still felt that she could utilize this space, although if I had been involved in the design phase of this house, I would have definitely recommended that this area be used for the master bedroom or home office.

I also rarely ask someone to not sleep in their master bedroom, but there have been a few times when that decision was going to be the best for the clients' health and well-being. One family many years ago, placed their three small children together in the large master bedroom and the mother and father slept in one of the small rooms. The kids enjoyed the bigger space together with all their toys and the parents enjoyed the cozy intimate nature of a small room. This was just a side benefit for having recommended that the parents sleep in the "money" area of their house instead of "wasting" it on the kids (who didn't have careers yet!)

Historically, the very wealthy Chinese emperors would take advice from the local feng shui master and position themselves in the most positive rooms of their mansion compounds, sometimes moving their bedrooms on a yearly basis in order to take advantage of the changing annual cycles and always be in the prosperity zones.

© Melt Magazine 2005