Chapters from the 'Design Your Way to Happiness' Series by

Drs. Ralph & Lahni DeAmicis

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Three Keys to a Good Marriage

(Excerpted from Happiness Lessons )

By Drs. Ralph & Lahni DeAmicis

That old ditty "First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage." all too often these days includes a second verse that talks about heart break, lawyers and divorce court. The first verse sounds like a lot more fun, but in our Feng Shui practice we've seen people make design choices that consistently program them for a break-up.

But there is hope for the romantic and if you follow these three Feng Shui strategies, they can assure that you and your partner are running programs that are encouraging love, passion and commitment. Let's start with an easy one. Never, ever paint your bedroom blue. We've seen that choice alone increase the traffic to the lawyer's office.

Blue is cool. You don't want to feel cool in your bedroom, do you? Not with your Honey late at night, with the lights off. Blue is about service, duty, work and 'blue collar' stuff. That's a great color to use in the kitchen because blue keeps reign on the appetites, which is not something you want to do in the bedroom! Avoid using white in your bedroom; it's too neutral and sterile and you don't want those qualities in your love nest, imagine passion and sweetness instead.

Avoid using yellow; it's very intellectual, which makes it great for an office, but lousy for the boudoir. Only paint your bedroom lavender if you never want to have sex again. This is the color of chastity, which makes it great for your teenager's room, but not for yours. Please keep pieces of amethyst out of your bedroom because it has that similar chaste influence. In contrast the crystal rose quartz promotes caring love and rhodacrosite encourages passion. These two are more suitable on the nightstand, or better yet, under the pillow.

Now that we've thrown out America's favorite bedroom hues, what colors are good? All skin tones, tans, light browns and pink help the body feel nurtured. The colors of plants, especially shades of green add a Venus quality to your bedroom. Avoid red, except as an accent. While red encourages passion, it disturbs the sleep. Instead, pick out something slinky to wear to bed in that passionate hue.

On the body it doesn't disturb the slumber and it promotes some delightful warmth. If you lean towards darker shades in the bedroom you'll sleep better. An amazing number of relationships break-up over sleep-deprivation in one of the partners. Often times they're light sensitive and the nighttime bedroom is too bright.

Ban all illuminated dials and clock radios from the bedroom. Remove any mirrors that are pointing at the bed. Use opaque window coverings to block out external light. If you do these simple things, you'll go a long way towards saving a sleep-deprived relationship. The next key to committed love is also pretty simple, but first it's helpful to understand something about how your body reacts to a space.

You have a left and right side to your body and on your left side is your stomach. This is where nutrition comes in. The Chinese express 'I love you' by saying 'I feed you', and above the stomach is where we feel our heartbeat. Think of the left side as 'mine'. On your right side is your liver where your blood is filtered and the stored nutrition is distributed. The liver is continually balancing the body's various needs and sharing its resources. That's why we extend our right hand in greeting. Think of the right side as 'ours'. When you walk through a doorway your body reads the left side of the room as 'mine' (individual identity and resources) and the right as 'ours' (partnerships and shared resources).

Energy flows around a space clockwise, from left to right like the body. That brings us back to "First comes love, then comes marriage, then…" In other words, one thing leads to another. The sections that relate to romance and relationships are all on the right side of the room. From the point of view from the room's doorway, the right third of the back wall is about your passion, the adjacent third of the right wall is about caring and the middle of the right-hand wall is about committed relationships.

Our simple advice is that anything you place in the right side of a room, especially the bedroom, relates to your relationship. Any image there needs to contain pairs, preferably of the same type or species, and demonstrating a polarity, for example big and little or male and female. The middle of the right wall is the perfect place for a picture of the couple. Furniture placed there should have a sense of balance, such as a love seat, or a cabinet with two doors. The best material in the commitment section is real wood because it expresses beauty, durability and longevity.

Which brings us to the third key. The only photos in the bedroom should be of the couple. Don't cover your dresser with pictures of the kids, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, best friends and the annual family barbeque. The bedroom is the couple's haven where you're able to shut out the world. It's hard to relax and be intimately romantic if you feel like the whole family is watching.

Also, there should be no pictures of Angels in the relationship sections. If Angels are having sex, they're not telling anybody and if you're telling the Universe that you want an Angel for a partner, you're missing the point. The same thing goes for religious images. Filling the room with the Virgin Mary and half of the Saints leads to separate bedrooms.

There are places in your home for all of these things, just not in your bedroom. In any other room, near enough to the door so that you see them when you first enter, place pictures of the two of you with pictures of your loved ones. This reinforces your connectedness, belonging and collective worth. It is a reminder that you are loved and loving and that wonderful reality helps relationships last a lifetime.

 

Drs. Ralph and Lahni DeAmicis were directors of one of America's largest and most modern professional Feng Shui practitioner programs, based in Philadelphia. Their books Feng Shui and the Tango, Happiness Lessons and Prosperity Lessons, from the Feng Shui Fuzion Series are transforming the practical applications of environmental design in America. For a complete directory of their articles and a catalog of their books and other products, visit www.SpaceAndTime.com. Copyright 2002 Ralph and Lahni DeAmicis

Editors who would like to print this article, including the additional graphics, please email Ralph@SpaceAndTime.com , and we will send you the links to the pdf documents.