Take a tour of what’s arriving through your senses in your home or where you work, observe your responses, and see if there are places where you could treat your senses to a happier experience.

Seeing:  When you look around at all the areas in your home or work, do you feel happy at what you see?  Do you feel uplifted, capable, inspired, or however it is that you want to feel as a result?  Do you have items that seem like they ought to be wonderful, but your experience of them is not wonderful?  What emotional mood do your various visual images evoke?

Hearing:  What are the sounds you hear on a regular basis in your environment?  Birds outside your window, the ring of your telephone or alarm clock, the hum of the refrigerator motor, etc.  Of course, many of these things are beyond our control to change, such as construction or traffic sounds, but they are all worth noting as you may gain insight into your internal experience by paying attention to all the sounds

Touch:  The feel on your skin of a cool leather couch, the smooth cotton sheets along the skin of your toes as you slide into bed at night, the irregular wood grain of a desk top, the fluffy cushioning of your step as you walk along a carpeted floor… are the different sensations that come through your skin friendly and welcome?

Smell:  The most primitive of all the senses, smell evokes immediate recollection of previous experience, and has a deep effect on the nervous system.  Smells are fundamental to a sense of well-being.  As you enter a room, or open up your refrigerator, what do you smell?  Smells are something we readily cease to be actively aware of, and are often best detected after you’ve been out of the house for a while. Any smell which causes your body to draw back from should be eliminated.  Smells, such as room fresheners, which cover up underlying smells, or numb our ability to perceive, can be removed to help achieve a healthier air quality.

Taste:  The sense of taste has the least relevance to feng shui, but it’s interesting that one’s personal aesthetic preferences are called “taste”.  Loosely interpreting this, one can say that what is around you ought to be nourishing, to feed your being, because sensory experience is a kind of food, and can actually help to provide energy in a way that’s similar to actual food.  Does what you have around you fit your “taste”, or needs for nourishment?

Kinesthetic:  How we move through space is constantly using the brain in a kind of balancing act as we turn corners to get into a room, around a piece of furniture, or up to fetch a book from a top shelf.  Is the arrangement of furniture and other items in your home, as well as the architectural design, something you experience as a joy to move through, or is it more of an obstacle course?