A bedroom you can sleep in

Your bedroom should be a haven. It is where you rest and recover at the end of the day, and in feng shui it matters as much as any room in the house, because you spend about a third of your life in it with your eyes closed.

None of what follows is expensive. Most of it is moving things.

Clear it first

Keep the bedroom clean and uncluttered so energy can move through it freely.

After 50 the bedroom has a habit of collecting things that belong somewhere else. The ironing. The exercise bike. Boxes from a child's old room that nobody has decided about. Each one is a small reminder of a job, sitting there while you are trying to rest. Find them another home, even if that home is the garage for now.

Colour and air

Paint the walls a soothing colour, one that comforts you. There is no single correct shade. The test is how you feel when you walk in at night and turn on the lamp.

Let fresh air in whenever you can. Open a window, even for ten minutes in the morning, and let the night's air out.

Four things to look at

• A mirror facing the bed. Move it. In feng shui a mirror opposite the bed is said to keep energy bouncing around the room when it should be settling. If it cannot move, cover it at night.
• Beams over the bed. Sleeping under an exposed beam is said to feel like something pressing down on you. Cover the beam if you can, or move the bed out from under it.
• Feet toward the door. If your feet point straight out of the bedroom door when you lie down, try another position for the bed.
• Your best direction. If you can, set the bed so you sleep facing one of your favourable directions, worked out from your kua number.

The tradition says a mirror, a beam or a bed in line with the door can all make for restless sleep. Moving them is no guarantee of a good night. It does give the room a far better chance of feeling calm.

Finding your kua number

Your kua number is a personal number in feng shui, worked out from the year you were born. It gives you four directions that suit you and four that suit you less. Once you know yours, the bedroom is the first place to use it, because you spend more hours there than anywhere else.

You may find that the bed has been facing the wrong way for twenty years. That is one of the easier problems in life to fix.

From the archive. First written for my journal years ago, and rewritten for life after 50.