The Honor System

Honoring Your Needs and Values

The first time I heard anyone use the term honor in relation to your own personal energy was my first feng shui consultant and mentor, Suzee Miller. She was recommending that my sister slightly shift the angle of her grand piano to “honor” one of her best directions. Up until then, the word honor was always used in a traditional conservative and religious Christian context, as to how to relate to parents or respect your elders and their position of authority.

Honoring what’s unique about myself? What a novel concept!

As they say, the rest is history! Inspired by classical feng shui principles and The 8 Elements, at the age of 20, I took up my own study of the personal elements, with the intention of discovering how people can honor themselves.

The Honor System is an 8-week self-study course that guides you through eight of the elements of honoring your unique personal energy. Once you know your personal feng shui element, it’s important to begin learning how to honor your unique needs and values. This do-it-yourself course provides weekly guides, journaling prompts and assignments that are customized for your personal element! It’s a guided self-study course you can use to determine how to honor your unique personal energy.

How is it different from my signature coaching package, Feng Shui Yourself? It’s a self-study course, not private coaching. It’s customized for your personal element, not personal energy coaching just for you. It’s just 8 weeks, not 15 weeks. It’s a self-guided and self-paced journey to self-mastery, not a personally guided experience by The 8 Elements Master. And it’s just $249, not a private coaching package you might need a payment plan for!

The Honor System course is for you if you’d like to master your inner chi, but aren’t ready to invest in private personal energy coaching, The 8 Elements Mastery monthly coaching membership or the Feng Shui Yourself signature coaching package.

Your element’s Personal Energy Guide, that’s exclusive to private coaching clients is provided in Week One of The Honor System Course.

The 8 page Personal Energy Guide includes your element profile in balance and out of balance, your element in nature, the Five Element Dynamics and their effect on your personal energy, yin/yang energy, house group, human expression, age and stage of development, completion number and relationship dynamic, life center, colors and best directions, as well as, guidance on how to honor and balance your personal energy.

Even if you don’t know your personal feng shui element or any of the aspects of your personal energy that make you unique, you can honor your needs and values. You just have to know what they are. And to do that, you’ll need to reflect and journal about your most essential needs and highest values.

Needs

Alison Armstrong taught me about needs and how important they are to maintaining your balance in life. She said that when your needs are being met, you are at the level of “fine”. Due to their relationship to their needs, most women live far below “fine” for most of their lives. And that anything above fine makes happiness possible and ecstasy accessible.

Obviously, humans have basic needs. It would be difficult to feel inner happiness if you’re preoccupied by strong hunger pangs, stressed about how to pay bills that are coming due in a few days or worried about a health issue that you haven’t determined the root cause of or how to heal from. But in addition to having an income that provides the basic needs of food, clothing and shelter, there are other needs that are unique to you. And left unmet you could be living well below fine for years, if not decades.

It’s common for people to describe items as “must-haves” or “essentials”. They’re usually talking about some Amazon find they impulsively “add to cart” or pumpkin shaped Autumnal mug they just can’t leave the store without. If buying yourself gifts is your love love language, maybe your online shopping addiction and treating yourself to new home decor every season is indeed a need for you. Although, I doubt it.

Next, are the people who have their list of non-negotiables. This concept has been popularized by boss babes who are driven by money, oppressed by their perfectionism and judge themselves by their level of productivity. They have hours long morning routines, never-ending to do lists and no work-life balance. Their needs are things they have to do and goals to achieve.

Then, there are what I call the obsession girlies. They scroll on Pinterest looking for trends or follow celebrities and influencers to find out what’s “in”. They become obsessed with finding and buying the thing they don’t need, but just have to have. Why? Because other people have it. Gigantic Stanley water bottle in every pastel color anyone?

So, what is a need, truly? A need is something you have, do or be that allows you to be fine. You know it’s a need if, when you don’t have it, can’t do it or aren’t being it, you don’t have wellbeing. Pretty sure you don’t need that new Fall scented candle to be fine, especially because they are highly toxic.

To determine your needs, make three lists. Start with making a list of your basic needs, what you need to have in order to be fine. Especially in the current economy, it could be that it’s your basic needs that aren’t being met right now. Next, make a list of the things you need to do in order to feel personally accomplished. It could be that doing that lengthly morning routine is the thing that sets the tone for having really good days. And the most challenging one of all may be the list of the qualities you need to beor embody more fully to feel a sense of personal fulfillment and inner wellbeing. It could be that you’re already being the way you need to be to feel good about yourself. Or, it could be that you know who you need to be, but just haven’t been being it lately.

The needs you’re the most diligent about meeting tend to be connected to your personal element. Often, needs are associated with having things like money and houses and cars or the lack of those things. Alison Armstrong, a Mother Earth element, taught women to make a list of their desired emotions and then the things they could DO to fill the tanks that gave them access to those emotional states of wellbeing. As a Water element, I focus the majority of my attention on who I’m being, much less on what I’m doing and expend almost no energy on making more money so I can have more material possessions.

Many times people think that it’s the responsibility of the people in their life to meet their needs. And while some of your needs will require contributions of time and energy from a partner or parents, friends or clients, most of the needs that will provide personal wellbeing are the ones you meet yourself.

Values

Each of The 8 Elements have a core set of values that are connected with their element’s qualities, default or dominant emotions and Life Center. You can discover the highest values of your personal element in The Honor System self-study course. But you don’t need me to tell you what your values are. You can determine them for yourself.

Values are the principles you live by or the standards of behavior you intend to live up to. They’re also what’s important or sacred to you. They’re the things you feel are beneficial to pay attention to or worthy of your investment of time and energy. And maybe even more importantly, they’re the states of being you prioritize having as you go through life.

When you have clarity about your highest values and are committed to honoring them, your life choices make perfect sense, at least to you, if not to others. Why you do certain things and not others becomes obvious. And your approach to and flow through life is no longer a great mystery to be solved.

Knowing your values also means knowing what opposes your values and being committed to not abandoning or violating your own values. I don’t know how many times people have told me to get a job doing medical billing or customer service for a corporation. I stopped explaining to them why I would never participate in the monopolistic scam that is allopathic medicine or contribute to the financial success of predatory corporatism. Now, I just thank them for thinking of me.

So many people today are desperate and demoralized wage slaves that will do anything for a few extra bucks. They trade hours for dollars and decades of their life for a salary, because they prioritize their need for money over honoring their values. They sell their soul to the devil for fame and fortune, owe their soul to the company store for forty plus years and work for the very man they say they despise.

One of the more recent trends in the entrepreneurial world is to provide a values statement. That way clients know what the company’s core or fundament values are and they can decide if they want to support that business or not. This is helpful if honoring your highest values is important to you. And it’s essential if you’d like to work with people who share your values or at least don’t violently oppose them.

I remember when my midwife retired after decades of birthwork in the local community. Since her income was no longer dependent on home birthing women, she felt free at last to reveal her personal opinions that opposed the traditional family and conservative values she knew many of her clients held. I always knew she supported abortion, as many state licensed midwives do, but some of the other liberal ideologies she began posting about were honestly very disappointing, to say the least. I felt betrayed by a woman who was pretending to share my values, or at least being neutral like Mountain Earth elements tend to do to “keep the peace”, instead of being honest about how much belligerent disdain she has for the very people she served her entire career. Like many entrepreneurs, she stayed silent because she valued having a financially successful business more than honoring her own integrity and being her authentic self with her clientele.

Even if you don’t own a business, I recommend writing your own personal values statement. First, make a list of your values. Then, prioritize the list to determine what your highest values are. What are some of the decisions you’ve made, rituals you practice or things you do that honor those values? If you’re doing things that don’t honor your values, re-evaluate your life and make some changes.

Dismiss that which insults your soul. ~ Walt Whitman

If you like, share your personal values statement in the comment section below!

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