2023 is The Year of Romance. Soft Wood years are the perfect time to practice romanticizing life. In this blog, I’ll share 23 ways to romanticize your life.

To romanticize life means to be intentional about what you’re doing. Instead of being on autopilot or going through the motions of life, you consciously choose how you spend your time. You create special moments and savor them. You choose to be fully present while you experience them. You romanticize yourself, your space and your life!

One of the ways people show their love is to give gifts. Although the majority of annual holidays, promoted by corporations, are centered around excessive consumerism, Mother’s Day tends to be a little less about the presents and more about our presence. Of course, you can buy all the things that companies are trying to sell you. But you can also put some thought into making Mother’s Day special for your mom, with or without the gift wrap.

2023 is a Soft Wood element year. Soft Wood is associated with the adolescence human stage of development, the ages between 13-18, when hormones are surging and sexuality is budding. It’s the time of life in which you come of age and begin to show interest in dating, romance and sex. You have your first crush, your first kiss or your fist sexual experience and maybe even, your first break up and broken heart.

Recently, I prepared a Personal Prosperity Guide for a friend and loyal client. It includes the Wealth & Prosperity enhancements for your personal feng shui element, as well as, the Chinese zodiac animal associated with your year of birth. Upon reading the guide, she said that the Chinese zodiac animal in the guide was different from the one she thought she was. Her text was the inspiration for this blog.

Each year when babies are born, it’s both their sex and date of birth that determines their personal feng shui element. Feng shui’s Eight Mansions trigrams honors both the yin and yang number orders. The yang number order of descending numbers, that establishes the element for the year, is also assigned to every male born that year. The yin number order the has its own column of ascending numbers, is used to assign a personal element to all females born that year.

2023 is the Year of the Writer! In addition to prosperity and romance, Soft Wood years are excellent for artistic creativity, academic achievement and writing. This element’s energy is especially supportive of writing copy for entrepreneurs, writing essays for students and writing manuscripts for authors.

Soft Wood energy is highly auspicious! It brings love and romance, a steady stream of wealth and prosperity, as well as, youth and beauty, entrepreneurial success and academic achievement, literary fame and artistic creativity, and travel for business and pleasure to the four corners of the world!

Greed is an all-consuming and selfish desire for material wealth. It’s a powerful craving for more with elements of self-entitlement and hoarding. You could even say it's the love of money that’s the proverbial root of all evil. This is especially true when the greediness involves taking and withholding from others.

The next two years promise to be extremely emotional ones. After back to back mental energy years followed by a year of physical rest, humans will be provoked to emote. Soft Wood next year will be followed by a Hard Wood year in 2024, providing the fuel for the new era of future prosperity to ignite, catch fire and slowly burn for the next 20 years.

As we near the end of the Mountain Earth 20-year cycle, people will begin to move out of the neutral zone. They will emerge from their hiding places. And they will take a stand for the truth.

'Tis the season for making lists and checking them twice. Naughty and nice lists. Holiday and seasonal bucket lists. Shopping lists and Christmas wish lists.

In addition to future prosperity, the Fire element is associated with happiness. This is because Fire represents the many celebrations of life that bring people together and put smiles on their faces. The holiday festivities like Merry Christmas with glad tidings of great joy. Happy days like graduation and wedding ceremonies. Happy birthdays parties and happy anniversaries dinners. Happy family gatherings like Thanksgiving and Happy New Years with friends.

In this series on annual goal setting for The 8 Elements, we're taking a new approach to setting intentions and making plans for our year ahead. In a previous blog, I shared ideas about how to set goals around your personal feng shui element's Life Center. In this blog, I will be sharing how goal setting can be an important aspect of intentional self-care instead of just worldly success.

Each month the element's energies move to a new house. This month the Soft Metal energy is visiting the North, the House of Water. As with every numeric combination, in addition to the feng shui energies, there are other interesting influences at play.In this blog, I will be sharing about the affect Soft Metal has on the Water element and how they depict our True North and inner compass.

Don’t try to do all the things. All the things you’re doing that take you away from the work you’re really here to do. All the things you could learn how to do but don’t really want to spend the time actually doing. All the things you should do but don’t like doing. All the things you have to do but aren’t good at doing. All the things you need to do but could be done by someone else.