Book summary “The Feng Shui of Abundance”: summary

Introduction

You likely work hard yet still struggle to build lasting wealth, wondering why money seems to slip through your fingers despite your best efforts. You might blame the economy, your salary, or bad luck, while your home environment quietly works against your financial goals. Suzan Hilton argues in The Feng Shui of Abundance that wealth is an energetic current intimately connected to your physical space, your body, your emotions, and your mindset.

The book combines traditional Eastern spatial design with modern psychological and practical tools to help you remove internal and external blocks to prosperity. You will learn to map your home, clear stagnant energy, regulate your nervous system, heal emotional wounds, and align your creative imagination with rational planning.

• How does your living space reflect your current financial situation?
• What hidden emotional blocks prevent you from receiving wealth?
• How can you harmonize your physical environment with your financial goals?

1. The Five Currents of the River of Gold

Abundance flows through five distinct energetic bandwidths that must work in harmony.

Abundance is navigated through a metaphorical River of Gold driven by five distinct energetic currents. The five currents are Feng Shui, Body Sensations, Emotional, Creative, and Rational. When these five bandwidths of energy flow freely and harmoniously together rather than fighting one another, they lead to the ocean of abundance.

Everything in the universe vibrates at its own frequency, and creating abundance requires bringing your personal energy and physical environment into resonant harmony with wealth. Feng shui focuses on encouraging harmony and alignment among various vibrations. When you come into resonance with the specific frequency of abundance, economic energy flows to you with ease, mirroring the natural cycles and patterns seen in nature. In 2001, the Seattle earthquake occurred, where a pendulum suspended in sand recorded vibrations by drawing a rose pattern. The author notes how people might sing Auld Lang Syne during Fourth of July fireworks, illustrating a lack of harmony and alignment between the holiday and the music.

Ch'i is the invisible life force energy circulating around and within everything that governs movement, growth, and wealth accumulation. Healthy ch'i flows harmoniously in dynamic balance. Excess ch'i creates destructive natural disasters, while too little ch'i leads to stagnation and death. Tuning into your own breath helps you sense the flow of ch'i.

Yin and yang represent the complementary, interdependent polar opposites that govern the movement of ch'i and maintain dynamic balance. Derived from the oneness of a circle, yin and yang flow into each other to create patterns and movement without rigid good-versus-bad judgments. When physicalized, yin characteristics relate to dark, earth, and yielding, while yang relates to light, heaven, and firm action.

The Five Basic Elements serve as foundational building blocks whose supportive or destructive cycles explain the flow of energy and financial stability. Metal, wood, water, fire, and earth interact through a supportive Creative Cycle and a restrictive Regenerative or Destructive Cycle. Imbalances in these elements can cause financial energy to stall or burn out, but they can be corrected using specific elemental colors and adjustments. Unrealistically high stock market prices driven by unchecked speculation followed by a severe market drop demonstrate an ungrounded excess of raging fire energy leading to imbalance.

The Five Currents

• Ask yourself three questions to check readiness: Am I breathing full, deep breaths? Is my body moving and flexible? Am I emotionally and mentally ready to take the next step?
• Use colors to enhance the Creative Cycle starting from the bottom of a room upwards: black for money and water, green for wood, red for fire, yellow for earth, and white for metal.

2. Diagnosing and Enhancing the Wealth Area

Your physical space acts as a mirror that reflects your innermost thoughts, beliefs, and relationship with money.

The placement of physical objects and the arrangement of your living or workspace symbolically reveal your financial attitudes. Changing your physical environment helps ease the path toward shifting your thoughts, actions, and economic flow.

A businesswoman who prioritized client relationships over money had a lidless toilet and open floor drain in the Wealth Area of her business space, symbolizing financial flow going down the drain, which correlated with making very little money.

The Ba-gua Map

The Ba-gua octagonal map provides a structured grid to locate and diagnose the different energy centers of any living or workspace. Derived from 3,500 years of study regarding flow and polarity by fung shui masters, the simplified Ba-gua is aligned with the main entrance door to map out nine key life sections, allowing practitioners to identify missing areas or energetic blockages.

• Sketch the outline of your entire living space or office including attached roofed areas.
• Trace the simple octagonal Ba-gua on translucent paper.
• Align the Career Area along the dotted line by your main front door and stretch it to fit the main shape of your space.

Every building, room, and desk contains a specific Wealth Area located in the farthest left corner relative to the primary entrance. By placing your left hand on your heart while standing just inside the doorway and extending your left arm toward the farthest left corner, you connect with the physical location of open-hearted abundance.

• Stand just inside the main doorway of your home or office with the door closed and face inward.
• Place your left hand on your heart and allow your breath to flow.
• Extend your left arm, palm open and level with your heart, toward the farthest left corner of the room or building.

Wealth Area Cures

Enhancing the Wealth Area requires removing items that do not represent abundance, cleaning the space, and adding symbolic objects or colors. Classic feng shui cures involve specific color palettes, natural elements like jade plants or water fountains, and personal items chosen through spontaneous intuitive recognition.

• Remove all objects from your main Wealth Area that do not represent wealth and open-hearted abundance.
• Give your Wealth Area a good cleaning before putting anything back.
• Find an owned object that you love and place it in your streamlined Wealth Area.

Alice used a crystal butterfly in her Wealth Area because it symbolized rebirth and new possibilities to her, despite cultural warnings against it.

The Penny Dance ritual uses daily micro-actions with copper coins to harmonize subtle energy flows and cultivate daily awareness of abundance. Saving and depositing a penny a day into a beloved container placed in the Wealth Area connects the practitioner with the conductive properties of copper and trains the mind to notice small nuances of flow.

• Choose a container that you already own and absolutely love to represent open-hearted abundance.
• Place the container in your Wealth Area and put your first penny into it.
• Every day, take another penny, hold it in both hands in your Wealth Area, give thanks, and place it in the container with gratitude.
• When the container is full, put your pennies back into circulation with love and gratitude.

April placed a clean container in her Wealth Area on an unemployment check, and within two months secured a higher salary that doubled eighteen months later while continuing the Penny Dance.

3. Clearing Clutter and Stopping Energy Drains

Physical clutter, open drains, and faulty architectural flows siphon away your personal vitality and financial reserves.

The more possessions you own, the more personal energy goes into maintaining them. This creates a detour away from your life purpose. Clearing space removes stuck energy and provides more options and ease of movement.

Fred, an emergency medical technician, responded to a call at an old house. The rooms were filled with stacks of newspapers over four feet tall, making navigation nearly impossible. After learning it took several dumpsters to clear the house, Fred went home and began clearing clutter from every room.

Ask yourself these questions to decide what to keep:

• Do I love this?
• Does it fit into my lifestyle as I am currently living it?
• Does it bring me joy and ease?
• Am I saving it for someone who loves and wants it?
• Is it of great value to me for sentimental reasons?
• Will I use it in the next couple of years?
• Does it make my heart sing?
• Does it speak to my soul?

Streamlining

You can enliven and clear the energy in a room using sound, smoke, and sea salt. Use bells, chimes, drums, and clapping hands to break up stagnant energy after setting a clear intention.

Apply these space clearing methods to break up stuck frequencies:

• Center yourself and set a clear intention to raise and release stuck energy.
• Open some windows and move around the space in a methodical way.
• Use bells, chimes, drums, and hand clapping in corners and throughout the room.
• Smudge the air with a combination of sage and sweet grass.
• Lightly sprinkle new sea salt methodically around the perimeter of the room from one corner to the center.
• Leave the salt in place for no more than two or three days.
• Vacuum or sweep up the salt and dispose of it outside the cleared space.

Leaking Energy

Bathrooms located in a Wealth Area act as major energy and currency drains because water constantly flushes down drains. An open toilet symbolizes money going down the drain.

In 1997, the author visited a lovely jewelry store on Madison Avenue in New York City that had shrunk from five stores down to one. In their Wealth Area, they had a staff bathroom with a lidless toilet and a wall of honor featuring photos of the owner's nephew, whose personal ventures were prospering while the jewelry business went down the drain.

Protect your space against down-the-drain energy with these practices:

• Keep the toilet lid closed at all times.
• Place a full-length mirror on the outside of the bathroom door.
• Keep the bathroom door closed.
• If no door exists in an open bedroom-bathroom area, hang a crystal or bead curtain in increments of nine in the doorway.

Excessive windows in a Wealth Area allow energy and money to leak out. Floor-to-ceiling windows act as leaky vessels that send energy away.

Use these physical barriers to contain the flow:

• Place green plants along windows or position credenzas and low furniture in front of them.
• Close shades to block chaotic external energy.
• Hang faceted round crystals in windows using a colored cord in increments of nine.
• Add a valance hanging down in increments of nine inches, half-inches, or feet.
• Place a small mirror above the inside doorframe of a Wealth Area door to slow exiting energy.

Staircases and sloping land cause energy to rush downward and escape through doors. Spiral stairways act like whirlpools that bore energy downward.

Stabilize the downward rush with these steps:

• Hang a round crystal halfway between the bottom stair and the doorway from the ceiling in increments of nine.
• Place a small, flat or octagonal mirror above the doorway if the ceiling cannot be reached.
• Place green plants at the bottom of spiral staircases.
• Wrap upward-flowing material like fabric or ivy on spiral stair handrails.
• Place a light near the top of a stairway and leave it on for several days.

Unbalanced fireplaces in a Wealth Area symbolize financial resources going up in smoke. Operating a fireplace requires fuel, air drawn from the room, and an open flue.

Restore balance with these actions:

• Set an intention for money to grow and for actions to be for your highest good.
• Close the flue and empty ashes, burying them in your yard.
• Keep the fireplace flue closed when not in use.
• Enhance the Wealth Area with a containing cycle of the Five Elements by adding a fountain with a pond-like effect and green plants.

4. The Feng Shui of the Self

The Body Sensations Current is foundational for recognizing energy flow, feeling abundance, and making timely financial decisions. Beginning at birth, this current engages through physical sensations, breath, and movement. Dismissing it causes you to ignore early warning signals of tension, leading to physical breakdowns and restricted life options.

Recognizing physical sensations and breathing deeply anchors your ability to detect dubious deals and manage money.

Body Sensations

Subtle body sensations act as an early-warning radar against deceptive business deals and con artists before rational analysis catches up. Con games and flawed financial opportunities often present rational numbers that look good on paper, but trigger subtle physical signals like tingling or muscle tension. Honoring these sensations prevents financial losses.

Lucille felt an odd itching sensation around a new employee at her regular car repair shop and avoided him. He was later fired for dishonesty, and a customer who ignored similar feelings regretted it. Ralph felt a subtle internal shift during a sales pitch for a product that was later discontinued due to reliability issues.

Physical interactions with small items and money reflect deeper life patterns and subconscious attitudes toward wealth. Behavioral habits established in childhood dictate how you handle money or dismiss seemingly minor details. Bringing awareness to these patterns opens up new movement options and financial opportunities.

Alan complained about a lack of career opportunities. When coins were scattered on the floor, he picked up quarters and dimes but left smaller coins behind, expressing anger that worthless little things were a waste of time. He realized this mirrored his father's dismissive attitude toward children, reflecting how he ignored subtle signals and small opportunities from colleagues.

Abundant Breathing

Diaphragmatic breathing supplies vital oxygen to the brain, directly improving clarity in financial analysis and decision-making. Upside-down breathing into the upper lobes of the lungs provides only a small amount of oxygen, starving the brain and causing fatigue. Breathing down into the lower lobes utilizes the larger lung capacity, massages internal organs, and restores mental energy.

You can reset out-of-sync breathing patterns and dissolve physical blockages with these practices:

• Sit slightly forward in your chair on your sit bones with uncrossed legs and a relaxed waist.
• Allow air to flow into your lower lobes first as you inhale by rocking forward on your sit bones and slightly flexing your pelvis.
• Lift your chin upward ever so slightly to open and expand your rib cage.
• Let your lower belly expand as your lower lobes fill, with middle and upper lobes filling automatically.
• Exhale by letting go and looking slightly downward, causing your spine to flex in harmony as your pelvis rocks the opposite way.
• Examine how you store and handle your cash, checkbook, and financial records.
• Choose a money container that your heart embraces and that feels abundant, honoring your current cash flow.
• Spend at least five minutes every day doing free-form movement, changing styles, tempos, and fluidity while noticing areas of tension or contraction.

5. Navigating the Emotional Current

Financial decisions are fundamentally driven by emotions rather than pure logic, and ignoring emotional components leads to reactive financial behaviors. You take financial actions based on underlying fears, angers, or desires.

Stock market selling panics occur when you fear being left holding worthless assets. Buying on hot tips from noncredible sources happens out of fear of missing an upswing.

The Big Five Emotions

All human emotions are built from five core emotions and love, which serves as the highest vibrational frequency encompassing all others. The Big Five core emotions are joy, anger, sadness, fear, and sexual feelings. These emotions combine with each other and with various currents to form all emotional experiences. Love is the highest vibration and widest bandwidth, encompassing everything from personal affection to unconditional divine love.

Unprocessed emotions and hidden biterness act as dams that block the flow of wealth until resolved through love and forgiveness.

Biterness occurs when boundary breaches are unresolvable, leading to high energetic and financial costs. Forgiving the debt is done for your own benefit to restore personal wholeness and allow wealth to flow again.

• Acknowledge who and where you are resisting canceling debts in your Travel Log.
• Choose one person and write out the whole scenario as you see it while feeling your emotions.
• Write a letter to the person, saying how he or she hurt you, and forgive the person.
• Write a letter to yourself and experience all of your emotions.
• Tear up or burn both letters.
• Do the Open-hearted Love Process for yourself to forgive and free yourself from debt.

A friend stepped into compassion toward her former spouse, stopped demanding child support after five years of messy divorce and child support dispute, refocused on her own life, and subsequently earned twice the contested amount in her business within one year. Compassion involves extending kindness toward those who have not earned it, operating on the River of Gold rather than the River of Shame. Gratitude is the ultimate experience that removes emotional blocks and attracts business and ease.

Forgiveness and Compassion

Regularly practicing conscious love expansion helps maintain balance, groundedness, and an enlarged flow of wealth and abundance in daily life. By intentionally engaging with feelings of love toward a person, object, or animal and multiplying that intensity, you can clear energy blocks and enhance your capacity to experience wealth and balance.

• Sit comfortably with your feet on the floor, eyes open or closed, and breathe deeply for five or six breaths.
• Think of someone or something that you know that you love, and experience and send your love to that person, object, or animal.
• See your love wash over and fill them, continue breathing deeply, and allow this love to return to your open heart.
• Increase the intensity of this love you are giving and receiving by ten times, fully receiving and enjoying it for a couple of minutes.
• Increase the intensity of the love again by ten times, feeling it flow in through your heart and body and out over your entire life.
• Surround your love object with a pink bubble, see the energy flow cease and return to your open heart, and sit quietly.
• Gently stretch, wiggle your toes, tap your feet on the floor several times, open your eyes, and come back to the present.

6. Harnessing the Creative and Rational Currents

Visualizing abundance and eliminating limiting language allows the creative mind to manifest wealth without rational worry.

The Creative Current enables you to imagine future abundance as a reality, generating a vibrational frequency that attracts wealth into your lives. By visualizing desires in full color with intense positive emotion, you create an energy field that goes out into the world. This approach skips logical step-by-step thinking and operates on the principle of imagining what is not yet physically present.

• Use I am statements with deep feeling such as I am financially abundant, I am enjoying my larger income, and I am at ease with more wealth.
• Avoid using I am for creating lack such as saying I am hungry.

Using the word want creates an energetic vibration of lack and complaint, which blocks the flow of abundance from the universe. When you say you want something, you subconsciously resonate with not having it. This triggers the universe to respond to complaints rather than clear requests of gratitude and having.

Business consultant Amy wanted more time and money but constantly felt terrified of lacking them. After realizing her complaints kept her stuck, she shifted her language to I am at peace with time to just be and successfully resolved her financial stress within months.

• Notice when and where you use the word want.
• Let go of using the word want and replace it with gratitude and visualizations of already having your desires.

The Rational Current

The Rational Current excels at logical analysis, order, and tracking details, but creates mental loops and worry when overwhelmed. Rooted heavily in Western culture and the Industrial Revolution, the rational mind tends to treat people like machines and defaults to negative judgments, worry, and the cycle of the Ws unless intentionally balanced.

• Sit comfortably with feet flat and count equal inhalations and exhalations.
• Gently flex your hips and spine while counting breaths to quiet an overactive mind.

Unconscious negative language and speech patterns actively push abundance, opportunities, and money away. Phrases containing self-doubt, denial, or limiting beliefs vibrate at frequencies that repel what you desire. Recognizing and releasing these phrases creates an energetic opening for wealth.

• Notice your language and release speech patterns that send things away for thirty days.
• Record old phrases in your Travel Log so they can rest in peace.
• Use positive and inviting language such as I am delighted this showed up and I gladly accept.

7. Overcoming Financial Hazards and Personas

Recognizing financial canyons, rapids, and family money personas prevents self-sabotage and unconscious struggles.

Canyons represent restrictive financial phases where options are severely limited and anxiety increases due to fast-moving pressure. A financial canyon manifests as thin resources, sudden job loss, canceled orders, or looming debt where margins for error are microscopic.

• Take a deep full breath and resonate with the experience.
• Check out your intention and inquire of all currents if you are committed to the ocean of abundance.
• Laugh at yourself and take a time-out to clear your head and get your bearings.

Detours happen when individuals unconsciously sabotage their approach to high levels of abundance because they do not know how to handle unfamiliar energy. John was experiencing intense excitement as his heart's desire approached, but within a couple of days his focus shifted entirely and he went on an unconscious detour away from his expansion.

• Breathe deeply into tight body places, move creatively to music, and admit out loud "I don't know" how to move forward with that much energy.
• Use wonder questions starting with "Hmmm? I wonder" to help both brain halves work together when facing the unknown.
• Work on long-ignored and partly finished projects step by step without buying anything new.

Personas and Scripts

People often get stuck in a state of stagnation called the Sea of Salt by unconsciously preserving old family money dramas and wearing protective personas. Penny waited for permission throughout her life, following her parents choice of college, major, and husband, while keeping orderly financial records without making big decisions until she learned to listen to herself.

• Review the list of Classic Personas and jot down how they dress, move, and speak.
• Identify the persona's theme song and preferred or avoided emotions.
• Send love to your persona and thank it for keeping you safe.
• Note the costume you put on when slipping into your financial persona.
• Ask yourself what situations or dramas drive these personas and how to change them.

The sticky triangle traps people in murky swamps of debt and stagnation through the roles of victim, rescuer, and persecutor.

• Exhale and take a deep full breath.
• Listen for the sound of a whine in your own voice.
• Notice what emotion you are not experiencing.
• Pay attention to how you are holding your body and where you experience tension.
• Notice any repetitive motion such as twirling hair or rubbing your arm.
• Wonder what you did to create this situation.
• Admit your emotions and imaginings first to yourself.
• Share that you realize you are playing one of the positions on the triangle.

Conclusion

Creating lasting financial abundance requires aligning your physical environment, body sensations, emotions, creative imagination, and rational planning into a harmonious River of Gold.

You now see that wealth generation depends on integrating every layer of your daily experience. Adjusting your space without clearing emotional dams leaves your prosperity incomplete. When you balance your outer surroundings with your inner state, money flows naturally.

1. Keep your wealth area clean, well-lit, and decorated with symbols of prosperity.
2. Clear physical clutter from every room to restore your personal vitality.
3. Notice your physical sensations before making any financial commitment.
4. Release bitterness and resentment about past money struggles through forgiveness.
5. Use creative visualization to picture your abundance without rational worry.
6. Speak about money with empowering language that welcomes steady wealth.
7. Maintain your financial flow by fixing leaks and honoring your resources.

10 Key Ideas

1. Abundance flows through five distinct energetic bandwidths—Feng Shui, Body Sensations, Emotional, Creative, and Rational—that must work in harmony.
2. Your living space acts as a physical mirror reflecting your innermost thoughts, beliefs, and relationship with money.
3. The Ba-gua octagonal map provides a structured grid aligned with your main entrance to locate and diagnose the Wealth Area in any room or building.
4. Physical clutter, open drains, and faulty architectural flows siphon away your personal vitality and financial reserves.
5. Recognizing subtle physical sensations and breathing deeply anchors your ability to detect dubious deals and manage money.
6. Unprocessed emotions and hidden bitterness act as dams that block the flow of wealth until resolved through love and forgiveness.
7. Visualizing abundance and eliminating limiting language allows the creative mind to manifest wealth without rational worry.
8. Recognizing financial canyons, rapids, and family money personas prevents self-sabotage and unconscious struggles.
9. Releasing childhood behavioral habits and stepping away from the sticky triangle of victim, rescuer, and persecutor opens up new financial options.
10. Creating lasting financial abundance requires aligning your physical environment, body sensations, emotions, creative imagination, and rational planning into a harmonious River of Gold.