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Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui

Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui

List Price: $18.95
Your Price: $13.27
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Inspires to Clutter Clear
Review: Karen Kingston makes great arguments in why one should finally pick up the mess that surrounds. While her reasons for clearing clutter may be Feng Shui based, there is very little actual Feng Shui in this book which may be a disappointment for those that are seeking it. An excellent Feng Shui book I would recommend is by Terah Kathryn Collins and is titled "The Western Guide to Feng Shui Room by Room".

I would skip the chapter on clutter clearing your body, too much "quack" ideas with no nitty gritty scientific evidence. I believe there is another review here which specifically sites research which has been done to disprove the entire "bowel-cleansing" segment. Sure, fiber is good for you, but let's just leave it at that!

Overall this is a quick read. It gives many reasons to stop the pack-rat mentality, clear the clutter, and open up to new positive energy that awaits.

A great clutter book I would recommend is by Sandra Fulton. She's written many in this genre. The two I would recommend are "The Messie Motivator" and "The Messies Manual". Sandra goes into detail regarding a system for cleaning (in "The Messie Motivator") which was helpful. She also goes into more details of the psyche behind the typical clutter collector, I think many "messies" will relate.

So although Karen Kingston's book provides motivation to clear it up, there are far better books available for both Feng Shui and clutter clearing.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great book despite the weirdness
Review: Okay, you have to weed through some mumbo jumbo when reading this book but see it as shopping at an outstanding discount store and avoiding the occasional "slightly irregular" items. There is some great stuff and like another reviewer said, it is the only book I have ever read that made me get rid of anything. The arguments she makes smack you in the face and say "wake up!" Why should I keep my beautiful "Alice in Wonderland" book on my bookshelf when I haven't looked at it in 5 years when there is a little girl in a hospital room who would just light up if she were to have it? I guess you can tell that this book made me clear the bookshelf that I *have* instead of buy a second one to store books I don't look at.

A definite must for anyone who opens their closet door only to sigh a mournful sigh.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The last clutter book you'll have to buy
Review: If this book doesn't cure you of clutter, give it up...nothing will! *LOL*

Seriously, she hits on every very good reason (and some harsh realities) for getting the clutter out from underfoot. The Feng Shui approach simply makes it that much simpler, and less overwhelming. (It's especially powerful in combination with "Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life," by K. R. Carter.)

This is one of the most motivating book I've ever read about clutter, and in just one week, it's made a h-u-g-e difference in my life. Highly recommended if you've been trying to get control of clutter for years.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: It was great until she got to the bottom of things
Review: She does a good job of defining the differences among clutter, junk, useful stuff, and so on. It is very practical about how to get rid of clutter and ways to think about it.

Then she ruins it in the last chapter by going off on a tangent about how your average person has a colon full of things from years past, has a ridiculous drawing of a wiggly colon and insists that the reader rush off to an herbalist for a colon cleanse to get rid of all these accretions from days of yore.

I have an acquaintance who is an herbalist, who said it was total nonsense and said that a sigmoidoscopy is going to reveal a smooth, pink interior to one's plumbing and not accretions and agreed it was all very strange.

I would suggest Ms. Kingston keep to what she is good at and keep her crackpot theories to herself. She'd have a much better book, for starters.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: This book changed my life
Review: I was merely interested in Feng Shui when I ordered this book. It turned out to be the miracle I had not been expecting. After the first few chapters, I started cleaning. Why did it speak to me? I'm a 21 year old packrat... I've saved everything. Every school assignment, every scrap of paper I've ever written on, every broken toy. There was a pathway from my door to my bed. I've given away 4 boxes of clothes I never wear, thrown away 4 garbage bags of junk, and I've just barely started to scratch the surface. I thought I would never have the energy to clean, but this book changed my life.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: smell my aura
Review: uh, when I got to the part about her being able to smell clutter in people's auras and then the part about how everything that happens in a house imprints itself into the walls so that if someone who lived in the house before you got fat there you might also get fat there too unless you do the sacred cleansing ritual, and the stories about getting money and more money suddenly coming at you just by cleaning out clutter and then the VERY detailed colon cleansing section at the end, um, I felt the book was not for me.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui
Review: A book worth reading. A philosophy worth advocating. A lifestyle worth adopting. If you don't enjoy the book, chances are you're sitting on a pile of unused "stuff" denying the joy that's found in giving it away, selling it or sharing it with others. I am finding in my sixth decade that less truly is more.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Clean that room!
Review: This book is a great motivator. I read it in two days and began clearing my spaces. I still have more to clear away, but I'm well on the road to having a neat living space and workspace. It was wonderful to have the subject of space clearing presented in a manner that is fun and makes sense. I'm not so sure about the colon cleansing section. I have recommended this book to several other people. I have read other articles and listened to tapes on clearing clutter, but this was the book that finally motivated me to get my act together and change my mindset on why I'd been keeping all of that unnecessary stuff. Thanks, Karen Kingston!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: great (except for the "internal cleansing" chapter)
Review: Being a clutterholic who keeps a lot of stuff "just in case" and for memory's sake (like 2nd grade report cards), this book was truly motivational and much of it made sense (like keeping stuff "just in case" means that not only are we cluttering the house for ourselves, we're also keeping things for people we haven't even met yet!).

Since reading the book, my husband and I have cleared out TONS of stuff in the house! We've had yard sales and donated a lot to the Salvation Army and Goodwill, and the rooms that have been "decluttered" are cleaner and more restful. Plus, with the goal of getting down to just the things we need, love, or use, we've been able to get rid of tacky stuff that we hung onto for no good reason, and stuff that we weren't using. The great thing is that after reading the book I felt selfish for keeping all the clutter- now I feel like I'm helping out by giving my "thin clothes" to people who could wear them before they go out of style. Plus I'm not depressed looking at clothes that I've inadvertantly outgrown. Or, for those gifts you get that you don't really love but feel obligated to keep, you feel better about giving them away because you know it doesn't mean you don't appreciate the thought and keeping it when you don't like it makes the whole thing worse.

I agree that the whole section on colon cleansing is a big wacky and although I read it the first time, I personally skipped over that the second time I read the book (it's the kind of book you can read every time you want a "pep talk" to clean). I recommended the book to my mom and my brother and mom keeps mentioning how dangerous the colon cleansing part could be, but in my mind that was a small section of the book and one that I didn't give much thought to because I'm more concerned with a clean, clutter-free house. So I wouldn't dismiss the book because of one small section. The rest of it, taken with a grain of salt, is the ONLY book I've read that has actually motivated me to DO something and get rid of the clutter! And honestly, we feel so much better about the house now. We still have work to do, but at least I don't feel like I'm living in a junkyard anymore!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Quack alert! Quack alert!
Review: Beware the health-related quackery in this book!

While I cannot speak to the usefulness of most of this book, I did read the section about reducing the clutter in one's body. One of the methods Kingston advises is taking herbal remedies to cleanse impacted fecal matter in the large intestine.

Kingston makes claims about "autointoxication" - stagnation of the large intestine (colon) causes toxins to form that are absorbed and poison the body) - that have not been scientifically proven. Kingston doesn't have the credentials to be making these health-related claims nor is there evidence in the medical literature to support her claims.

Since I should practice what I preach, here is the evidence Kingston either is ignorant of, or would choose to ignore if she knew it existed:

Ernst E. "Colonic irrigation and the theory of Autointoxication: A triumph of ignorance over science." Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology 24:196-198, 1997.

Chen TS, Chen PS. "Intestinal autointoxication: A gastrointestinal leitmotive." Journal Clinical Gastroenterology 11:343-441, 1989.

If I'm going to read a book about feng shui, I'm going to read one that ONLY discusses the clutter in my house!


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