Sometimes, all you really need to change your life is a little change in perspective, and what better place to start than with your environment? In “Feng Shui for Success: Simple Principles for a Healthy Home and Prosperous Business,’’ Kurt Teske, a feng shui practitioner who holds degrees from Harvard and Columbia, gives a practical introduction to the ancient Chinese system.
After explaining the fundamental concepts of the five elements in any environment (wood, fire, metal, earth, and water), which are really symbols for feelings rather than actual substances, Teske shows how having certain of these elements in a room can work for or against you, making interior design a kind of psychotherapy. Are you a wood person, driven by goals, or a quiet, conservative earth person? Wood people like tall shapes like skyscrapers or even well-scaled vases, while earth folks usually favor flat areas.
Whatever your makeup, you may want that quality reflected in your habitat. Teske gives you easy ideas to try out. A stairway that faces an outer door begs energy to fly out. It’s too expensive to remove, but placing plants or sculptures near it will ground needed energy. You don’t have to be a feng shui expert to understand why you wouldn’t want sick plants or that hideous painting Aunt Abby gave you in your environment, but it’s interesting to realize the subtlety of why a communal space should be free of personal objects (everyone should feel equally at home).
We can actively use our imaginations and a few well chosen objects to change the feel of a space and how we react when we are in it, says Teske. All it takes is a few hours, and this handy little book to show you not only how feng shui works, but why.
Creating the right personal environment is important, but how you operate in the larger world also has ramifications. Cami Walker was in her early 30s when she was told she had multiple sclerosis. Disheartened and barely able to walk, she felt her life was finished.
Two years later, a South African medicine woman advised her to give away 29 gifts in 29 days, and in “29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life,’’ Walker reveals how this simple practice turned her life - and other lives - around. As Walker begins to give her gifts (often as simple as a smile, spare change, or a kind word), she begins to feel good things happening in her life. She sleeps better, gives up her cane along with her bitterness about being ill, and even finds new purpose in starting a “29 Gifts’’ Web site. The best way to attract abundance is to be in a state of giving and gratitude, Walker says, and to learn to respond differently not just to your environment, but to the things given to you.
Walker’s a plucky writer, and it’s hard not to be inspired by her story. Plus, the community she created online does a great deal of good, including helping to fund a cancer patient’s surgery. Can “29 Gifts’’ work? Well, at the very least, it makes you more aware of the good in your life, and it shifts the focus from yourself to others.
So, while we’re looking outside ourselves for answers, maybe we should look outside our own country. In “What French Women Know About Love, Sex, and Other Matters of the Heart and Mind,’’ Debra Ollivier, who lived in France for a decade, wittily addresses the eternal question: What is that “je ne sais quoi’’ that French women have, and why should American women covet it?
Laced with insights from Marguerite Duras to Albert Einstein, “What French Women Know’’ is highly subjective, and Ollivier admits there are always exceptions to rules, but she nevertheless lays out a Gallic prescription for living a life that is richer, more sensual, messier, and a lot more fun.
French women, unlike Americans, don’t obsess about others liking them, and they don’t expect to understand men. They savor the aging process and rather than aspire to be one of the blue-eyed blondes Americans seem to favor, they cultivate rich inner lives which transform the outer ones, making their beauty unique rather than cookie cutter. From work ethics (the French prefer having a life to making a living, and they have government-supported, six-week vacations to prove it), to valuing nuanced thinking, Ollivier shows how the French way of life might enhance our own.
And finally, if you’re aiming for that French confidence, check out “Think Confident, Be Confident: A Four-Step Program to Eliminate Doubt and Achieve Lifelong Self-Esteem.’’ What I love about this book is how practical it is about cognitive psychology, which deals in shifting perception. Psychologists Leslie Sokol and Marci G. Fox show how to identify the areas of your life that trigger insecurity, and they offer suggestions on how to replace doubt with confidence. More evidence of how little shifts in how we understand our world can have big consequences.
Caroline Leavitt’s ninth novel will be published by Algonquin books next year. She can be reached at www.carolineleavitt.com. 
