If you are familiar with feng shui, you might know enough to wonder about mirrors and where to place them. Questions regarding mirrors are frequent and often cause much confusion in the world of feng shui. So, if you’ve ever wondered if it is ever OK to have a mirror facing a door in feng shui, you’ve come to the right place to find out.
What Is Feng Shui?
Feng shui is an ancient Asian philosophy that looks at the flow of energy (called qi) in your home and how to improve and enhance it. Most of us can understand that our homes affect our well-being in many ways, so it’s helpful to learn how to make subtle shifts to create spaces that support us.
Feng Shui of Doors
One of the things we look at in feng shui is doors. A door is how you enter and exit a room. A door also connects rooms and spaces when open or closes them off when they are shut or locked. In feng shui, doors are the portals that control how energy flows through your home, from room to room, and from outside to inside the home.
Feng Shui of Mirrors
Mirrors are glass with a reflective (often metallic) coating on one side. Mirrors embody the water element in feng shui because they can mimic still waters that can accurately reflect the image of the moon. When feng shui was developed, mirrors were often highly polished pieces of metal. Therefore, mirrors are considered both water and metal elements in the five element system and they are also closely related to the color white in feng shui.
Outside of the five elements system, mirrors can be applied strategically for their reflective qualities which can invite, expand, enhance, amplify, and/or minimize qi.
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Mirrors and Front or Exterior Doors
There are dozens of schools of feng shui offering conflicting information that can be confusing to follow. Although the schools may have similar foundations rooted in the bagua, the five elements, and so forth, there are differing viewpoints on how the mirror and front door face each other.
All feng shui schools feel it’s important to have a strong front door because it’s how energy enters your space and life. In the traditional and classical viewpoint, the placement of a mirror facing the front door will reflect the energy back out of the door. In the BTB school of feng shui, a practitioner may recommend a mirror facing the front door to invite advantageous energy into the space. In this case, it’s best to check with a trusted feng shui consultant. Also, it’s helpful to recognize if your fears are based on what you’ve read. If you are worried about a mirror facing your front door, then it is probably bad energy regardless of what anyone tells you because you have created negative thoughts about it.
Mirrors Facing Interior Doors
In general, it is OK to have a mirror facing an interior door, aside from the front door. However, some situations may also be happening in tandem that may cause you to relocate a mirror (that has nothing to do with the mirror facing the interior door).
Here are some general situations when you would not want to hang a mirror in any location of your house, according to feng shui principles. For example, do not hang a mirror (or you can remove it) in the following situations:
- The mirror is not fastened securely to the wall and you are worried that it will break or fall on you.
- It reflects something you want less of in your life. For example, the mirror reflects the pile of bills on your table or your garbage bins.
- The mirror is broken.
- It was gifted and you do not want it in your home but you’re keeping it out of obligation.
- It is a secondhand mirror and it may hold energies from a difficult home or person.
- You do not like the mirror.
Most importantly, not everything in your home is a feng shui object. In general, you can put mirrors up where they are functionally useful as long as you don’t have negative feelings attached to them.