Feng Shui – Living in Ease

How aware are you of what you are feeling in your body when you walk into a room? These days most people think of feng shui as synonymous with interior decoration/design with an Asian twist. However, feng shui is more than a pleasing appearance. When properly understood feng shui becomes a methodology for creating harmony, balance, prosperity, health, & an elevated consciousness.

Just about every culture on the planet has their own variation of feng shui. The idea that we are affected by our surrounding is universal. In India, vaastu shastra was practiced. Their spatial map looks like this.

(Geomancy & sacred geometry are both related fields that have their roots more in western culture. The medicine wheel might be the way native americans lined themselves up with the cosmos, which is the original intention of all of these disciplines, to align oneself with that which is greater as represented by sun, moon and all the planets in the night sky.)

These chinese characters, wind and water, are the characters used to describe Feng Shui. (Just remember, when we begin to translate another’s language we can get mixed up.)

In today’s culture, feng shui is showing up as an offshoot of interior design/decoration. And it can be a great reason to give in to our ’shopping’ addictions. Most people regard feng shui as a clever series of magic tricks artfully placed to affect our consciousness regarding our surroundings. That’s true to a certain extent, however it’s soooo much more!

Feng Shui provides a map for us to see the greater whole. It’s intention is to bring peace, love, & happiness to all. Where there is peace, love & happiness, there you will also find prosperity, health, & joy.

I became interested in feng shui, per se, in the late 80’s. Previously I had studied architecture & interior design in college. At this same time I was working as a real estate agent which enabled me to see thousands of homes & businesses…although with a different focus. Nevertheless, my right brain began to collect information on how different surroundings impact our lives. The turning point came when I discovered the role that astrology plays in determining auspicious design & placement. Suddenly, everything I had previously learned about environmental metaphysics became crystal clear.

The compass school of feng shui (check out this post) makes specific use of astrological information.The practitioners used a luopan which was placed in the home in alignment with the birth information of the head of the family…..usually the father. With the advent of the computer, we are now able to create personalized maps of the planetary locations for anywhere and any time on earth. When these maps are placed in your home/office/business it is easy to see the ‘lines of energy’ radiate through physical space. From here, we can then apply ‘feng shui’ to mitigate, minimize, maximize, alter and adjust our interior spaces to take advantage of the movement of chi. The results are usually pretty immediate and impressive.

This is what a local space map looks like. You place it in the center of the space and work from there. (If you live more than 50 miles from your birth place then you need to recalculate the map for the current location.)

Of course you also need to be knowledgeable of all the other correlations and correspondances that are part of the astrological/feng shui vocabulary…..none of these techniques are as simple as they appear and one needs to be quite balanced with both information and intuition to make use of the data.

I like to think of feng shui as environmental acupuncture, or perhaps astro-ecology.
How you choose to define feng shui is a personal choice since Feng Shui can be either a noun or a verb.Since the late 80’s I have been working as a feng shui practitioner using the bagua & the local space map. The results have been quite amazing.

I hope to be posting more articles in the months to come. Stay tuned.