How aware are you of what you are feeling in your body when you walk into a house/office/building/room?
Today’s movement to declutter our homes/live has it’s roots in feng shui which is not the same thing as interior decoration or artistic design with an Asian flavor. Feng Shui is much, much more than a pleasing appearance. When properly understood feng shui is a methodology for creating harmony, balance, prosperity, health, & an elevated consciousness of environment and self.
Every culture on the planet has their own spiritual tradition of connecting buildings & man-made structures with nature and the cosmos. The idea that we are affected by our surrounding is universal. As above, so below and so it goes.
(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 from language to language, a lot of translation gets lost; just one of life’s paradoxes)
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 ‘shopping’ addictions. Awareness is a key element in knowing what is really needed. Some people regard feng shui as folk art, old wive’s tales, or magical actions time-fully performed in affect our lives, and there’s certainly an organic truth to everything you’ve heard.
Feng Shui provides the map for us to see ourselves in relationship to others and the greater whole of our communities. It’s intention is to bring peace, love, & happiness to all who enter upon the space. And, 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 the same time I was working as a real estate agent which enabled me to see thousands of homes & businesses…although with a different focus. My right brain began to relate to my left brain in new ways and I began to understand how different surroundings impact our lives in significant ways, and that we could change our lives with some simple ‘cures’. Feng Shui became a tool for self-discovery as well as practice that kept me grounded and stable through difficult times. Another awakening occurred when I discovered the role that astrology plays in determining auspicious design & placement.
The compass school of feng shui 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.
The Yoga of Space….June 3, 4pm on Zoom. Go here:
As Above, So Below
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