Water, The North, and Feng Shui

Metaphorically, water brings life to stillness and if you want an in-home business to thrive, you could inject ‘life’, perhaps in the form of a fountain.

The Water Element and Feng Shui

by Victoria Pendragon

Feng Shui is not about getting the girl or guy, landing the perfect job or making a million, it’s about creating a sanctuary in which you can unfold into the fullness of your being with effortlessness and grace, a place where you can feel safe and centered, secure in the knowledge that everything is exactly as it should be. It’s true that any or all those things I mentioned may happen but if they do, you can know that what played the biggest role in your dreams coming true was that you were ready because your space is no more than a reflection of your own vibration.

The essence both of good feng shui and of the sort of grounded and centered individual that seems to attract the best of everything is balance. Each of the eight directions of the compass resonates with an element; each of those elements can be utilized to enhance, expand or diminish the effects of any of the directions on the overall energy of a space.

Why might you want to manipulate energy in that way? I’ll give you an example: let’s suppose that you have an apartment space and that, according to the way things are laid out, the only space that you can use for your in-home office is a room on the north side of the building. The direction of the north is known for its stillness; the element associated with the north is water, which is not known for its stillness except when in its frozen state. Metaphorically, the flow of water brings life to the stillness of the north and if you want an in-home business to thrive in such a placid place, you could probably use an injection of ‘life’ in that area, perhaps in the form of a fountain.

Other items that carry the energy of water, although somewhat more indirectly, would be, in order of potency: clear glass, blue, teal, or aquamarine glass, paintings of the sea, paintings of rivers, prints derived from paintings of the sea or rivers, photographs or drawings of the sea or rivers, seashells or river rocks. Glass, with its transparency and the flow that it can acquire through its creation, is like water that has been ‘captured,’ hence it’s standing at the top of the list. Paintings of the sea quite naturally outrank painting of rivers as the sea is a much larger body of water and paintings outrank drawings or prints because they are fluid in their very nature. Shells and rocks, while from the water, are not water, hence their place at the end of the list.

Such objects placed in the northern aspect of a room carry more weight than when placed elsewhere in the space, though they would be very much at home and enhance water energy in the western or northwestern areas as well.

The colors associated with water are the many shades blue and the blue-greens that lean more towards the blue spectrum, so one could also consider the possibility of painting the office with one of the more stimulating shades of blue. Muted or pale shades would harmonize with the stillness but wouldn’t perk up the energy in the way you might want for a lively commercial endeavor, while such soft colors might be a real boon if the same space were a bedroom for a highly energetic, or perhaps over-energetic, person.

In this particular case, the in-home office, one would go with either a fountain or blue walls – but not both. Using both would provide too much water, throwing the energy of the space out of balance. Bright blue walls cover a large area, providing quite a lot of water energy while a fountain actually is water and therefore enough all by itself.

But suppose that the room is wood-paneled. Wood needs water to grow, hence the presence of wood walls could, like the presence of actual water in the form of a fountain, stimulate the energy in the room because its presence, in a metaphorical sense, forces the water energy to ‘work’. But there is a danger that, if there is quite a lot of wood-covered wall space, that the wood could prove too much for the watery energy of the north to support and actually exhaust it.

A person skilled in feng shui could easily assess the exact balance of the elements but almost anyone is likely to sense that something is off, even if he or she can’t pin down exactly what it is that they are feeling. That’s one of the reasons why elemental balance is so important…because even when we don’t know it’s off, our bodies do, they can feel it.

Balance can even be seen in the ‘map’ of feng shui, the bagua, which is a perfect model of balance. North and south, directly opposite each other, are governed by the opposites of water and fire, which, when present in the correct proportions, balance each other both metaphorically and elementally. It might surprise you to know that in feng shui terms, water is considered to be the most dangerous of the elements.

Most people would be tempted if they had to pick, to choose fire as the perilous element since fire is fire because it burns…but that’s precisely why it doesn’t merit the most-dangerous prize because we know to avoid it. Water has killed more unsuspecting people than fire ever has; people run from fire but many an unwary soul has wandered into seemingly safe waters only to find themselves sucked beneath the surface by an undertow they never suspected.

And that is why water is the element associated with the area of the Life Path. Life is, as gambling folks like to say, a crap shoot…you just never know…which is why, in the parts of your life that you can have at least some control over, you want to create places of balance where you can weather the whirlpools life provides.

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About the Author

Victoria Pendragon’s study of metaphysics began in childhood as an attempt to validate the lessons she’d been learning from the earth and the trees whenever she left her body. She has been a professional in the field of spirituality since 1995, has read tarot since 1964, and created Sacred Earth Seven Element Tarot. https://victoriapendragon.me/