Feng Shui: Healing Through Your Environment

Are You Happy in Your Environment?

The practice of Feng Shui is often referred to as a system for living in “harmony with nature.” For me, this explanation conjures up images of fields and forests, when in fact most of us are living and working indoors. Does this mean you must spend more time outdoors to achieve the kind of balance Feng Shui adherents are referring to? Does this mean that apartment dwellers and workaholics cannot enjoy good Feng Shui? Absolutely not!

While it is enviable that some people can spend a lot of time outdoors and luxurious homes are often built in the scenic mountains or at the beach, there is also an unseen, powerful aspect of nature going on right inside your home, right inside every single structure built on this planet. The Chinese call it “chi” and East Indians call it “Prana.”

Our Body Energies Interact with the Physical Environment

These energies exist within our own bodies and they also exist in our surroundings. There is a constant ebb and flow and co-mingling of energies inside our bodies and our immediate physical environment. And that is one reason is why having a wood framed bed could have a different effect on you than a wrought iron bed frame. There is a transferring of energies from one object to another.

This is also why a blue room will have a different effect on your body than a yellow room. Everything in your physical environment can affect your body, intellect and emotions.

Many people are introduced to Feng Shui through the media. The concept of “chi flow” is under discussion most often. This often boils down to furniture arrangement and architectural features in how they affect invisible air currents within our home or workplace. Several factors determine whether these energy flows are healthful or hurtful.

Examples of Healthier Room Changes

For example, we like to arrange a desk so that you can see and sense incoming people into a room. Having your back to a door can be unsettling and the chi flow will be hitting your back. If there is substantial clutter in a room, it will inhibit a healthy circulation of the air currents in the room, eventually resulting in ill health for the occupant.

Less known in traditional Feng Shui is how we can alter the magnetic field of a room using raw elements. These elements are water, wood, fire, earth and metal.

An example of water is a fountain. Wood can be a live plant. Fire is real fire burning or a large display of red color. Earth is something really made or stone or soil. Metal can be copper, brass, bronze, gold or silver. Our own bodies possess ratios of these five elements as well, with our bones being an example of the earth element.

Elemental Theories in Feng Shui

A common misunderstanding about Five-Element-Theory, even amongst Feng Shui enthusiasts, is that you can create balance by representing all these elements together in a room. This is the furthest thing from the truth. As elements, they have both a productive and a destructive relationship with each other. For example, water nurtures wood the way a plant is watered and it grows. This is an example of a productive relationship.

However, water can destroy fire, so they are rarely put together in the same room. And putting all the elements together will cancel out all their affects. So, to learn how to use the elements powerfully and correctly, one must train in the traditional Feng Shui schools in the same way that one studies Chinese medicine over a period of time and with qualified instructors.

Feng Shui Philosophy and Principles

In Feng Shui philosophy, we want to live in harmony with our own environment and the good news is that we can control a lot of those energies. Given that there is so much in this world which we cannot control, Feng Shui principles can provide both protection from harmful circumstances as well as ways to enhance areas that are already good, making them even better.

Every house is a combination of positive and negative influences, permanent as well as transitory. Therefore, we may call Feng Shui a predictive art, like astrology. The reason for this is because we base some permanent energies on when a structure is built. Other energies come and go with yearly cycles.