An intro to Feng shui

China, a country with 5,000 years of history, is rich in culture and art. One of the ancient Chinese arts that has become increasingly popular in the West is Feng shui.

About 30 years ago, few people in the West knew anything about Feng shui, but today, many people at least have heard about it and some might even know more about it than the average native Chinese do.

Many Feng shui books and articles have been published in English, often focusing on interior design and decoration, landscape design, architecture, and clearing clutter.

Feng shui has been used by the Chinese to build homes and offices, design cities and villages for thousands of years. Individuals as well as businesses consult Feng shui experts to improve their lives and businesses.

So what is Feng shui? How can Feng shui be helpful in our modern lives?

Feng shui is an ancient Chinese art for achieving health, wealth, happiness, harmony and good fortune according to the arrangement of building design and the placement of objects.

In Chinese, Feng Shui literally means “wind and water,” referring to the two universal elements necessary for life. These universal elements are connected to Chi (or Qi), which is life energy or life force. Wind and water carry this life energy throughout the world. This invisible life energy flows through the universe and is present in everything in life.

The flow of Chi, or energy, is the key component of Feng shui. We want the Chi to be flowing evenly and gently, to go at a certain pace, not too fast or too slow. Chi travels best when it imitates nature by flowing in gentle curves, rather than along straight lines, where it can move too quickly, or against sharp edges and dead corners, where it can be blocked.

The ancient Chinese believed that the lay-out of our homes, the positioning of our furniture and other features, can affect how that life energy flows. Good Feng shui can enrich your environment and create balance and harmony in your life, while bad Feng shui can hinder the free, smooth flowing of energy and create disharmony in our life.

Creating balance and harmony is the essence of Feng shui. It’s about connecting with nature and living in harmony with our environment. If your environment is in balance, you feel better. Without balance, you don’t have harmony which can cause problems in all areas of your life.

The eight directions of the compass (north, east, south, west, northeast, northwest, southeast, and southwest) and the center, known together as the Nine Palaces, are basic components of Feng-shui.

Each direction is associated with a different kind of chi energy.

Bagua, the eight trigrams, is an energy map used in Feng shui. It is traditionally shown as an octagon with eight sections encircling the center. Bagua divides any space (your entire home or simply a room within it) into nine areas. Each area corresponds to a different aspect of your life. These nine areas represent health, wealth, fame and reputation, relationships, children and creativity, helpful people, career, knowledge, and family.

Our health, our wealth, our relationships with others, our career, all areas of our life, are affected by Feng shui. The Bagua map can be superimposed over any space to help identify where problems exit.

Feng shui teaches that by adjusting and shifting the energies within a space, by making changes to your home and using cures to correct problems, different aspects of your life can be strengthened.

Also, you can achieve balance, harmony and abundance in your life.

The Chinese believe that everything in the universe is made up of five elements: earth, water, wood, fire and metal. These elements exist in a constant movement of change.

Each element has its yin (receptive, passive) side and its yang (creative, active) side. Day and night, dark and light, hot and cold, soft and hard, feminine and masculine, they are opposites and complementary to each other. One cannot exist without the other.

Feng shui uses the five elements as one of the effective ways to create positive energy or remedy bad energy. If all of the elements exist in a space and none of them dominates, you get a feeling of comfort and harmony. Feng shui teaches us how to balance the yin and yang elements to achieve harmony.

Color is another important aspect of balance in Feng shui. Color has an effect on the look and feel of a room, but colors also have associations linked to them. For example, to the Chinese red is a lucky color, associated with life, happiness, and warmth. Green and blue are associated with new beginnings, growth and family life.

Numbers also have meaning and some are more favorable than others. Nine is considered the luckiest, partially due to apparent mystical qualities: when nine is multiplied by a single-digit number, the sum of the two digits of the product is nine.

The number four is considered bad-luck because its Chinese pronunciation, "si," sounds similar to the word for death.

In the next three columns, I will talk about how to use Feng shui to declutter our lives, what some good Feng shui practices are and what a Feng shui consultant can do for you.

I would like to end this column with an old Chinese proverb: “If there is harmony in the house, there is order in the nation. If there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world.”


[This is part 1 of the series on Feng shui. Originally published in Woodbury Bulletin on 10/24/2007]