What Feng Shui is

Feng Shui (pronounced Fung Shoy) is a complex form of therapy which examines the relationship between you and your living and working environments. It originated in China over 3,000 years ago; there are different schools and it is still developing. Other cultures have similar traditions which acknowledge the interplay between humans and their surroundings. It is part mystery as there are many effects which can be systematically reproduced but some which cannot be logically explained.

Feng Shui: Fierce Fact or Superstitious Sham?
By Mr. Kym Suttle, MA, FSDI.

Perhaps you have already heard of Feng Shui (pronounced Fung Shoy) and may even think you know quite a lot about it. Well read on because you may be in for a bit of a surprise. At the risk of upsetting a lot of people who have got into the habit of keeping their toilet seats down in the name of Feng Shui, its time to put the record straight as much as is possible in a relatively brief article.

I am a trained Feng Shui consultant, NOT an ‘intuitive practitioner', i.e. someone who has done a weekend course, read all the books and claims to know what I'm doing but don't actually have a clue'. Initially I trained for a year (Traditional Feng Shui practitioners train for years but learn many things which are inappropriate for the western world) with the Shen Dao Institute which was voted "Best Course" by the Evening Standard magazine.

Feng Shui has been a fad in the Western world for a few years now. A watered down version of ‘the Art of Placement' has captured the imaginations of the public especially since they discovered that major corporations such as Richard Branson's Virgin and The Prudential employ it for business success. Shen Dao's client list is fairly impressive but name-dropping is not the purpose of this article so let's get to the nitty gritty:

It is absolutley pointless, and I can't stress this enough, giving you ‘helpful hints' on how to Feng Shui your home/office/cat/whatever. Feng Shui is a vast and complicated topic and no article can do anything more than scratch the surface and 90% of the books you read should be sued for misrepresentation. So in the hopes of encouraging you to find out more about how Feng Shui can help you to help yourself here are a few facts to whet your apetite:

1. (Real) Feng Shui is not a fad - fads (by their very definition) don't last for three thousand years. What you usually see in the magazines/books is a trivialised version of a highly complex system. No-one would claim to be able to repair a motor car after reading a one page article and yet there are a surprising number of people who will try it out for themselves without knowing what they are really doing.

2. There is much more to it than the ‘Art of Placement' - certainly the placement of certain objects in specific places comes into it but it is only one of many facets which combine in the overall process. There is a lot of science and psychology involved and although some of the practices may have their roots in superstition much can be scientifically explained in western terms.

3. People who write DIY Feng Shui books have missed the whole point - you can't do it yourself, at least not through reading a book, and hopefully this article will explain why.

ORIGINS: Originally Feng Shui helped people locate a good place to live, protected from the elements with a good supply of water and fertile soil in which to grow crops. Obviously in a modern urbanised context these are not really relevant and so Feng Shui has developed to help us cope with our displacement from natural environments. Although we may not be working the land and directly dependent on our surroundings for our subsistence, our habitat is still crucial to our health, happiness and productivity. Someone raised in an environment of space and luxury is going to have a very different outlook on life to someone brought up in conditions of deprivation and squalor, though not necessarily a better one.

QI: Feng Shui literally translated means ‘Wind Water' and is a description of two types of Qi (chi), or energy, which operate on the planet. Feng Shui is the result of the interaction between fast moving Feng as it comes into contact with slow moving Shui. Feng is fast moving energy which operates above the ground and takes many easily identified forms such as the wind, high and low pressure, sound, light, heat and cold. Some of the more subtle manifestations of Qi are experienced as colour, spatial ambience, personal moods and intangible qualities which most of us have experienced, cannot fully explain but know for a fact that they occur, e.g. people and places that are energy-leeches which leave you feeling drained, or attacked or undermined.

Shui on the other hand is slow moving energy which is located subterraneously and is considered beneficial provided one isn't immersed in it. Next time you travel on the tube notice how retarding and debilitating it is - you're right in the thick of the Shui, especially on the Northern Line (for those of you who live in London). Shui could be explained as the magnetic ‘pulse' of the planet and runs at various levels. Places such as tropical rainforests with lush vegetation would be deemed to have an abundance of Shui whereas a desert is lacking in Shui. Qi is said to be beneficial when it travels in a meandering fashion much as a river follows the contours of the land. When it is forced to travel in straight lines it speeds up and becomes overpowering and dangerous. This is called Sha. A fairly simplistic example of this in a working environment would be a building with long narrow corridors which are likely to create a ‘high-speed' working environment where people are constantly rushing - see any correlation in your work place?

HARD WORK: Real Feng Shui (as opposed to DIY Feng Shui) takes into consideration each individual in relation to their surroundings and belief systems and attempts to balance the space with the occupier. As a result the Feng Shui requirements for a space may well change with a different person in it. Feng Shui is only half a tool which assists in implementing balance and, often, change in one's life. I guarantee that if someone experiences no change in their life as a result of a Feng Shui consultation they have either not done what has been recommended (or got it wrong or only half done it) or been taken for a ride by an unscrupulous con-artist. A large part of the Feng Shui I and my colleagues practice is the identification of personal patterns and personality profiling (based on Chinese medicine five element diagnostics) which is one of the main reasons why it can't be done by oneself.

Some common sense things which are part of Feng Shui, such as not sitting with your back to the door, are often passed off as the whole story and given power by appealing to our superstitious side by adding ‘it is bad luck to sit with your back to the door'. The real reason is that humans have animal survival instincts which even in urbanised settings are still fully operational. One is likely to work better facing the door with a wall protecting one's back so that anyone entering ‘your territory' can be seen coming. Obviously the further away the door is the more time you have to prepare yourself.

Sorry ladies, but those of you who have convinced the men in your life to keep the toilet seat down to improve your finances are wasting your time, but it probably makes you happy - so maybe that is lucky for the men! Let's be sensible, a toilet is not a good luck charm, and lid up or down the energy still departs every time you flush! It is very appealing to imagine that all we have to do to save our marriage is move the dustbin or change the colour of the sofa - much easier than spending months having counselling and addressing our personal flaws and foibles. You may have to do the aforementioned things but if that is what is recommended it is only part of a much bigger process. We live in a quick-fix era which wants instant and disposable solutions and hopefully at a bargain price (like £??.99 for a book on Feng Shui). Many people may well have found their lives improved for a brief period after following the advice in a book or magazine but I guarantee that it was a coincidence probably thanks in part to their belief that something good will occur.

Feng Shui is a complex system but statistically speaking someone who doesn't know what they are doing will get it right by chance a percentage of the time. If I steal a variety of unmarked tablets from a pharmacist and start taking them at random when I'm ill, chances are the pills will either cure me, have no affect and I'll get better anyhow, have no affect and I'll stay ill, or they'll kill me.

There are different Feng Shui schools, some claiming to have the definitive form. The Shen Dao Institute has combined these schools of thought and through the amalgamation arrived at a system which consistently produces results. If you call me or one of my colleagues in for a consultation you won't get a bargain basement price but you will get something tangible and genuinely life-changing for your money, but be warned - if your life is in a big mess it may have to fall apart completely so that you can start again - so don't employ Feng Shui unless you've got the time and initiative to deal with it. It is not something to be entered into lightly; it takes hard work and resembles therapy in many ways and if employed correctly will help you thrive well after the fad has died out.

The basic principle of Feng Shui is the energetic reaction between fast (Feng) energy and slow (Shui) energy represented by walls. Within the walls, eight areas are said to correlate to eight aspects of our lives (knowledge, family, prosperity, fame, partnerships, creativity, mentors, career and health). This ‘map' is called the Bagua. Depending on which compass direction the energy comes from and where the door is, formulas have been worked out to identify what pattern the energy flows in around the room. This determines whether each of those eight areas has a positive or negative energy and whether or not you want to feed or drain the area. If all there was to making your whole life ‘lovely' was activating ALL your various areas then everybody would have done it long ago and they'd all be leading splendid lives. Clearly this is not the case. So, not only are there positive and negative energies in a room, but there are also different qualities to each, i.e. there are eight different types of energy in each room. So don't blithely ‘activate' ALL the spaces of the bagua without identifying what type of energy flows through the space. One is likely to get something right but more likely to get most of it wrong. I have had clients who thought the Feng Shui wasn't working because things were not improving - in fact it WAS working - but they had stimulated negative areas!

Energy (wind' light, people, etc.) is channelled through passageways and doors, so it is completely inaccurate to place the bagua over a map of the whole house since that ignores the existence of the walls and the position of the walls is what makes the bagua work. Such advice completely ignores the scientific principles of Feng Shui.

What the simplifiers have tried to do is make something that is complicated easily accessible to the masses and appeal to our laziness by saying that we don't need to exert ourselves to change what we dislike about our lives. Its a very appealing thought. The truth of the matter is that sh*t happens. We have good days and rotten days and no amount of Feng Shui is going to alter that. However, we can't begin to change anything until we have identified what the source of the trouble is, and that is what Feng Shui can do for you. Some seemingly miraculous things have been known to occur after a consultation and some of the recommendations may seem hocus pocus but I will never tell you that you need to fill your home with Chinese paraphernalia or chant strange mantras if that is not what turns you on. I will tell you if you need to chill out and get a sense of humour if that's what you need to hear and some of the physical changes may remain unexplained to you because there are some things that I cannot explain but have seen to work time and again. As Shakespeare says in Hamlet: "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." And many of them will remain unexplained and unproven. There are some things that we simply accept without question because we ‘know' them to be true. When was the last time someone said "I had a dream last night"and you said "Prove it"?