Making Moves: Experiencing Feng Shui
What is feng shui? Most of us have heard stories about how city planners, businessmen and celebrities throughout the world often consult feng shui masters, but many of us are at a loss for how this ancient Chinese practice works and how it can be applied in our own lives. We contacted a local feng shui expert to tell us more about the practice and to help one of our editors rearrange his home according to its teachings.
For many Westerners and even many contemporary, cosmopolitan Chinese, the thinking behind many practices inherited from ancient China is incredibly foreign. With no proper context in which to view them, many appear as mere superstition, completely bereft of logic. Legendary psychologist C.G. Jung notes in his introduction to the Yi Jing, an ancient text of Chinese divination: “While the Western mind carefully sifts, weighs, selects, classifies, isolates, the [ancient] Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail, because [to them] all of the ingredients make up the observed moment.”
True to this method, feng shui advises us on how to build and arrange the interiors of our homes based on seemingly unrelated information such as where we were born and when we were born, information referred to as shengchenbazi. In fact these relationships are so essential that Anny Li, a local feng shui educator and advisor says that where someone is born determines what services she can provide. “There are two types of feng shui: one type is where I come and help alter your home or environment – anyone can do this; the other type utilises shengchenbazi, taking your birthday and working from that – not everyone can do this.” The logic is that the system of feng shui has insights that relate to the temperature and the humidity of the season when a person was born and the fluctuations that follow. Someone born in an area without regular seasons (i.e. the tropics) doesn’t fit readily into the model.
Like all practices rooted in ancient China, feng shui is also rooted in an understanding of qi or life energy. Much in the same way that traditional Chinese medicine looks to promote health by removing impediments to the flow of qi, so feng shui tries to make our workplaces and homes better suited for living by improving this qi’s flow. However, unlike the qi in traditional Chinese medicine concerned with balance within the body, feng shui is also concerned with the regulation of qi through phenomena such as the presence of magnetic fields, detected with a traditional compass called a luopan. Not only does the luopan detect changes in magnetism from computers, TVs, etc. that might be harmful, it is also believed to be useful in detecting ghosts.
“If there are ghosts in someone’s apartment,” says Li, “the luopan will spin around when doing a reading.”
Equally important in feng shui is the concept of wuxing. Often translated as the ‘five elements’, the wuxing include fire, wood, metal, earth and water. In feng shui, each element corresponds not only to a specific colour, but also shapes and materials. For instance, the colour red, materials such as glass and synthetic fabrics and triangular shapes all belong to fire.
Generally, good feng shui practice attempts to have all five elements in a space. “The safest way to go about dealing the five elements is to make sure that you have all of them, that it’s balanced,” says Li.
The final core concepts which round out the practice of feng shui are the yin and yang and its extension, bagua, a set of eight symbols representing states derived from yin-yang relationships. The concept of yin-yang is fairly well understood in the West as a dynamic tension that exists in nature: light and darkness, emptiness and fullness, male and female, etc. However, bagua remains less understood.
The eight distinct symbols of the bagua are defined by all the possible combinations of three yin-yang relationships. Much like the five elements, each symbol is aligned with certain physical qualities. For instance, one symbol called kun represents earth, the Southwest, summer and a receptive personality. Feng shui masters will often relate bagua symbols to the way a home faces and draw implications about the arrangement of furniture and the lives of inhabitants based on them.
The use of all of these concepts and further systems derived from them forms a feng shui master’s style. And while there is an internal logic at work to these underlying principles, the meaning and significance of feng shui practice is only fully grasped when it is applied in a personal context. Discussing the meaning of symbols and signs is one thing, but inviting someone into your home or place of work to apply them is something different entirely.
