What is Feng Shui?
by Thomas Dill
(Costa Rica)
Feng Shui (pronounced FUNG SHWAY) is the ancient Chinese Art of Placement and explain how the placement of furniture in our homes impacts our daily lives. With just a basic understanding, you can immediately become a practitioner and experience better balance and harmony in your own home and work place resulting in better health, prosperity, and happiness.
FENG SHUI HISTORY
Feng Shui is a Chinese term meaning: “Wind and Water” predates Confucianism and Taoism, and been practiced for over three thousand years in China. Early practitioners of Feng Shui located building sites for homes and villages. The perfect site was one where the vital energy called Ch’i flowed in a manner that was harmonious and supportive of human life. Practitioners relied on their highly tuned senses, their intuition and the knowledge passed down from their teachers to evaluate the land. They were interpreters of sorts, translating the dialect of the mountains, valleys, and meadows into a language that local villagers could understand and benefit from. In this way, they were responsible for strategically placing habitats above food plains, below strong winds, and in the safe embrace of land that was blessed with harmonious Ch’i.
Once a suitable plot of land was located, the Feng Shui practitioner guided the building process so that the natural qualities of the Ch’i were not damaged in any way. They listened to every sound, tasted the soil, scouted the surrounding area to position each new structure so that they were “joined” with the land as one and in harmony with its Ch’i qualities. They chose the building materials and monitored every step of construction to assure the Ch’i continued to flow in a natural and nourishing manner. The building was like a jewel being placed in its perfect setting.
FENG SHUI TODAY
To practice decorating and Feng Shui today, we need to blend traditional wisdom with our own keen intuitive skills. Our Western habitats present us with a very different scenario because many structures are located on land that would have never been chosen by the ancient practitioners.
Today we usually start with a structure that already exists and in most cases we are unable to control the location, the direction, or the configuration of other buildings and streets in the area. This presents the Western Feng Shui practitioner with a new set of challenges. However, when we apply Feng Shui principles, we find that we have quite a deck of powerful ways to enhance the Ch’i and establish harmony inside our own environments and especially our homes. Regardless of our location, our intended results are the same in our individual homes…to find that pathway to Ch’i to create natural harmony and prosperity within our own homes.
We can all become practitioners of Feng Shui and maximize the benefits of harnessing the natural flow of this Ch’i energy. And it all starts by better understanding basic Feng Shui principles and then incorporating them into our own home interior design plans.
The Art and Science of Feng Shui, gives you a big bag of tools to help you produce positive results in your home environments. The following articles will explain specifically, how we can practice working with these principles to improve our surroundings and experience balance and harmony in nature and experience prosperity. Balancing and enhancing the environment where you find yourself today is one of the best ways to energize and manifest your goals, hopes, and dreams for the future. Success to all and we all can experience prosperity together by tapping into and harnessing this natural Ch’i energy and learning to apply Feng Shui principles into our daily lives.