In actuality, Feng Shui is one of the earliest disciplines which attempted to codify the influences of weather, Earth, cosmology and energy (known as qi) and apply them to spatial arrangement and orientation in order to result in a harmonious balance between humans, their residences, and nature.

Feng Shui principles are said to benefit your career, wealth, health and relationships, and it’s also supposed to make you lucky. Skeptical? Well, consider it this way: if you balance your life (yin and yang) and improve the flow of energy (qi) around you, can you visualize the effect on your life? Your happiness, satisfaction, spiritual and physical health would all improve. Positiveness breeds positivity, after all. By balancing our relationship with our environment, there’s no way our outlook couldn’t improve. As humans, we are defined by our moods as much as anything. And, as for the general luck, which is what is said to be most impacted by good qi (the energy Feng Shui attempts to balance), with a positive outlook and a high level of energy, things that happen that might be considered bad luck by some people don’t quite affect us as strongly as it would if our energy levels were down. It’s the same thing as saying that we can handle the day better on a breakfast of fruit and grains than we can on sugar and fat. To me, an improved mentality is how good luck is defined. The same things happen to the same people, but positive people respond positively to those things, while negative people respond negatively. By thinking of Feng Shui in that way, even skeptical Westerners can better understand and accept the tenets which the discipline hold most true. And if you still think it’s magical, well that’s all right too.

Optimizing the Flow of Qi
One problem with trying to adopt Feng Shui principles into your life now is that most people who might be interested in it are people who already have homes and jobs and lives. Why is that a problem? Because one of the primary things Feng Shui is useful for is to reveal to us a place to live. To build our home. A place which would be in harmony with its environment, ensuring good qi. If you already have a home, then you’re already trying to backdoor qi, and qi doesn’t like to be railroaded. But all hope is not lost. By remaining positive you can still direct positive energy. Don’t railroad qi, soothe it into the empty spaces. Analyze where you live now, try to determine if you might have just a little good qi, and hope that you can design your domicile to direct the flow in such a way as to maximize what little there is. And over the long haul, find a good vein of energy flow and, through landscaping, soothe it delicately toward your home. Attract it.

This can be done with landscaping: trees and shrubs and gardens and ponds. Reflecting pools are wonderful for qi, and a row of trees can funnel energy like nobody’s business. Once you have qi redirected into your home, now it’s time to modify the inside of your home to make it more attractive to qi, allowing it to flow in and through and then out again. The exit can be as important as the entry, keep that in mind. You don’t want the energy to back up and grow stale, it has to get out, run free and flow.

That’s it in a nutshell. Once you’ve got good qi flow, you’re in business. Literally. Your should become more energetic and lively, happier, and yes, even luckier. When things are going well they seem to just get better and better. That’s how important energy flow is to a home.

Feng Shui Luopan
A luopan is a kind of compass developed in ancient China. Geomancers analyzed Earth formations and watercourses and astronomers charted the skies, gaining insight into the flow of energy throughout the world. With the knowledge they gained, they developed the luo pan. The luopan illustrates not only direction (by pointing to the magnetic south pole), but also the energy of each direction, depending on the landform or heavenly body to be found there. By interpreting the information on the luopan we can determine energy paths (possibly a relation of Ley Lines) so that we know the best place to establish residency, as well as how it would best be oriented.

A modern compass has four or eight directional markings, while a luopan has 24 directional marks. This translates to 15 degrees per direction. The Sun traverses one point of degree across the ecliptic in 15.2 days. If you mark a series of 24 points on the ecliptic it creates a cycle of 365.25 days, which means that each degree on a luopan approximates one terrestrial day.

The Significance of Meditation
One last thing to consider is the potential impact of meditation on the flow of qi. Sometimes when I meditate I like to envision qi flowing around and through me like a bright wind filled with light. It helps me find my focal point. And you know what? I don’t really believe it’s all imaginary, I believe that is how qi flows, how it interacts with us. So never underestimate the power of meditation.

Consider the human body. As a subject of study, the human body has withstood more scrutiny and scientific analysis than anything else in the world, and yet there are still things we cannot explain about it. Like why, when we experience an extreme of emotion, do our eyes well with tears? We understand all the mechanics of tear ducts and eyes, we know the physiology of the individual pieces by rote, but we as yet have no explanation for the why of the matter. Or hiccups. We understand that the diaphragm contracts to cause a hiccup, but as yet we have no explanation for why the diaphragm does this. There are many conditions that are associated with hiccups, but none have been shown to be the cause of hiccups. There have been accounts of people hiccupping for years of their lives with no break. There is no cure, obviously, because we don’t have any idea how it happened in the first place. Odd that one of the most simple-sounding things can be so difficult to explain.

There are many other examples. The placebo effect, for one. Why would a person experience a decrease in symptoms when treated with a simple salt tablet or saline solution? I know personally of a quadriplegic who became addicted to Valium and, in a weaning process, had his daily doses reduced to the point that eventually he was receiving nothing more than a saline solution. But his symptoms never changed, his relief didn’t seem to change, although there came a point where he discovered the trickery and immediately began experiencing withdrawals.

And there are many others which, though they’ve never been proven to exist, cannot be entirely disproved either: ESP and intuition, deja vu, near-death experiences, auras and spontaneous combustion come to mind.

So long as there are unexplainable phenomena in the Universe, fortunately, there will always be a mysterious side of life. Without it, life could get pretty boring. Some of us thrive on the mysteries.

Image credit: jpqarnham