Since I’ve been talking about feng shui for awhile, especially over on Instagram, I thought I’d write a longer post to explain what exactly feng shui is and why I love the practice.
In yoga we talk a lot about prana and chi, the life force that is within each of us. The practices of asana (yoga poses), pranayama (breath work) and meditation all help to foster healthy personal chi. But it doesn’t stop there… as persons we all live in homes which also have chi or qi (pronounced the same way but is the way it’s spelled in the discipline of feng shui that I study, BTB Feng Shui).
Our home is affected by our personal qi and our personal qi is affected by our home. The two cannot be separated.
Just like in a yoga practice where we notice the quality of our prana, where it may be stuck and how to help it flow more smoothly, the practice of feng shui does all that for the qi in our homes. What is the flow? Where does it need a bit of help? It is flowing too quickly, too slow or is it stuck?
To understand the qi of our homes we look at a few things.
The layout of a home and its surroundings is one of the main parts of the practice. There is a map that we lay on our properties, homes and individual rooms to understand how certain parts of the home correspond with areas of our lives (children, money, love, personal development, travel, etc.), the physical body, emotions, the seasons, natural elements, animals… the list goes one. This map is called the bagua map, made up of two terms ba meaning eight and gua meaning areas. There are 8 areas on a bagua surrounding a center area.
If you want more information about each of these guas, you can check out my #fengshuifriday posts on Instagram and Facebook. (I’ll be sharing more here too eventually).
Using the bagua we can work to adjust the flow of qi to help us find more harmony in our lives. There are many different things you can do including what we call mundane adjustments (fix things, clean, move items in your home around, add items) and transcendental cures. Transcendental cures are provided to a person when they book a feng shui consult with a practitioner (which I am :-). They are sacred and must be transmitted orally from a practitioner to a client. All adjustments, mundane and transcendental, are done with attention and intention.
As an outdoor enthusiast, one of the things I enjoy looking at is the play of elements in our homes. Water, earth, fire, wood and metal are the natural elements that we study. Seeing them at play in nature and understanding how we can increase or decrease them in our homes can help us tap into that peaceful vibe we feel whenever we are in a natural setting. And to me… that’s what it’s all about!
But I think I’ll leave it at that for now and talk more about the elements and Feng Shui in a future post.
Until next time…
Susan