Generally, feng shui is thought of as a way to optimise the home environment but there is much more to it than this. About half of my work is surveying people's homes and offices to help bring their lives into line with their dreams. The other half includes drafting and interpreting ba zis (or personal feng shui) as well as calculating auspicious dates, compatibility and so on.
For me feng shui is simply what it takes to make people happier than they were before I arrived. To this end and in line with ancient Chinese principles, I change decor and move furniture and I set up water features and all sorts of symbolic arrangements. I re-angle doors and I fiddle with mirrors. I place stones and insist on the demolition of walls. And I listen very closely to people. Because the main reason I move things is that they have meaning. Everything we see, hear, touch and so on has meaning. I try to arrange things in such a way that an unhelpful meaning is replaced with a helpful one. If I can balance their environment people are likely to be healthy, wealthy and wise. And if not, not.
Everything, it seems to me, is a choice. Some people are ill and some are unhappy. Using Chinese metaphors I present them with options, mostly better than what they've chosen to date. That is what I do and what The Feng Shui Diaries are about. Here's an example:
Today I'm placing a water feature for Singha who works in the Social Services in East London. Her office is drenched in stress even at 8am in the morning. If you walk into the waiting area during the day when it is full you could, if you are sensitive to these things, be poleaxed. So much misery, so much desperation. Singha advises on what to do in cases of chronic debt; a lot of her work is in the even more miserable environment of a civil court.
That's what I call working for a living.
She insists she can get away with a small water feature by her desk in the open plan office. That sounds a little daring. On one occasion she interpreted my instructions over-literally and ended up sandwiched between neighbours who were unhappy with the dramatic and not entirely appropriate changes she had made to her suburban garden. On the other hand it was then that her whole life turned around. I make clear that she can use a mirror in her office instead of water as long as her placement is exactly correct. I use an extension of a formula I have been using for several years. There are two compass directions that get rapid results in such cases. I have recently discovered a way to make it work even faster.
The principle is that certain points on the compass are what are called low guas – that is all other things considered, good locations for water and others are high, that is good locations for weight and bulk.
As well as the low gua that houses the water and the high one where I place something heavy, I am now putting something in a third position called an active gua which knits the other two together. There are numerological formulae for working this out but I have two or three pre-prepared for most situations.
Marking the locations takes moments. I am charging her my hourly rate for this and I still owe her forty minutes but I can't stand to be here any longer. I am skilled at separating ‘my' feelings from those that belong to other people and places and I could make a permanent difference here but it would be several days' work and I have no brief to do it.
‘Do you want to buy me a cup of tea, then?' I suggest.
Her voice often has sadness in it; her husband is not well and she worries about him at home without her. But that tone, I sometimes remind her, is predictive rather than explanatory.
‘Okay,' she says, brightening.
We talk about the similarity between the ambient feelings in her office and her home and I ask her:
‘Is this a coincidence?'
‘I suppose not.'
She is a brave woman with considerable spiritual awareness.
‘We could not feel other people's feelings if they were not to some extent ours,' I add.
‘I understand that.'
‘But what happens is that when we feel something, we instantly start making up reasons for it. A feeling arrives. We explain it. We relate it to ourselves. Rapidly we have a story. We have culprits. We have explanation. Human beings very often prefer to be miserable for reasons they can explain to being happy for no reason at all.'
‘I know that,' she says. ‘What do I do about it?'
‘I'm going to give you two pieces of homework,' I say. ‘One: when you are at work and someone brings you the worst story you've heard all year, notice the feelings that accompany it. Notice that you didn't feel them before. Notice that your tendency is to think of Rajul back at home and link the feelings with that idea. Take a deep breath and deliberately feel the distress - then, in that moment. Notice how this lightens the load of the people you are dealing with. Notice how it makes you better able to help them. Notice that choosing to feel this stuff makes it less not more painful.'
‘Okay. And the second piece of homework?' She pronounces the last word with just a shade of irony.
‘On your way home... Do you travel by car or tube or what?'
‘Car.'
‘Pity. Public transport is better. Anyway, on the way home remember each of the most stressful moments of the day. And relive them. Feel the feelings. Breathe deeply into them. Keep breathing deeply – don't hyperventilate, I want you home safely – until the distress has faded. Then relive the next one.'
‘That's it?'
‘Pretty much. All distress is an attachment to a reality other than what is real. In other words while we're trying not to feel what we are feeling we can't get on with our lives. The Tao is flowing one way and our preferences another.'
I pointed racily at the Tao with my left hand and her preferences with my right – like an air stewardess giving out the safety procedure.
‘Just get up to date and move on. If you do that at least three times every day, you might even arrive home optimistic.'
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. Really this stuff is that simple. Then she opened them again.
‘That's wonderful.'
‘All in a day's work, ma'am.'
‘More tea? Breakfast?'
‘My work here is done,' I said, like Christopher Reeve restoring a bus to the horizontal. I had a committee meeting next. Now that might be hard going.
From The Feng Shui Diaries © 2007 by Richard Ashworth, published by O Books.
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