|
Where Shall I live? The Feng Shui of Place
by Lynne T. Ashdown
Where shall I live? As life circumstances change, an
increasing number of Americans, especially in California, periodically ask
themselves this question. On average, Americans pick up and move to a new
location every five years, including me. Every time a friend says, “Oh admit
it, you LIKE to move,” I picture whapping them on the head with a frying
pan. While citing my own dilemmas as an example, my intent here is to
explore different strategies you can use to determine the best place for you
to live.
Three years ago I sold my house near San Francisco and
moved an hour north to a small town in the wine country, although I’d been
looking for a house closer to my former home. On an outing with a friend, I
saw a house being built, and the price was more than right. I fell in love
with it, thought the town probably would be fine - everybody ELSE liked it -
bought the house and moved in. For the first year I busied myself with
putting in a garden, but soon I began to notice that fewer and fewer of my
needs and desires could be met in the town and the region.
My solitary work of writing required the sight of humans
in the afternoon and I was in the habit of hanging out late in the day at a
local coffee house. For three months I searched for this place; it MUST be
here, I thought. It wasn’t.
An avid cyclist, I turned to my bike. This is the wine
country; there must be great places to ride. Wrong again - in the narrow
valley, the only through road was too dangerous for a road bike.
I’ll hike! But the beauty of the countryside was
contained inside fences, unlike the public open spaces I’d known before.
Well, I’ll find a like-minded group of people - wrong
again; no one was interested in cycling or metaphysics, especially Feng
Shui. Everyone was focused on their houses and their travels, and for the
most part, unlike me, their deal was set in life, and they were sitting back
and enjoying it. Business was flat and traditional, not a place for my
consultancy to flourish.
I grew unhappier by the month. Just before three years, I
sold my beautiful house and moved back to Marin County. One of the lessons
here is not to fall in love with a house before choosing the region and the
town.
What does this have to do with Feng Shui? This conclusion
is just common sense, but other issues are more subtle, such as an
understanding of chi. Chi is the life-force, subtle energy that links you to
places, events, memories, and possible paths to the future. It is in all
living things, land, and in the air, where it flows like invisible water.
The goal of Feng Shui is to link you, your land and your
building with the most auspicious cosmic influences in an unimpeded flow of
chi to create perfect balance and harmony, opening the way - opportunity -
to give you the support, strength, vitality and clarity you need to live in
peace and achieve your goals. The Feng Shui practitioner can help you pick
out land with supportive land forms and good flows of benevolent chi, and
can optimize your connection to land and building, but when it comes to
choosing your region and community, you alone must do this work.
Look to your deeper issues. Where do you feel most at
harmony with the land and the universe? Are you a person who must be near
the water? Do you feel fully alive only in the mountains? Do you thrive in
the desert, or does the very thought of it make your throat dry? Do you feel
comfortable and secure in a deep valley, or does being walled in make you
claustrophobic? Studies show that people who choose valleys tend to seek a
risk-free, predictable life, while people who crave mountains and views put
a higher value on personal freedom. A tenet of Feng Shui is that if you seek
unlimited opportunities, live with an expansive view - what you see you have
an opportunity to get. Each environment has a different quality of chi that
will influence your path.
Begin to consider, if you haven’t before, how you feel in
different geographic environments. Do you need the stimulation and fast pace
of a city? Creative people and thinkers are attracted to urban environments.
If you feel a need for community, does a lively small town where people know
your face appeal to you? Or do you feel the most at peace in a truly rural,
quiet environment? If you are a maverick or a risk-taker, think twice before
moving into a planned community with restrictive rules; attitudes tend to
become conforming, just like the houses.
Perhaps your prime concern is a safe place and a big
house for your growing family, and you are willing to commute a long
distance. Of course your choices will be governed by cost and where you
work. Even with these constraints, you have many options. Nature seeks
balance, and at an instinctual level, so do you. If you work in the city,
perhaps you need the balance of a quiet home to restore yourself. Or if you
work at home alone, you may need the stimulation of a town or city to
balance and satisfy your soul as a social being. If you look at tall
buildings all day, you may feel best living in a house on a flat lot.
Consciously or not, we all seek balance.
There are other, more esoteric aspects to geographic
choice. When traveling, have you ever found yourself in a town, region, or
country that you couldn’t wait to get out of? Where you felt anxious or a
sense of impending doom? Or, have you ever arrived at a place and had the
distinct feeling that you’d been there before, that you felt extremely at
home there, even though you’d never been there before? Some believe you may
have lived a past life in this place, and that your feelings about some
happy or traumatic event that took place during that lifetime are seeping
through the veil.
Carl Jung talks about the ‘collective unconscious’. Your
feelings in a place may be tapping into a past or present condition. Do you
recall ever feeling a state of well-being and high energy walking through a
district with busy, successful businesses? You were tapping into the
collective unconscious of the neighborhood, the chi of success. It’s in the
air - literally - in the subtle energy that is chi. Regardless of your
feelings about re-incarnation or the concept of the collective unconscious,
perhaps you’ve been aware of these influences or have felt this deja vu.
Feng Shui practitioners know that energies from past
events stick, and that they affect you in your building whether you are
aware of them or not. This ‘predecessor energy’ is why it is important to
know the past history of your building, your land and your community, so you
can avoid places where there has been failure, violence, or other
unhappiness. Some Feng Shui practitioners can clear negative energies. There
is so much more than we know. But consider trusting your feelings of
repulsion or attraction to place.
A discipline related to astrology is called astro-cartography,
which relates your birth chart to the best places for you to live. The
science/art of astrology is based on observations of cycles of movement of
heavenly bodies over millennia. A horoscope is a map of the sky at the
moment and place of birth. Being born under the influence of certain planets
has been observed to affect one’s destiny in a positive or negative way.
Astro-cartography, using your birth date to determine the most positive
planets under which you could have been born, maps the places in the world
where the influences of those auspicious planets are at this time, to show
you where the best heavenly influences are for you now. Can moving really
change your destiny? Astro-cartographers who have collected data think so.
The point is to try to match yourself to your intended
new region and community. It helps if you write about this. First, make a
list of your personal values. Then make a list of qualities you desire in a
region, and one for your chosen town (Coffee house? Casual restaurants? Good
gym?) Then list the qualities your chosen region and town actually has, and
check the match. Or lack of a match. You might surprise yourself. You may
prevent yourself from making a mistake, or see how good your choice really
is.
It is important to choose wisely because a precept of
Feng Shui is that you are affected by your environment the minute you set
foot in the door, and you are increasingly affected until at three years you
have been indelibly affected by your environment. Your home or office is
akin to an outer layer of skin, and your region can be thought of as your
outermost layer of skin. Just as you will become depressed if you live in a
dark, unkempt place, so too will you be unhappy if you live in the desert
when you crave being near water.
You may not be conscious right away how the things with
which you surround yourself, your home, and your geographic environment
affect you, since these effects can be subtle and gradual, but they are
inevitable nevertheless. So also will you experience a clear path to your
goals if you live in a place where everywhere you look you see order and
control of your life, beauty, color, light, only things that bring good
memories, things that empower you, a home where you feel at peace, and a
view that inspires you, be it flower pots on your porch or a sweeping
mountain range.
Just as your clothes reflect who you are, so does the
place you reside, and your larger environment. In order for you to be happy
and at peace, you should strive for your home, your town, and your region to
be a match not only to who you are but to your future goals as well. Your
immediate and larger environment will shape you, so be sure the shape into
which you will be transforming is one of your conscious choosing.
References:
Feng Shui, The Ancient Wisdom of Harmonious Living for
Modern Times
by Eva Wong, Shambala
The Power of Place, by Winifred Gallagher, HarperCollins
Elliot Tanzer, astro-cartographer:
www.elliottanzer.com
|
