Creatrope

Feng Shui asks one to ‘buy into’ a lot of concepts that are hard for a pragmatic technical person to accept. You need to accept a lot of it on faith or through hearsay that it’s worked well for centuries/millenia. It’s not fundamentally different than being religious, so if you’re doing well with the religious meme, you might find it easy to take on the Feng Shui meme.

But not everyone will.

As I read a few books on Feng Shui and learned more about it from friends, I learned that a substantial amount of it, surprisingly, does not rely on faith. Indeed there are parts that are ’slap your head’ obvious – but only after the fact.

In this article, I’m going to summarize the parts that work for a person who doesn’t buy everything, but wants the intersection of pragmatism and Feng Shui.

Feng Shui starts with the concept of Bagua or PaKua which are specific areas of your home laid out in a 3×3 grid that represents various aspects of your life: career, knowledge, skills, wealth, family, heritage, etc. The basic idea is that you want to do things to ‘improve’ the areas you want to focus on and minimize problems via feng shui principles. Decluttering, placing chimes and various other blessing exercises all help.

This is a tough one to buy, that various physical locations corresponding to a grid could have any plausible relationship to success or failures.

However, some of the instructions to mitigate problems make a lot of sense and are sound.

Lighting light home by natural sunlight if possible. Bright light invites movement and activity. Ok, you don’t need to be endowed with mystical karma to know why this is good. So open those shades, think about installing more windows (I did), and get some natural lighting (even if simulated).

Smells Lemons feel light and airy and are pleasant, old potatoes are not.

Living Things Plants, pets, fish, flowers all create energy in the home.

Fresh Artwork Does your artwork represent you or positive feelings? Perhaps you need to change it out.

Movement Fresh air creates movement and energy. Ensure that doors open fully and nothing blocks a door from opening. D’oh! But you’d be surprised – I had lots of partially blocked doors, in closets and going in and out of room, and by removing these obstacles, it really did feel better. And it required no mysticism to feel why this would be the case – but I didn’t even think about until I read the Feng Shui book(s).