Design for Life
(Page 2 of 3)
May/June 2004
By Carol Venolia
Feng shui faux pas
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This perspective clarifies how feng shui snafus happen. When specific prescriptions are transplanted from China without regard to their origins, confusion and ineffectiveness can result. “In feng shui, there’s a rule against having four steps up to the house,” says Anderson. “But why? Well, the Chinese character that represents ‘four’ is similar to the character for death. But a Native American might say ‘I’m grounding my life with the four directions!’”
Applying single feng shui guidelines without regard to context can also create problems. “Maybe you’ve heard that feng shui says you’ve got to put the bed in a certain position,” says Anderson. “And you do that, but then you don’t sleep well. That’s not really following feng shui. There is no one criterion for locating a bed. You need to look at the energies of the spot, what you see from the bed, whether there’s a drafty window nearby, or even whether you can get into and around the bed easily. Don’t lose your common sense just because you’re availing yourself of the wisdom of feng shui!”
Sidling up to chi
Common sense sounds good, but what about this chi stuff? Is it possible for Westerners to get our heads around chi? Tom Bender, architect and author of Building with the Breath of Life (Fire River Press, 2000), sees our time coming. “Our culture is on the brink of a quiet yet fundamental change,” he says. “Acknowledgment of the existence and importance of chi—the foundation of the arts, sciences, healing, and spiritual practices of virtually all other cultures throughout history—is beginning to occur in our own culture.”
We don’t have an adequate word for chi in English, so it sounds esoteric. Yet what could be more familiar to us than the breath of life? We know the difference between a living being and a corpse. We know the difference between feeling truly alive and feeling like we’ve been hit by a truck. And we know the difference between a place where we love to be and a place we’re eager to escape. We know chi intimately.
Perhaps the real problem is that we’ve been asked for centuries to ignore what we know in every cell of our bodies. Our culture is about speed and excess; we’re too busy to notice how we feel or how profoundly we’re affected by our surroundings.