Feng Shui in Traditional Chinese Medicine (part III)
This is a continuation of the articles on the vision of how Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is applied to maintaining your health. To achieve this goal, TCM is built on eight pillars: Meditation, Body Movement, Diet Therapy, Feng Shui - Environmental Health, Herbal Medicine, Moxibustion /Cupping, Acupuncture, and Massage Therapy. These are divided into two tiers with the first four pillars (Meditation, Body Movement, Diet Therapy, Feng Shui) representing what the individual can do in terms of “self-care”. The second tier has the same goal of maintaining a healthy balanced living style but needs to be applied by a professional. This article is about Feng Shui, which is part of the first tier.
Feng Shui, in general terms, is the observation and optimizing of the use of Qi (energy) in your environment in order to give you maximum positive results in your daily life and keeping your personal Qi balanced – spiritually, physically and mentally. Many of us want to be in tune with our surroundings. In fact many people have their own ideas about what makes them feel good or comfortable in an environment. The internet is full of good and bad Feng Shui advice, so you have to be careful. At its most simple initial stages, Feng Shui uses eight directions: North, South, East, West, Northeast, Northwest, Southeast, Southwest of a building. Each direction is linked to one in a family of eight trigrams. A trigram is a group of three lines, each one representing yin and yang energies, i.e. passive (receptive) or active energy.
You then need to find out your “good” and “bad” directions based on the time of your birth (year, month, day, hour) and the energy of the building/environment also based on the year it was built (and possibly the month). Then an analysis is made of the relationship between your trigrams and the environment’s trigrams to determine the best areas for your daily activities such as working, sleeping, relaxing, and interacting with others.
The Chinese have worked with Feng Shui for more than 3000 years and in the beginning, it was more connected with nature, like mountains and rivers. Even so, the topic was and is complex - directions can be divided down to 24 (15° for each) or more than 360 (a size smaller than 1°), and you can use both trigrams and hexagrams (six lines stacked one on top of the other).
There are many techniques that go into Qi interpretation and can include the effects of time, space, climate and movement. Today, of course, there are some differences. For example, natural formations are still used where possible, but in cities, streets take the place of rivers and skyscrapers are our mountains.
Feng Shui is also used with other Chinese Metaphysic arts, such as BaZi – an in-depth study of an individual’s energy. In fact, many consultants use both when mapping a home or company. A good Feng Shui professional knows how to fine tune your environments to maximize your opportunities and options. Feng Shui can also be used with Date Selection, that is, finding dates with the right energy for doing certain activities such as moving to a different house and signing contracts.
It all boils down to this: most of us want to be richer, have better jobs, find that right person or even have a better understanding of ourselves. Feng Shui is just one of the Chinese arts to help us with our goals and desires. But remember, there is no perfect chart where you will only have positive energy in an environment. In other words, the yin and yang of energy doesn’t let us forget that we need both in order to live a balanced life. And really, that is the goal of Feng Shui: Balance.
