Create a "Home for your Soul"!
How do you like the sound of "creating a Home for your Soul?"Doesn't that sound cosy, nurturing, supportive?
If you've heard of the Chinese art of Feng Shui, you'll probably know it is about trying to bring your living space into harmony with your environment and with your own needs. Feng Shui has gone from a 3000 or more year-old complex system of helping wealthy Chinese to honour their ancestors by finding auspicious places to bury their dead, to a perhaps more intuitive system of creating the most supportive and indeed "auspicious" environment in which to live your life.
Older systems of feng shui, originally derived in part from the "I Ching", a book and divination tool, employed mathematical formulas, Chinese astrology, geography and compass directions to locate the best places to live and to arrange one's belongings. Using their powers of observation for situating villages, it made sense in mountainous areas to build above flood plains in spots where rivers would flow in the right way around structures and also be nearby for their water needs, but tucked in below mountain tops to avoid winds. Things that suggested bad omens would be avoided, and things that were healthy and vibrant were good omens.
A combination of so-called "logical" and "illogical" cures evolved to help people remedy aspects that were considered not so auspicious, and in fact engendered a considerable amount of fear in folks, not to mention constant changes as when the year's astrological sign dictated some change in the home was required.
That may be a simplistic summary, but suffice it to say, Feng Shui has evolved a lot over the millenia, several schools developed in China, partly adapted to geographic differences. Ultimately, in the wake of the Cultural Revolution in China, feng shui made it to the west and North America where, with the help of various modern Chinese masters who emigrated here, followed by their western students, has been adapted still further into various systems that rely less on the mathematical formulae and fear-based teachings, and more on the intuitive skills of both practitioner and client and an awareness of how we live in our modern cities and suburbs.
It still involves a central idea about "Chi", the universal life force or energy that sustains us and all things, and ideally, chi should be able to move and flow (not too fast!) through a space and not be blocked or stagnant.
Interior Alignment® Instinctive Feng ShuiTM is a "brand" of feng shui refined and developed by my Soul Coaching® mentor, Denise Linn, partly based on her studies of the work of Professor Lin Yun, whom she credits for "bringing heart into feng shui".
Feng Shui was Denise's major focus of work prior to developing Soul Coaching® and she created an institute to teach and certify practitioners in this discipline, of which I am now one! It clearly reflects her own path of discovery, drawing on the best of traditions from many cultures, not just Chinese, and adapting them for our western culture supported by our innate sense of "what feels good". "If it feels good it is good feng shui" says Denise.
If, on the other hand, some aspect of your home or even your life in general (career, relationships, abundance, health, emotions) feel "out of whack" or are suffering, and other avenues have been explored unsuccessfully, perhaps there is something blocking the chi or else off-balance in your home or business that may be contributing to your malaise or discomfort. Traditional feng shui utilizes concepts like the 5 elements (earth, fire, wood, water and metal), and Interior Alignment® also allows for the alternative possibility of working with a 4-element system (earth, air, fire & water) that seems more familiar in our western culture, based in part on her native American heritage. They are both ways of interpreting the balance in a space and we can add and subtract certain "elemental" representations in order to redress that balance.
We also consider colour, sound, environmental issues, shapes, geography, symbolism of certain objects and even "metaphors" in the home, among other things, to analyze where an imbalance may be arising from. And sometimes the main thing that's needed is simply clearing your clutter to allow the energy to move! Although, when it comes down to it, clutter clearing can be an emotionally charged prcess. We have advice for that too.
Our homes can set a template for our lives and it is surprising how rarely we realize the power of location, objects, symbolism and our arrangement of things to disturb the balance in that template or to create a template that works against what we value and aspire to.
I will soon be offering feng shui consultations (complete with perhaps a few "illogical" cures and the odd Chinese trinket if necessary!) to help empower you to set a template that reflects the life you and your family want to live and to bring your home into harmony and balance, a Home for your Soul!
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