Order in space or what is Feng Shui?

How can space work for us? Is there such a thing as "Feng Shui" and what is it? Where does it stand in the sea of knowledge, and how can we use it?

Even its name sounds strange and foreign—"Feng... something." It's difficult to talk about something that has existed for over 5,000 years in just a few pages. I’ve decided to start by acknowledging that it is ancient knowledge, an art of working with space that has survived from ancient times to the present day. If that’s the case, there must be something special about it, something that was used not only by Chinese peasants. First, I’ll tell you its history, and then the lessons we can learn from it.

The words "Feng Shui" translate to "wind and water" and originate from early Chinese agricultural culture, where the presence of sufficient water and suitable wind were crucial for a bountiful harvest. Rivers and lakes were sources of water and ensured the survival of farms during droughts. The gentle wind brought rain and fresh air, providing relief to the farmers and ensuring the survival of crops. On the other hand, stagnant water in water sources during the absence of rain led to lung-related diseases, droughts, floods, destructive winds, and everything that was considered a "disaster" for rural farms.

The location where a farm was established was extremely important for its survival, and the difference between a suitable and unsuitable location could mean the difference between life and death. The right location was sought, studied, and theorized, resulting in various hypotheses based on the success or failure of different experiences. All of this gave birth to Feng Shui in its most primitive form.

The ancient people discovered that energy (Chi = life force) could be directed by different landscape formations and could be gathered and generated in various places, especially where there was water. They also found that Chi could be scattered and dispersed by the wind. This is the origin of the name Feng Shui.

"Chi is carried by the wind and scattered, but it is preserved when it meets water."*

One of the foundations of Feng Shui is the discovery that many good things can happen simultaneously if a lot of Chi is gathered in one place, or rather, that the strength of the Chi flow is decisive. This stems from the dualistic nature of the universe: Yin and Yang.

Under the right conditions, Chi gathers and increases, leading to growth. The goal of Feng Shui is to position a building in such a way that it leads to the accumulation of good energy both in the place where it is built and for the people who inhabit it.

Find the energy and gather it! This is the core concept of Feng Shui. It’s about the natural energy found in nature.

On the other hand, natural forces that have a negative effect on the building as a whole and its structure also adversely affect the people living in it. They cause illnesses, loss of prosperity, and other troubles. The goal of Feng Shui in this case is either to completely avoid this stagnant, harmful energy or to redirect it in such a way that it does not affect the people living or working there.

How does all this look through the prism of modern life, say, in a city like Sofia? There are few farmers here, at first glance, there are no rivers or lakes, and most of us live in apartment blocks. All of this seems distant and inapplicable.

Is that really the case? On one hand, Feng Shui works with universal energies and uses the universal laws of heaven (astronomy) and earth (the magnetic field). On the other hand, this knowledge has evolved and developed along with the development of societies. Gradually, rivers have turned into roads, streets, and boulevards. The role of hills and mountains has been taken over by large buildings, malls, and skyscrapers. If we think about it, we’ll see that the traffic of cars and pedestrians also has a certain direction of movement and creates a flow of energy, and the presence of a large building like a mall near our home, for example, influences the entire neighborhood. Energy concentrates around it, and gradually supermarkets, parking lots, new buildings appear, traffic changes, and the entire area takes on a new look. Few people realize how multi-layered Feng Shui is. The truth is, with the help of this wonderful and very precise tool, we can choose locations for building offices and residential buildings, develop infrastructure, make improvements to the exterior, plan the interior, determine the purpose of rooms, their distribution, and the arrangement of the home.

Let’s look at it in more detail. The easiest way to imagine it is as a puzzle with several pieces that, when put together, allow us to see the whole picture. Before arranging this puzzle, everything seems chaotic, complex, and illogical.

The first piece is the exterior or the influence of the surrounding environment. In the context of modern settlements, the surrounding environment continues to be crucial for the well-being of the home and business. For example, Mount Vitosha influences life within an 8-10 km radius. Hills, large buildings, and high-rise blocks can take on the role of a mountain or "dragon in Feng Shui." It matters whether we live near a large boulevard, a small street, a hospital, a school, a church, a cemetery, etc. The exterior is more important than the interior, according to classical Feng Shui. Here, the rule applies: "Not everything can be cured, and what can be cured is not always fully cured."

It’s worth it, when planning to acquire a new home, build, buy a plot, or rent an office, to spend enough time and energy to make the right choice of location.

Here, unlike compass Feng Shui, generally applicable rules are used, which do not take into account personal energy numbers. For example, mountains generate a huge amount of energy, and when choosing a home, it’s good for the mountain to be behind the back of the building where we will live or to its left. The closer we are, the stronger the influence. When it’s on the left, this is called a dragon configuration and is one of the conditions for the place to attract prosperity and a stable financial flow. This helps the men in the family to develop a successful business and the family as a whole to accumulate and retain assets. This "dragon" to really work for us must be a mountain, a natural landscape formation, but sometimes a large building, like a mall, can help. For business buildings, the mountain on the left is almost a mandatory condition. When the mountain is behind the building, it brings security and stability to the family, which is also a good option. Our projects are realized more easily, and we have more opportunities. In this case, however, if there is nothing on the left, money does not come easily to the family, or we lose it. An unfavorable factor is a large street or boulevard behind the back of the building because it "drags" the energy and scatters it. Depending on the direction of movement of this street, it’s possible for the family to attract prosperity, but it may flow away, unable to hold onto it. Often, this negatively affects the relationships between the people living in the building. However, there are exceptions to every rule, and if you live near a river or a large boulevard, the direction from which the flow comes and goes is important relative to the degree to which the specific building is oriented. This requires measurement.

Hospitals and cemeteries have a negative influence within a 2 km radius and are best avoided. Surprisingly for some people, schools also fall into this category because of the noise, which is always considered an unfavorable factor.

The second piece of the puzzle is the interior. Compass schools (Ba Zhai) emerged about 2000 years after landscape Feng Shui. Here, the meaning of the Earth's magnetic field and how it affects the human biofield has a serious influence. There is a lot of scientific evidence that magnetic and torsion fields affect the human body at the level of cells, organs, and systems. The greatest influence of magnetism is on the nervous and endocrine systems. The brain also has an electromagnetic field, and depending on the specific wavelength, the state we are in at the moment is determined—alertness, activity, meditation, drowsiness, deep sleep. The heart and other organs are no exception. It has been proven that changes in nearby magnetic fields cause changes in human brain activity. Experiments conducted in recent years prove what the ancients knew several millennia ago**. The human biofield and the Earth's magnetic field are in constant interaction.

Compass schools in Feng Shui study this interaction and use it to achieve certain goals. The compass needle points to the magnetic, not the geographic north. Magnetic directions are not good or bad in principle, and they do not mean anything by themselves. They have a certain meaning only when they interact with the human biofield. How does all this work?

According to the Feng Shui system, every person has a personal energy number or life number. It comes from the date of birth or the natal trigram. The trigrams are described in the I Ching, one of the oldest books known to mankind, which explains the structure of the world. Each trigram or personal number is associated with one of the eight compass directions in a very specific way. Based on this energy number, people are divided into an eastern and a western group. Simply put, each of us interacts differently with the eight directions of the world—the four cardinal and the four intermediate. Based on this, the suitable entrance door, the suitable arrangement of sectors and rooms in the home, the direction of sleeping, studying, working, etc. are determined. Ba Zhai in combination with the principles of the balance of interaction of the five elements is our second piece of the puzzle.

According to our year of birth, our personal energy number is determined. Each person has 4 good and 4 unfavorable directions, each of which is associated with a specific area of our life. One of the important conditions for us to feel good, for example, is when we sleep with our head pointing in one of our good directions. The crown of the head or the seventh chakra is exposed to the influence of the direction throughout the night, and this affects both our consciousness and our subconscious. Children are very sensitive to the direction in which they sleep and often turn themselves. There was a family in my practice with two little boys, 2 and 4 years old. They slept in one room, with their heads positioned at an angle to each other. The mother shared that the little boy kept jumping over and lying in the big boy’s bed. According to her, the reason was that the big brother slept in a bed shaped like a car, and he liked it more there than in the crib. We swapped the beds according to the suitable directions of the children, and the little boy suddenly lost interest in his brother’s bed. The mother called me with news after a week: "I don’t know how it happened, but everyone in our family is sleeping at night." If your child regularly turns upside down or sleeps with you instead of in their own bed, the reason may not just be that they want to cuddle.

How can we find out our personal energy number? Like everything else, Feng Shui has a formula for this. It is different for men and women and is based on the date of birth. Let’s say you are a woman born on May 5, 1965. The last two digits of the year are added to a single-digit number, and the number 5 is added to the result.

In the example, it looks like this: 6+5=11, 1+1=2. The number 2 is added to 5, and we get 7. This is the personal energy number. For men, it is subtracted from 10. If we take the same birth date, May 5, 1965, then the formula would look like this: 6+5=11, 1+1=2. Subtract 2 from 10, and we get the personal number 8. For all people born before February 4 of a given year, the previous year is taken into account in the calculation. For people born after 2000, the number 6 is added for women, and for men, it is subtracted from 9.

People with personal energy numbers 1, 3, 4, and 9 are from the Eastern group, and those with 2, 6, 7, and 8 are from the Western group. In Feng Shui, there is no personal number 5, but if you get 5 in the calculations, you are from the Western group, with men being equated to the number 2 and women to 8.

Now we come to the third element, the so-called flying stars. This part is related to time and its periodicity, not space. The main thing here is how time affects buildings and life in them. The combination of time and space creates an energy field in the building. Feng Shui uses two main periods of time. Twenty-year periods and an annual period. Every 3 periods of 20 years are one cycle, and a large cycle (era) consists of 9 periods and covers 180 years. The time periods are counted sequentially, depending on the position of the planets in the Solar System. The way Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Mercury, and Venus are arranged relative to the Sun determines the duration of these periods. For example, Jupiter and Saturn align with the Sun every 19.852 years (rounded to 20 years). This marks the beginning of each period. We are now in period 8, which lasts from February 4, 2004, to February 3, 2024.

Buildings (form) are constant, while time changes, and each new cycle brings new energy influences that affect the health and well-being of people.

There is a specific way of calculation, thanks to which this energy influence can be determined. The main thing in this type of calculation is the period in which the building was built and when the occupants moved in. The degree to which the face of the building is oriented and whether significant renovations have been made are also taken into account. The change of ownership and the moving in of new people also matter. The calculation of the flying stars or the horoscope of the house, as some masters call it, is impossible without compass Feng Shui. The horoscope of the house can give us an answer as to what energy is in each room of our home. Many people who lived before and after February 4, 2004, in the same home have felt the difference themselves. Often, there is a sharp decline or a sharp rise after this date in the dynamics of the family. Here, the annual changes that are added to the twenty-year period must also be taken into account. "Favorable stars" often lead to unexpected happy events, promotions, gains, or happy resolutions in relationships. What’s interesting about these energy influences is that they are easily manipulated and can be activated or "cured" with Feng Shui techniques.

These three pieces of the puzzle, at first glance, have nothing in common. They are based on different principles and systems of knowledge. The only thing they have in common is that, taken together, they represent Feng Shui. To say that a space is in line with the principles of Feng Shui, it must be in line with the exterior, Ba Zhai, and the flying stars. Everything else would give a partial picture. Of course, there are additional factors, but the purpose of this article is to give a general idea in understandable language.

Now, the most important question. What can we use all this for? Is it possible through Feng Shui to really influence our lives and cause positive changes? Can space, as something outside of us, be used in such a way as to bring us balance and harmony? Isn’t balance and harmony primarily a condition of our internal state, from which the results in the external environment should flow?

We are energetic beings. Love, health, and prosperity are forms of energy. Feng Shui is the only tool that gives us the opportunity to manipulate, change, and use external energy so that it works for us.

I am often asked whether Feng Shui "works" regardless of whether we know about it. Of course, it does. It’s like electricity in an outlet. You can’t see it with your eyes, but when you plug in the plug, you can toast your bread. It’s just that people who use it as knowledge have some control over the external environment. And speaking of the plug, by definition, it is an electrical installation product for temporary connection to the power supply network. A wonderful formulation. That’s exactly what Feng Shui is. I would define it as a unique tool for connecting to the energy source.

Grand Master Yap Cheng Hai liked to say that what happens to us in life depends on three factors. Our heavenly luck, our human luck, and our earthly luck. Our heavenly luck has a lot to do with the law of cause and effect or what is written for us and will happen. In Eastern cultures, it is called karma, fate, joss. Our human luck depends on ourselves and the choices we make. In Bulgaria, we often say, "What someone does to themselves, no one else can do to them." With our thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and actions, we have the opportunity to model our lives.

Our earthly luck is Feng Shui. By applying its principles, we can use our connection with the earth and the way we interact with it, and this, in turn, can help us attract circumstances and people into our lives that help us. Looked at this way, a person can influence two of these three factors—our personal choices and Feng Shui. If we accept that heaven, earth, and we as people are one whole, then the effect we could achieve is to change 66 percent of our lives. And that’s a lot, isn’t it?

*The Zangshu, or Book of Burial by Guo Pu (276-324)

** research of Joseph L. Kirschvink, California Institute of Technology

Author: Rositsa Georgieva