Articles of Interest
Where Shall I Live? The Feng Shui
of Place
Written by Lynne Ashdown
Where shall I live? As life circumstances change,
an increasing number of Americans, especially in California, periodically
ask themselves this question. On average, Americans pick up and move
to a new location every five years, including me. Every time a friend
says, “Oh admit it, you LIKE to move,” I picture whapping
them on the head with a frying pan. While citing my own dilemmas as
an example, my intent here is to explore different strategies you can
use to determine the best place for you to live.
Three years ago I sold my house near San Francisco
and moved an hour north to a small town in the wine country, although
I’d been looking for a house closer to my former home. On an outing
with a friend, I saw a house being built, and the price was more than
right. I fell in love with it, thought the town probably would be fine
- everybody ELSE liked it - bought the house and moved in. For the first
year I busied myself with putting in a garden, but soon I began to notice
that fewer and fewer of my needs and desires could be met in the town
and the region.
My solitary work of writing required the sight of humans in
the afternoon and I was in the habit of hanging out late in
the day at a local coffee house. For three months I searched for this
place; it MUST be here, I thought. It wasn’t. An avid cyclist,
I turned to my bike. This is the wine country; there must be great places
to ride. Wrong again - in the narrow valley, the only through road was
too dangerous for a road bike. I’ll hike! But the beauty of the
countryside was contained inside fences, unlike the public open spaces
I’d known before. Well, I’ll find a like-minded group of
people - wrong again; no one was interested in cycling or metaphysics,
especially Feng Shui. Everyone was focused on their houses and their
travels, and for the most part, unlike me, their deal was set in life,
and they were sitting back and enjoying it. Business was flat and traditional,
not a place for my consultancy to flourish. I grew unhappier by the
month. Just before three years, I sold my beautiful house and moved
back to Marin County.
One of the lessons here is not to fall in love with a house
before choosing the region and the town. What does this have
to do with Feng Shui? This conclusion is just common sense, but other
issues are more subtle, such as an understanding of chi. Chi is the
life-force, subtle energy that links you to places, events, memories,
and possible paths to the future. It is in all living things, land,
and in the air, where it flows like invisible water. The goal of Feng
Shui is to link you, your land and your building with the most auspicious
cosmic influences in an unimpeded flow of chi to create perfect balance
and harmony, opening the way - opportunity - to give you the support,
strength, vitality and clarity you need to live in peace and achieve
your goals. The Feng Shui practitioner can help you pick out land with
supportive land forms and good flows of benevolent chi, and can optimize
your connection to land and building, but when it comes to choosing
your region and community, you alone must do this work.
Look to your deeper issues. Where do you feel most
at harmony with the land and the universe? Are you a person who must
be near the water? Do you feel fully alive only in the mountains? Do
you thrive in the desert, or does the very thought of it make your throat
dry? Do you feel comfortable and secure in a deep valley, or does being
walled in make you claustrophobic? Studies show that people who choose
valleys tend to seek a risk-free, predictable life, while people who
crave mountains and views put a higher value on personal freedom. A
tenet of Feng Shui is that if you seek unlimited opportunities, live
with an expansive view - what you see you have an opportunity to get.
Each environment has a different quality of chi that will influence
your path.
Begin to consider, if you haven’t before, how you feel in different geographic environments. Do you need the stimulation and fast pace of a city? Creative people and thinkers are attracted to urban environments. If you feel a need for community, does a lively small town where people know your face appeal to you? Or do you feel the most at peace in a truly rural, quiet environment? If you are a maverick or a risk-taker, think twice before moving into a planned community with restrictive rules; attitudes tend to become conforming, just like the houses.
Perhaps your prime concern is a safe place and a big house
for your growing family, and you are willing to commute a long distance.
Of course your choices will be governed by cost and where you work.
Even with these constraints, you have many options. Nature seeks balance,
and at an instinctual level, so do you. If you work in the city, perhaps
you need the balance of a quiet home to restore yourself. Or if you
work at home alone, you may need the stimulation of a town or city to
balance and satisfy your soul as a social being. If you look at tall
buildings all day, you may feel best living in a house on a flat lot.
Consciously or not, we all seek balance.
There are other, more esoteric aspects to geographic choice.
When traveling, have you ever found yourself in a town, region,
or country that you couldn’t wait to get out of? Where you felt
anxious or a sense of impending doom? Or, have you ever arrived at a
place and had the distinct feeling that you’d been there before,
that you felt extremely at home there, even though you’d never
been there before? Some believe you may have lived a past life in this
place, and that your feelings about some happy or traumatic event that
took place during that lifetime are seeping through the veil.
Carl Jung talks about the ‘collective unconscious’.
Your feelings in a place may be tapping into a past or present condition.
Do you recall ever feeling a state of well-being and high energy walking
through a district with busy, successful businesses? You were tapping
into the collective unconscious of the neighborhood, the chi of success.
It’s in the air - literally - in the subtle energy that is chi.
Regardless of your feelings about re-incarnation or the concept of the
collective unconscious, perhaps you’ve been aware of these influences
or have felt this deja vu.
Feng Shui practitioners know that energies from past events
stick, and that they affect you in your building whether you
are aware of them or not. This ‘predecessor energy’ is why
it is important to know the past history of your building, your land
and your community, so you can avoid places where there has been failure,
violence, or other unhappiness. Some Feng Shui practitioners can clear
negative energies. There is so much more than we know. But consider
trusting your feelings of repulsion or attraction to place.
A discipline related to astrology is called astro-cartography,
which relates your birth chart to the best places for you to live. The
science/art of astrology is based on observations of cycles of movement
of heavenly bodies over millennia. A horoscope is a map of the sky at
the moment and place of birth. Being born under the influence of certain
planets has been observed to affect one’s destiny in a positive
or negative way. Astro-cartography, using your birth date to determine
the most positive planets under which you could have been born, maps
the places in the world where the influences of those auspicious planets
are at this time, to show you where the best heavenly influences are
for you now. Can moving really change your destiny? Astro-cartographers
who have collected data think so.
It is important to choose wisely because a precept of Feng Shui is that you are affected by your environment the minute you set foot in the door, and you are increasingly affected until at three years you have been indelibly affected by your environment. Your home or office is akin to an outer layer of skin, and your region can be thought of as your outermost layer of skin. Just as you will become depressed if you live in a dark, unkempt place, so too will you be unhappy if you live in the desert when you crave being near water. You may not be conscious right away how the things with which you surround yourself, your home, and your geographic environment affect you, since these effects can be subtle and gradual, but they are inevitable nevertheless. So also will you experience a clear path to your goals if you live in a place where everywhere you look you see order and control of your life, beauty, color, light, only things that bring good memories, things that empower you, a home where you feel at peace, and a view that inspires you, be it flower pots on your porch or a sweeping mountain range.
Just as your clothes reflect who you are, so does the place you reside, and your larger environment. In order for you to be happy and at peace, you should strive for your home, your town, and your region to be a match not only to who you are but to your future goals as well. Your immediate and larger environment will shape you, so be sure the shape into which you will be transforming is one of your conscious choosing.
The point is to try to match yourself to your intended new region and community. It helps if you write about this. First, make a list of your personal values. Then make a list of qualities you desire in a region, and one for your chosen town (Coffee house? Casual restaurants? Good gym?) Then list the qualities your chosen region and town actually has, and check the match. Or lack of a match. You might surprise yourself. You may prevent yourself from making a mistake, or see how good your choice really is.
Lynne Ashdown is a Feng Shui practitioner in San Rafael, Calif.
Find her at: www.AuspiciousPathsFengShui.com
Email: Lynne@AuspiciousPaths.com
References:
Feng Shui, The Ancient Wisdom of Harmonious Living for Modern
Times by Eva Wong, Shambala
The Power of Place, by Winifred Gallagher, HarperCollins
Elliot Tanzer, astro-cartographer: www.elliottanzer.com
