Practical Fengshui: don’t put water where there is water
Practical Fengshui: don’t put water where there is water
So I’m on track to being taken as a formal disciple of Master Song and we are working on some wonderful educational materials for you which will be presented this fall. In the meantime I want to share some very practical and easy to apply Fengshui advice for your homes which will immediately make sense even if you have no background in Yijing studies.
Fengshui is primarily based on the five elements with the four cardinal directions and center of the house representing water, wood, fire, metal and earth.
The Northern quadrant of your house is represented as water, but in point of fact water is actually present where there is water usage in the house. It isn’t automatically the case that water using rooms such as toilets and kitchens have to be in the North and Fengshui has multiple styles, each with their own unique principles that you should be aware of, but let’s talk about water rooms today.
Usually in our practice we tend to think in terms of what needs to be added of taken away from the location of a particular element in your house or property in order to improve the Qi situation.
People might think that this is quite straight forward and you can put black or purple things in the north, green things like plants in the east, your kitchen stove in the south and your sword collection in the west, but this is not how Fengshui works.
In fact, adding more of an element to an already strong element is often seen as a bad thing and also adding an element which controls or breaks an element can also be a bad thing. For instance, metal controls wood so in a wood area of the house you wouldn’t normally keep metal decorations, cooking pots etc... This part may require belief in the five elements, or a very careful dissection to understand fully, so let’s stick with water.
The key point I want to make here is that you don’t add water to water in a house or else there will be a problem.
Here is a really specific example:
your washroom/toilet is a place where there are probably at least three major water features including a toilet, sink and shower/bath. You also carry out the activities of your kidney palace there every day (IE: urination) and also the other thing that has two do with your intestines. You also wash yourself and probably brush your teeth and do personal grooming there too, so this room is one of the most water usage intensive places in the house.
This means purely from a structural point of view that this place is prone to dampness. If you live in a wood house this is especially important since wood absorbs water and since it is an organic material it can rot over time leading to structural issues with your house.
On another level, excess dampness can cause health problems and general feelings of stagnation.
If you think about this from a Chinese Medicine perspective you can understand that sitting water gradually enters the body through luo channels and exposure via acupoints etc... Eventually this is going to cause things like Bi syndrome where you feel pain in muscles, joints etc..
If you live in a warm place, excess moisture can also attract unwanted bugs like mosquitos which are not only annoying, but can also carry serious illnesses with them.
Therefore in Fengshui practice the washroom is not where you keep a fountain or other water feature since you are adding water to a place which is already very water abundant. The water feature could instead be added to a locale associated with wood such as your garden since it generally nourishes the situation on account of the relational harmony of water and wood.
At the same time it might seem strange, but if you are in the habit of doing home purification by burning sage or moxa, you can actually apply them to the washroom right around this time of year since the Yang Qi is very strong and the moxa or sage smoke can chase away accumulated dampness. Be careful though because smoke is toxic and fire is dangerous.
Even if you don’t want to do this, there are some steps you can take to avoid excess dampness in the water palace including being cleanly to avoid excess bacterial growth, not letting water sit, cleaning mirrors and bath after bathing, not stacking up books and magazines which absorb air moisture and contribute to latent dampness, scrubbing the floor with a dry mop once a week or so, and making sure the walls and fixtures are clean and well taken care of.
The bottom line is that every room in our house is connected to the physical health, emotions and vitality of all family members, so if we want to live energetically, spiritually, physically and emotionally healthy lives we shouldn’t discount the importance of taking care of our abodes.
This isn’t the entire purpose of Fengshui, but it is one essential part and it is good to master these fundamentals before getting into things like looking at how the lay of the land affects the energetics of the house, or how the year and location the house was built in relates to the current time period we are living in. Those things are important too and over the next two years or so master Song and perhaps even grandmaster Miao and myself are planning on developing a program which will take you from being a total beginner in Fengshui to eventually being able to work and seek certification if you want to. I’m going to launch a reading course of the Zang Shu this August. It is the earliest extent Fengshui text and teaches how to locate living Qi in land forms. It is essential reading to begin the study of the Form School which is one of the best ways to start practice. Master Song will discuss other materials such as the Four images and nine palace system between September and December and we’ll be following up with more advanced courses about the water method and divination in the new year, so keep your eyes peeled because wonderful opportunities are coming.
Please contact me if you are interested in either studying Fengshui, or even having master Song do a consultation of your house using your floor plan and photographs as we are hard at work getting everything ready and are currently looking for feedback and interaction.
Today behind the paywall is most of Chapter 21 of Le Yu Tang by Huang Yuanji. The sections is mainly about the nature of the two halves of the true mind and emptiness in Neidan practice. The knowledge of the true mind is essential in Neidan and one way to test whether a teacher actually undertstands practice or not is to see if they can explain to you the relationship between Wu and Ji, two major heavenly stems associated with the yin and yang aspects of the earth element and the function of the mind as it pertains to the relationship of heart and kidney, jing and shen etc...
Wu and Ji are also very important in Fengshui, but they are used differently than in Neidan, even though both can be understood using the Nine Palace system.
Subscribe to learn about the true mind in Neidan!!