History of Feng Shui

Feng Shui is known as the art of placement. It has been around for over 5,000 years and because of its extraordinary effects on people, including improved health, rewarding relationships and an increase in happiness and prosperity, it is finding increasing popularity now in the West.

Although Feng Shui is Chinese, the more you learn about it, the more you discover that it has links to many other cultures, such as Native American, Japanese and Indian. Feng Shui is about bringing balance to life – a balance between extremes. As human beings we don’t really like extremes of anything, for example, we don’t like to be too hot or too cold. We want to be ‘just right.’

Feng Shui deals with energy, the energy in an environment. We all sense it and everyone has experienced it. For example, if you go to someone’s home, perhaps for the first time, and you immediately feel very comfortable and relaxed, you feel right at home. What you are sensing is the energy in the environment. In this case, it feels balanced and harmonious and you instinctively sense that. On the other hand, you could to go someone’s home, which is very beautiful, perhaps very expensive with lovely furniture, very nice to look at, but somehow it just doesn’t feel right. Again, you are sensing the energy in the environment, but in this case it is not balanced and harmonious. Now we know through science, and the work of Professor William Tiller, that this energy is real and can be influenced by many things, such as our thoughts and the things we have in our environment.

Feng Shui is about recognizing the importance of the environment, its affect on us, and learning how to make it work for us.

Literally translated, Feng Shui means Wind and Water. If you think about those two elements, first of all they are the essential elements of life – we need air to breathe and water to survive. We can survive without food for a while but we certainly cannot survive without water. So Feng Shui is concerned with the very essence of life itself. But if you also think about those two elements and the way they flow, this is exactly the same way in which energy can behave in an environment. So it can go rushing through an area, like a raging river or strong wind. It can trickle and meander like a stream or brook, or it can become stuck and stagnant. So in Feng Shui we are looking at harmonizing and balancing this energy, bringing things into balance. Organizing things into their natural pattern.

So Feng Shui is about cultivating a sense of balance between us and our environment, so that we can become in balance with the world around us.