Healing Through Your Environment

Feng Shui – Healing Through Your Environment

By Kartar Diamond

The practice of Feng Shui is often referred to as a system for living in “harmony with nature.” For me, this explanation conjures up images of fields and forests, when in fact most of us are living and working indoors. Does this mean you have to spend more time outdoors to achieve the kind of balance Feng Shui adherents are referring to? Does this mean that apartment dwellers and workaholics cannot enjoy good Feng Shui? Absolutely not!

While it is enviable that some people can spend a lot of time outdoors and luxurious homes are often built in the scenic mountains or at the beach, there is also an unseen, powerful aspect of nature going on right inside your home, right inside every single structure built on this planet. The Chinese call it “chi” and East Indians call it “Prana.” These energies exist within our own bodies and they also exist in our surroundings. There is a constant ebb and flow and co-mingling of energies inside our bodies and our immediate physical environment. And that is one reason is why having a wood framed bed could have a different effect on you than a wrought iron bed frame. There is a transferring of energies from one object to another.

This is also why a blue room will have a different effect on your body than a yellow room. Everything in your physical environment can affect your body, intellect and emotions.

Many people have had an introduction to Feng Shui through the media and what gets discussed most often is the concept of “chi flow.” This often boils down to furniture arrangement and architectural features in how they affect invisible air currents within our home or work place. These energy flows are determined to be healthful or hurtful depending on a number of factors. For example, we like to arrange a desk so that you can see and sense incoming people into a room. Having your back to a door can be unsettling and the chi flow will be hitting your back. If there is substantial clutter in a room, it will inhibit a healthy circulation of the air currents in the room, eventually resulting in ill health for the occupant.