Author Archives: Sugeet

Widening the Field

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The more I study Feng Shui, the more I understand that what began “how to site your ancestor’s graves,” has important implications for the troubled world we live in today.  I just finished teaching an introductory course, the sort of thing retired folks might like to hear so they knew the Chinese were not sending voodoo into the US.  It went very well until the final session, when I wanted to use some video about Permaculture.

After all, good Feng Shui comes from observing how nature works and then augmenting it, letting it be even more bountiful than it usually is.  It was an excellent way for my seniors to start to grasp a bigger concept.  Several of them were bothered that ‘this isn’t Feng Shui.’  They certainly are to be honored for their choices, but I would like you, dear reader, to consider that Feng Shui can widen and widen.  May you find new uses, and when you do, let me know?  Thanks.

How Green is Feng Shui?

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With climate change and going green being the hot topics of the day, it’s not unreasonable to ask how green is feng shui? At first, it doesn’t look very green. But if we take the feng shui blinders off, we discover that this ancient art and science is cutting edge environmentalism.

Feng shui studies how nature moves energy through a space, and how to best arrange that space for the most harmonious flow. A true feng shui master is sensitive to how energy moves, or doesn’t move, through a space. Adjustments are then made to remove blockages, and to make the flow is smooth. The most dramatic example of this work in the West is permaculture.

Bill Molison made a series of four short documentaries for PBS, taking four were dramatically different environments, and applying the principles of permaculture to each. In every case the results were dramatic, inspiring, and bursting with life.

See for yourself follow this link:

Check out the website as well: Creative Visions Feng Shui

Roots

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Feng Shui has its roots in the I Ching, as does acupuncture, chinese medicine, much of the philosophy and a few other areas of inquiry. Four main characters gave us the teaching as we know it today. Fu His is the originator of the I Ching’s trigrams. King Wen, combined the trigrams into their 64 combinations of hexagrams. The Duke of Chou write the interpretations, and finally Confucius reviewed the whole. While it would be interesting to study the lives of these men, we would learn nothing about the development and less about how Feng Shui relates to the I Ching.

The originator of the I Ching, Fu Hsi, is the most significant of the four for our understanding of Feng Shui. That’s because there was no one to teach him and no one to tell them what to do. So he had to find his answers by taking life itself as his teacher. Much of a depth study of Feng Shui incorporates that study of life and nature. The I Ching presents us with ways to understand the the relation of the world to our individual choices of action (divination.)

The hexagrams which form the BaGua used in feng shui are only eight of 64 hexagrams in the I Ching. Each of the eight are interpreted as representing a broad aspect of our everyday life. Intimate Relationship, Children, the Family, Beneficial People all four aspects which effect the physical space we inhabit. Fame, Career, Wealth, and Knowledge are the other four. Feng Shui then interprets how each these broad area effect one another by using the Five Element Theory. The relationship of those elements for one to another is based on hundreds of years of physical observation of what happens in nature.

The simplest example of this is planting an elm tree next to a river. In short time it will die, as the roots drown in the constant immersion in water. Yet if we plant a willow tree in exactly the same spot, we will see it grow rapidly and thrive. The difference? One tree loves to have its roots in water the other only lives when the roots are out of water. Understanding this broadly can aid someone who needs to know how to plan a landscape.

Using Feng Shui can guide us to the most beneficial and harmonious use of any physical structure. There is considerable movement here in the West to try and reduce Feng Shui to rules and guidelines easy to understand and apply. Many folk buy a book and wonder why they do not grow immensely wealthy.  My experience with Feng Shui keeps leading me to continue to study, producing a profoundly deeper and wider understanding of the natural world. And as such, it is ultimately rewarding.

Thoughts on the Year of the Tiger

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It occurs to me that yesterday’s posting was strong.  And well it should be, as this is a Metal Tiger year.  What does that mean?  In its simplest form, each sign is affected by the system called Five Elements Theory.  Each element either moderates or strengthens another element.

Wood feeds fire.  Water douses fire. One element supports, the other moderates or negates.  When we look at a Metal Tiger, know the following: metal will moderate or stop growth (seems we already know that – look at the world’s economies.)  That stifling effect ripples out into other parts of our world.  But metal supports liquidity and flexibility.

So the message is clear: one needs to remain supple but grounded so if things go awry, you can shift as needed.  Don’t expect huge development and growth, but, like the hippies say “Go with the flow Man!”

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright

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We’ve already had a tsunami in Hawaii, devastating earthquakes in Chile and Haiti, and those are only the disasters being reported by CNN.   It’s all part of the year of the Metal Tiger.  This isn’t going to be easy for any of us, and that’s why I suggest buckle up.  Things will be moving quickly, could be disastrous or disquieting; beneficial or catastrophic.

We’re all aware that there is more happening in the world than we can possibly grok, and we should not have to.  We are in the Information Age and we are having our own tsunami of information – most of it irrelevant to our existence.  When I wrote Pay Attention, I meant it as a life ring for what can become a tsunami of overwhelm.

We exist in the center of 3 cycles.  The innermost is ourselves, alone in the world.  The second one contains our friends, neighbors, our local community. And the 3rd is the circle that contains the world.  We have great influence on the first circle, and we can influence the second.  Bu we have no effect on the 3rd circle.  Yet many of us waste our time and energy bemoaning “those dupes in Washington” or “that crazy governor” and on and on.  When we realize using our energy in this way is pouring money down a toilet, it becomes obvious if we want to have any effect at all, we need to work within the circles where we can have a real effect.

Paying Attention can help.  This is something I need to continually remind myself of, and I hope, writing this, it helps you well.  Happy Tigers!, Or, as e.e.cummings said:

Tiger, Tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Pay Attention!

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Pay Attention!
Allan Watts used to say that the trouble with English was that it could only describe parts of things and not the thing as a whole.  He used the illustration of a cat passing behind a picket fence.  Each space between the pickets was part of the description, and each was limited by what you could see – part of the head, then part of the neck and so on.
He contrasted this to the Chinese written system, which is made up of ideograms, or symbolic pictures of objects and concepts.  Thus, the symbol for a cat could be rendered in such a way that the reader understood that it was a grey tabby, kind of old, moving slowly, a myriad of characteristics.  It was in this way that Watts showed how we in the West have an incomplete understanding of the world as we communicate and think in a linear way (one letter follows another) while the Chinese use ideograms to communicate the whole.
“Alphabetic writing is a representation of sound, whereas the ideogram represents vision and, furthermore, represents the world directly-not being a sign for a sound which is the name of a thing. As for names, the sound “bird” has nothing in it that reminds one of a bird, and for some reason it would strike us a childish to substitute more direct names, such as tweetie, powee, or quark.” Alan Watts, Tao, the Watercourse Way, 1975, p14.
The natural world is not a linear system.  There are an infinite number of variables that interact constantly.  Indeed, we know that the only constant is change.  So to accurately describe one moment with all it’s variables would take ages in our linear, alphabetic language.
As we approach the New Year (the Chinese New Year will not be here until February 14) rather than making resolutions, I invite you to decide to approach the world differently –  pay attention to the natural world, for it is in that natural world that you will start to see great wisdom.  Once this process starts, the Chinese way of approaching how the part fits into the whole makes a lot more sense than our Western concept of breaking things down trying to gain control.  Indeed, as we in the West try to gain absolute control over the natural world, we end up trying to take more and more control through creating more and more devices which purport to give us more control. We finally become slaves to the devices of our own making, and still we cannot control even a small part of our world.
Take a look at the areas in you business that don’t seem to be working and try and observe what is blocking the energy from flowing smoothly in that physical space.  At home, look around your yard.  Where do things not grow? What areas are used often by your animals and where do they Not Go?  Inside, what room do you tend Not to Use?  Where do things gather (clutter magnets)?
Instead of trying to fix something quickly, take the time to pay attention and observe how the world operates in a
ny location you observe.  Don’t be in a hurry. Once you have a pretty good idea of what’s not being used or is out of control, what can you do to make it more harmonious?  Of course, that’s what I do for a living, but there’s a lot you can do before you need my services.  And if whatever you do does not give you the results you hoped for, then we do need to talk.  Hopefully, you will start to see that Feng Shui is not some mysterious or magical thing – it is very practical and based on considered observation of our natural world.
I think much of our problems today come from the fact that we (and I mean here our culture) keep attempting to remove our focus from the natural world and direct it to man made things. What is the latest incarnation of this?  Back seat DVD screens in cars!  People think they are buying distraction and quiet, but they are really demonstrating to their children that the man-made, the artificial, is more desirable than the natural.  And that, my friends, is a symptom of a real sickness.

Allan Watts used to say that the trouble with English was that it could only describe parts of things and not the thing as a whole.  He used the illustration of a cat passing behind a picket fence.  Each space between the pickets was part of the description, and each was limited by what you could see – part of the head, then part of the neck and so on.

He contrasted this to the Chinese written system, which is made up of ideograms, or symbolic pictures of objects and concepts.  Thus, the symbol for a cat could be rendered in such a way that the reader understood that it was a grey tabby, kind of old, moving slowly, a myriad of characteristics.  It was in this way that Watts showed how we in the West have an incomplete understanding of the world as we communicate and think in a linear way (one letter follows another) while the Chinese use ideograms to communicate the whole.

“Alphabetic writing is a representation of sound, whereas the ideogram represents vision and, furthermore, represents the world directly-not being a sign for a sound which is the name of a thing. As for names, the sound “bird” has nothing in it that reminds one of a bird, and for some reason it would strike us a childish to substitute more direct names, such as tweetie, powee, or quark.” Alan Watts, Tao, the Watercourse Way, 1975, p14.

The natural world is not a linear system.  There are an infinite number of variables that interact constantly.  Indeed, we know that the only constant is change.  So to accurately describe one moment with all it’s variables would take ages in our linear, alphabetic language.

As we approach the New Year (the Chinese New Year will not be here until February 14) rather than making resolutions, I invite you to decide to approach the world differently –  pay attention to the natural world, for it is in that natural world that you will start to see great wisdom.  Once this process starts, the Chinese way of approaching how the part fits into the whole makes a lot more sense than our Western concept of breaking things down trying to gain control.  Indeed, as we in the West try to gain absolute control over the natural world, we end up trying to take more and more control through creating more and more devices which purport to give us more control. We finally become slaves to the devices of our own making, and still we cannot control even a small part of our world.

Take a look at the areas in you business that don’t seem to be working and try and observe what is blocking the energy from flowing smoothly in that physical space.  At home, look around your yard.  Where do things not grow? What areas are used often by your animals and where do they Not Go?  Inside, what room do you tend Not to Use?  Where do things gather (clutter magnets)?

Instead of trying to fix something quickly, take the time to pay attention and observe how the world operates in any location you observe.  Don’t be in a hurry. Once you have a pretty good idea of what’s not being used or is out of control, what can you do to make it more harmonious?  Of course, that’s what I do for a living, but there’s a lot you can do before you need my services.  And if whatever you do does not give you the results you hoped for, then we do need to talk.  Hopefully, you will start to see that Feng Shui is not some mysterious or magical thing – it is very practical and based on considered observation of our natural world.

I think much of our problems today come from the fact that we (and I mean here our culture) keep attempting to remove our focus from the natural world and direct it to man made things. What is the latest incarnation of this?  Back seat DVD screens in cars!  People think they are buying distraction and quiet, but they are really demonstrating to their children that the man-made, the artificial, is more desirable than the natural.  And that, my friends, is a symptom of a real sickness.

Health Care & Feng Shui

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The current debate about health care in Washington revolves around how much profit insurance companies can make, how much profit hospitals should make, how much profit the pharmaceutical companies can make.  The fight is not whether or not Americans should get good health care, it’s about how much profit corporations can get into this bill.

So what does that have to do with feng shui?  Quite simply the basis of feng shui is understanding how the energies of nature work and how we human can align ourselves so that we benefit from those energies.  Think of a sailboat out on the sea.  It can either tack back and forth trying to gain ground as the wind pushes the boat backwards, or it could turn around and sail away, being pushed by the wind.  It’s obvious which takes more work and which is easier.  The basis of Feng Shui is to understand which way the wind is blowing and what’s happening in the water – observations of nature.  Much of chinese medicine is built on the same principle.  You only pay when you stay well.  If the doctor has made a mistake and you get sick, you pay nothing.  To my way of thinking that is serving the public good.

Our system of health care has resulted in our being 23rd in infant mortally, and something like 25th in quality of health care IN THE WORLD.  Why? Because we have turned our back on nature and gone for the profit.  In other words where other countries provide a public service, we monetize the industry and hand it over not to the doctors but to corporations.  And by law, corporations are duty bound to make profits for the shareholders – not the public.

So feng shui should remind us to learn about how nature can help us cure any imbalance (sickness) in our body.  And it is up to us, not corporations with their pills and tests, to assist our bodies back to radiant health.

To see what Sugeet does with Feng Shui, check out the web site.

That time of the year…

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My November/December newsletter talks about the holidays, and how to recapture some of the healing elements we can have in our home at this time.  It came as a wonderful suppose to see the International Feng Shui Guild reprint that article as it’s lead in it’s professional publication.  I get so very very tired when merchants start hawking Christmas and Hanukkah well before thanksgiving.  Seems we have monetized everything where, if it doesn’t bring monetary profit, we will just ignore it.  Celebrations are not about monetary profit, they are about human connection profit.  Luckily Feng Shui has some helpful ways to magnify that.  If you’d like to get a copy, just drop me a line <info@fengshuicv.com> and I’ll see that you get one.

In the meantime, have a blessed holiday season.

Is Feng Shui Satanic?

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The Rogue Valley in Southern Oregon is not known for it’s progressive leanings (outside of the bubble called Ashland.)  And newspapers need to try to keep readers by sometimes going a bit far afield from news and features. But here’s one for the books, which appeared in Grants Pass Daily Courier October 16, 2009.  This from their “business journalist” Kathleen Alaks:

As an Interior designer, Catelin Hoover knows that the right placement of an object or color can make for a pleasing, comfortable, attractive home.

But as a devout Christian, she also believe that giving the placement of that object or color mystical or spiritual significant can be outright dangerous.

Hoover, who moved to Grants Pass a year ago and cares for her elderly father, has written and self-published a book, “Unmaking Feng Shui – A Christian Perspective,” in which she evaluates the ancient Oriental practice of feng shui and elaborates on how it is neither innocence or harmless.

“It is mostly base on superstition and divination, consulting the stars, the earth or some other force for direction,” Hoover says.  “And God forbids divination.  So this cannot be from the Lord.  It’s from Satan.”

Feng shui is an ancient system of aesthetics believed to help one improve life by receiving positive chi or life force.  In the traditional practice, specialists use compass-like instruments to determine the cosmic forces affect on a site and then align the construction of buildings and the placement of their contents with those cosmic forces.

Hoover first heard about feng shui in the 1980s while she was teaching interior design in Simi Valley, Calif.

“I saw this trend coming up which I couldn’t pronounce, got some books and read about it and thought it was strange,” she says.  “It never made sense to me.  I mean, just from an interior design sense, it violated everything I had ever been taught.  It’s just not sound decorating theory.”

She thought feng shui was a trend that would soon fade.  But as she heard more and more about it, she did more and more research.  And what she found was a philosophy that she saw as a subtle form of the occult and a theat to her religion. (underlining added)

It’s all passed off as innocent, but it isn’t,” Hoover says.  It started as a form of Buddhism, then pulled in ideas from Taoism, the I Ching, Confucianism, transcendental medication, which came from Hinduism and draws from the demonic world.  Many things have touched it.  There’s also a strong basis into paganism, holistic medicine and alternative therapies.”

Hoover contents that the practice of feng shui is dangerous to Christians and Jews because it brings the occult into the church and influences people to forego their faith.

“People read a magazine article or get a book about it and think, ‘oh, this will be fun.’ But if you do it for awhile, it becomes a habit.  And you begin to believe it instead of your faith,” she says.

Hoovers book also attacks many of the practitioners of feng shui as untrained and deceptive.

“There are no credentials for practitioners.  They have no background in interior design.  That doesn’t make too much sense,” she says.  “And some devotees of feng shui are quick to denigrate Christians and Jews and twist Bible passages to their own meaning.”

Whew!  That’s a full frontal assault. Suzanne Chavez of Grants Pas then wrote to the editor:

What credentials does feng shui critic have?

Thank you for printing the interviews with Catelin Hoover, the interior designer whose self-published book educates us about the satanic roots of feng shui.

I now know that Buddhism, Taoism, confucianism, transcendental medication, holistic medicine and alternate therapies are dangerous and evil.  I will now avoid my Hindu friends because I have learned they are closely linked to the demonic world.  Hoover says she is available of talks and seminars, so perhaps I should invite my Asian friends for a meeting with her.

I also leaned from this interview that all practitioners of feng shui are uncredentialed and have no background in interior design.  Maybe reporter Kathleen Alaks can interview Hoover again and ask what Hoover’s credentials ares, since the article did not make that clear.

I can see from the photo, however, that her philosophy of design is based on plastic bins with books shoved askew in them, chairs with ripped vinyl upholstery and desks with scratches gouged deep into the faux redwood finish.

A friend who works ow of Grants Pass writes, “the last word? We’ll see.”  What do you think?

Get Ready for the Crazies

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The holidays are upon us.  Four major events in slightly less than 3 months.  Often there’s unnecessary burnout which detracts from the very core of these events – celebration.  What with the big box stores putting out Christmas merchandise July 5th, many of us are psychologically sick of it.  The culture has transformed what’s supposed to be a celebration into another buying opportunity. And that misses the entire point.

I admit I’ve looked for fast and dirty ways to get through these as if I really care.  Truth be told, I don’t, not when it’s so over commercialized.  But that’s me.  And I’d like to see all of us get back to the real spirit of Halloween, of Thanksgiving, of Christmas and of New Years.  To that end, I’ll be giving a talk in Ashland Monday, November 17 at the Ashland Coop Community Classroom on how to use Feng Shui to reduce holiday stress.

The November December issue of Creative Visions’ newsletter also takes up on this.  If you’re not already a subscriber, I invite you to become one – at least for an issue or two.  If it’s gets to be overload, cancel the subscription.  And know that I Never rent, borrow, buy or distribute anyone’s email.  That’s bad bad karma and there’s enough of that floating abbot not to incur any additional!  If subscribing is something that can help you get through the upcoming time, click here.