Feng shui your home and change your life
By Karen Kingston
DENPASAR (JP): Feng shui is the ancient art of balancing and harmonizing energies in buildings to enhance the lives of the people who live or work there.
Put simply, we spend many hours of our lives inside buildings and they do affect us for better or worse. So it makes a lot of sense to find out how get the best out of them.
My own approach to feng shui is rather different to that of other practitioners because I work directly with the energy of each space.
It all began 24 years ago when I discovered I could sense energies with my hands. The history of events is recorded in the walls and furniture of a building in the form of subtle electromagnetic imprints, and through reading and interpreting these it is possible to detect everything of significance that had ever happened there.
Traumatic or repetitive events become more deeply embedded and have a correspondingly greater effect on present day occupants.
To begin a consultation, the first thing I do is go around the entire inside perimeter of the building, taking an energy reading. I describe the process as being able to read information with my hands in the same way as I might read a book with my eyes.
Mattresses, as an example, are very absorbent. People leave a complete energy imprint of themselves in their bed. I usually do a first pass to read what is happening with them on a physical level and then further passes, if necessary, to fine-tune to the mental, emotional, sexual and spiritual levels. It's actually easy to feel this energy and most people can do it. The tricky bit is to tune in to the right level and translate the information accurately.
Space clearing
The more I have developed these abilities, the more obvious it has become to me that people living in homes with fresh, vibrant, free-flowing energy are mostly healthy, happy and successful, and people living in homes with stagnant, stuck energy are exactly the opposite.
The first book I wrote, Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui, describes a 21-step Space Clearing ceremony which anyone can do to clear this stuck energy out. The book became an international bestseller and was Amazon.com's best-selling feng shui title of 1998.
To give you a better understanding of what Space Clearing is about, try this. If you are reading this article inside a building, just stop for a moment and take a look around you. Is it physically clean?
Hopefully it is. But is it energetically clean? Unless you have space cleared it, it very probably is not. In the same way as everyday living generates housework on a daily basis, we also generate psychic debris.
And just as physical dust, cobwebs and so on collect in corners and nooks and crannies of a room, stagnant energy does too. If you are living in a place that other people have lived in before you, then the problem compounds because their energy will still be in there as well.
A while ago I did a consultation for a woman in America. Through energy sensing I discovered that the previous occupant of her apartment had been a man who suffered severe and persistent severe headaches. She admitted she had never had more than an occasional headache in her life before moving to the apartment, but she was now experiencing some excruciating ones. Space Clearing cleansed these frequencies from the building and her headaches disappeared.
One house I visited in England had seemingly excellent feng shui. It was reasonably well situated, beautifully decorated, full of elegant furniture and decorative objects. It looked ideal. But when I took an energy reading, I immediately understood why the people in the house had been depressed since they moved there two years ago. Embedded in the walls was the energy imprint of the previous owner.
By fine-tuning, I discovered this was an elderly widow who was so grief-stricken when her husband died that she fell into a hopeless depression for the remaining 10 years of her own life. This residue of grief was still hanging in the air and profoundly affecting the new occupants. Space Clearing cleared it out.
"It feels so different it's hard to believe we're living in the same place," they told me a week later. They said it felt as if a huge weight of rocks had been lifted from on top of them.
Clutter
Whenever I come across clutter, its energy field is unmistakable. It presents an obstacle to the flow of energy and has an unpleasant, sticky, unclean feel to it, like moving my hands through unseen cobwebs.
This is what first made me realize that clutter causes problems in people's lives. It also has a distinctive musty, pervasive odor that I can smell if I walk into someone's home, even if the clutter is hidden away from sight. Actually, if I tune in, I can also smell it in a person's aura (the energy field around their body) if they stand near me, because they become imbued with the smell of it.
But don't worry about this if you ever meet me in person -- there is so much clutter in the world that I don't tune in too often! The good news is that after clearing clutter, this unwholesome, stagnant energy and accompanying odor quickly disappear.
Most people have no idea how much their clutter affects them. They fondly believe it to be an asset, or at least a potential asset after it has been sorted through and organized. It is only when they start clearing it out that they realize how much better they feel without it.
People who hoard clutter say they cannot find the energy to begin to clear it. They constantly feel tired. But the stagnant energy that stacks up around clutter actually causes tiredness and lethargy. Clearing it releases new energy.
One woman wrote to tell me: "I stayed up late to read your book and got so 'wired' that I couldn't sleep. Finally, I got out of bed and started clearing my clutter until four in the morning! I had to go to work the next day but didn't feel at all tired."
It is important to realize how fundamentally intrinsic clutter clearing is to the whole practice of feng shui. Most books on the subject mention it only in passing or not at all. Perhaps they assume their readers have already dealt with this issue, but of course the truth is that most have not.
I do not consider clutter clearing to be one process and feng shui to be another. I have come to realize that clutter clearing is one of the most powerful, transformative aspects of feng shui there is, and in most cases, feng shui cures; enhancements are at best only minimally effective until this has been done.
The bagua
The feng shui bagua gives further insight into the problems caused by clutter. The bagua is a grid that can be laid over the plans of any building to read off where each aspect of your life is located. So in your home there is an area that is to do with prosperity, one for relationships, another for career, one for health and so on. Clutter in your prosperity area will block the flow of money in your life.
I once gave some feng shui advice to a woman in Bali who then began clearing some of her clutter to improve her business. She was puzzled as to why nothing improved as a result of this until she discovered that her staff had diligently been rescuing everything she had thrown away and storing it in the prosperity corner behind her house!
Another person living in America recently wrote to tell me: "After reading your book I was motivated to take a day and clear all the junk out of my home. I worked for 13 hours straight and got rid of stuff I'd been hoarding for years, especially the items in the prosperity section of my home. That was on Monday. Today is Thursday and in the mail I received a check for US$8,775 from a relative as a gift. Needless to say, everyone I know is hearing about your wonderful book."
The writer will be teaching a selection of her most popular workshops at Kamandalu Resort in Ubud, Bali, on March 9, March 11 through March 13, and March 18 and March 19. For further information, contact Miranda at 0361-285027/081139 8554, or e- mail: ekabawana@denpasar.wasantara.net.id. Or visit Kingston's website at www.spaceclearing.com