Looking for a Deeper Feng Shui Experience: Astrology and Feng Shui

 

I have been reading books about feng shui for some time, but I didn't grasp how broad and deep the subject is until this past year when I picked up a book by author Master Lam Kam Chuen which put feng shui in the greater context of many other facets of life than just the arrangement of one's home.

As he explains, in China feng shui masters train for decades in the breadth of the system and then specialize in a specific area. Feng shui can be understood to encompass health in many aspects - from diet, exercise, energy balance, meditation, and the home. In the West we tend to separate these into their own fields without training on the interactions between these aspects of life; thus while you may likely have heard of Tai Chi, Chi Kung, Acupuncture, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Chinese Astrology as well as Feng Shui, within the Chinese culture they are interconnected and all spring from the same worldview. It is all about coming into harmony with the universe.

In contrast, the individualist perspective of the modern West has experienced great separation between all these aspects of life, and only in the past century have we progressively been finding the ways in which health intertwines - from physical to mental to spiritual, from the body to the home to the environment, and more.

Roots of Feng Shui

Intrigued by Master Lam's explanation, I sprang to read more to understand the Chinese point of view further. Since Master Lam mentioned how masters would draw up the astrological horoscopes for each member of the household before applying feng shui remedies (and even go so far as to specifically prescribe what day and time a remedy should be applied, per the astrological factors), I looked at The Imperial Guide to Feng-Shui & Chinese Astrology: The Only Authentic Translation From the Original Chinese, by Thomas F. Aylward. His book includes large excerpts of the primary feng shui text used in China even today.

This book is a fascinating read, but it clearly opened up for me the gap between how I am able to conceptualize and experience feng shui and how a native Chinese person would experience it. It reminded me of a text I read in my college anthropology class about trying to understand how the French related to cats in the 1800s when it is so foreign to how people relate to cats today (maybe you had to be there). Even if I were to study the various Chinese languages and immerse myself in the culture, at some level it will never be the same nearly "intrinsic" understanding that someone native to the culture can know.

Feng Shui Parallels to Western Wisdom

So what is a person to do? Where is the wealth of knowledge in the West? Did we ever have it?

On one hand, it may be impossible to ask such a question. Eastern cultures developed alongside a mythological worldview that valued teaching the individual to merge with the collective, to experience the Whole (think Indian guru reaching enlightenment). This kind of relationship to "creating harmony" is not typical in Western culture at all.

On the other hand, it may be that something like it existed (in a version that follows Western perspective), but the pieces were lost or split apart. Though we are limited by what was retained as power centers shifted over time, within Western Astrology there are markers for many different ways that the stars above depict ways to understand our lives on earth, much as Chinese Astrology does - life path, relationships, personality, health.

Exploring Astrology Alongside Feng Shui

As I go through my own experiment of how my home environment affects my life, I will be inserting discussion of how my personal astrological chart is reflected in the triggered areas. I hope to explore some various ideas by other people about how Western astrology and feng shui complement each other, perhaps even look at how some of the more basic Chinese astrology/feng shui concepts (lucky stars, etc.) compare, and maybe along the way we'll uncover more that we can predict!