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"Feng" means wind and "Shui" means water. In Chinese culture wind and water are associated with good health, thus good Feng Shui came to mean good fortune. Feng Shui is an ancient art and science developed about 3,000 BC in China. It is a complex body of knowledge that reveals how to balance the energies of any given space to assure health and good fortune for people inhabiting it.
Historically, Feng Shui was widely used to orient buildings - often spiritually significant structures such as tombs, but also dwellings and other structures - in an auspicious manner. Depending on the particular style of Feng Shui being used, an auspicious site could be determined by reference to local features such as bodies of water, stars, or a compass.
The underlying premise of Feng Shui is that everything in your surrounding, down to the smallest details of furnishing and décor, can either further your aims in life or work against you. By understanding the subtle currents of energy that flow through hour body and through everything in the universe, you can arrange your living and working environments to help you reach your goals. – Simon Brown, Practical Feng Shui.
Feng Shui seeks to promote prosperity, good health, and general well being by examining how energy, ch’i (vital energy, prana, ether etc.) flows through a particular room, house, building, or garden. Feng Shui considers yin, feminine and passive energy, and yang, which is masculine and hot. It also looks at the five elements - water, fire, wood (ether), metal (air), and earth, and the external environment. The points on the compass, with eight separate directions - north, northeast, east, southeast, south, southwest, west, and northwest - are also important.
The magnetic compass was invented for Feng Shui and has been in use since its invention. Traditional Feng Shui instrumentation consists of the Lo-pan, though a conventional compass could suffice if one understood the differences. The Lo-pan is a disk of lackered wood carrying in its center under glass a small mariner’s compass. Some of the characters in the surrounding twelve circles are of different colors. The first circle contains the eight trigrams, the second the numerals from one to nine, the five being omitted as it belongs in the center. The third row represents twenty four celestial constellation etc.
Medicine Wheel Feng Shui is based on the innate understanding that anciet people had about the natural forces that shaped their world. These wise predecessors instinctively understood that the rhythms of the elements and the magnetic flow of the four cardinal directions were powerful forces which profoundly affected all life on earth. The knew that within each element were patterns of energy that permeated the universe. The used this understanding to develop cosmological models to orient themselves on earth and create a sense of balance in their homes. – Denise Linn, Feng Shui for the Soul.
