Published: April 04, 2008 01:48 pm            

VIDEO STORY: Feng Shui Your World

What were ancient metaphysical connections between the cosmic and the corporal are today regarded as lifestyle choices.

Activities like yoga, meditation and even wine drinking once had spiritual connotations to go along with their more earth-bound benefits. The grunt work of personal progress, be it for health or other form of improvement, is sometimes easier to take with a patina of mystic backstory.

Enter feng shui (from the Chinese for “wind and water,” pronounced “fung-schway”), a discipline of architecture and interior design more than 3,000 years in the making, with exploding popularity in the 21st century.

The idea is to make and keep a house or work area harmonious and de-cluttered, each section of the place aligned with a variety of virtues and assigned a task (career, prosperity, creativity, etc.), the end result a space that is an oasis of calm and empowerment.

A calming and empowering environment is a rare thing, so I visited the feng shuied (yes, it’s a verb) Kenmore home of Matthew LaChiusa and Renee Filip with an open mind. They, with 6 year-old son Matthew, maintain a north-facing house with an astonishing lack of the sort of stuff that spills all over most people’s lives— those half-finished projects, those works in progress, the things someone brought through the door that never found a permanent spot.

This is feng shui in action.

Realtor and feng shui practitioner Linda Ellson gave their house the treatment, but it goes beyond a mere clean-out-the-clutter exercise. She follows the pa qua, an octagon-shaped map that helps decide how to designate areas in the house.

The northeast end of the house, for example, is for “knowledge and education” — hence, the bookshelf. The southwest is for “partnership” and houses a collection of framed him-and-her photos. Each room has “the five different types of energy”— earth, fire, metal, water and wood — represented by color or by example, and all furniture is installed with an eye toward proper placement. Like a quality hotel suite, there is nothing haphazard, and visiting here is a calming experience.

“I’ve always had a predilection to the metaphysical,” says Filip as she explains the reasoning behind the method. “All living things have a connectedness, and this makes you more open to those kinds of thoughts.”

Adds Ellson, “It’s another way to make the house comfortable, a personal way of empowerment.”

It is a beautifully arranged living space, but some people might find all this unified tranquility a bit constraining. Anyone who admits to being something of a slob, for example, or the soccer mom neighbors with athletic, mud-encased kids. Still, this is not a Zen monastery or a design museum, but a working house containing one active child and two busy grownups. Yes, the system works.

Filip tells of her son’s 10-day stay at Women and Children’s Hospital four years ago. She and Ellson feng shuied his room, rearranging the monitors, adding symbolic minerals and other totems, and witnessed his recovery.

“Jokes were made about sacrificing chickens, but within a minute of reorienting the bed, alarms went off, and his natural oxygen levels increased.”

At this point in telling the story, where some people would employ the word “miracle” or “prayer,” Filip simply says, “Alternative methodologies stabilized him.

“And the staff (of the hospital) liked to hang out there, in his room.”

Ellson, who operates the consulting firm Feng Shui Your World, has success stories, too, of a Buffalo law firm that arranged its desks and floor plans to capitalize on the energy feng shui provides, and of homes for sale that find buyers immediately after a feng shui treatment.

It should be pointed out that no one involved in this home décor adventure could be identified as a spacy, New Age-type who regards his or her aura a status symbol. While there are various rocks and minerals in each room of the house, and the mantelpiece is the home of a pi yao (a small sculpture of a lion-like animal symbolizing abundance), the man of the house is a football fan, among other things, and two plushy living room armchairs are aimed squarely north at a massive television.

Neither are they evangelists. “Feng shui is not a religion,” says Ellson, “although it draws from Taoist, Buddhist, and Confusian principles.”

Well then, what is it? It is evidently derived from Chinese astrology, and from a rural ethic predicated on proper alignment of lines and forms. Thousands of years before the invention of the magnetic compass, feudal-age Chinese worried about north, south and where to put the furniture.

Feng shui’s practicality in modern life is its capability to encourage household serenity and to reduce clutter, two commodities spectacularly lacking in many American homes. If feng shui can deliver on those points and improve them, then debating its history or pretenses isn’t worth the bother. Our children and grandchildren practice martial arts and watch Japanese cartoons; we stir-fry in woks and envy Buddhist serenity. The origins of feng shui hardly matter; it’s clearly all in the way that you use it.

Contact reporter Ed Adamczyk at niagaraliving@gnnewspaper.com

        

• Click to discuss this story with other readers on our forums.