Every part of your home from your choice of wall hangings, quality of mirrors, to the position of your bed tells a story about who you are – your joys and your struggles. In fact it can be said, we choose our home as a reflection of who we are. This is most obvious in revealing our health, wealth, relationship, and career issues.
Analyzing how you interface with your home or work environment, and the effect those environments have upon you, is called Feng Shui. Feng Shui (fung sch’way) is an ancient Chinese art and science that like acupuncture has been used to maintain or restore harmony to people’s lives for well over 4000 years. Understandably, over these many years, it has been refined to an incredibly precise system.
There are many techniques used in making a comprehensive feng shui analysis. The most essential evaluation is in regard to siting, structure, and room configuration. But to understand how a home’s structure, your choice of furniture, or wall hangings can effect your health, it is important to understand that most primitive part of our biology, which is our survival mechanism buried deep in our most primitive ‘fight or flight’ response to danger.
How We Respond to Danger
When there is danger, whether real or imagined, the adrenal glands release adrenaline – the so-called ‘fight or flight’ hormone – which speeds up our breathing to bring more oxygen into our lungs, which is then rapidly transported to our muscles by a rapid heart beat and increased blood pressure. After the necessary ‘fight or flight’ action is taken, and the danger has passed, the body should return to normal. Shallow panting should become abdominal breathing, along with calming of the heart and so forth. However, if the stress continues, the various biological systems remain imbalanced, and eventually some facet of the immune system is compromised and inevitably collapses.
Beware ‘Hidden Arrows’
Imagine someone pointing a bow and arrow at you. You say, “Can you point that elsewhere?” “Oh, I won’t let go of the arrow. Trust me.” You inevitably reply, “Though I trust you, I know I will feel more comfortable if you point that thing in a different direction.”
Even if the bow and arrow were carved out of one piece of wood as part of a wooden statue standing in your dining room, you would still feel uncomfortable if it were pointing at you. And our primitive mind goes one step further, it considers anything with a pointy edge threatening.
If there is a pointy leaf dracaena plant at one end of a couch, people will choose to sit at the other end. If there is a dresser near your bed with a sharp corner, though you may never walk into it, that part of your body that would be hurt if you were to walk into it, becomes weakened in anticipation and vulnerable to injury, perhaps when jumping up and down in aerobics class.
Factors That Can Undermine Health
Even the doorway into your bedroom, if it is directly in front of the bed, or directly to one or the other side of the bed, can keep us from sleeping deeply as we keep one eye on the doorway in anticipation of possible danger coming through the door. It is a sure sign of lack of sleep when there is hypertension, high blood pressure, and general irritability. Change the relationship of the bed to the doorway into the bedroom, and deep sleep can again be enjoyed – along with a calmer heart and normal blood pressure.
Other factors that can unconsciously influence health can be a bathroom in the center of the home with corresponding problems with kidneys or urinary tract infections. People living in a house situated at a T-section might constantly feel tense and uptight fearing cars may not turn in time and can crash into the home. A beam over a bed can keep the ‘fight and flight’ mechanism a wake all night worrying, “what if it falls.” As mirrors reflect reality, poor quality mirrors can indicate a distorted sense of reality, which eventually can reflect a weakening of the immune system.
Comfort and Security
The two primary goals of a feng shui evaluation is comfort and security. And no matter how comfortable a home is in regard to furnishings and choice of colors and decorations, it is unlikely that you will fully enjoy those comforts without also enjoying a feeling of security. By looking through the trained eyes of feng shui, we can identify the causes of disharmony. Then by either removing, blocking, or deflecting those hidden arrows, we can free up our energy to live a more dynamically successful, and healthier, life.
