The environment around a home matters far more than the way its interior is arranged. In the end, energies are little affected by how an apartment is decorated. If it receives good energies from outside, it makes no difference whether the wardrobes are burr elm or come from Ikea. You could even have inherited Grandma’s furniture: the Qi doesn’t care, as long as it can flow freely through the apartment.
You could say that a house acts like a mirror: it reflects the environment in which we live. If the mirror’s reflection is blurred, so will our life be.
This is worth repeating, because it is fundamental: to assess the harmony of a house, you must start by observing the harmony of its surroundings.
If your idea of Feng Shui is that placing an aquarium here and a bronze object there is enough to fix energy problems, it may be time to revisit a few beliefs…
An excerpt from Robert Cialdini’s book Pre-Suasion sheds some light on this curious phenomenon: the influence of places on our thinking.
“When I wrote my first book for a general audience, I was on sabbatical at a university other than my own. On campus, my office was on an upper floor, and I had arranged it so that I could see through the window a whole row of imposing buildings housing various institutes, centres and academic departments… In town, I rented an apartment that also had a desk set in front of a window. By pure chance, the view was the exact opposite of the one from my university office. Instead of the rigid bastion of academia, I saw the flow of passers-by – mostly pedestrians on their way to work, to the shops, or to one of the thousand ordinary activities of everyday life…
Writing in these two places produced an effect I had not expected and only noticed after about a month, when I gathered and read all the draft pages of the project: the work done at home was much better than the work done at the university, because it was frankly better suited to the general audience I was aiming for. In both style and structure, the texts written at the university were fit only for colleagues.”
But, you may say, I live in a set-back apartment, in a hidden courtyard where the sun never reaches. It isn’t the furniture that blocks the Qi from reaching my home, but rather the fact that my apartment looks onto the charming little courtyard of a Haussmann building, on a small, dark Paris street.
If you live in Paris, when you go shopping or meet friends for a cup of tea, take the time to look for a place where the Qi flows well.
Do you live on the Left Bank? Go to Le Bon Marché and have your tea at a table, if possible, by a window overlooking Square Boucicaut.
This little square is a place where the energies of the crossroads gather before flowing in to feed Le Bon Marché with their energy of prosperity.
In Feng Shui, the Chinese call such a space a Ming Tang: an open place where the Qi can gather before spreading out.