Where does feng shui come from?
Like its name, much of the understanding of feng shui in the West today has come from the East, where it has been practised for thousands of years. The ancient Chinese had an understanding of the invisible world of energy that lay behind all things. Their knowledge and observations were expressed in the I Ching, a profound oracle which encoded, in the 64 hexagrams of broken and straight lines, a description of the nature of all things. This huge body of wisdom became the foundation of all traditional studies, including feng shui.
Yet the application of feng shui today need not be Oriental. Traditional peoples from all over the world have studied the relationship of humans living on earth under the influences of the forces of heaven. They have looked at the cycles of the seasons, the movements of the planets and, guided by their observations of the natural world, they have reached an understanding of the ways in which different places and homes can affect well-being and fortune.
Over time, different forms of feng shui heve developed as practitioners recorded how they understood the nature of the world, classifying the information in maps and tables. Data on the shape and form of the land (Form School) and the charting of astrological influences on the Earth (Compass School) were gathered and evaluated.
Classical feng shui, which draws together aspects of both schools, is very much alive today because there is still a huge body of the older recorded information available from the Chinese. Whereas, originally, feng shui meant living intuitively through your heart and body, the classicalk approach was much more scientific and, with its complex calculations to evaluate the quality of the energy in an environment, was more about the mind. It has continued to have its appeal through the centuries. Through the articles on this site, we look how you can be guided by your intuition to determine what feels right for you in your home. But it also actively presents a system of looking at how energy moves according to a "bagua", a map of energy thousands of years old, taking into account the importance of symbolism, and understanding the relationship of everything in terms of five types of energy.
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Summary:
A good interior designer will nudge you further along pathways upon which you may have already placed a tentative step. But a good interior designer will never impose their taste on your environment. Designers are there to work for you and to help you to achieve your design goal. If you're not happy with something, always remember you can say no.