20th March 2005
Spring Equinox; Right answers, wrong reasons; Teletherapy; Exchange of Chi; Music; The hunger site…
Feng Shui Diaries
Chun Fun: Spring Equinox
Solar fortnight beginning:
Sunday March 20th 2005 20.41
Hour Day Month Year
water water earth wood
yum quai gay yute
sute muw muw yu
dog rabbit rabbit rooster
Spring Equinox
So already the nights are shorter than the days. Since about the 9th it has smelt like spring. There’s just a tinge of pollen in the air, a certain dampness and a suspicion of warmth. We ponder whether Easter will be warm enough to re-colonise the garden, to sit outside or even to go away. Someone once said that the great thing about living is Britain is that we have weather rather than climate.
However, the elements (above) are still pretty conflicted and the cheerlessly named Place Curse of Ging Jit is succeeded by the equally unprepossessing Calamity Curse. Jolly stuff. Derek Walters*, the Western World’s authority on this stuff says that the Calamity Curse brings misfortune through natural catastrophe such as fire and flood.
Right now the chi is too yin. In fact the way things are now almost describes the difference between yin and feminine. The extreme of yin is dark, destructive even. The feminine principle emerges from this however and allows creation.
This powerful female energy – possibly the most powerful there is – may bring major change for the better later in April. It is already peeping out; probably best exemplified by the McCartney sisters who have revealed to the world the punch line to the IRA joke. A banana skin dropped decades ago is finally stepped on and that particular justification for killing is over.
Only women work like this. When will we ever learn? as Pete Seeger once asked.
*Chinese Astrology (Watkins Publishing) ISBN 1-84293-025-7
Right Answers, Wrong Reasons
As I usually do, I drafted a sketchy ba zi# (or personal feng shui) for my new client Lizzie, last week. I arrived at 7am, in time to catch the Dragon chi as I surveyed her flat and the Victorian building it was set in and tried to work out how far the grounds had stretched a century ago.
I like to work at that time of day. There is a sleeping-in-waking quality about it that bypasses logic. We are more likely at that time, I find, to see the truth without the hard work of reason.
Having braved the cold, establishing facing and sitting directions, I joined Lizzie for a cup of tea and started to pull information from the ba zi. Artistic? Yes. Very distinctive relationship with father and therefore men. One difficult relationship. Close to daughter. Yes, yes, yes. A new Big Fate started in January at your 48th birthday, I said.
She looked blank. I would not have guessed but I had flattered her by six years. The ba zi was drawn up entirely wrong. And yet I knew so much about her.
Divination is always some combination of good drafting, respectful reading of the symbols and intuitive leaps. But this was dreadful drafting. And yet.
So I owe Lizzie an accurate ba zi when I see her again and whole new possibilities have opened as to what is going on.
# Personal feng shui, available with 1hour debrief or as the 1st of 5 one-hour life-changing sessions.
Teletherapy
My friend Nikki has been doing some distance healing for me this last few weeks. Everyone can do this of course but to have the assistance of another person who is powerful and benevolent is always helpful.
In one case there was a lot of woo-woo* to deal with; more ghosts than you could shake a censer at; the other a stuckness that I judged was best handled this way.
The problem is that getting hung up on the woo-woo can be a powerful obstacle to responsibility. We decide that a ghost or a geopathic stress or cutting chi is actually the cause of all our problems. It is and it isn’t of course. But if we are to gain command of our lives we have to take responsibility whatever the landscape looks like. It’s a paradox. Just the sort of trick the tao would play: this causes that except when it doesn’t.
I remember when I was an Insurance Broker in the 1980’s and someone sold me my first computer. He said :”You’d be amazed. People think their lives will work once they’ve got a computer.” It stopped me in my tracks. That was exactly what I thought!
* woo-woo™ : the inexplicable, the unknown, ghosts, hauntings etc.
Exchange of Chi
I met with an agency this week who specialise in representing psychics, mediums and so on. Their business is putting tv and magazines together with wierdos like myself. While I was there I did just a tad of feng shui for them. “An elastoplast,” I said. “You’ll have to pay me though.”
I explained to them the law of exchange of chi which basically says that you must pay me something to save me from resentment and to save you from taking the work for granted which will reduce its value to you.
This rule does not apply just to feng shui. It’s a sound principle whenever we contribute or receive a service. If our experience is that we have got away with something, we tend to be diminished. Similarly if we feel unrecognised we are likely to judge the culprit and file them away in the darkest part of our mind under the heading “Bad”.
Grudges, grievances, even wars start this way and prevention is so much better than cure.
Music
Music is generally reckoned to be of the metal element although some masters judge it to be water. So where the problem with your house or part of it is to do with excess earth and the solution may be metal or water, music is a perfectly acceptable expedient. Often when I find basements or spare rooms that have gone yin I recommend music because it’s so simply done and so effective.
And for your information, all houses on a South West/North East axis have this problem in spades during the current Fate period – which lasts until 2016, by the way.
Oh and not just tibetan bells or tasteful whispering flutey noises but also rock’n’roll. Guns and Roses are wonderful for waking up the chi.
The Hunger Site
I’m printing this again so you don’t forget: as you click onto thehungersite.com (for free) a cup of food is passed onto those who need it.
As we experience the extraordinarily fortuitous karma of living in the peaceful plenty of the UK it’s doubly important, it seems to me, to do simple things like this.
Spring in Iraq may not be so picturesque.
Best wishes,
Richard Ashworth
Richardashworthfengshui@hotmail.com
Richard is featured in Channel Five’s Housebusters during 2005.
As ever, names have been changed to protect privacy.