Friday April 4th 2008 18.16
MayDay, MayDay
Richard Ashworth
Feng Shui Diaries
Solar fortnight beginning:
Friday April 4th 2008 18.16
Hour Day Month Year
water wood fire earth
gui chia bing wu
yuw xu zhen tze
sheep dog dragon rat
Month: bing zhen the fire Dragon
Solar Fortnight: Ching ming Clear and Bright
MayDay, MayDay
Short one; this fortnight; usual excuses. Busy, busy, busy.
Attached is a shortpiece about the International Feng Shui Congress in Turin the weekend of the 19th September. It’s an attachment so you can open it or not as you choose or perhaps visit www.torinofengshui2008.itYou get busy too of course.
I will be appearing at the Congress myself as well as such authorities as Simona Mainini (an architect schooled in classical feng shui who designed among other buildings, the monkey house at the LA Zoo) Howard Choy, Jon Sandifer, Derek Walters and Richard Creightmore.
This year, as well as my regular work – I’m surveying most days while juggling ba zi’s* with my other commitments – we have been offering a series of weekend workshops in which we push the envelope of the ba zi’s power in rapid life change. Blocks have been removed, smiles returned to faces, loves and lives rekindled and careers opened up. There is a Spirit and Destiny review# on the website but my favourite feedback remains:
“Rebecca has accepted my invitation to go out – yahoooooooooooooooooooo:-)) fantastic fantastic fantastic from a manufacturing entrepreneur aged 55.
For the reasons above, I attach blurb about the next workshop starting Saturday June 28th. If you’re stuck and fancy employing the mysteries of Chinese Metaphysics to unstickin good company and rural surroundings, let us know. There is an optional 3rd (Technical) Day for those who wish to learn how a ba zi is put together.
* For nubes, personal feng shui based on moment of birth, sometimes called
Four Pillars or (misleadingly) a Chinese Horoscope.
# http://www.imperialfengshui.info/site/1/horses_mouth.html
The room was humming harder.
I find myself in one of those huge family pubs drafting ba zi’s for my visit to Carole. I often draft in Starbucks, not so often in pubs but this is Wednesday night when Joey has his drum class. The class happens to be above my head in the same building. I can hear the odd thump. Those who know the GU postcode will know exactly where I am.Actually it’s we: Sheila, my 2nd son Alex and my daughter Jessica are with me. We are unable to find a table in the better-lit South-East of the place and are forced into a dark basement area towards the North. Almost instantly I am nauseous. The feeling is like all the worst aspects of being drunk without any of the good stuff. It is as if the ceiling is too low and the floors are moving. Oh my God, I sound like a Procol Harum lyric. In 1967 they called this feeling psychedelic. Now it’s just nasty.
Jessica who is young, beautiful and grounded, is impatient with me.
“Oh Daddy,” she says. “Don’t.”
It’s like the woo-woo equivalent of embarrassing Daddy dancing. Not that I am dramatic or ostentatious. I just need to move out of the darkness. It hurts. Her main problem of course is that she feels it too.
“Let’s trust that space in the light will become available,” I suggest and indeed it does.
“Now sit down and behave yourself,” she tells me. I am grateful for the light.
What can this all this darkness mean?
On one level this is simple feng shui. This year the tai sui is in the North. This means that the most powerful force known to feng shui masters is pushing from that direction. The rule is not to disturb it but there is constant disturbance in the North here and the refurbishment has created a sort of bull pit in the lower floor of this listed building, accessed by wide stairs. It is an inappropriately busy feature in an area that calls for quiet. On a Friday night this part of the pub and the pavement outside are an intimidating proposition, fueled by testosterone, alcohol and who knows what. Not that I have an ain’t-it-awfultake on kids flooding themselves with alcohol by the way. At 6th Form College and University so much is demanded of them.
Students need downtime; kids need to play, don’t they?.
On another level this uncomfortable energy is attached to the people sitting here right now. Opposite are a pair of sad-looking middle-aged women with dental problems and the dried-up yellowness that attaches to self-abuse.
On a 3rd level, for me to feel it, the darkness must be my stuff. I was 15 in 1967. So I was just too young to be a hippy back before drugs were recognized for the overdraft on the energy bank that they are. I was fortunate that they were never my demon. These experiences become an asset when we choose to feel our own feelings, because they allow us to feel other peoples’. That level of empathy is partly a simple drawing on past experience and partly a preparedness to be present in the moment, regardless of what it feels like. This allows us to help others who for the most part are trying not to feel.
When we feel, we wake up it’s as simple as that.
What trauma, upset, abuse, neglect or abandonment has felt so bad to these crumpled women in front of me that the horror of chemicals is preferable?
Finally these ba zi’s are for Carole’s husband and son. So this is a clue as to what I will find at her house.
And sure enough when I get there at 10am sharp one morning, the following week, she tells me a lurid tale of drug dealers and domestic violence.
It has been an interesting journey. I travel by rail when I can but the Sussex Coast is hard to reach from Surrey. I catch a train to Havant and from there one towards Brighton and after an hour and a quarter I find myself at Chichester just 20 minutes drive from where I started. I buy a croissant from the trolley that has allowed the rail company to fill every inch of this train with people without wasting any space on a buffet car. A couple are threatening their toddler with smacks if he doesn’t stop his harmless chuntering. Fortunately he’s unimpressed because when I alight I’m about one stop from intervening.
Carole’s son has teetered on the brink of self-destruction. I feel in his room, the same sort of stuff described above. There is an additional nausea that I feel in my gut.
“Reflux,” Carole tells me.
It’s all I can do to hang on to my croissant.
She loves the house but it has history. I note that it is just off North-South which suggests show-biz. She confirms that several of her neighbours are thesps. She has clearly settled the house somewhat with space clearing and Three Gate Theory but it’s still not at peace. I am here to finally sort it: the nuclear option.
There is more learning for me here. The problem, just like the pub, is to do with rising and falling. Broadly at both of her doors, front and back, there are steps. It’s too active for the pockets of energy here. The front is made worse by a fence that cuts across the natural openness to keep her cocker spaniel in but the problem is that these are yang active features that need to be yin, that is quiet.
The Flying Stars (or temporary energies) define these pockets of chi as 5:2 and 2:5 respectively. These pairs of numbers known as burning earth when they appear together will exacerbate whatever nastiness there is. These combinations are particularly hard to deal with because both numbers represent powerful pockets of negative energy. To deal with the first we want yang activity, to deal with the second yin. It is as if we must both slow them down and speed them up. Some authorities use metal features and the colour white here but the issues, violence and abuse are metal in quality. What we need is water to drain the metal. And quiet.
Carole has, like many of us she has learned a lot the hard way. She has always been her own woman and now has a successful marriage at the third attempt and a son who has directed his discomfort into a career. She is very sensitive and possesses a rare native intelligence.
We both feel a welter of uneasy energy in several of the rooms which we work to dispel. Her attempts to still the house (which was chaotic, I learn, long before she arrived) have proved impermanent. There is no point my second-guessing her wind chimes. This is more fundamental.
Because the house is on a North-South axis, like the pub, we have to be careful what we disturb. So we calm down what needs to be quiet and boost what needs to wake up. I do a calculation and then we move mirrors around in effect to take the doors off the problem spots.
It’s an art to make a doorway quiet. Opening and closing is inherently active. But we moderate the flow with shapes. Ideally there would be a flat goy moon hill at one door and a rounded mou kuk at the other; that is real honest-to-goodness promontories. But on the Sussex sea front there are no rolling hills. We agree to imitate these shapes in the surrounds to the steps and to use deep blue to drain the vicious yang metal that hangs here. That should do it. There is more but that’s the heart of it.
Next year, I tell her, we’ll alter the orientation but I can’t do that while the tai sui is in the North. Let’s talk then. Keep me in the picture meanwhile.
It would be good to talk with the owners of the pub.
Richard Ashworth © 2008
Names have been changed to protect..uh…me.
My (still) super-duper (still) revamped website is atwww.imperialfengshui.info and my book The Feng Shui Diaries is available now from:
Amazon(www.amazon.co.uk/Feng-Shui-Diaries-Richard-Ashworth/dp/1846940176/sr=8-4/qid=1166798863/ref=sr_1_4/026-3383613-4930062?ie=UTF8&s=books
Waterstoneswww.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/displayProductDetails.do?sku=5567853)
or indeed Tescos. Do buy it from a bookshop if you can.
Feedback is welcomed including that you never want to hear from me again if that happens to be the case. Please also let us know if you are getting too many or too few diaries or that they are appearing in Cinemascope on your screen or whatever. Thanks. R