Sunday January 7th 2007 01.32

siu hohn – Slight Cold

Richard Ashworth

Feng Shui Diaries

Solar fortnight beginning:

Sunday January 7th 2007 01.32

Hour Day Month Year

earth metal metal fire

jee xin xin ding

chow chow chow hai

ox ox ox pig

Month: xin hai the metal Ox

Solar Fortnight: siu hohn Slight Cold

Wind fans Pig

As I calculate the year from the solstice which was of course on the 22nd December, this is the first diary of the Fire Pig. Pundits all over the world disagree but I’ve not yet heard a convincing argument against it. The shortest day is clearly the sun’s idea of the end of the year.

Not that it’s been especially cold but it has been so dark. So dark that even the slight lightening of January is a contrast. I find myself surprised that I can see my hand in front of my face at 4pm.

And the winds! Feng shui of course means wind and water. Here the door was blown off the garden store and the trampoline is rocking as I write.

The chi as the classic says, is borne on the wind and held by the water. Fast winds dissipate it. Nothing stays firm. Nothing can settle. Xun the wind, is above all, thorough. By extension xun is a healer and the healing is in the thoroughness. First a flap then a tap, an insistent force that just will not relent. In Western Australia they call the wind that rips in off the South Pacific, the Fremantle Doctor, in the Caribbean and the North East of England, the prevailing wind is sometimes called the widowmaker.

Wind changes everything. Nothing escapes the wind.

This is a time for plans not foundations.


Sty Guru: Where to do what in the Year of the Pig

2007 is not only a Fire Pig but also what we call a 2 kua. If you draw a lo shu (or magic square) for this year, the 2 is the number at the centre which indicates its character. A 2 year is yin, that is more feminine but yin doesn’t quite mean feminine. Too much yin is very unyielding and it’s that sort of year.

At the end of this diary entry there is more on this for those with the appetite.

The Medium is the Message

Before Christmas my wife Sheila and I attended a New Age Festival where I was giving a workshop. I rarely write anything without her endorsement and never speak in public without it. So making a weekend of it with her meant that I could be very clear what I wanted from the workshop and what I could give to it. On the way down we took the opportunity to catch up with our friend Alex, one of our favourite people. After a 200-mile drive, I wasn’t switched to feng shui mode but Alex’s new home in Devon reflected her life as homes tend to. There were for instance, two front doors, one solid and one flimsy, representing her on-off relationship and the house although warm and cosy, retained something of the character of the previous occupant.

“Lady of a certain age? A little stroppy? Tempted by cynicism,” I suggested.

Alex nodded.

“How can you tell?”

“One, I can feel it in the house. Energies just sit. Secondly I feel it in you.”

Alex is beautiful, smart and open and not yet 30 but there it was. Hopefully I will get the chance to do some work with this.

The workshop took place in a big hotel conference room overlooking the Irish Sea. The sun was warm but the water was choppy. Out of the bay window beyond the audience I could see the waves crashing the harbour headland which stuck out in the distinctive Tiger embrace formation which speaks of assertive women. As if there were any shortage of these in my life. The audience were a fun, feisty bunch with some interesting questions. One lady asked me about nasty formations outside the house. A tree was too close to her front door.

“Which direction?”

“South East.”

“Well,” I said drawing the Imperial Heaven Stars in front of the box I had scrawled to represent her house. The Imperial Heaven Stars show what the impact of close external features can be. “What that means depends on exactly where in the South East. There are three positions or Mountains there: the Dragon, the Wind and the Snake.”

She studied my boxes and stick men.

“Dragon,” she said.

“I was afraid of that. Broadly the Wind and the Snake are okay but the Dragon holds tin diu or Heaven Hook which means nothing should be too high here.”

“What if it is?”

“Animals run over, miscarriages, lost children” I answered. Baleful stuff. I know this particular Heaven Star well. I once had an overgrown laburnum tree there but that’s another story.

The lady went quiet. After the workshop she took Sheila to one side and told her that she had lost a child while living in this house. I’d rather not be right about things like that.

After the workshop, Sheila had a reading with a psychic. It was a mixed experience. Some of the observations on the tape Sheila asked me to listen to with her on the drive home, were spot on. But some of it really wasn’t. As we listened however, an interesting pattern emerged.

The psychic saw that Sheila was very busy and wore a lot of hats. On a typical day she juggles me, a household and her own business as well as overseeing the home education of our eleven-year old, Joey. In addition she is the source of wisdom for seekers throughout the GU postcodes and routinely does the work of three women which is of course, equivalent to seven or eight men and minus the wingeing. Many clients graduate from survey and ba zi sessions with me to the masterclass of phonecalls with Sheila.

So the psychic was correct that she was busy but then she started to tell her that she was put-upon and needed time for herself. Sheila was incensed by being addressed as a rather pathetic stereotype.

“You’ll lose weight after Christmas,” the voice on the tape added. No prizes for that; who loses weight in December?

“Your work colleagues aren’t always supportive,” she said. I thought of Joey experimenting with novel cuss words while he battled with his online Maths tutor in her office and of myself needing Sheila’s immediate reflection at no notice.

“One day soon you’ll be your own boss.”

Again a real perception followed by offbeam generic advice. Sheila is a successful theatrical agent who has been self-employed most of her life.

“The family’s dissipated; you need a holiday together.”

That would make a fifth (modest) family holiday, getaway, what have you, this year but it’s true this has been a hard year to get everyone in one place at the same time.

We tend to be all-or-nothing with such reflection. Some dismiss it altogether on principle. The thing to remember is that the fact of being psychic does not make the psychic’s advice worth taking. Often we hang on every word of the genuine seer or dismiss them wholesale. One or the other. But what if she were psychic but just not very bright?

The master psychics I have known – take my good friend Michele Knight for instance – have a genuine gift and are also smart. They’ve seen the world and read a few books. They have a moral and ethical grounding through which to draw worthwhile advice from miraculous perception.

One the most difficult challenges is to receive information responsibly. We need to know ourselves well enough that we hear and heed what is useful and not what is not. Of course when we start to explore we may notice that everybody is psychic if they will be brave and still enough.

House and Garden.

Elisabeth introduced me to her mother this week. She wants a ba zi and is toying with flying me out to Alicante to survey her villa. Who am I to argue? Elisabeth herself deftly juggles the duties of the domestic Goddess with her ruthless climb up the ladder of success. Her husband still wants pressed shirts but she has that job delegated and this week I survey her Knightsbridge business premises.

I was there to reinspect Elisabeth’s house, fix her water feature and check her bedroom into which, she proudly showed me, she had introduced blue as instructed. And this time without friction. A Snake in this Pig year and therefore a little exposed, I am keeping my eye on her while she approaches moguldom.Her little boy wants a wand which, as it happens, my friend Phil who sculpts jiu shapes for me, can make up. All healthy, wealthy and wise. I must be doing something right.

Post Script: Seasonal Adjustment

Young Rebecca is on the mend. Thank you all for your goodwill. Her ba zi, drawn up much earlier this year, showed her gaining strength from the Winter Solstice onwards. Hers is particularly vulnerable to the fire of a Dog year like 2006. Some just pan out that way. As it happens her doctors changed her medication on the 22nd December. It’s great when science backs us up. Most of us need something to believe as well as to trust.

I cover the fortunes of the animals on my radio show http://www.myspiritradio.com/3-ashworthr.html; those for December 2006 on the current show, 2007’s follow in January.

My new super-duper revamped website is at www.imperialfengshui.info and my book The Feng Shui Diaries comes out in February. You can order it from Amazon now.

Names have been changed.

Richard Ashworth


In a Pig’s Eye: Where to do what, in detail.

The stubborn matronly earth 2 sits at the centre of the lo shu of this Fire Pig year. The lo shu tells where we can sit or make home improvements which to the untrained eye looks like hardly anywhere.

The tai sui (meaning Great Year) is the indicator of the (notional) position of Jupiter and represents the most powerful negative energy of the pig year, to the NorthWest, a few degrees round from where it was in the dog year of 2006. So no foundations should be dug in this sector of the house. And no important or longterm activity should take place facing this direction, that is backing onto the South East (which is called the Year Breaker).

Additionally the Three Killings in the West should be undisturbed as should the Five Yellow in the North East.

So where can I go?! Well, first of all, houses vary wildly and a well-positioned, regularly-shaped one will generally not react too badly to halfhearted abuse of these principles. It is when a house is facing uphill or too close to water or overlooked by pylons or shaped like a wedge of cheese that these strictures tend to become crucial. Nonetheless, do not ignore them lightly because their influence in your house is peculiar and personal to you.

Equally every house has its own energy configuration so each will be affected differently and to a greater or lesser degree by the year chi.

The East is a favoured area this year, generally good for innovation and progress, so theoretical thought or experimentation will work here. Oh and the creation of wealth, if anyone is concerned with that. Keep this sector which receives the light of the rising sun, light and open. If it is overshadowed, leave lights on for at least three of the hours of darkness. You may like me, be driven into a frenzy of environmentally responsible indecision by this advice. I have no answer but to point out that while N-Power sponsors sport, the forces that would contain energy abuse remain impossibly outnumbered by those who would have you use more.

The West outside is twitchy but the West inside is supportive of learning, romance and travel in 2007. Study here and invite your intended to test you. The blue of water is the colour to add.

The SouthEast is the place for fame and fortune this year So face into it especially if you’re outside. Phone-calls from here and especially a desk facing this way will tend to work. Not without effort or opposition though. Recommended colours: browns.

The SouthWest is the place to go for wealth. In the 8 Fate (1996-2017) this is pretty much always true but it is especially favoured in 2007. As the South West is referred to by many (though none of them are feng shui masters) as the relationship area, joint ventures may be indicated. And above-all the sort of male-female to-ing and fro-ing that turns a good idea into a great one. Elementally the introduction of metal is called for which is white again.

The South is ambivalent: ambition fulfilled at the risk of ill-health. Make up your mind. The colour to activate the lucrative action of fire on metal here is white.

The North is not dissimilar except it calls for wood element whose colour is green.

The trick is to observe this model without superstition and for that reason I am very sparing with the use of traditional Chinese images as cures. As Stuart Goldsmith asked me playfully on the pilot for his puckish new-age debunking show: “Yes but it isn’t it all bo**ocks?” Now editing documentaries after the fact is shooting ducks in a barrel but the fact remains that everywhere I look there are books, articles and programmes about the Chinese Century. Do not be misled into believing that the neo-Confucianism of the PRC was ever anything other than rooted in Chinese tradition.This means yin and yang, the Book of Changes and the Five Elements. In 2007, you can not even buy underwear without involving the Chinese. In so far as anything is real –which is another (long) conversation – these forces are real.

So to Stuart I dedicate the fact that all over China and the Chinese diaspora, close to 1.5 billion people will be placing green Tiger images to enlist the assistance of the secret friend of the Pig. The North East is a good location. I recommend you and he do that.

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