Discovering the Benefits of Feng Shui
“That’s weird!” I thought, tossing the magazine aside. It was 1998, and I’d just read about feng shui for the first time. As a professional organizer, I knew the importance of keeping our homes and workspaces uncluttered and organized, but the idea that changing the placement of something in my home would change my life felt… well, unbelievable.
But then I remembered my dad, a scientist, saying, “If you want to prove something true or false, you have to experiment with it.” So I experimented with feng shui. Skeptically, I made some changes to the “abundance” area of my home. The next week, I received an unexpected large gift of money and was hired to manage a project I’d applied for. Curious, I made more feng shui changes. Months later, I was awarded a full scholarship for my last year of college. That’s when I seriously started studying feng shui.
Feng shui is an ancient technology based on the same five-element theory that Chinese medicine and acupuncture are based on. The health disciplines work to create harmony in the body, and the goal of feng shui is to create harmony in the home and workspace—and success in life.
In some areas of China, feng shui became oriented toward luck. Certain directions, numbers and colors were lucky, some unlucky. I prefer teachers like William Spear and Denise Linn, as well as Karen Carter, who pared the fear-based overlay and focused on the ancient, commonsense life-space-design principles. In 2000, at a space-clearing training in California, I met Jean Haner, who had lived in China for many years. In her classes, I also learned Chinese Face Reading and the 9 Star Ki, the feng shui of the birthdate.
After I began teaching feng shui, a woman approached me in the hallway after church. “Are you the feng shui lady?” she asked. When I nodded, she declared: “I’m single—and I don’t want to be!” In feng shui, each area of our home can help us up-level a certain staging area of our lives. I asked about her relationship area. “Oh, no! That’s the junk room I never unpacked!” she moaned.
I asked her some questions, and she quickly made the connection between dating experiences that left her feeling awful with the current condition of her relationship area. I suggested she organize and beautify that room in ways that anchored her intentions for a supportive relationship. A few months later, after the Sunday service, she came running down the hall toward me with a happy, good-looking guy in tow. She exclaimed, “Melody, I cleared out my relationship corner and look who I found!” She came to my feng shui classes over the next few years, to learn how to up-level their lives. I’ll never forget her happy glow when she announced their engagement.
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