GUESS WHAT? I figured out that the element AIR should be added to feng shui! Since traditional feng shui’s five elements excludes AIR I have never considered it. But finally I figured out why AIR should be considered an element of design. contact www.feng-shui-institute-of-america.com to sign up for our free conference call Thursday 8 PM EST Jan. 26th
Northing is Ever Lost
During the eight day training blitz, my feng shui institute used to have to indoctrinate neophytes into the world of scientific feng shui, I used to say on about day three to my dazzled students. “Everything you heard me say is stored in your brain; all you have to do is access the road to that piece of information.”
Their faces would like up as if I were handing them the Holy Grail, but I knew that the roads to finding that scrap of information needed another ingrediate, which some would find and others not.
Unless the brain has a built-in bulldozer, the way to ensure a path is constructed, is repetition. Sort of like a footpath across the lawn to the front door of my golf’s clubhouse. While there was a concrete path, its location was designed to look good, not to provide the best and shortest way to traverse from the parking lot to the front door. And so, like we do in a variety of areas in our lives, the golfers trod over the grass, creating, over time, matted down grass that signaled the best pathway to the front door.
To access what you hear, see and learn you need to attach it to a vehicle that is likely to be used frequently. My mother used to tell me that if I repeated a word three times then that word would be mine. What she failed to tell me was that the word would have to be bundled with words that are used in similar ways. So portal would have to be tossed on the path of entry, threshold, or door. As a stand alone word portal would most likely vanish from a memory.
Thus, in my work of understanding how place informs behavior, I realize that symbols, icons, and proximities must be attached appropriately. Now I know why I am skeptical about “treasure mapping”. Creating a picture of what is wanted to initiate the reality is only step #1. Aligning that picture with sympathetic, accessible proximities is necessary before the intention can be slid on the pathway that takes you to the place that allows you to accomplish this.
A rather simplistic example would be for a person who wants to write a cookbook to place their computer in the kitchen or a if one wants to lose weight to place the scale in front of the refrigerator. The computer would be surrounded by those things that are known so that the act of transcribing them would be facilitated and the scale would be a red traffic signal.
Thus, nothing is ever lost so long as that “thing” is aligned with relevancy. Motivation and memory need relevancy as a sidekick to foster action or change.
Healing Home
The expression “home is where the heart is” resonates today on the anniversary of 9/11. While I work with many aspects of healing be it from lack of self-esteem to illness, the most enduring dis-ease is of the heart.
In the largest sense, home is the universe, but this is far too wide for us to connect with in a personal way. Probably the grandest scale of connection is our country, that place from which emanates our bedrock biases, our notion of genuine. Our culture gives us parameters from which we interact with others, and defines for us the rules of engagement with the world in general. In fact, so endemic are these guidelines that we sometimes forget that they are acquired not fixed.
What does our heartland promote us to celebrate? For many of us, descendants of immigrants we rejoice in opportunity. Options include many aspects of life including being able to learn, being able to distinguish ourselves, being able to befriend without the barriers of social standing, and contained as a core within all of these is being able to chose. Yes, choice is the gift of America, one we should never disallow.
When I hear revolts about a Mosque, limitations on education, or withholding medical care, I worry that what we hold to be self-evident in our system is being eroded. Being united as a country fosters being in agreement with our hearts. What heart would deny choice for oneself, one’s family and countrymen? On this our anniversary of having our core values challenged, let us recommit to the heart of our nation’s founders ideals.
Try On A Role
Almost everyone reading this has, at some time in his or her lives, donned a role. It may have when acting in a class play, playing shopkeeper as a three year old or trying to pass for whatever the drinking age was, but assuming the qualities of another is part of life’s experience. Well, at least part of a childhood experience. It seems that as we age, we are more reluctant to assume another identity even for fun.
We somehow get fixed into what we consider our being. And there in lies the rub! The truth is that you can change on a dime if you want to. What you are in only limited by your imagination.
Recently I have altered my role as mother. My son turns 40 this December and my belief that I am the same mother that incubated him for over 9 months should cease to exist. True, through play and verbal transmissions I inculcated, beliefs, morals and values. But, in the end were those moments of disengagement, when, for example, I watched the back of his head drive off in a car, or when he slipped the ring on his wife’s finger, my role as what existed as mother terminated.
It is important that I reinvent the relationship or role that I play in his life. Can I be a valued, wise adult? Whatever the definition is, is less important than the fact that this role must be redefine .
Every permutation has its finale. Whatever is surely will not be. Don’t let yourself be limited by antiquated beliefs, wishes or be swamped by truths so inflated with immutable molecules that like the carbon we call self , it will die ignorant of the fact that it needed to change so that what is left behind is a valuable part for the living.














