Although Feng Shui feels like a homecoming for me, I have often been very disillusioned with the way they are taught and practised in the global West.

At its worst, Feng Shui has been boiled down to furniture placement and a certain kind of aspirational thinking. It has become associated and superficial and exotic notions of harmony, and minimalism. Meanwhile, Chinese Astrology is known for tacky horoscopes, limiting caricatures, and strategies for personal gain.
 
During the cultural revolution tens of thousands of classical texts were completely destroyed thanks to the rapacious influence of Western orthodox science and structures of self interest. The remaining texts were subject to a kind of mundane and reductionist thinking that is out of alignment with the relational, associative thought that created them. The result is a kind of hollowed out, rigid set of Feng shui formula and rules used in the service of personal gain.

At the same time, as Feng shui came to the West, the methods were mixed with New Age practices, various energy work, interior design. This resulted in a diluted melange of exoticised ideas with no grounding in the more rigorous comprehensive methods of the Ancient East.  

As an advocate for authentic, classical methods and an Internal Arts practitioner, my ongoing aim is to meet Feng Shui and Chinese Astrology at their deepest richest roots, as a radical knowing of ourselves and our world through the powerful lens of ancient Daoist thought.

It is an embodied, soulful wisdom that mines the full depth of the human and more-than-human experience. What Ursula Le Guin calls the “pure apprehension of the mystery of which we are part”. 

And though ancient, these ways of knowing are far from antiquated. I feel a kind of urgent curiosity as to how they can be brought into dialogue with contemporary challenges and practices, both within the individual and collective spheres.
 
To do this, I believe that we need to:

• Demystify the Arts. the patterns and symbols that describe both outer and human nature are intimately familiar to us and always available. By recognising and reintegrating these timeless universal principles, we can better appreciate, understand, and cooperate with ourselves and our world. The implications for the various environmental, social, political and mental health crises we are currently experiencing are obvious.

• Re-embody and relate our understanding both to personal and collective spiritual growth. The Wisdom Arts form a beautiful and comprehensive system of understanding that helps us to map our experience - but it is not the experience itself.  In the Feng Shui world, knowledges can quickly become abstract, over-intellectualised and removed from the deeper reality that they are designed to represent. The symbols are pointing to something within or around us,  and it is only be paying attention to - and working with - these phenomena, that we can transform ourselves, our buildings and our environment. To do this, we need to work with our awareness, and our qi, in practical, embodied ways.

In my work, I am committed to; 

• reclaiming the depth and vitality of these ancient Arts,
• bringing them into authentic, embodied practice;  
• honouring their original purpose as a living dialogue between ourselves and the world; 
• fulfilling their transformative potential for the people and places that I work with.