Feng Shui for White People

I didn't start magic doing magic, per se. I started with 风水. When I was still fairly young, my mother bought a couple of new agey books-- a handful of Sylvia Brownes, possibly a John Edwards (of "Crossing With" fame, not the political candidate) and a guide to Feng Shui, Chinese geomancy. I devoured them all, though the spiritism books weren't exactly how-to guides, so I never really attempted anything with them (later, when I discovered western magic, it was with the usual Llewellyn fluffy bunny warnings of "Spirits will fuck your shit up! They are always bad news." and so I never really explored it). The feng shui book, however, was chock full of useful information and all the relevant charts and calculations. (Now that I study East Asia professionally, I still wonder: What is it about charts and calculations that sinitic magical systems love so much? Not that the Renaissance western schools fare much better, mind)

So very early, I acquired a useful set of geomantic skills, devoid of any kind of cultural context. It was through feng shui that I learned to read energies, to channel and reflect and block the flow of qi wherever it needed to go. When I had problems in my life, I'd analyze the flow of energy through my spaces and make the appropriate corrections.

Feng shui was also my introduction to Eastern thought. Never before had I thought of the world as a constant state of flux, of energy as an innate quality that can be manipulated rather than originating in the practitioner. I didn't really sink in at the time, but when I returned to Eastern methods as a practitioner, I realized how much more woo I could push if I used myself as a conduit rather than a battery.

Zen speaks a lot about inner calm, about no-thingness (to borrow a term from Osho). It treats effort as transient, a mere reaction to the environment that should be as efficient and (in the Japanese tradition) elegant as possible. Vajrayana has a thousand thousand systems and techniques and devices for manipulating energy, for creating it and consuming it and using it to power things. Zen is not an esoteric tradition, at least in the sense of occulture. But I find the Zen approach works remarkably well for magic: use the inertia of things to power themselves. Don't lock a bunch of energy into a yantra if you don't need to; simply make the right push in the right place, and you can get everything to tumble just so. Qi is temporary, transient, a river of power that can be diverted but never stopped, never controlled.

I still use feng shui techniques occasionally, mostly when setting up new homes. Partially because feng shui lends a certain psychic balance to spaces, a sense of hyperspatial symmetry and, above all, flow that I enjoy that simply randomly arranging furniture can't provide. And partly because in using the tools, I can ground myself not only to physical space (a useful meditation in and of itself), but to the Dharma, as rigid but somehow flexible as feng shui itself.

New Year, New You: Week 1

Time to clean your house.

Is your time being well spent?

Just because someone hands you a big rock doesn't mean you have to carry it.



Time to clean your house.
I rearranged my bedroom the other day so now I actually have space to move around. I still don't really have a ritual space carved out, though I've been using a shelf for candlework (post on my recent use of hoodoo coming tomorrow).

I need to finish getting everything squared-away post move, but already the cleanliness has made such a difference. Feng shui warns that I shouldn't ever put my bed in front of a window or the qi will keep me up all night, but I love sleeping here. I guess feng shui can't handle the intricacies of the energy eddies a practitioner relies on.

Is your time being well spent?

I've been largely squandering it of late, to be sure, but today was very productive. I need to get into the habit of walking 30 minutes a day and meditating when I wake up; we'll see how tomorrow goes.

Just because someone hands you a big rock doesn't mean you have to carry it.

I used to be much better at this, but lately I've been slowly getting back to where I used to be, anxiety-wise. I have appointments with a really cool psychoanalyst, so I think I'm definitely on the right track, though I also need to remember how much using my mala beads helps when I'm feeling overwhelmed.


This was a really boring post for anyone who's not me, I'm sure. Tomorrow when I have brain I'll write about feng shui and hoodoo and how I reconcile them.

New Year, New You

Two things.

1) I am terrible at blogging. I was supposed to blog in this thing at least once a month, preferably more. Instead, I wrote an intro and then stopped. That's not good.

2) Because I am terrible at blogging, I have started a new blog with 5 other people. The idea is that since we are all terrible at blogging, five half bloggers makes at least one decent blogger. We all have very different ideas, and the conversations I think are going to be very interesting.

That blog can be found at Alternomancy.

2a) To ameliorate my being bad at blogging, I am going to participate in Drop Out Dilettante's "New Year, New You", a series of prompts to invigorate my blogging and my magical practice. It should be a lot of fun.