Conscious Choice: The Art of Knowing Where You Are

May 1996

The Art of Knowing Where You Are

by Janet Durovchic

If you experience an overwhelming sense of vertigo in a place as flat as a tortilla, you know it’s best to keep your mouth shut unless you want to be considered "different." Since the industrial revolution, anything that can’t be measured, weighed, or verified scientifically is viewed as hocus-pocus. Consequently, ours is a culture without a vocabulary to describe and explain the things we perceive about our surroundings. The void in our vocabulary makes it difficult to develop a sense of place, one that feels right to us. About the best we can do is make a place look good.

When science made us masters of the universe, we began to favor vision over the other senses, believing above all that "seeing is believing." For that reason, we expect a place that looks good or normal to be good or normal. Yet, despite our attempts to be rational and reductive, we instinctively understand that every place has a "feel." It was not so long ago that Sir Winston Churchill, during a debate on the restoration of the House of Commons, said "We shape our buildings and they shape us."

We know, though we don’t always adhere to our knowledge, that many factors contribute to our sense of comfort or discomfort. Some of those factors are concrete and physical concerns such as safety. Others are less quantifiable concerns involving our sense of beauty, harmony, and comfort. We have all entered — or inhabited — homes, buildings, offices, and communities that seem to have something missing, something that is not quite right.

The problems people experience might be as obvious as trying to create a sense of romance in one of those new master bedrooms that are the size of football fields, or as intangible as the headache you get after three or four hours at your desk.

What can we do about this melange of environmental imbalances? We can consider all together those obvious and subtle factors that contribute to our sense of a space. And we can include in our considerations those feelings that get tossed out because they can’t be measured. That is, in essence, the approach of feng shui, the Chinese art of placement.

You may have heard of feng shui fairly recently; it is an ancient art, but it achieved visibility in the United States when Donald Trump employed a feng shui practitioner for his own building. While putting his feng shui practitioner on national television was likely a publicity move, Trump opened a door to a more holistic approach to designing home and office space. With his indisputable success and disdain for what we think, he was the perfect person to bring up this unusual topic. Whether intentionally or not, he has made it acceptable — even fashionable — to ask: how can the art of placement improve our homes and communities?

Practiced for centuries by the Chinese, feng shui is part common sense, part aesthetics, and part mysticism. Generally speaking, it is a system for harmonizing homes and offices. It is based on the conviction that balanced environments help us come into our own and allow us to take advantage of opportunities that come our way. If you can remember a day when you were "on" and everything clicked and went smoothly, you can begin to understand the goal of feng shui. It aims to create a state of balance, so you can increase the number of days in your life when you are "on." As a result, you hope events will move in your favor. In any case you can be sure your level of stress is reduced.

Feng shui originated to help people site family tombs. Practitioners held that that an excellent site for the ancestors would bring good fortune to the descendants. Eventually, sometime during the Han dynasty (206-221 BC), feng shui was applied to the homes of the living. This art has evolved over the centuries, and now there are many schools. The system with which I am most familiar is the Black Hat Tantric Tibetan Buddhist tradition. I’ve studied with Professor Lin Yun, an international expert, for more than nine years.

Many people want to know what, from a feng shui perspective, constitutes an ideal site and floor plan, but there isn’t such a thing; that is, a perfect floor plan in one location may be totally inappropriate in another. The most important factors are that a site or floor plan feels good, and balances you. this principle, like much of Chinese philosophy, is both simple and complex. For example, when you are judging the chi, or energy, of a place, you must examine the history of the place, the quality of the neighborhood it’s in, and the degree of safety you feel, to help you assess the overall quality of the environment.

The history of a building, a home, or an office is a good indicator of feng shui and can point to what you can expect to happen there in the future. A client told me that he and his wife looked at a home a number of years ago and rejected it because of an ugly carpet. The property was owned by a professional ball player who was selling because he’d been traded to another club. This trade was a great career move for him. During the time he’d lived in this home, his career had skyrocketed and his wealth increased.

The lucky people who bought the house despite its ugly carpet also prospered; they won substantial sums with the California Lottery — three times in a few years. Ignore the carpets, pay attention to the history. Whenever possible, select a place that is available for wonderful reasons. If a house you want has a history of sadness, you can alter its energy by remodeling, reconfiguring, and otherwise changing the space so that old patterns cannot remain.

What may be an ideal home, site, location during one decade, can change in another because the chi of the land is constantly moving. You can get a sense of the direction the chi is moving (up — increasing, down — decreasing) by reviewing recent events in a neighborhood. Robberies, untimely deaths, divorces, and bankruptcies indicate a decline in a neighborhood’s chi. Marriages, remodeling, new building, prosperity, and the like, indicate chi is on the rise. Favorable neighborhoods have strong chi, indicated by well maintained yards, buildings, homes, and pets. Generally we feel good and optimistic in such places.

Last December I saw a client in West Los Angeles. Despite the beauty and affluence of the neighborhood, I was surprised at the sense of hostility and stagnation permeating it. Having grown up not far from this area, I remembered it as having a stable yet active feel in the late‘60s and was surprised by the tremendous change. I mentioned the strange sense of deadness to my client (also a native of the west side) who agreed that the chi was very different from what it was even ten years ago. He didn’t like it; it made him apprehensive. Later he told me that Nicole Simpson had lived halfway down the block and that in addition to her murder, there had been a number of others in about a four block radius within the last few years. The chi in this neighborhood is clearly declining. If they don’t make efforts to change their neighborhood’s energy, residents here will continue to suffer from the negative events that have taken place.

People often ask how they can improve a neighborhood. It’s hard to give a universal remedy because there are so many factors involved in each case. With regard to Los Angeles however, Professor Lin has mentioned that the massive network of freeways is responsible to some extent for violent energy that accompanies the earthquakes, riots, and other disasters of the last few years. In urban environments, the chi of the land runs along the streets and freeways. When it is forced into an artificially straight path, it takes a form that is detrimental to a community.

To make this concept tangible, imagine you are dehydrated and someone gives you a cup of boiling water. It is the substance (water) you need, but in a form which is dangerous to you. In a similar way, we need the chi of the land, but when it is delivered in a dangerous form it creates trouble. In the case of Los Angeles, Professor Lin has suggested that large trees be planted near the freeways to soften the chi and correct the problem.

Obviously, a feeling of safety is a critical factor in an ideal site. Yet even the concept of safety plays out in many ways. There are mundane, physical concerns that relate to such things as adequate hand railings and the steepness of a stairway’s slope. These, of course, produce instant feelings of unease. Other safety issues are more peculiar. Miss Shammy, my high school history teacher, lived in a house that was situated so that on three occasions, cars lost control and crashed into her bathroom. How could you feel comfortable spending more than a few seconds in this room? Eventually, her insurance company made Miss Shammy put a concrete block wall along the side of the house — a good feng shui solution for increased security.

Then, too, what feels safe for you may be different for another. For example, I don’t sleep well if there’s a window over my bed. I’ve seen how quickly earthquakes can shatter glass and don’t want to be near such a potential hazard. My aversion to sleeping under windows is so strong that I have, on occasion, lectured midwesterners about this danger. They remind me that earthquakes aren’t a hazard in the heartland and point out that in summer it’s more comfortable to sleep near windows. From a feng shui perspective, therefore, I should never sleep under a window. Yet perhaps you should.

In short, if there is something you can do to make a space feel comfortable, do it. Likewise, if something makes you feel unsafe, avoid it. Remember, when we feel unsafe, it wears on us, reducing our vitality.

Most of us endure low levels of stress without even noticing; yet over time this stress reduces our vitality. Do an experiment. The next time you go out to eat, notice how differently you feel when you sit at a table with your back to the door and when you sit so that you can see the door. If you feel a significant amount of stress with your back to the door, rearrange your bed or desk at home to accommodate your need for comfort. You’ll be pleased with the increased energy you feel.

A bedroom with lots of doors can be difficult — our reptile brains, scanning, for safety, never let us fall into a deep relaxing sleep in such a place. After a few years of light sleeping, the resulting fatigue can be quite apparent. I recently reviewed a set of blueprints for a new home. The bedroom had eight doors, six of them leading to decks What a nightmare!

For many years the emphasis in Western architecture has been on the development and utilization of new technologies and materials. While it can be exciting to stand in a building cantilevered out over a cliff with crashing surf below, it’s another thing to live there. Last month I toured a fashionable new live-work space in the San Francisco Bay Area. The ubiquitous sloped ceilings and acute angles were both spectacular and exciting, but within five minutes, I developed a dull ache in my stomach. I felt as if giant magnets were trying to pull my internal organs out of my body. Someone will eventually buy this property and live in it; I wonder what their internal organs will feel like after a few months, or a few years. Whether we as a species will evolve to fit these new shapes in architecture, I don’t know. What I do know is that architects don’t focus on harmonious configurations in homes and buildings as much as we’d like to think.

By focusing instead on rational considerations, architects and builders have developed some wonderful technological innovations. However, to achieve balance we need to incorporate the non-rational considerations such as the feeling of a place. Chinese thought might couch these considerations by using the terms "feminine" and "masculine," or yin and yang. In any terminology, however, attention to balance can optimize technologies and stretch the envelope on what they can contribute to day-to-day quality of life. Homes, buildings, and communities built in harmony can reduce our sense of fatigue, alienation, anomie, and the like.

By addressing such problems as, "How can I design this house so that people will feel refreshed and revitalized even though it’s the size of a tennis shoe?" we will be moving in the direction of balance.

Thus, feng shui can provide architects with a starting point for incorporating the realm of the feminine in their planning. It also can provide the rest of us with a new way to approach and improve our homes and work places. Please remember, however, if you are contented with your life, and have a place that works for you, you don’t need to fix it. Once you strike a balance, simply maintain your good fortune, and enjoy!

Janet Durovchic conducts feng shui workshops and consultations. Please her call for more information, 510-526-1943.

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