Feng Shui - A Primer and a Practical Start

Q & A with New York and Paris based Feng Shui and Yoga Consultant, Jade Dressler

I’ve always been fascinated by Feng Shui, the ancient Chinese system of balancing the energies in your work and living environments to insure health, wealth and prosperity. As a yogi, I toyed with it a bit and have a few tips I’ve learned a long the way, but I’ve never had a true understanding to the point where I could go into an environment, use the Ba-Gua and get to work. In our continued quest to keep you balanced, motivated and to utilize tools to bring harmony into our lives, I called upon New York and Paris based Feng Shui and Yoga Consultant, Jade Dressler to walk us through some of the basic principles and how we can regularly add some Feng Shui into our lives.

Michelle Barge, beYOU.tv:
Spring is a time when people naturally gravitate to cleaning the home, throwing out the old and doing general refreshing and repair. How could we add a bit of Feng Shui’s theories into our homes?

Jade Dressler:
The un-junking is key! We have to recognize what is no longer working for us on all levels; like the elephant in the room. Like the simple poses or breathing in yoga -simplifying is where we have to start. The good news is that you don’t have to think that much to get started in tossing out old stuff. Get yourself worked up about it emotionally, get angry about what is holding you back and I assure you - you will be ruthless in tossing away (or recycling) what you no longer need. Once you do that, feel the difference in the atmosphere, in your body and in your heart and you have mastered Feng Shui 101. (I know… its like a meditation practice, you get it in theory but it scares the hell out of you. The good news is that these ideas have been around 5000 years, they are time-tested, and so you might as well just give in and start cleaning!)

MB: I’ve always been fascinated by the Ba-Gua. Can you explain this tool used in Feng Shui?

JD:
It’s a road map to show how the territory of energy moves. It’s no mystery really, just as water and other elements have chemical formulas and calculations on how they move, aspects of our lives are also governed by natural forces and they have systems and relationships between them that can be respected and harnessed.

The name Bagua translates to “Eight Gates”. In my work I correlate these to chakras or the energy centers of our bodies, as they are known in Eastern philosophies, which in turn relates to centers of our nervous system, as Western Science knows them. When you “connect the dots”, or the energy centers, you balance the energy, in your body, home or any environment you find yourself in.

Just as with yoga we are sweating to balance our bodies, emotions and our noisy minds… Essentially with Feng Shui we extend our understanding of these relationships beyond our skin and into the spaces we inhabit. Of course, by extension, this has big possibilities for our planet, if you want to really expand the possibilities!

Thanks to Jade Dressler for this informative interview; part two will be available tomorrow.

Written by: Michelle Barge