Can you Feng Shui a relationship?

The answer is yes and no. In the scheme of things, feng shui is about balancing your environment so that you can benefit from it. The end result is that your relationships may flow better. If you live in a house that indicates a strong potential for arguments or feelings of loneliness, then by balancing the space, you will absorb those improved energies and therefore notice a difference in your relationships. But no, there is not an element that you can expose yourself to that will automatically improve yours or any relationship. Some people think that if their personal Gua element is metal and their spouse is wood, that they need to put water between them (in their house) because metal destroys wood, while water strengthens it. This 5-element theory is applied to the space you occupy, not the people themselves.

Are vertical blinds poison arrows and therefore bad feng shui?

The sharp edges of vertical or horizontal blinds are only poison arrows if you sit very close to them. Even still, I have not been able to conclusively relate them to any health problem for a client. There are much more important things to be concerned with.

Where is the best place to hang pictures of family members?

If you like your family members you can place their pictures anywhere in the house. If you do not like your family members, do not feel obligated to put their pictures anywhere.

Where is the best place in the house to have a meditation spot or an altar?

Hire a feng shui professional to identify the most positive areas of your house and see if it is practical to use those spaces for meditation or prayer. You may also pick up a beginners feng shui book to simply find out what your best personal directions are, based on your birth date. That will tell you where your personal lucky, health-inducing directions are and those areas of your house can be used as back-up choices. (If you want to E-mail me your birth date I will tell you your most peaceful, restful direction for meditation.)

Is a house with severe drop off behind the property always bad feng shui?

No. Sometimes the back of the house has spectacular views and other features which overwhelmingly make it the "facing" side of the house. So if it is really the front of the house by feng shui criteria, then the drop in land level is not perceived as a house with no support in the back. Also, there are certain house types called "reversed houses" that do in fact benefit from lower land level behind them as opposed to lower on the front side.

Are there some houses that have such bad feng shui that they cannot be fixed?

A tiny percentage of the houses I see are real stinkers and they should just be torn down or the occupants should move. Sometimes the remedies would be so expensive and involve structural changes, that it is not worth the effort. It also depends on how much someone values feng shui in their life. I take feng shui very seriously and would not choose to live in most of the houses I evaluate, for one reason or another. But these are not houses where terrible things are happening to people. I just think the houses may be hindering a greater destiny or potential than what the client could experience in a house with naturally better feng shui.

If feng shui is so complicated, how can a beginner be sure that they are not doing something that will have a negative side effect?

For beginner students I recommend that you stick to the East/West School of feng shui until they know how to properly add the correct elements to a room. As an example, if you know your best sleeping direction and can place your headboard in that direction, there should be no negative side-effects to doing that. (Unless by moving your bed you have placed yourself under a beam or in alignment with a door. Also, if you tune into Form School feng shui, you will start noticing how your furnishings are placed and how you can better manipulate the flow of chi in a room. These are some easy things that should not back fire on you.

But to properly know which elements and colors to use in a room, it is better to hire a professional who has been trained in classical feng shui. Each house is unique and while one house may need a water feature in a certain part of the house, for your friend s house that same area could be totally wrong. Just as one example: specific to this year the location of the south sector of your house will have a type of wood energy known for stirring up trouble including gossip and legal problems. Water stimulates wood, so the south sector would be an incorrect placement this year for a water feature in your house. Some of you have read that you should never place water in your bedroom. This is not true. Some people can benefit by it while others don t. Sometimes two people have the same problem, but the feng shui remedy is quite different.

(For any advanced practitioners reading this newsletter: an example might be the couple with fertility problems. Sometimes the bedroom is the 2-1 energy and sometimes it is the 8-4 combination. One room requires the metal element as a remedy and the other requires the fire element.) In both cases, the wrong element would make things worse. Any book which tells you to just use your intuition and that you can never make a mistake, is a book you should return to the place where you purchased it.

Is a ceiling fan good or bad feng shui?