Using Dowsing in Feng Shui Practice
by Nancy C. Canestaro, D.Arch.
What is Feng Shui?
Feng Shui is a method for creating harmonious, healthy, and prosperous spaces. We use these techniques to analyze where specific energies exist in and around our buildings. Then we apply remedies and enhancements for balance. Before and after this analysis, we can use dowsing to further refine the energies in a building.
Think of Feng Shui as the Science and Dowsing the Art of working with these patterns.
What Are Energies and Remedies?
Basically, we want to spend time in places that have beneficial energy and avoid those that are hard on us. Some beneficial energy will be peaceful (Yin), making it a good place for sleeping or quiet activities. Beneficial energy could also be more active (Yang), and good for work or interacting with others. For example, you wouldn’t want Yin, slow energy in your office. On the other hand, you would want soft Yin energy around you while you sleep.
What happens when you can’t avoid detrimental energy? Then you can introduce a remedy to balance the energy in that space. Remedies come from one of the five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water). Wood relates to growth, fire to transformation, earth to settled quiet energy, metal (sound in particular) to tuning up a space, and water for greater flow of prosperous energy.
What is Dowsing?
Dowsing shows us where specific energies flow into and through a building. The practice of dowsing allows a practitioner to gain information about a space that is beyond the normal physical senses of sight and sound. Dowsing allows us to tap into areas of the subconscious. Have you ever known something but didn’t know how or why you knew it? With dowsing we can bring this information up from somewhere deep in our psyche. You can use an instrument, a pendulum, or your body to register dowsing responses.
How Dowsing Works with Feng Shui?
Feng Shui calculations point out specific areas of beneficial (life enhancing) and detrimental (life depleting) energy in particular orientations.
Dowsing goes deeper than this to indicate negative as well as positive energy patterns in a specific area. Once you identify detrimental areas of energy, you can clear them using one of the dowsing procedures described in the two companion dowsing articles.
Electrical service entry into a home could disturb someone spending time near the meter. Dowsing for detrimental energy at one client’s house, I concentrated on where electricity entered the house at the exterior dining room wall. The client later remarked that they were attracted to dine in this space for the first time.
What Are Some Things to Dowse For?
Unique geographic conditions specific to a particular location may also need to be addressed. There may be underground streams of water that are affecting occupants in a beneficial or detrimental way. Specific situations, such as this, typically won’t show up in a classical feng shui analysis. Dowsing is useful in this way to fine tune building energies beyond what feng shui remedies can offer.
Using dowsing I check for areas of detrimental energy that need clearing, such as where people sleep or spend more than an hour a day. I also “trace the nine stars” by offering a dowsing prayer for protection at each of the following locations…Center (tai chi), NW, W, NE, S, N, SW, E, and SE in that order. This is the ancient pathway of directions that has been used for centuries by Feng Shui practitioners.
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