I recently suggested to one of my acupuncture clients that we schedule a feng shui visit to her home.  She has a serious chronic illness, and I wanted to be sure that her home environment supported her healing. She looked at me in some confusion, and said, “what does my house have to do with anything?”

Like so many, this person thinks of feng shui as a superstitious and fanciful way to re-arrange furniture, or use Chinese looking charms and crystals to bring good luck. So her reluctance to have me come over and look at her house was completely understandable.  In modern Western culture when a person gets sick, they typically go to a doctor (or some other type of healer,) to find out what’s wrong. The doctor will examine them or do lab tests, and perhaps prescribe medicine. Sometimes the patient gets better; sometimes not. Too often, the patient enters a maze of confusing dead ends and nothing seems to work.

The missing link here is that no one has stepped back and examined the patient’s relationship to their environment.This process is at the heart of classical feng shui. In feng shui it is understood that we are relational beings living in a reciprocal world. We cannot exist in isolation from our environment. We affect it, and it affects us. It’s basic physics. So where you spend most of your time at home and at work, directly affects your health.

Take your bedroom, for instance. Most of us will spend a third of our lives in bed. A feng shui practitioner can  arrange your bedroom for optimal restorative sleep,and also align your bed with your personal healing direction to optimize recovery from sickness. This direction is different for each of us and is dependent on your personal astrology. We call this direction your Tian Yi, or “Doctor from Heaven.”

This kind of fine tuning of the home is just one of the many adjustments that can be made to facilitate speedy recovery from illness through the use of feng shui.