From going through a 9-years barren spell (without kids, despite trying very hard to conceive, that is) to 2 pregnancies in 21 months is simply amazing!  I am glad and at same time amazed to hear from my brother that my sister-in-law had been pregnant again.  I know Ancestor Fengshui works, but never in my wildest imagination, worked to such efficacy.  This is also not a work of coincidence as can attest to it being personally involved in meddling with our Ancestor Fengshui 2 years ago.

Well, supernatural or superstition or not, all Ancestors like to take care of their Descendants and will act once the communication channels are wired up.

My inspiration to blog about this comes from a chat with a friend A who shared about her and her friends’ encounter with a fortune teller.  She and that group of friends were all ladies, single and had not much luck in love all these while.  In fact, one of them, let’s call her B,  had considerably worse luck in this aspect as she was hurt twice by jerks in the course of her romantic encounter.  It was one of those days when the mood beckons that B decided to pay a visit to this fortune teller for consultation and naturally brought along her group of single friends which included A who was single thenand other friends which included another lady C.

This fortune teller’s modus operandi comes in the form of reading people’s fortune by pulling out poker cards that were shuffled by the client.  It was not clear if the ladies had unwittingly let out some information of the state of matter for B in the course of conversation with the fortune teller.  But he was able to predict that B had bad luck in romance because she always meet “bad Peach Blossom烂桃花” in Chinese, which means that she, in terms of  her romantic relationship matters, always meets the bad guys.

The solution proposed by the fortune teller? A pair of scissors to be placed in the Southwest corner of the room/house of lady B.  He reasoned that the scissors will cut away the negative “Peach Blossom” and that Southwest is the love corner which is reserve for Fengshui-ing romance and love matters.  The ladies were curious and enquired whether the scissors will “cut” away all romantic relationships alike, whether it be with good or bad guys.  The fortune teller then justify by explaining to them that good guys or good romance will not be cut away and the scissors only acts on bad guys and bad relationships.

He then proceeded to display his “generous” and “altruistic” side by telling the rest of the single ladies that Southwest is the universal love corner in Fengshui.  Since the ladies are single, they can turbo-charge their love corners in the Southwest by placing flowers and crystals.  Like typical girls starved of good romance, these ladies with the exception of A, are willing to try the cures for romance recommended by this fortune teller. The reason why A did not follow the recommended cure is because the Southwest corner in her room is placed the bed, and she could not place those items suggested by the fortune teller.

Now, fast forward to 2-3 years later and what is the romantic fate of these girls?  For Ms B, she is still single and in fact, had not gone on dates with guys since activating the Southwest corner of hers.  For Ms C and the rest of the unnamed gals, they are still single.  As for Ms A, who had fortunately or unfortunately not adopted the recommended Fengshui cure, she is married! 

Now, with the facts of this case, it would strongly suggest that the Southwest may not be the universal Fengshui-able love corner.  Even if it is, it may not be effective enough just to activate this corner by flowers and crystals.  The outcome to Ms B also suggested that good guys or good romance are not invincible against the scissors as claimed by the fortune teller.  As for the outcome to Ms A, it shows that a stroke of good luck and her own sensible action in seeking romance is more effective than those poorly thought-out cures.

Is it possible to use Fengshui or Chinese Metaphysics knowledge to enhance the chances of good romantic encounters?  Yes it is possible but defnitely not as simple as activating a universal love corner!  In Zi Wei Dou Shu, it is certainly possible to differentiate where the good and bad romantic encounters are coming from and tune accordingly.

I just had a conversation yesterday with a friend who enlisted my help for Feng Shui few months back when they selected a new house and were going to do the house renovation as well.

Nothing extraordinary except that this friend had indicated to me that relationship with her spouse have transcended the state of lukewarm and that she wished for some help to spice things up with her spouse.  Noting her personal requests, I did incorporate this aspect into the Feng Shui set up for their new home.

During the conversation, she revealed that she was pregnant recently.  I was certainly happy for her as that probably meant that relationship with her husband had improved considerably after implementing my Feng Shui recommendations.  I sought her confirmation whether relationship with her husband has indeed improved and she confirmed it.

However, she proceeded to let me know that they had decided not to keep the baby.  Whilst it is the couple’s decision to make, nevertheless I feel sorry for the unborn being.  I have done Feng Shui tuning at the requests of the couple but the unfortunate outcome to the hapless unborn being was not what I had hoped for. 

This experience certainly tells me Feng Shui for relationship and marriage certainly requires more parameters to take into consideration.  In addition, should Feng Shui practitioners make Feng Shui recommendation solely in line with the client’s requests?

Chinese Metaphysics, or what layman know as Feng Shui, is often ostracized by non-believers for instigating people to believe in superstition and supernatural when scienctific explanations would have been much more convincing.  As such, it has led to a plethora of attacks on the Feng Shui practice, like what the TV hosts Penn & Teller has sought to achieve in their show.

It is very easy to discredit a practice like Feng Shui because Metaphysics is defined by Wikipedia as “investigates principles of reality transcending those of any particular science”.  When it transcends science, how many mortals can understand it and explain it convincingly to detractors?

Feng Shui is not superstitious.  It merely looks superstitious because it is beyond science and hence science cannot explain it and neither can humans.  How do you expect a kid to explain the action of his parents?  Since Feng Shui transcends science, one cannot get a satisfactory explanation of Feng Shui using scientific principles.

Furthermore, the development of the Feng Shui practice has not been helped by its followers.  A lot of the followers of Chinese Metaphysics and Feng Shui are Chinese themselves.  Throughout the history of China, Chinese has demonstrated a streak of selfishness and tendency to fight within themselves.  For example, Chinese Medicine has a history of more than 2000 years old which is several times older than that of Western Medicine.  Yet, the world has embraced Western medicine as the defacto source of cure and they cannot envisage that Chinese Medicine has cures that even Western Medicine do not possess.

Another example of this self-destruction among Chinese is the penchance to try to outperform or discredit fellow enthusiasts or practitioners in the field of Chinese Metaphysics.  Frequently we see incessant criticisms and attack by a person on another person or group practising or following another method which he viewed as as a rival faction.  Like the Penn & Teller show, it is too easy to find an obscure example or clever manipulation of the environment or parameters to discredit a Feng Shui practice.

If even Feng Shui enthuasiasts and practitioners can be going all out to discredit someone with the same beliefs, what more outsiders who are like Penn & Teller?  Sometimes I wish fellow enthusiasts in Chinese Metaphysics wisen up and not be the proverbial “divided loose grains of sand”.  If we help each other in this interest group or profession, Chinese Metaphysics & Feng Shui as a whole stands to gain.  We as enthusiasts and practitioner of the same field stand to gain too.  After all, one famous Chinese saying by the victimized Cao Zhi in the Romance of the 3 Kingdom goes “Why cannibalize one that is of the same family?”

How can we help each other?  By treating fellow practitioners and enthusiasts as allies and suggest areas of weakness as points to consider for improvement.  By not treating fellow practitioners and enthusiasts as rivals and going all out to attack one perceived point of fallible practice or advocate.

I have seen current practitioners having the nonchalance to cite methods in Feng Shui classics compiled by renowned Feng Shui Master like Jiang Da Hong’s methods like as if these were universal truths that are applicable for all time and social context.  For example, they say that these greats did not mention in their books that they tailor their Feng Shui method according to the beneficiary’s destiny so they believed that Astrology is not needed to carry out Feng Shui.  

If the likes of Jiang omitted to mention about it, does it mean that they are against it or such a practice is useless?  The likely reason is that the context of houses and technology during their time could have rendered it immaterial or unachievable to do so.  In any case, unless one is speaking from the capacity of someone having learnt directly these Feng Shui greats over a few years, they cannot assume to have fully understood the thought processes and approaches of these greats.

During Zhang’s time, there were hardly high-rise apartments with subjective façade that makes for determining the apartment facing and consequently most Feng Shui formula highly subjective.  It can also be said during his time, people that can afford paying for Feng Shui do not live in small apartments unlike now whereby the closer inhabitation means Feng Shui tuning takes on a new level of complexity which therefore warrants a fresh perspective into occupant’s destiny.  

Afterall, it was said that Jiang lead a very tough life and remained very poor even after practicing Feng Shui.  So is he poor by choice or would he have become richer had he incorporated astrological consideration into his Feng Shui methods for himself?  Although we will never know the answer to this question, still it shows that Feng Shui cannot improve beyond the borders demarcated by destiny. 

To read further into our views on this matter, please visit our forum discussion at:

http://fengshuiforward.com/forum/index.php/topic,722.msg6091.html#new

(picture credit of Lexinatrix)

In my previous article about the psychology of resistance to change, I talked about how people are mentally conditioned against changes and usually back themselves up by falling back on precedent cases.  A more extreme form of precedent cases are historical ones.  Ask ourselves, do the past always oppose to changes in the future?  Without change, how can improvements come about?

Ask yourself whether a man living in contemporary society like you will like a dish that was cooked exactly the same way 1000 years ago? With technological advancements we have high pressure cookers, deep fryers and plenty of other cooking equipments.  Why should we still think that a dish that was cooked using wood and the pathetic stove of few hundred years ago is still the best way to process it? Such an insistence to adhere to historical practice betrayed one’s reluctance to innovate and follow up with times. 

In fact a Feng Shui practitioner ought  to be lauded for his ability to modify and adapt Feng Shui advices to the modern and local context.  Why is this so?  The logic is that Feng Shui method evolved from a context was set few hundred years ago in China and  houses and social practices have changed significantly since then.  Even if Feng Shui methods were only developed in recent years in China, its geo-political and cultural differences with other countries meant that modification and adaptation of the methods must still be made for Feng Shui advice in another country.   

For example, few hundred years ago in China, toilets were never housed within the same roof as the living quarters.  But in modern society, toilets are under the same roof as the living quarters are the norm now and differences like this inevitably means that a Feng Shui practitioner that continues to copy methods listed in Feng Shui classics blindly run a great risk of messing up his client’s environment.  Feng Shui practitioners should not be mistaken to think that they can continue to practice Feng Shui by following ancient Feng Shui classics to a T.

 The above are typical lines taken off the websites and other advertising medium of certain famous Feng Shui masters.  While it is understandable to exaggerate service and products levels with advertising puffs, this one takes the cakes too far as paints a misleading picture that Fengshui is all about secret formulas that are only passed exclusively through appointed successors and descendants.  Such an advertising gimmick leads the layman to think that Feng Shui is mystical and un-learnable by most people. I have the benefit to come across the blog of the widely respected Feng Shui Master Joseph Yu on this matter.  I would like to thank him for his thoughts on this matter.  Excerpted from his blog are the following paragraphs in bold:

“I have Feng Shui practitioners today claim to be the xxx generation disciple of Yang Jun Song or even Guo Po, Huang Shi Gong, … They are proud of peeping under the trousers of these great Feng Shui masters in history. This is how the lineage game is played.

How did Newton learn from Descartes? The answer is simple: from his written work.If we want to see more, we have to stand on the shoulders of Giants and not hiding under the legs of Giants and claim to be closely related to the Giants. How? The answer is simple: learn from the books written by the great people in history.

The “lineage holders” will say, “You can’t learn Feng Shui from books. The masters in the past wrote the books in cryptic language and only the lineage holders can understand the secret. This is because the masters did not want the powerful Feng Shui technique to be in the wrong hands.”

How much damage can Feng Shui do if it falls in the wrong hands? Can it be worse than using the knowledge of science and technology to create modern weapons that can kill millions?There is a Chinese proverb: Stop eating because of hiccups that describes this stupid excuse.

I hope Chinese Metaphysics and Feng Shui believers will wise up and not be taken in by such irresponsible advertising claims.  Feng Shui is not that mystical nor secretive.  Greater are those Feng Shui Masters that are receptive to different practices of different Feng Shui schools and yet have the clarity of mind to discern and pick up the crème de la crème of different schools’ practices.  Poorer are the Feng Shui practitioners who need to cloud their lineage in a veil of secrecy and exclusivity to scare, confuse and con their customers.  It is by no coincidence that in my review of Feng Shui audit cases of customers who had suffered terribly, they had their Feng Shui audit done previously by Feng Shui Masters that proliferated this type of advertising puffs.

Source of Pic: Flickr.com

As a Fengshui and Bazi practitioner, I get a lot of enquiries on how to use information on a person’s Bazi (4 Pillars) to avoid bad events or make the best use out of good events.  One of the event that interests readers most is those related to accidents and injuries.  For this session, I will touch on how we can deduce the possibility of accidents from reading the Bazi chart of a person and of a particular day.  

In Bazi, there are 12 zodiac animals that are termed “Earthly Branches” and another 10 elements that are known as “Heavenly Stems”.  The 12 zodiac animals are subdivided into 3 groups of 4 with the certain similar characteristics among zodiac animals of each group.  One of the group is called horses and they contain the zodiac animals Tiger, Snake, Monkey and Pig.  The reason why this group is collectively termed as horses because in the study of Bazi, these 4 animals signify mobility and travel.

Now, if we are interested in looking out for accidents, the presence of these 4 animals in a person’s Bazi chart or a particular day’s Bazi chart, is necessary.  This is because most accidents resulted from moving around or traveling, particularly road and traffic accidents.  This has also been statistically corroborated by the number cases of accidents that Bazi practitioners have compiled so far. 

However,  I give a word of caution to the Bazi novices not to conclude that their friends or family members will meet with accidents simply because their Bazi charts contain anyone of the 4 zodiac animals belonging to the group of Horses.  Like the saying goes, “One swallow does not make a summer” and so does 1 horse, who do make an accident happen on its own. 

For an accident to happen to an individual, usually his Bazi chart contains more than 1 horse element and the likelihood is that it will be coincided by a day with at least one horse element in it as well. One may then argue that this means a high likelihood of accidents for a lot of people.

There are other conditions that need to be present for an accident to happen as well.  First, the horse belonging to the day of accident is usually an unfavorable horse to the individual as determined by the theory of Bazi studies.  Secondly, the presence of earth zodiac animals (Dragon, Ox, Dog and Goat) are required because roads are made of earth.  The zodiac animals classified in the group of earth is another group the total of 3 groups of animals I mentioned in the earlier paragraph. Thirdly, there would be some form of clashes in the individual and day’s Bazi elements in order for it to happen. 

With the above knowledge and further application of basic Bazi theories mention in the previous paragraph, one would have a high chance of avoiding accidents.

Now, does a good brand definitely mean good value-for-money?  I would say, most times a well-known brand either give the consumer the fair value or slightly below fair value for their money.  Being a cost conscious and sophisticated customer, I have done a lot of  comparisons and assessments to be confident of my stand on this.  For example, one of the particular brand of branded shoes always give way much earlier than the other less prestigious brand of the same category shoes I had.  Some will this shoe may compensate durability for other qualitative aspects like design.  On this argument, I will agree to disagree.  However, do take note that like stocks, an established counter is seldom undervalued except for the transition period of market correction.

The need for branding permeates every aspect of our society.  From the parents that prefer to send their children to the elite schools, to the S$ 400 hairdo that celebrities did and finally to the Fengshui customers that will only take up the service of old and well-known Fengshui Masters.

Now, does an old and well-known Fengshui master necessarily delivers the best or most value-for-money Fengshui service?  As Fengshui is an abstract and sophisticated field of expertise, most Fengshui customers would look to age and reputation as their criteria for engaging a Fengshui master.

It is precisely because of the cognizance of this evaluation criteria of potential Fengshui customers that a lot of Fengshui masters portrays themselves as learning this art since tender ages like 9.  It is also because of this that a lot of Fengshui Masters will pay a lot to advertise their services in the newspapers or even on Google Ads.  This includes high sponsorship deals to appear in the yearly Chinese New Year Eve Variety Program on local television station.  

There is a saying in Chinese that “???????” which literally means that you pay for what you demanded.  Put simply, such advertising dollars splurged are going to be recovered from future customers and therefore, we can safely say that this Fengshui Master’s services would not be value-for-money.

Does being older necessarily makes one a better Fengshui Master?  I have come across work of so-called old and reputed Fengshui Master which are riddled with mistakes.  Old conveys a message about vast experience and definitely experience will be very useful in the field of Fengshui.  However, what if some old Fengshui Master has been repeatedly doing the wrong things or not so effective things all these while?  His many years of experience under his belt would not have been as effective as a younger Fengshui Master who can correctly identify the critical areas to study and research upon.  As such, an intelligent younger Fengshui practitioner, that studies and works smart by identifying the critical areas and who is able to incorporate a practical approach would be a better choice of Fengshui service provider.  I am sure customers do not want a Fengshui Master that only quotes them particular sections of this classical Fengshui text only to be informed that there is no cure for this Fengshui problem as per the teachings of that classical Fengshui text!

What is the problem with being young?  There is one tarot card reader in Singapore who started his Tarot Card reading business since 23 years of age.  Then there are also 12-year-old music prodigy whose immense talents see land her a ticket to perform in Vienna.

I only believe in looking at age for certain positions.  For example, management positions in a sizeable corporate entity.  In this case, no matter how competent the young guy is, he still lacks the management experience which is necessary for him to manage people.

Why should a Fengshui practitioner be judged by his age?  Fengshui practice is a different altogether from the corporate structure we talked about.  One can start to research and practice since young. If one works smart, he may instead not systematically repeat the mistakes that certain older Fengshui Masters make.  So by the time one is in his late 20s or early 30s, one can become an accomplished master.  Isn’t Joey Yap, one of the better Fengshui Masters around now, also very young?

Last night as I was reading the Xin Min Daily Chinese newspapers in Singapore, it reported that May Phua had decided to revert back to her previous Chinese name, citing reason as fearing for her life.  This is because she was one of the many Singapore Media Corps artist who had her Chinese name advised to be changed by 1 particular Fengshui Master in Singapore.  Unfortunately while their acting career seems to have all been resurrected somewhat by their name changed to the one advised by this master, 2 of them had suffer other mishaps after the name change.

The first one, Christopher Lee , got involved was charged with drink driving and leaving the scene of accident.  The result was that he went to jail for that.  He reverted back to his original name after being released from jail.  In fact, there were 2 other Fengshui masters that appeared on Chinese newspapers thereafter, criticising the name change.  To me, I see this 2 Fengshui masters as hitting below the belt.  It is a fact that Christopher’s popularity improved after his name change by this master.  But to blame drunken driving on a name change is too lame and too irresponsible.  An individual need to be accountable for his own action no matter what effects of Fengshui name change he was under influence of.  

The second one, Jimmy Nah , better known as MC King, mysteriously died of heart failure in his sleep.  After his demise, I checked on his birth date and realised he had a special Bazi chart.  I analysed his Chinese name thereafter and found that the configuration is indeed unorthodox.  Without the information on the hour pillar I dare not conclude that the Fengshui Master caused Jimmy Nah his life.  But I will still advocate any name change and Fengshui done to be implemented after only fully considering the Birth Chart of the client.  That is the reason why I do not agree with Fengshui Masters who do Fengshui audits without analysing the birth charts.

Fengshui customers that baulk at the cost of audit, should re-think again.  Efforts like reading the birth chart is transparent to the customer but Find Out More!