Feng Shui 101

Sure, feng shui seems simple at the outset - redecorate your living room, buy a mirror and suddenly, ta-da!, you have rearranged your life. However, once you get into the nitty-gritty of this ancient Chinese practice, it can be overwhelming. It's enough to make your head spin faster than the needle on the compass your Feng Shui for Dummies guide instructed you to buy.

Feng Shui expert Teresa Polanco (right) advises a client on her home.

"The class confirmed what I felt for a while — I felt my clutter was holding me back."

Books might give you a basic understanding of which feng shui tool does what, but they're not going to give you the full picture.

"There are so many different tools and applications, and if you read one book on one tool and another book on another tool, you're not going to know which to use," says Teresa Polanco, founder of the Feng Shui Alliance, a feng shui/interior decoration school in Edgewater, NJ. "You don't go to med school to read books; you have to take classes. The classroom helps you integrate the different tools."

The Feng Shui Alliance offers classes throughout the year, ranging from 1-day workshops to a 12-week certification program. Clearing Clutter and Feng Shui 101 are especially popular courses. What sets the Alliance apart from other feng shui schools? For starters, Polanco tells students that some of the traditional feng shui practices, such as decorating with crystals, don't appeal to her at all.

"Hanging crystals and bamboo flutes are classical Chinese corrections from a Chinese aesthetic design. If you go into a colonial-style home and do that, it will look ridiculous," she says. "Instead, we'll hang a crystal chandelier, for example. We adapt feng shui tools to our culture."

Polanco believes this art form is very much a reflection of an individual's subconscious. For instance, many single women itching for a relationship commit a classic feng shui faux pas without even realizing it, she says: They decorate their homes with paintings of forlorn looking single women.

"I made that mistake myself when I was single," she says. A classic fix would be to replace such images with, say, Gustav Klimt's The Kiss.

Those who are partial to the aforementioned "Dummies" book can actually take a class with its author, David Daniel Kennedy, in Berkeley, CA. Among other things, Kennedy teaches how bad luck and illness can befall people living in too much yin energy, which exists in spaces that are dark and cramped. Remedy? Brighten up the place with living things like plants or pets.

According to Kennedy, "a very common problem that people have is living in an unnatural setting, in concrete, cut off from anything green and living."

Inversely, too much yang (spaces that are, for example, too brightly colored) can also cause bad luck, so he suggests keeping spaces painted in muted tones.

Traditionalists and adventurers alike might enjoy a class that takes them way out of their present confines . . . literally. Feng Shui Designs, an institute in Nevada City, CA, offers immersion programs in China, where participants have on-site training by feng shui masters. For those who prefer to learn from the comfort of their own homes, Bella Andre, a romance novelist-cum-feng shui consultant, teaches an online course that's geared toward writers. She uses a Yahoo! Groups bulletin board to post and receive class assignments.

Vonda Ogle, a writer from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, discovered newfound organization through feng shui, both literally and figuratively, by taking Bella Andre's course.

Says Ogle: "The class confirmed what I felt for a while - I felt my clutter was holding me back from achieving what I wanted. Once I started de-cluttering, I saw positive things start to happen. Now, I feel I have my environment under control, instead of my environment controlling me."

Posted on August 21, 2006