Article Archive
The following articles were published in The Mountain Astrologer Magazine.
Aug/Sept 2009 : Astrology and Feng Shui
Feng Shui is a Chinese term meaning “Wind and Water” and deals with creating more beneficial Ch’i (life-force energy) in your life. It basically demonstrates how to live in harmony with your environment and has been practiced in the Chinese culture for more than three thousand years.
In the last decade, Feng Shui has become increasingly popular in the Western world, particularly with regard to the placement of furniture in the home. A "Bagua Map" is used to lay out the house into nine different sections, each section representing an area of life. With some basic training you can learn to unblock and even enhance the Ch’i in specific parts of your home. When life-force is increased, positive changes take place with less effort as well as with more harmony and greater success.
As an astrologer, I have always been fascinated with utilizing the ancient art of Feng Shui to help recognize how to make rapid and harmonious progress during a strong transit or solar arc. For example, if a client has Saturn transiting the 7th house, or its ruler, I might suggest that they focus on energizing the part of their home that is connected to relationships and marriage (the back right third of the house according to the Bagua Map).
Sometimes this can be accomplished by simply doing a deep and mindful cleaning in that area, or perhaps just moving the furniture to smooth and freshen the energy. Affirmations can also be written and placed there as a focal point for positivity. With a little research, you can find many Feng Shui “cures” designed to help clear and cleanse the energy and to restore positive Ch’i in this area. At the very least this creates helpful action steps that can be taken in order to convert a cycle of developmental tension into positive movement forward.
My real interest in this started when I experienced a classic example of how Feng Shui and astrology work hand in hand. In 1998, my husband had Pluto solar arc to the ruler of his midheaven. I was alerted to the suggestion that there could be transformation and change in his career area, so I was prepared to see some activity. At this same time, I was exploring Feng Shui and working with it to enhance the Ch’i in our home.
Here’s what happened:
We moved to Virginia Beach in 1996 because my husband got a job offer that launched him in a new direction and sounded very promising. It started smoothly and we enjoyed the excitement of being part of an emerging new technology company. After a few years, though, we noticed the energy starting to clog up and stagnate with this new venture (this was just a few months before the solar arc was exact). It started to become clear to us that he needed to move on to another experience.
I decided to utilize my knowledge of Feng Shui to enhance and energize the room in our house that corresponds with career on the Bagua Map. My specific intention was to manifest a wonderful new opportunity for my husband. Soon after making the appropriate changes to the room, everything accelerated and the job situation got more and more intense. He found himself coming home angry, frustrated and verbally “grinding away” about the situation nearly every day.
At about the same time all this intensity was building, we began to have problems with a sewer pump that is located just outside of the house, underground, and exactly underneath the window of the career room. Of course, as we know, Pluto rules underground sewer pumps!
This pump is responsible for taking all the water and sewage from our house and moving it out to the city sewer system that runs down the middle of our street. The device is called a grinder pump - isn’t that interesting? At the very same time my husband was “grinding” about everything happening at his job, the pump was running nonstop, failing to shut down when there was nothing to pump! And don’t forget, it was grinding away in the career section of our house. I have to emphasize that at this point, we still didn’t have a clue there was a problem with the pump. We could hear it making noises, but we didn’t know the significance of what those noises meant!
The situation became acute, and my husband made a decision to give his notice so he could begin his new job hunt. The day after his final day at the old job, the pump finally burned itself out (which is interesting because at that point he described himself as being totally burned out). I found out about the malfunction because I looked out the “career” window and saw a lake of very smelly sewer water that had overflowed from the now defunct pump. My husband had stopped grinding - so did the pump! Oh, the joys of Pluto!
Look at the amazing symbolism here - my husband felt stagnant and clogged at work and was experiencing a very intense burnout. The universe supplied us with a physical demonstration of the problem in the exact part of our home that, according to the Bagua Map, corresponds with career!
We called in a plumber to dig out the pump and replace it, fixed the landscaping that surrounded it, blessed it on a daily basis, and focused on new energy circulating in his career. It wan an expensive experience, but incredibly fascinating to me.
Hopefully, any such experience you might have won't be as grossly unpleasant as ours, but sometimes the universe makes you wake up and smell the sewage! So, open your eyes, ears - and nose - and explore the often uncanny correspondence between the Bagua map and the houses in the natal horoscope.
