What Does Feng Shui Have to Do With My Spiritual Journey?

You may be surprised to hear that Feng Shui was the catalyst to my spiritual journey. How does Feng Shui have anything to do with my spiritual journey? To answer that question fully, I have to go back to a time in my life prior to COVID.

I was living like a nomad, travelling over 200 days a year as a 100% remote worker. While I had been working remote full time since 2010, it wasn’t until 2015 that I began to take advantage of my flexible position. Remember, back then remote work was not the norm. My brother is who I credit with this brilliant idea of travelling anywhere and everywhere while I worked. When I had taken him out to dinner for his birthday the year before, he was telling me about all his business travels and I couldn’t help but voice my envy. He then said something along the lines of “Why don’t you travel then? You have a full time remote position. You don’t have to stay at home and work. You can go somewhere else and work during the day then enjoy whatever place you are visiting on your free time!” That had never dawned on me because everyone else I knew who worked remote worked from home day in and day out just like I did!

So I began travelling around the U.S. while I worked and tried to take one international trip a year as my vacation. I was not allowed to travel internationally while working due to corporate liability issues. I didn’t have a ton of money to pay for hotels either, so I typically traveled to places where I could stay with either friends or family so I spent most of my time in California and Nevada.

When COVID hit in 2020, I was forcefully grounded, spending my entire time at home, something that had become foreign to me. I found myself feeling miserable at home, working long hours and not doing much of anything else. It became very clear to me that travelling had been an outlet to deal with the difficulties of my job and bringing me happiness. Since I could not travel, spend time enjoying good food and experiences with friends, with the world on lockdown, I sought out another way to relieve stress and experience moments of happiness and joy. That is when I started writing short fiction stories, quickly discovering it was a great outlet for me to leave reality for a couple of hours diving into something I loved that also gave me peace.

At the end of 2020, I made the decision to sell my home and move to a different state, starting the drive halfway across the country on New Year’s Eve. By mid-February of 2021 I had signed a lease to rent an apartment that I actually loved. With COVID still rampant at the time and work at the highest volume it has been in 5 years, while recently losing a couple members, I spent all the time at my apartment working 15+ hour days and even working weekends for a few months. Needless to say, I was struggling with the lack of balance in my life and growing more and more unhappy and unhealthy. When work eased up in late spring, I finally had a chance to start asking myself a ton of deeper soul searching type of questions.

Without going into a ton of details of all the things that I was questioning, because I will eventually get into all those as I continue to write more and more blog posts, I’ll give a brief rundown of all the things I started to consider.
1. I wanted to turn my unhappiness around and find what truly makes me happy.
2. In order to get closer to happiness, I felt I needed to find and understand myself better.
3. I needed to find a consistent way to relieve my stress.
4. I wondered about what I wanted in my long term future.
5. I feared the already developing feeling of unhealthiness in my body was only going to manifest into serious illness or disease.

As a result of all the things I was thinking about, I started dipping my toes in a few different things that so happened to be in the metaphysical realm. Because a friend was into tarot, I began watching tarot readings on YouTube based on my zodiac sign, but she also educated me that my sun sign was only the tip of the iceberg and I should understand and look into my rising and moon sign as well. After sending my natal chart to me, learning about astrology came into play since I thought looking deeper into that could be a great way for me to understand myself better. I began watching a lot of videos on both tarot and astrology to immerse myself more into the two subjects. At that time, I had planned to write blog posts about my research to explain how I was discovering myself through my natal chart. However, I ended up only thinking about it, not taking any action. I also tried meditation to help with my stress and access my intuition, which I knew was blocked off.

Lastly, since I was spending all the time in my apartment and I had heard of Feng Shui knowing it fell into Chinese Metaphysics, I began to look into it. Even though I loved my apartment, I wondered if maybe the Feng shui was attributing to the challenges I was experiencing at the time. I was open to changing some things for a better outcome in several areas of my life. The way I saw it, doing Feng shui remedies couldn’t hurt. Of course back then I didn’t realize that it actually could cause negative effects and implementing incorrect remedies could make my life, work, health, finances much worse, but more on that when I actually write about Feng Shui specifically later. I thought I could google and do DIY Feng shui myself, but I quickly realized there were many types of schools of Feng shui and each had different and conflicting methods. I didn’t have the time to take a course myself and it would be a struggle to even decide which of the schools to learn. I knew I was in over my head, so found a consultant online who had trained with a few different schools and indicated she used a combination of all. That sounded good to me with my limited knowledge and hired her to get a consult on my apartment.

The day of the consult, after taking the compass reading, walking around my entire apartment and taking notes, she insisted on helping me move my work desk immediately to a more auspicious area between the living and dining room. She knew I would not be able to do it on my own with it needing to be moved down a flight of stairs. In less than 2 months of doing that, I did receive both a promotion and salary increase. That being said, I still wondered if that was due to moving the desk or the fact that I already was told by my manager over 6 months prior that they were trying to get me a promotion and raise, but were not able to get approval for it just yet. Was the timing of getting the approval coincidental? Either way, I was only more intrigued by Feng Shui.

When my lease ended, I moved to a different apartment and looked again at seeing if I could DIY my own Feng Shui, but I was stumped choosing what school to follow. I came across a YouTube channel that was debunking all the Feng Shui myths and misinformation that could actually cause severe negative impacts. I felt especially drawn to it and then discovered a course was starting in only a few days. After reaching out to get more info, I went against my norm and blindly jumped at the opportunity to become a certified classically trained Feng Shui consultant in mid-July of this year, without giving it much thought because I felt I should simply do something different.

It was during my Feng Shui certification course that I learned implementing a Feng Shui practice on your home can help minimize bad earth luck and enhance the good energies. But Feng Shui remedies and activations will only take you so far because it is only one third of the pie, called Earth Luck, which is basically your home. Another third is called Heaven Luck and is based on the premise that fate, destiny and karma, which is related to past lives and related karmic debt, will affect your current life. Some claim this area is unchangeable since you are born with your soul’s history just like you are born with your specific DNA. Other’s believe it can be affected, but I do not know enough about that to speak about it any further. The last third of the pie is Man(kind) Luck. This is what each person has free will to do, such as thoughts, feelings, and actions. This is the area that has the most potential to have the greatest effects out of all the three and where both actions towards goals as well as spirituality come into play.

Based on that knowledge, while doing Feng Shui in my apartment will help, I know in order to really shift my life, I have to tip the Luck scale from one thirds to two thirds. To do that, working on both Earth and Mankind Luck is necessary. Knowing one of my greatest problems is negative self talk and that is a big problem with Mankind Luck, I found myself propelled towards taking many spiritual actions to change that and starting my Spiritual Journey.