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Articles about Feng Shui Toronto
Let Your Love Flow, My Messy Bedroom (syndicated column), by Josey Vogels, March 1st, 2000
More Feng Shui Fun, My Messy Bedroom (syndicated column), by Josey Vogels, August 16th, 2000
Let Your Love Flow
My Messy Bedroom (syndicated column) by Josey Vogals, March 1st, 2000
Which direction is your love corner?
I once dated a guy whose bedroom consisted of a pile of blankets on the floor laid out to sort of look like a bed, a few shelves of books and a knapsack full of laundry. We were in university and he was big on romanticizing the poor student image. Little did he or I know at the time that his minimalist sense of home decorating might have been what was contributing to the only thing that kept the relationship going as long as it did – a hot sex life. Though now, come to think of it, the fact that his makeshift bed was on the floor (well, actually it was the floor) just might have been responsible for sinking this same relationship right into the toilet.
&#In Feng Shui philosophy, the idea is to keep things off the floor because they pull the energy out of a room and into the ground,” Bridget McFarthing tells me over the phone from Toronto where she has worked for the last two years as a Feng Shui consultant helping people bring more health, wealth and happiness into their lives with some strategic furniture placement. Okay, it’s a little more complex than that and by the way, it’s pronounced fung shway and means “Wind Water.” I came across McFarthing’s name in the latest newsletter from my fave Toronto sex shop, Come As You Are. It seems she’ll doing a workshop there in July entitled “Feng Shui Your Boudoir” teaching people how to maximize the sexual energy in their bedroom.
My place is a bit of a Feng Shui nightmare but I decided a little phone consultation couldn’t hurt. At least I wouldn’t have to hear her gasp in Feng Shui horror when she walked into my place and was able to hear the distinct slurping sounds of energy being sucked into my floor through the piles of precious stuff scattered about.
Besides, we were going to focus on my bedroom here, the most Zen room in my place (despite this column’s title). There are at least three or four feet of energy-sucking free floor space and my bed isn’t against the wall.
&#Getting rid of clutter and bed placement is one of the most important things when it comes to maximizing sexual energy,” says McFarthing, who practices a more westernized version of Feng Shui based on the theories of the Black Tantric Bhuddist Sect (BTB) based in California. Sounds a little scary I know and, admittedly, these folks do give the traditionalist Feng Shui masters the willies. Not from fear, but because they work to correct existing spaces rather than the more preventative approach of the masters. McFarthing believes the approach is more suited to Western needs. “You can’t rebuild your house or remodel your apartment because it has bad Feng Shui. I try and work with what people have.”
I can hardly explain the entire philosophy of a practice that has been around since the Tang Dynasty, but for those of you less familiar with the whole Feng Shui trend (ah, how we Westerners love to rip stuff off from everyone else and make it our own in our perpetual search for happiness and harmony) the basic philosophy is that everything is alive (rooms, tables, and yes, even beds) and contains energy or what they refer to in Feng Shui circles as chi. The BTB Theory of Feng Shui uses placement and colour to readjust the chi in to help the flow of energy in any given space.
Including the flow of orgasms through your body. “Orgasms are energy too,” says McFarthing. “The flow of energy in your bedroom can effect the flow of orgasms in your body. “For example, for people who don’t feel comfortable during sex, bed placement might be the problem,” she says. Beds should be away from the wall and if possible facing both a door and a window, so you feel free to go in and out. And lose the ceiling mirrors – the 70s are over. Mirrors reflect your own chi back at you and this is a bad thing. Energy, including sexual energy, also gets stuck in clutter. A bedside table is okay if you keep it clean and uncluttered, and you might want to put up a shelf to hold that pile of books lying beside your bed. A chair is okay. Better to throw your clothes on it, than the energy-sucking floor.
And get that crap out of the corners. “Stagnant energy goes to corners of a room,” McFarthing tells me. “We usually find people who have a lousy sex life have a lot of stuff in their love corner.”
Yes, in Feng Shui, every room has a love corner, which can be determined by laying something called a Ba Gua map over a space (or by standing at the main entrance and extending your right arm diagonally over the space to determine the direction of your love corner). Over the phone, we figure mine is the southeast corner of my bedroom, and is currently occupied by a number of dead or dying plants. “Get ‘em outta there, girl!” she cries.
Once you clear your corner, you should decide what you want to go on in your bedroom and let the corner reflect this. So, say you want lots of hot sex to happen in your bedroom and the last time you and your partner had hot sex was on your vacation in Tahiti; you should clear your love corner and stick a few pics from that vacation in the cleared space.
&#Posters, pictures, and collages are all powerful,” says McFarthing. But be careful, if you’re single and looking for love, for example you don’t want to stick up a bunch of hot pictures of you all alone. Chances are you’ll stay that way; alone, that is. Better to leave the space clear than put up something that will chase the sexual energy away says McFarthing. Candles are good too, (“fire is powerful,” she says) but watch what colour they are and recite a little passion request every time you light them. You can also use colour to stimulate your love life. Red and pink are traditionally powerful colours that represent love and passion. But also, in Feng Shui, everyone has a birth star based on your birth date. Apparently mine is six metal. I’m not sure what that means but Bridget told me my best energy comes from the northwest and that white, silver, gray, and gold are my sex colours. You can also combine your colours with a partner’s to achieve maximum hubba, hubba. Sadly, the boys’ birth star is two earth, which means his colours are brown, beige and tan.
Though, come to think of it, those dead plants are pretty brown. Maybe I could hang some tinsel on them.
You can ask Bridget McFarthing specific questions (about Feng Shui, of course) by visiting her web site at www.interlog.com/~fengshui.
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More Feng Shui Fun
My Messy Bedroom (syndicated column) by Josey Vogals, August 16th, 2000
When we last checked in with Feng Shui babe Bridget McFarthing she told us how to put some more bop in our boudoir with a little furniture shifting and some clutter clean up. But McFarthing has expanded her particular version of Feng Shui (pronounced fung shway) to the rest of the house.
“My last workshop focused specifically on how to ‘Feng Shui your boudoir’ to improve your sex life, but now it’s about more than sex,” says the Toronto-based McFarthing “Now I focus on how to change your entire space to improve all the relationships in your life – your romantic relationships, your relationship with yourself, your career and your friends.”
One way to do this is to do what McFarthing calls, “creating a template” for your home. By way of example, she describes one client who told her she wanted more passion in her life. “She was a very controlled, orderly person and her place reflected that,” explains McFarthing. “I asked her to describe passion to me – what did it look like to her. She said that for her passion was about things not being neatly ordered. In other words, it was about letting go. So we tossed some cushions around, and broke up the order a bit.”
McFarthing puts the passion questions to me. What does it look like? What colour is it? What shape is it? Big, sweeping burnt orange flames of passion are soon dancing in my head and McFarthing suggests a few orange throw cushions, or some flowing orange fabric and candles might be just the thing to turn my place into a den of passion.
Or say you’re someone who finds themselves constantly in crummy relationships being treated like crap. If you wanted to break the pattern and find someone who would treat you like the fabulous person you are, McFarthing would ask you to describe what it meant to be treated better. “Again, I would ask them what it looks like in their mind and then to introduce a physical representation of that in their physical environment.” Surrounded by bouquets of flowers, boxes of chocolate and pictures of people kissing your feet, it will only be a matter of time before this manifests itself in real life.
Another of McFarthing’s clients wanted to be in a long-term relationship. “I asked her to come up with something in her apartment that would represent that,” she explains. “She decided roses and the colour pink represented love and relationships to her. We planted roses in her garden and worked on introducing pink throughout her house. Within six weeks, she was in a relationship.”
McFarthing admits that a lot of the power of her particular approach to Feng Shui has to do with taking an active role in focusing on what you want. “It’s all interconnected,” she explains. “You think about what you want and physically introduce representations of it into your space and the universe supports this.”
The Feng Shui McFarthing practices is a more westernized version based on the theories of the Black Tantric Bhuddist Sect (BTB) based in California. “The idea is that thought creates form,” McFarthing explains. “By creating the intention, by thinking and writing down and introducing physical representations in your space of what you want to have happen in your life, you can make it so.”
It’s a bit like that thing your mom used to say to you about having confidence. If you act confident, soon you will feel confident and others will see you as confident. The beauty of this approach to Feng Shui is that it doesn’t involve moving or rebuilding your entire home, as do some of the more bad ass traditional approaches to Feng Shui.
“The idea is to work with what you have which is more suited to western urban culture because you can’t necessarily physically alter the structure of your space if you live in an apartment.” All Feng Shui is about the flow of energy in a space. “Your house is like the body of a living spirit,” explains McFarthing. “The window is the eyes and the door is the mouth. Energy is inhaled into the home and it flows according to the structures and the layout of the rooms. If the energy can flow freely, you’ll be healthy and prosperous.”
If it flows directly into that pile of papers and boxes in the corner you’ve been meaning to deal with, or collects in the dust bunnies under your bed, it will get stuck and wreak havoc. And if it’s relationships we’re focusing on here, then you really need to look at the junk in your relationship corners. In Feng Shui, each room is mapped out with different areas representing different aspects of your life. The relationship corner of each room is determined by standing at the doorway and extending your right arm diagonally across the space. If its full of the crap you still haven’t returned to your ex, you’re in trouble.
“I’ve met people who keep getting into bad relationships and the one thing I consistently notice about their house is that they’ve got a lot of clutter from past relationships,” she says. “I call them sentimental archives, you know, love letters, old wedding photos. It’s hard to move forward when you’re symbolically stuck in the past.”
McFarthing recommends all her clients do something she calls, “The Clutter Test.” “Look at what is in the relationship area of any room and ask yourself three questions about whatever is there,” she explains. “Does is lift my energy when I think about it or look at it?” “Do I really love it?” and “Is it genuinely useful?” If you can’t answer yes to at least two out of three of these questions, you need to make some changes.
But be careful. All those pictures of you and your friends having a good time may fulfill all of these needs but if they’re in your relationship corner you may be shooting yourself in the foot. “It tells me you have a lot of friends but no lover. The friends need to go in the friend corner where they can help you and you need to get something else in your relationship corner that will bring love into your life.”
I’m thinking maybe some shots of me and Dylan McDermott hanging out.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some cleaning to do.
You can ask Bridget McFarthing specific questions (about Feng Shui, of course) by visiting her web site at www.interlog.com/~fengshui
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