Finding feng shui balance

QUESTION OF THE WEEK: What are your thoughts on people who are really into feng shui yet still seem to have bad things happen to them — way more than the average person? I know someone who the more she gets into feng shui, the more crazy and upsetting her experiences are.

In my opinion, people like your friend have been conditioned to believe that their lives are determined by outside forces beyond their control, and that feng shui magically can mitigate and eradicate all the bad in life. In my experience, the more a person strives for a one-sided reality — in this case, all good and no bad — challenging life events occur to bring them back into balance.

Just as a magnet has two poles, a positive and a negative, life has two opposite yet complementary sides. We live in an oppositional reality: good/bad, up/down, light/dark, positive/negative, etc. Trying to use feng shui to create something unbalanced will never work, because feng shui is all about balance. From the foods we eat or the friends we choose, to the lifestyle we live, it’s all about balance, including within your home environment.

It sounds as if your friend is using feng shui to avoid “bad luck.” She is perhaps putting so much of her energy into avoiding the bad, that she is drawing it to her. She can turn her luck around by using feng shui properly to bring balance to her environment and her life.

My advice

I have heard it said that to have a loving and supportive family is a blessing, but to have a healthy, beautiful, supportive and happy home is to be blessed twice! The latter is — and should be — the focus of feng shui.

If I could talk to your friend, since she is into feng shui, I would tell her to bring more harmony into her life by working with the five elements — wood, fire, earth, metal and water — using the basic feng shui principles to shift, balance and harmonize the energy in her home. By concentrating on balance rather than avoiding the bad, she will find that balance comes naturally.

Another thing she could do is to look for what is good and what has been favorable in her life (versus focusing on what is bad or trying to avoid the “bad”). If she would look back on her life to see the good that did happen, and affirm those events more often, she also could come to a different awareness about her life and as a result, attract a different (more favorable) set of circumstances to her.

As my mentor Dr. John Demartini said, “It’s wiser to embrace life for the true and balanced magnificence that it offers than to strive for a fantasy of what it idealistically should be.”

Do you have a question for Alice? If so, send it to alice@yourhappinessu.com. Alice Inoue is the founder and Chief Happiness Officer at Happiness U, a friendly educational establishment, where you’ll find inspiring classes geared toward personal growth and self-development. YourHappinessU.com.