Hey everyone,
I know I don’t blog about feng shui topics often as the theme of this blog has always been more focused on the philosophical approach to metaphysics, but something happened which provided the impetus for me to write something on the topic. Nothing technical here – it’s more of a sharing of what goes on behind the scenes and some of my experiences thus far.
Unbeknownst to most, I’ve been pretty active for feng shui engagements although I don’t blog about it as much. I find the need to sort through the photos particularly troublesome especially when I take horrible pictures. I know I said this a thousand times, but you will never see me in these pictures because it’s pretty weird to have someone take a picture of me while I’m doing the audit and the whole idea of trying to ‘sell’ yourself with a picture holding a ‘luo pan’ feels very awkward to me. I guess the incumbents usually have an assistant who tags along. I’ll attach a gallery at the end of this post for everyone to take a look at some of the weekend adventures I’ve embarked on. I’ll try to find time to write a few case studies – I’m still rather tied up by the cases that came in through the Channel NewsAsia article and it has been late nights and burnt weekends ever since.
I do remember a good number of client cases very vividly – which is usually not a good thing. I remember these cases because they are the ones where I do worry for my clients when that one critical year hits. For some reason, the majority of people don’t take what I say seriously until something happens (perhaps due to my age). A good handful of my past clients are reaching out to me 1 or 2 years later, updating me about what I saw in their charts back then. This particular case I’m about to share is worth mentioning because I want to set things straight with everyone when it comes to feng shui:
A client who engaged me for a feng shui audit back in 2016 reached out to me, and she’s kindly allowed me to use her situation as a case study. My response was, “I’ve been wanting to pull out your reading” because this was one of those cases that stuck in my head, and quite frankly, I was waiting for this client to reach out to me this year because 2018 was identified as an extremely critical year. Remember the ranting post I wrote a while back on why I don’t take up each and every single case which comes to me? This case is also a perfect example of why I decided to implement a screening system for feng shui. I was still very fresh in the market as a practitioner back in 2016 when the said couple approached me for an audit. I took the case willingly back then – I didn’t screen my feng shui cases as I assumed my clients would see feng shui the way I see it and I learned this usually isn’t the case the hard way.
The Biggest Feng Shui Misconception That People Have
Everyone needs to know that the assumption that a practitioner can go into a house and ‘fix’ everything, or turn a bad house into a good one, is a huge misconception, and it needs to stop.
Honestly, whenever I see other practitioners make declarations like “activating the good ‘qi’ of the place and tapping in the Water Dragon formation” and other forms of hocus pocus, I am thinking to myself “What the heck are they talking about?”. No one can go into a house, take out the ‘luo pan’ (it’s just a fancy-looking compass), shift a few things around and declare the ‘qi’ of the house has been shifted. Changing the feng shui of the house is virtually impossible if you’re staying in an apartment because the layout of the house and the orientation of the building is fixed and they are extremely important factors when it comes to Feng Shui. The only way that you are going to maximize feng shui is when you build a house from the ground up.
This is why I very much prefer hunting for a house with my clients despite it being very time inefficient for me because I hate going into a house someone just bought and delivering bad news. What makes it worst is that clients expect practitioners to make the house perfect in terms of feng shui, not knowing that most of them just get lied to so that the case can be closed with a clueless but seemingly satisfied client.
This particular engagement didn’t go down too well because I had nothing good to say about the house, and I think everyone knows by now I would not lie or sugarcoat such things. It was a bad house in the eyes of feng shui and it is what it is – I’m not the wrong who decides what nature’s laws are and I’m not a deity who can control or alter them. There are plenty of ‘practitioners’ out there who are willing to lie in your face and perhaps even sell you a cure in the form of a crystal or figurine of a mythical creature – just not me. And yes, my client’s then-husband took it very badly. I remember his exact words to me very clearly: “Didn’t we hire you to give us solutions and fix these things?”. This wasn’t, of course, the last time I had this imbecilic comment thrown at me, which Is why I’ve decided that I will now start to screen my feng shui clients too.
This case happened way before I wrote that epic blog post explaining the existence of a bad BaZi chart (which the world happily denies its existence), and needless to say, the person who said that to me belonged to a Category 4 BaZi chart. There’s no point in finding a wealth spot in the house because someone with a chart like his will never find a house that supports the growth of wealth. If anyone thinks every single house has a wealth spot for you to ‘activate’ and you’ll suddenly become rich, I would like to bring everyone down to earth again and say this is not the case. This old client of mine, like any other Category 4 person, failed to realise the problem is not with the house – it’s with him. Please remember our BaZi & Zi Wei Dou Shu chart comes first before feng shui, and there’s no point trying to change your environment without first changing yourself. Heavens will not give someone with a bad chart a good house – trust me on that.
I know everyone gets very curious about what a Category 4 person is like and clients like to ask which category they fall under. Just to give you some perspective: I once had a prospective client who claims his wife is the reincarnation of one of the Buddhas. This is an extreme case, but the bottom line is that a lot of people who fall under this category operate at a level that a lot of us will never comprehend and to their detriment, of course. I’m sure we all have that one person we know whom we find toxic and draining, and we do what we can to avoid them. This field tends to attract people like that unfortunately and as a service provider, I would rather not deal with them.
This particular case has always been embedded in my mind because it was one of the first traumatizing experiences I’ve had as a practitioner. It was one of those moments when I realized what I studied and practised is simply not the way the public perceives it. It also made me realize how big of a gap there was regarding the public’s education in this field. 2016 was a year where I started to conduct things very differently and I started blogging about all these issues a lot more. I implemented screening processes for BaZi first since it took up the majority of my cases. Through my BaZi consultations, I realized not everyone benefits or gets to benefit from metaphysics.I have unpleasant encounters due to the misalignment of what metaphysics is really about from time to time and I am trying my best to minimize it. This screening process is also now in place for my feng shui audits for the very same reason. I know people will perceive this as arrogance and elitism, but I do this only because I speak the truth about what I see, and not many people are ready or willing to hear it. Such engagements are not a good match, and I felt the wiser thing to do is to make sure I served the right people. I know not many businesses can select their clients, but I hope everyone understands the nature my my ‘business’ is different and I need to conserve every ounce of time and energy I have for me to be able to continue doing this well.
Don’t Always Expect The Feng Shui Master To Say Positive Things
I won’t say I’m in a dilemma and feel pressured to say good things just so clients can be happy. I will always say things very objectively, and that’s something that will never change about me. Can you imagine if I were to fluff and lie my way through my consultations, and when (not if) the foreseen negative event happens and the clients gets caught unaware – wouldn’t it be worse? I will still end up getting the blame, won’t I? The whole point is to get a heads up so everyone can start taking steps to alter the course. If you can control the cause, you can control the effect as well. Metaphysics is nothing but a way of explaining cause-and-effect. The sad thing is that a lot of people still think feng shui is about shifting furniture and placing items, and basically a short cut to you life’s problems. What makes it worse is that people are willing to spend thousands on ‘cures’ which don’t exist, and here I am getting flamed by clients I’m genuinely trying to help and educate. Trust me, there are ex-clients out there who hate me for various reasons: It’s either I denied them of the Q&A because they were obnoxious (and this was clearly stated in the T&Cs), or because I didn’t give them solutions. I’m fine with that – I’m not in the business of pleasing everyone and I wish to make it clear that I’m not the kind of practitioner who is meant for everyone given how misconstrued and misunderstood this field is.
Metaphysics is not a shortcut – only people with the lowest quality BaZi charts would be so naive to perceive metaphysics this way. I’m not saying this because I wish to keep smiting people with bad charts. What I’m saying to point out is that your mentality and the way you handle and approach life matters a whole deal, and your BaZi chart is basically a description of who you are and, more importantly, how you develop. Seeing metaphysics as a shortcut is extremely detrimental and a very negative reflection of the person’s character. There is a reason why successful people who are doing well in life don’t usually need or want to come for a reading because they already know the source of their success is themselves.
Yes, feng shui can help, of course, but that’s provided you get the chance to enjoy it in the first place. The cruellest thing to say here is that not everyone has the fortune to live in a place that uplifts their life. The old Chinese saying goes 福人居福地 – people with good fortune will live in places with good feng shui, and frankly, not everyone has this kind of life, just like how not everyone will have a good BaZi chart. There will always be people who are doing well and get to live in good places and people whose lives feel like a struggle every day. If feng shui was something that can be so easily manipulated, then wouldn’t everyone have perfect lives? Even if you do get to stay somewhere with good feng shui, it’s definitely not everything.
I keep an archive of all my cases from the past. So let me pull out this old case way back in June 2016 (notice the date in the email) to share with everyone:
By the way, for anyone who has not engaged me before, all my reports look aesthetically unpleasing. It’s very, very ugly trust me. It’s all in email with no nice page borders or what not. I’m focused purely on the content which I feel is the important part and not on the presentation as I simply don’t have the bandwidth to package things nicely at this stage, so do pardon me.
A quick analysis of the house: Under 《阳宅三要》 this house is not so ideal, being classified under 祸害宅。Flying Stars wise it does have 双星会坐 but the master bedroom is in a really bad position where both Stars 2 and 5 are in – both very negative stars in current Period 8. It’s not exactly a very good house and it’s not the kind of house where the tenants will rise up to a higher level or status if I were to put it in a traditional way. It’s basically not the kind of house where the tenants are meant to reach 富贵ness – meaning wealth and nobility for my non-Chinese readers.
The one thing that most clients feel is that the house will put a ‘curse’ on you if the feng shui is bad. That’s one way of looking at it of course but I wouldn’t phrase it that way, because we would expect a good house to make our lives better so the house can ‘bless’ us in a sense. The more objective way to put it is this: We are, in a way, fated to end up in a certain kind of house. Using the case above, whatever was reflected via the house is also seen from the couple’s BaZi charts as well, and I wrote about how your BaZi chart and houses are linked a very long time ago and you can find the old blog post here: https://www.masterseanchan.com/blog/do-fengshui-items-really-work/. Not the best post I’ve written as it was written in 2016… And I just realized the case being mentioned here happened 1 month after I wrote that post. There is a very close link between your BaZi & Zi Wei Dou Shu chart and your eventual home because you can definitely see parallels, which is why I said we are sort of fated for the kind of house we end up in.
Your House Feng Shui Paints A Story Of How Your Life Unfolds
In other words, through analyzing the house, a practitioner can tell what the tenants will eventually go through. It’s a bit like reading the BaZi chart of the house and seeing how it will impact the tenants. The bottom line is: The quality of our BaZi and Zi Wei Dou Shu charts will definitely have some form on the impact on the house we eventually end up in, and it is under in extremely rare cases that someone with a bad BaZi chart will end up in a really good house.
I can’t bring myself to say a house is good when the Chinese classics are screaming at me saying it’s bad. I will never say something like “I have activated the good ‘qi’ of your house! And I hereby declare your house a good house!”. What a practitioner can do is extremely limited because you can’t shift your main door or kitchen so easily these days. Speaking of kitchens, please feel free to read this article I wrote for 99.co: https://www.99.co/blog/singapore/open-kitchen-concept-bad-feng-shui/
I know what’s the next question on everyone’s mind: If so happens you end up in a bad house – what can be done then? The last you can do is focus on the practical. Putting a fish tank, a plant, or rolling a pineapple isn’t going to change your life. I’ve once had a client who wanted me to solve her health issues by placing items and shifting the furniture around and she was not particular pleased when I told her this isn’t what feng shui is about – I cannot emphasize enough how childish and irresponsible such an attitude to life is. If the house tells a practitioner that you will have health issues, then by all means please do what is practical to take care of your health. Again, don’t see it as the house putting a curse on you – see it that you’re meant to be in such a house and the practitioner can see the things you’ll eventually go through when he or she assesses it. Feng shui is also based on the same laws we apply for BaZi and Zi Wei Dou Shu, and the house you end up it is but nature’s way of unfolding. If I were to draw a parallel from what we can see in nature, since everything is about nature’s laws after all – you will not find a weak plant on fertile soil growing in the midst of other thriving plants. The seed it grew from has to originate from a strong source in the first place, and even if it did, it needs to start competing for resources with others. What I’m saying is: For any living thing to be somewhere which allows them to thrive – they need to deserve it first. Cruel I know, but that’s just how the world works.
In any case, the biggest myth I wish to address in this post is where people expect the practitioner to solve the flaws of the house and turn a bad house into a good one. This myth has to die.
Anyway, here are some of the nicer pictures of my journey and adventure so far this year. Look out for my brown messenger bag! I have a new, black Samsonite backpack now too which I bring for my audits sometimes:
– Sean
