FENG SHUI Flower Essences Uplift Your Ch'i

Feng Shui has long been recognized and appreciated for its ability to allow us to live in harmony with our environment. The teachings of this ancient practice allow us to enhance the quality of our lives. By applying the principles of feng shui we move closer to realizing our desires in our careers, partnerships, prosperity and health.

by Elyse Furlong


The state of our personal ch'i is just as important as our external environment. While putting pairs of objects in the partnership gua of our home and bedroom can provide the energetic assistance needed to bring a partner into our lives, the type of individual that we attract and how successful that relationship is, will be determined by the quality of our ch'i.

By adjusting our outer environment with feng shui, and "curing" our inner selves with flower essences, we create lives that are filled with harmony, balance and promise. In this article I would like to share the benefits that you can experience by using flower essences to adjust your inner ch'i.

While there are thousands of flower and gem essences available in the marketplace today, the flower essences that I discuss in this article are the first essences ever discovered. They have stood the test of time and have helped countless people the world over. They are the Bach Flower Essences, developed by the brilliant British physician and gifted intuitive, Dr. Edward Bach. This elegantly simple system contains thirty-eight flower essences each acting as an antidote for a specific negative emotion.

By combining them we are able to treat any negative emotions. These subtle liquid extracts can change forever the way that we relate to ourselves and our world. They bring us home, back to our true selves. By replacing fear with courage, depression with joy, anger and hatred with love, we move out of the personality based self into our true self. As Dr. Bach so eloquently stated in the 1930's "our health and happiness depends on being in harmony with our souls." By following the dictates of our soul, we experience harmony and peace and joy.

To use flower essences effectively, simply identify the negative emotion that you are experiencing and select the essence that counteracts that emotion. For example, if you've recently relocated and find that you're terribly homesick; you miss your old city, friends and job and can't imagine how you will ever feel as happy in your new life, you would need the flower essence, Honeysuckle. Honeysuckle would energetically shift your ch'i out of the past and into the present, gently awakening an interest in the here and now.

These essences are taken under the tongue four times a day, until you experience a positive emotional shift. Generally six or seven essences can be effectively combined at one time. By alchemically transforming our negative emotions into their positive counterparts, we learn how to find our strength by embracing our shadow side and uplifting it. What we resist persists. What we face and uplift, uplifts us.

A new client asked me to feng shui her home. She contacted me because her career was stalled. Despite her efforts to get her writing career off the ground, she had been unable to sell any of her short stories or more commercial pieces. Her savings were running low, and she decided that a feng shui consultation was in order. When I arrived at her home, I noticed that the path leading up to her front door was very narrow, and the walkway was lined with scraggly, half-dead white and light pink bushes that had overgrown the already narrow path. I almost felt like I had to "squeeze" through them to get up to her door. She was also located on the curve of a busy street, and the ch'i from the road seemed to fly by her home. I advised her to pull up all the plants along her walkway and to visually widen the path by placing river rock on both sides of the path.

The black color of the river rock symbolically enhanced the water element of the career gua of her home. I recommended that she place fresh healthy plants along the outside border of the river rock. We decided a colorful banner type flag would be the appropriate "ch'i catcher" that she needed to attract some of the energy that had been racing by her home. Shortly after my consultation, she called me to report that "it was working" - she had gotten two excellent opportunities to write for national magazines. While this story seems to have a happy ending, it doesn't, at least not yet. Two months later she called me sounding very distraught and asked if she could be helped by flower essences.

Both writing assignments had fallen through. Upon further questioning she told me that she procrastinated about getting the assignments completed, and the articles were never published. It seems that she had a fear of failing. She kept working on draft after draft, yet never feeling that any of them were good enough. This client told me that she was concerned that she had made a mistake by thinking that she could make a living as a freelance writer. While writing had always been her hobby, how could she think that she was good enough to do this professionally? She said, "All this time I was afraid that I wouldn't get any jobs, and yet when I got them after improving my feng shui, I was more afraid that I wasn't capable enough to do the job." She told me she felt guilty and embarrassed that she had failed, and didn't know what she should do with her career.

After discussing her concerns and issues, I prepared a flower essence dosage bottle containing five essences.

• Larch - to give her confidence in her skills and abilities, and an increase her willingness to take the risks that are necessary to succeed
  
  
• Mimulus - to allay her fears and give her courage
  
  
• Pine - for her self-recrimination and perfectionism
  
  
• Wild Oat - to assist her in figuring out what she wants to do with her life and then to help her manifest those dreams
  
  
• Gentian - for feeling discouraged and wanting to give up.

She remained on this mixture for two months and experienced a big boost in her confidence and desire to "go for it". She was recently published in a national trade magazine, and is working on several other projects. She is confident that she is finally on her way to a career as a professional writer. She said to me, "Between the Feng Shui and the Flower Essences, how could I miss!"

This story highlights the benefits of addressing our inner emotional clutter with flower essences, while balancing our environmental issues with feng shui. The combination of these two modalities allows us to enhance both our inner and outer chi, bringing us into more perfect harmony.