It often happens when going around the web or flicking through a magazine to come across articles about Feng Shui. Usually, it is a short collection of general advice on how to place the bed or how to furnish a house. The impression you get is that Feng Shui is a style of furniture, something confusingly similar to one of the many "ethnic" styles or some philosophical or spiritual new age current. The reader, especially if profane, remains at best with a vague urge to study the subject better, more often with a distracted curiosity stimulated by some captivating image (usually very green bamboo twigs and black pebbles poised one over the other).
The containers in which these articles are placed, mostly used as fillers, obviously do not allow particular insights, let alone a specialized approach or high theoretical level.
Until a few years ago, in the general media, the theme Feng Shui was treated as a "picturesque" subject, between the exotic, the spiritual, the magical. Lately, the diffusion of this ancient Chinese discipline, through important schools that refer to a more authentic Feng Shui, linked to the original sources, with qualified information and training courses, has begun to bear some fruit. There is a more professional approach as more and more interventions are written by people with specific training and active in practice as consultants Feng Shui. Although sometimes we still come across articles that suggest the use of amulets, bells, prayers or other picturesque and useless interventions, we can, therefore, say that in general, the contents are quite correct.
However, this is not enough. Like any discipline, science or art, in order to understand and obtain valid results, Feng Shui cannot be traced back to general rules applied mechanically to specific cases with formulas that guarantee defined and uniform results.
Any intervention that applies Feng Shui must start from an in-depth analysis of the environment and the people who live there. In fact, the heart of Feng Shui is precisely that of harmonizing the specific person, with his or her history, with his or her psychophysical characteristics, with his or her relational, emotional, and family baggage, and that particular environment, placed in that unique space with its forms, its colours, its relations with the objects, its forms and the flows that surround it. What is good for one person cannot necessarily be good for another.
Working with Feng Shui is a fascinating and complex experience, which in addition to theoretical knowledge, requires much practice and human and perceptual sensitivity on the part of the Feng Shui consultant. Of course, there are some "rules", but in order to be effective, they must be contextualized and adapted to the situation under consideration.
However, the responsibility for the unsatisfactory level of articles concerning Feng shui is not only of the containers or the professionalism of the writer. It is not an easy solution because, in reality, it is partly the fault... of Feng Shui itself!
One aspect that makes Feng Shui difficult to reduce to the current short and sporadic exhibitions, is its eastern origin, particularly Chinese. It is a problem that not only concerns Feng Shui but also our western approach to Chinese thought and disciplines in general. These are based on a language, and consequently, a way of thinking, based on a relatively limited number of ideograms, i.e. more or less complex stylized drawings that suggest infinite images, ideas and concepts with blurred and variously interpretable margins. This is very different from how language and thought evolved in the West, with alphabets based on a few signs, letters, grouped in an almost infinite combination of words, representing concepts, ideas, objects in a more precise and defined way. The result in China is an intuitive rather than rational thought, often made up of similarities, evocations, metaphors and symbols. A true understanding therefore passes, not necessarily from learning "Chinese", but from learning to think like a Chinese. It is certainly a long path, at the beginning also destabilizing because it is difficult to find the logic with which we are accustomed to thinking, but that once seized the key turns out to be surprisingly "simple" and effective.
For this reason, if it is true that the basic principles of Feng Shui are universal, not linked to a specific cultural context but to natural and psychological elements, which can also be defined in Western rational scientific terms, nevertheless full understanding and practical application require a mental approach on the part of the Feng Shui consultant, in which "thinking" as a Chinese takes on fundamental importance. And this means that the understanding of the reality that surrounds us is not reduced to black and white numbers but is enriched and completed with images, colours, emotions.
And this is the main characteristic that makes Feng Shui such a fascinating and, above all, effective discipline.