Keeping Your Chi in Check
By Stacey Young
Behind every peace is a finicky balance. Figuring out an equation that maintains the two can be such a monumental mind-twist that you and everyone from the wealthy to the worried are rustling up expert help. So, now that you’ve had Rodney Yee adjust your spine, Caroline Myss dissect your soul, and Deepak Chopra dispense with a diet, why are the blahs making a comeback?
Could be that you’re in as much need of a tune-up as your car. Where better to retool than in the places you spend most of your time? At least, that’s the advice of R.D. Chin, a feng shui (pronounced fung shway) master who’s spent ten years practicing the ancient Chinese discipline, a melding of design and environment through the lens of “chi” energy. “The feng shui you had done a few years back might not be the same feng shui you need today,” he says. “Energies change over time and people change over time.”
Those subtle shifts make for consultations that are rarely done deals. Chin says to think of your first feng shui as a baseline for balancing the five energies —earth, water, wind, metal and wood—that affect your life. But forward a few years beyond consultation and the chi may be as in sync with your current life as Pat Boone grooving at a Metallica concert. A new taste for chochkas or the flutter you get from clutter may render earlier consultations mute. That’s when you need to charge or chill chi by getting what Chin calls a chi check. “I come and check periodically on how the energy is circulating,” he says.
At Hirschhorn & Young, a Manhattan design company, a recent chi check turned up energy issues after Chin’s initial office consultation. A painting that he hadn’t originally placed in the fame corner was throwing off chi. “It was a beautiful painting, but I told them that we should find another spot for it,” he says. Chin suggested putting the company logo there instead to “give employees the understanding of who they’re working for and the company’s goals.”
His suggestion helped, says Holly Young, the company’s president. “I hate to use the word peaceful and calm in a business sense, because this is such a frantic, driven business, but there is a sense that the energy flow is now organized,” she says. Since she’s been opting for periodic chi checks, Young’s expanded from 35 people on one-floor to 70 employees occupying two floors. She credits Chin’s suggestion of adding something green to her office—she chose a green bamboo Chinese scroll inscribed with her business intention—to the growth explosion. “You want to say it’s coincidental but it really happened when I put the bamboo up.”
Chin, author of Feng Shui Revealed, wasn’t always traveling this plane. Before, he walked the New York corridors of Paul Rudolph, a leading architectural firm, where Chin thought his University of Pennsylvania architecture degree meant he’d be designing buildings, not breaking energy blocks. But his father’s death and a subsequent shiatsu session, led to a revelation: He had to do something more. When a co-worker nudged him towards feng shui it seemed right. “It was much more fulfilling because after I started doing consultations, people would call me up and say I helped them change their lives,” Chin says.
One of those people is Billie Sutter, a business development consultant. She hired Chin to feng shui a Hamptons home that she was having trouble selling. “He gave me seven suggestions,” she says. “I went through with those and in one week we had two offers on the house when I hadn’t had any in 8 years. It was then that I realized there is visible energy and not so visible energy.”
Chin’s incessant chi checking and fung shui pit stops have even led to his sister’s door. At a ranch where she and their mother live with a brother-in-law who Chin describes as “your typical macho Texan,” Chin realigned the energy in their 1890-circa Victorian house, shuffling his sister’s clutter so that the three adults could live in harmony. “My mother went from feeling like she didn’t belong to really loving the place,” he says.
Chin’s next push is to coax more urban planners into using feng shui in mapping out city expansions. He’s already dissecting the world’s best and worst feng shui cities for guidance. Amsterdam? Great feng shui. “The city has incredible water energy and it would be too much but it’s balanced out by buildings that are built low and with flat rooftops that create a balance of earth energy.” Delhi? “Too much earth energy,” he says. “They could use more water and more trees.”
America’s worst feng shui city? Sorry, Los Angeles. You may have Hollywood but Chin says L.A. feng shui won’t win any awards.
R.D. Chin is available for Private Consultations, Classes & Blessing Ceremonies. Please visit www.RDChin.com for details or contact him at: 212-695-2147.
He is also author of Feng Shui Revealed.
OTHER ARTICLES IN VARIOUS MAGAZINES
CASA VOGUE IN BRAZIL
METROPOLITAN HOME – USA
DE WOONKRANT IN HOLLAND
FENG SHUI FOR MODERN LIVING – UK
CREATING SACRED SPACE – BELIEFNET
